#Berkeley Weed Doctor

[ineedtoreadmorepoetry]

Best Friend Ballad by Sharon Olds

Sometimes I'll suddenly remember the power of her house, and of the approach to it, down the narrow, extreme-curve-to-the right street, opening onto the

somehow delicate cul-de-sac, my best friend's house--what? Italianate? Ogive windows,

balconies, tile roof, the land fallen off steep behind it to the gradual slope to the Bay. And then the flat stones up to her Doric

portico--between them flowering weeds, no ice plant, no ivy, just tiny blossoms, then there it was, like a villa, a little Berkeley palace, a doctor's

elegant home of safety where she was dying, 9 years old, and I didn't let myself realize it. If her mother had been there, maybe I could have

asked her if I could take a nap with my friend when she fell asleep--but her mother had died the day before, my job

was to not let my friend know it--

so she could die as if she had a mother. And what would I have given to have been allowed to lie down next to her dear skeletal body.

She still had her fine, chartreuse, thick, almost sour-color hair, as if the lead poison they'd breathed had sharpened the chartreuse of it--

what would I have given to be allowed to fall asleep with her and dream, alive--what would I give now? Nothing, I have nothing to give,

none of the luck which followed in my fortunate life. But I pray for a sleep tonight in which, 9 and 9, we can hold each other in a green dream.

[krlavalenzuela]

If you would like to establish connections, please feel free to reach out or like this post and I’ll reach out to you! I wrote this character with the intent of achieving multi-dimensionality so no matter how different our charas may be, I’m down for plotting! Looking forward for you all to meet her! - Rick

[ KARLA MARÍA VALENZUELA. 28. FEMALE. SHE/HER(s) ] is here! They’ve lived in Silver Lake for [ 1 MONTH ] and are originally from [ MEXICO CITY ]. They are a [ LAWYER ] and in their downtime love [ TENNIS ] and [ EQUESTRIANISM ]. They look a lot like [ CHRISTIAN SERRATOS ] and live [ ON REDCLIFF ST ].

STATS

Name: Karla María Valenzuela-Lopez

Age: 28 (born February 4th, 1992 at 09:18am)

Zodiac: Aquarius sun, Aquarius moon, Pisces rising

Height: 5′8

Weight: 112lbs

Personality: INFJ

Birthplace: Mexico City, Mexico

Nationality: Mexican-American

Languages: Spanish, English, LSM

Education: University of California, Berkely (BA), Stanford University (JD)

Occupation: Immigration attorney 

Drinker: Yes 

Smoker: Yes (weed -regularly, cigarettes - socially) 

EXTENDED BIOGRAPHY

Karla Valenzuela was born and raised in Mexico City as the only child to  Abel Valenzuela and Imelda Lopez.

At age six, her father left Karla and her mother for the US to better provide for them financially. With eventual hopes of her entire family relocating to the US, Karla began studying English from the age of seven in preparation for her move.

Growing up as a child, Karla found a sense of pride in her Mexican heritage, taking part in escaramuza, an all-female equestrian sport that features women dressed up in traditional Mexican gear performing choreographed routines on horseback. She would go on to practice the sport throughout her childhood and even currently, is on a riding team in San Diego.

Using visas, Karla and her mother immigrated to the US when Karla was the age of fourteen. Reunited with her father, Karla enrolled in a SoCal public school and quickly found herself immersed in the happiness of having her family together, something she hadn’t had in a long time.

Finishing high school as salutatorian, she would go on to pursue higher education but not without struggles as to how she would pay for it considering her undocumented status and ineligibility for federal financial aid. Through fundraisers and California’s Dream Act, she was able to finish undergrad at the University of California, Berkeley.

Inspired by her family’s struggles with immigration and citizenship, she decided to pursue immigration law, enrolling at Stanford University where she’d graduate with her Juris Doctor degree at 26.

Following her graduation, she began to work in the San Diego area at an immigration law firm. It was there that she’d meet what she considered to be her first real love, a colleague ten years her senior, Graham. Despite initial hesitance due to their age gap, she soon found their late nights at work turning into more, including clandestine meetings and longing stares that continued for a near thirteen months. It wasn’t until she suggested going public that problems began to arise. Prior, she hadn’t thought to question anything as she’d always been private about her personal life. More than anything, she'd become comfortable having someone. Piecing things together, she quickly realized the obvious, that she’d been the other woman in a fifteen-year marriage. Breaking it off immediately, she would spend the next two months at work miserable before she’d write two letters. One, a resignation letter to the law firm heads announcing her departure and the other a letter that she’d leave in Graham’s mailbox for his wife to read before he got home from work.

Still heartbroken, she packed up her things and relocated to LA, finding a new job at a tele law service. She’d move into a two-bedroom house on Redcliff Street, hoping that a new location and a new job would help her move on from her past.

[onlinemarijuana0-blog]

When it comes to finding the finest Berkley weed doctors, http://www.onlinemarijuanacards.com/ is the one place where you can find the best of the lot.

[magicweed8-blog]

Marijuana Can Gain Millions In Pain

Magic Weed

Amendment The right to Medical Marijuana could make using medical marijuana legal under specific health conditions. Patients or caregivers using an issued permit with a doctor would also be permitted to attend enrolled marijuana therapy centres (Ballotpedia 2014). Not just anyone can find a medical marijuana permit however. Individuals have to be diagnosed using a"debilitating medical condition" such as cancer, HIV or glaucoma.  The Florida Department of Health will be responsible for regulating medical marijuana and it would also issue identification cards and create processes for treatment centres.  From the subsequent passages, I will go over the advantages and disadvantages of bud, how bad people are able to get it if they can not manage it and the way I feel about amendments 2 along with the legalization of marijuana.

