As It Stands blog: Are ‘Dabs’ & Pot Concentrates the New Crack?

  Good Day World!

 On April 7, 2013 I wrote a column - Faster is not always better: THC 'dabs' can be dangerous Apparently it’s resonated with some people and continues to pop up in the 10 Most Viewed stories for The Times-Standard on a daily basis.

As of this writing it’s #7. Check back tomorrow and it may be #2. For the last 90 days, this column has crept back into circulation as one website after another continues to pick it up. No wonder. Concentrated marijuana is becoming more well known every day. What started in California and expanded to Oregon, has now swept across the county. You’ll be hearing more in the moths and years ahead about these “dabs” or concentrates – for better or worse.

The day after my column came out, April 8, 2013, “Drugs Forum,” an online drug information website had this reader feedback:

“Hey guys,
Last night I took one of the biggest dabs of my life. I purchased a gram of Green Crack wax concentrates from my favorite dispensary and loaded up a full dab, yes a full! Normally a half dab gets me good but I felt like going all out. I looked at the mini oil rig peice and felt a nervousness and anxiety hit me, if that means anything. I took the whole dab on one hit and it went down fast. Lungs were full of concentrate wax. Exhaled and it didn't feel right. Well first of all, its was almost impossible to breathe normally cuz of the size of hit and thickness of wax. I felt like something hit me in the brain super hard and I was dizzy. The difficulty to breathe might have made me have an anxiety attack but it took me 10 minutes to return to normal calm mind. Do you think anxiety caused this pale/ sweating response? It was really unpleasant. Or could it have been a super large hit? Not used to milking a bong with wax! Any response helps. thanks!”

The Atlantic Wire came out with a good piece on “Dabs” a month later – The Amateur's Guide to Dabs – on May 15th, 2013. It’s got more information than I was able to squeeze into my short column.

More recently this website – Treatment Line offers treatment alternatives for addicted for Dabbers. It also provides a lot of good information and is worth checking out. Read Potent Marijuana Concentrate (BHO) Is Anything But Harmless

Finally AlterNet came out with this article on July 1, 2012: It asks, Is 'Dabbing' the Crack of Pot? Good question. Is it? What are your thoughts on the subject? (Note: if you’d like to email me any comments please send them to richarddavestancliff@gmail.com )and I will keep them confidential.

Time for me to walk on down the street…

 

As It Stands blog: All the planets aligned for a fan one night!

      Good Day World!

I always enjoy hearing positive stories and the one I have for you today is a good example. Nothing earth shattering. Just a superstar who’s more grounded in reality than most. When he encounters two fans it becomes the thing that legends are born from. I hope you enjoy this story as much as I did:

“A woman on her way to see the Dave Matthews Band perform in Hershey, Pa., on Saturday stopped her car to help a stranded bicyclist — and in the process saved the very rock show she was going to see.Emily Kraus and her boyfriend, Joe, were already running late when they noticed a man on the side of the road. When they pulled over to help, it was none other than Dave Matthews.

The singer was out for a pre-concert bike ride when he got a flat tire, and he didn't have a cell phone to call for help. Kraus happened to have a bike rack on her car, and she told local TV station CBS 21 that Joe helped Matthews load his bike while she held his helmet.

Matthews then got in the car and rode with the couple to the concert. The three made small talk about his tour, and Kraus told CBS 21 that the rocker was very humble. He later invited Emily and Joe to dinner, had them visit backstage and gave them front-row seats for his show.

During the concert, Matthews made mention of the whole ordeal and the "nice lady named Emily" in the red car who gave him a ride to the gig.

In reply to a photo posted on CBS 21's Facebook page, Kraus said she has been listening to the Dave Matthews Band since she was 9 years old. "All the planets aligned last night — something greater then I'll ever be able to comprehend,"she wrote, adding later, "My cheeks still hurt from smiling, giggling and laughing all night long ... this will always be remembered." (Story ran here 1st)

Time for me to walk on down the road…

As It Stands blog: Tiny Satellites for all, & Tanks Purchased for the 2022 World Cup!

  Good Day World!

Here we are on Monday. It comes this time every week. Today, I have two quick stories for you to get your mojo going for the week ahead:

Someday, swarms of satellites the size of a tissue box will be snapping pictures, taking environmental readings and broadcasting messages from orbit — but the entities controlling those satellites won't be governments.

Instead, they'll be hard-core hobbyists and elementary-school students, entrepreneurs and hacktivists. In short, anyone who can afford a few hundred dollars to send something to the final frontier.

I’m sure not making any plans to see the 2022 World Cup. It sounds more like preparation for an international war if the wrong team wins!

Qatar is set to purchase 118 Leopard tanks and 16 tank howitzers from Germany in preparation for hosting the 2022 World Cup.

German newspaper Bild am Sonntag made the announcement Sunday claiming the oil-rich nation will pay several billion dollars to German defense manufacturer Krauss-Maffei Wegmann and defense tech group Rheinmetall.

The deal comes after the government of German Chancellor Angela Merkel approved the initial purchase of 62 Leopard tanks and 24 howitzers this past spring.

Time for me to walk on down the road…

 

As It Stands: A Boomers story: once I believed, but now I don’t

By Dave Stancliff/For The Times-Standard

I didn’t start out distrusting our government.
 

 I was proud to say the Pledge of Alliance when I went to school in the 1950s and early 1960s. I never questioned what our government was doing because my teachers told me our government was an institution that maintained people’s rights.
I believed them. My parents believed them. Almost everyone believed our government protected our civil rights.

Except for African-Americans and some progressive whites. That segment of society had to fight for equal rights, but I didn’t see much of the battle for a couple of reasons.
For starters, I seldom watched television. When I did, it was only for special programs like watching the Mickey Mouse show, or Howdy Doody. News about civil rights demonstrations seldom slipped into my social studies classes. When it did, in the early 1960s, the coverage was spotty at best.
 

It wasn’t until I graduated from high school in 1968 and went into the Army that I began to have misgivings about our government. After my tour of duty in Vietnam (1970) I was a different person. For numerous reasons. When I got out of the Army in 1971, I bought a car and traveled around the country.

Like other Vietnam veterans at the time, I was not given the red-carpet treatment for serving my country. My country had changed. Or, I was the one who changed. I now knew that I had grown up clueless, and I began to see the world around me for what it was. 

For the first time I followed the news. I was in Ohio on June 17th, 1972 when the Watergate burglars broke into the Democratic Party’s National Committee headquarters. The rest is history. I tore up my honorable discharge because it was signed by Richard M. Nixon.

 My disillusionment was so great I felt compelled to do something about it. That was a turning point in my life, when I knew I had to expose all the lies I grew up with and the machinations of the current administration.

 Throughout my career in newspapers I sought the truth behind political intrigues and exposed everything I believed the public should know. My ability to get information during the late 1970s through the early 1990s, was limited compared to what’s available these days to anyone who has a PC and the internet.
 When I began this blog and the newspaper column in 2008, I returned to politics and news with renewed interest. A lot has happened in the last five years. Two historic elections, a great recession, and now the revelation that the government has been spying on all Americans for an unknown period of time.

 They still do. Yes, I know you can argue that PRISM and other secret government programs are for our own good. You can also argue that our government has gone too far in monitoring our every activity.

 I admit I’m more concerned about our freedoms now than ever before in my life. I’ve watched the Patriot Act morph into other secret programs in the name of national security, and it appears we’ve got to live with Big Brother watching our every move, even after exposing him.

 I’m not surprised George Orwell’s 1984 is selling like hotcakes lately. The sales rankings for Orwell’s dystopian view of the future spiked like crazy two weeks ago, according to Amazon.com.

 A new generation is discovering this classic book. I think that’s a good thing. People need to question what’s happening when the government starts stripping away liberties in the name of safety and ideology.

 Knowing that what I’m write here could put me on a secret government list, deeply disappoints me. I’m proud to be an American. I fought for freedom, not an overbearing government. But as revelations continue to unfold about the NSA’s, CIA’s and FBI’s illegal activities, I can’t trust our government.

 After five years immersed in political history and current events, I’ve come to the conclusion that the Obama administration continues to follow in the footsteps of every president since Richard Nixon.
Those footsteps have led to a disconnect between the government and the people and have resulted in the biggest case of spying in our history.

The image of Watergate fades beside the enormity of what’s happening in America today.
 As It Stands, my disillusionment is somewhat abated by the fact that social media has become so powerful, government corruption is harder to conceal. 

As It Stands blog: If employee’s ‘Too Hot’ boss can fire them says court

Good Day World!

So, it’s come to this:

A dentist acted legally when he fired a longtime assistant because he had grown too attracted to her and worried he would try to start an affair, the Iowa Supreme Court reaffirmed Friday in its second crack at the controversial case.

Coming to the same outcome as it did in December, but clarifying its rationale, the court found that bosses can fire employees that they and their spouses see as threats to their marriages. The court said such firings do not count as sex discrimination because they are motivated by feelings, not gender. (Read story here)

What’s a poor girl (or guy) going to do now? Start dressing like clowns and gain lots of weight quickly to become unattractive to save their job? I don’t know about you, but that just doesn’t seem right. I hesitate to guess what the courts will say next…on any subject!

You can bet on one thing, it’ll be about something some prigs think needs changing because it doesn’t conform to the laws of Big Brother!

Time for me to walk on down the road…

Did you know that 1 in 10 adults use phones during sex?

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As It Stands blog: Massive icebergs, plants that smell like corpses, flash floods, plane safety & a princess accused of ‘Slavery’

    Good Day World!

Let’s start off with the massive iceberg, larger than the city of Chicago, that broke off of Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier on Monday and is now floating freely in the Amundsen Sea, according to a team of German scientists. What’s that mean to you and I?

What’s up with plane safety? Lap-only seat belts started disappearing from cars decades ago — after all, they're a nearly 100-year-old technology. Yet we still click them in modern airline seats. There is early indication that some of the injuries suffered during the crash landing of Asiana Airlines Flight 214 resulted from passengers being thrashed about while restrained only in their midsections. Could better seat restraints have prevented more injuries?

Under the category “It Seems Odd To Me” is this story about a flower that smells like “a dead body lying in Florida for two weeks” and attracting some 5,000 people to the National Botanic Garden of Belgium outside of Brussels this week. That’s ten times their usual draw.

Just when you thought it was safe to go outside again, flash floods rising as high as 2½ feet caused a massive mudslide Wednesday that swept away a car, stranded many others and closed a busy highway in the Colorado Springs area.

The flooding shut down a four-mile stretch of U.S. Highway 24 for almost three hours west of Manitou Springs as motorists rode out a summer storm that dumped heavy rain and golfball-size hail on the region.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

A summer storm shuts down a 4-mile stretch of U.S. Highway 24

El Paso County officials said at least 21 vehicles were stranded on the highway.

And at least one was swept off the road — an incident that was captured in this dramatic video.

Finally, we have a Saudi Arabian princess who is accused of “slavery” after a woman who was allegedly held against her will as a domestic servant escaped from a three-story building, flagged down a bus and alerted authorities in Irvine.

Time for me to walk on down the road…

 

As It Stands blog: Record Day in Death Valley: Rangers ask people to stop frying eggs unless they clean the mess!

   Good Day World!

With current temperatures hovering above 120 degrees, rangers in Death Valley National Park have some advice for would-be visitors: Drink plenty of water, avoid excessive outdoor activity and, please, stop trying to fry eggs on the pavement.

It doesn’t work, it makes a mess and the staff has better things to do than clean up after you. In fact, the proliferation of broken shells, discarded cartons and accumulated goo has reached such a point that the park recently took to its Facebook page to implore people to stop — or at least use a pan or tin foil and dispose of the results when they’re done.

Today, the park’s holding an event to commemorate the hottest recorded temperature in the world, which was set when the thermometer at Furnace Creek hit 134 degrees on July 10, 1913.

The centennial celebration will include talks by meteorologists and park rangers who will discuss why Death Valley gets so hot, how the park last year wrested its title back from El Azizia, Libya, and other issues of interest to “extreme weather enthusiasts.”

Visitors will also be able to participate in a popular Death Valley tradition by accompanying rangers to the Furnace Creek weather station to read the temperature, a ritual that has occurred daily since 1911.

Time for me to walk on down the road…

 

As It Stands blog: It’s Tuesday & did you know there’s a city in America that doesn’t allow cars… really!

   Good Day World!

 It’s Tuesday, perhaps the most uncelebrated day of the week,and I’m feeling lazy.When this happens to me I reach into my bag of tricks (like Felix the Cat!) and pull something out of the cyberspace.

Today’s offering idea was sent to me by my friend Larry.He thought it was interesting. I think it’s interesting. What about you?

Photo credit: Street-Marada on Flickr

Meet the American City Where Cars Have Been Banned Since 1898
Written by Stephen Messenger

“When early automobiles first arrived on the scene in the late 19th century, few people could have imagined that they would one day take over the world. In fact, some towns found the noise and exhaust from these novelty ‘horseless carriages’ so off-putting that early cars were actually outlawed in some places.

In time, of course, restrictions were lifted and the car soon became ubiquitous across the country — but there is still one place in the United States that has yet to change its mind. Meet Mackinac Island, where cars have been banned since 1898.

Located just offshore of mainland Michagan, in Lake Huron, Mackinac Island and its namesake city have long been a favorite spot for a relaxing getaway. So, when automobiles first began to arrive, loudly sputtering along the island’s once-quiet roadways, startling horses and spitting out smoke, it quickly became apparent to locals that this new invention was not for them.

Photo credit: Bicycles-Cletch on Flickr

One resident at the time was quoted as calling cars “mechanical monsters” — clearly not a glowing review.

Naturally, in 1898, the Mackinac village council moved to outlaw the automobile before the monsters had a chance to take over: “Resolved: That the running of horseless carriages be prohibited within the limits of the village of Mackinac.” — Mackinac Island Village Council, July 6, 1898”

Such legislation might seem quaint and old-timey, but in Mackinac, it has yet to be repealed. So what is life like in place where one of the most impactful inventions in history has been outlawed? Well, it’s quite nice, actually.

Although the small island is home to only around 500 people, in the summer, that number swells to 15,000 as tourist flock to the island. However, aside from a couple of emergency vehicles, there’s nary a car to be seen. Transportation on Mackinac is limited to walking, horse-drawn carriages, and bicycling — a pleasant departure from the car-centric society that exists beyond its borders.” Read the rest of the story here

Time for me to walk on down the road…