Magic Weed

Medical marijuana Has many health benefits like relieving chronic pain because of an illness or relieving stress after a lengthy or active day. The evidence is shown by research that marijuana can alleviate certain kinds of pain, nausea, vomiting, and other debilitating symptoms brought on by such disorders like cancer and AIDS in patients all over the world (ProCon 2014). Sanjay Gupta, MD, Chief Medical Correspondent for CNN said that marijuana does not possess a higher potential for misuse and there are quite legitimate software. Additionally"Sometimes bud is the one thing that works", '' said Gupta. Arthritis is another frequent disorder, usually in elderly adults, with no present cure and bud has been shown to help alleviate the symptoms of the disorder too. Rheumatology reported in 2006 that"Compared to the placebo, the CBM [cannabis-based medication ] produced statistically significant improvements in pain on movement, pain at rest and quality of sleep (ProCon 2014).  Even though there are many valid advantages of medical marijuana, there continue to be those who disagree and assert that the legalization of medical marijuana could be detrimental to society.

The Ones that are against Amendment 2 as well as the lawful use of marijuana assert it could possibly be damaging to society by inducing a rise in crime. Bishop Ron Allen asserted that marijuana could increase poverty and crime in Berkeley and he clarifies,"Research tells us that marijuana has the very same results on the pleasure fundamental system in the brain as heroin and crack cocaine" (OpposingViews 2014) Supporters of bud such as Mason There, of the Marijuana Policy Project disagree with Allen, saying that Allen did not understand what he was referring to marijuana has been demonstrated to be less toxic and less addictive than other medications.  "The truth is that Medical institutions throughout the nation and over 80 percent of Americans believe marijuana might help seriously ill individuals (Opposing Views) says Tvert." A research performed by the University of Texas in Dallas found that legalized marijuana could reduce crimes such as vandalism and homicide (Ferner 2014).

Is supposedly a gateway or stepping stone to additional dangerous drugs like cocaine or heroine. The Eagle Forum said in a statement that"Since THC is in the body the"large" from marijuana gradually reduces so marijuana smokers normally take other medications to have a kick (ProCon 2014)." Sue Roche, Founder and President of the National Families in Action states,"This issue received intense press coverage and California's teens got the concept, their previous month marijuana use increased by almost one-third year, by 6.5percent to 9.2% based on the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse.  It is still continuing to grow: 1997-6.8 percent, 1998-7.4, and 1999-8.4 percent. Even if using marijuana continues to grow and it's legalized, how can the poor families get it if they can not afford it?

Recently declared a new law where marijuana dispensaries might need to donate 2% of the cannabis to low-income folks beginning in August of next year (OpposingViews). This may be a fantastic law which other states like Florida may use to control the usage of marijuana if they do decide to make it lawful. With the donation legislation, poor people can access the marijuana they want which is proven to sell for $400 an oz in California. This cost is merely the street value of this plant-form (that which you smoke) of medical marijuana, so other kinds like liquid or expressed may be more expensive. The main part about state law is that poor households with"debilitating medical conditions" will have a means to acquire the medical marijuana that they should relieve their symptoms.

With all the factual evidence pointing towards the  Amazing advantages of medical marijuana, I concur and vote on the amendment 2 that will legalize medical marijuana.  I have a grandma who has Epilepsy seizures and when a dose of prescribed bud will help Relieve any other individual's symptoms, why don't you give her or alternative  Patients doses by pill? The Epilepsy Foundation published a statement Earlier this season who supported the rights of families and patients  Residing with migraines and epilepsy to get physician-directed care, Including bud (OpposingViews). There's no factual proof of Anybody dying from bud and my study reasoned mostly positive Advantages. Weighing out the advantages of medical marijuana and the Actuality  That poor families might have a means to get it, provides the state of Florida all of the reasons and factual proof it needs to legalize Bud.

[drjosephcho]

chara stats: joseph cho.

LEGAL NAME: Joseph Cho. NICKNAME[S]: Joe, Joey. DATE OF BIRTH: April 25th, 1984. GENDER | SPECIES: Male | Human. PLACE OF BIRTH: San Francisco, CA.

CURRENT LIVING CONDITIONS: Seattle, Washington. SPOKEN LANGUAGES: English. EDUCATION: Bachelor’s Degree from Berkeley, Doctorate from Johns Hopkins.

OCCUPATION: Trauma surgeon. CRIMINAL RECORD: None. DRINK | SMOKE | DRUGS: Yes | No | weed. LIKE[S]: Watching Friends, traveling, and talking to cute girls. DISLIKE[S]: Traffic, dancing, and doing laundry. FEAR[S]: Patients dying, being a bad doctor, losing his loved ones. PERSONALITY TRAITS: Warm, awkward, impulsive, and gullible.

{ P H Y S I C A L   I N F O R M A T I O N }

HAIR COLOR: Black. EYE COLOR: Dark brown. HEIGHT:  5′10 WEIGHT: 148 lbs. TATTOOS: He has a sleeve of tattoos on his left arm, and a few others on his body.

{ F A M I L Y   I N F O R M A T I O N }

SIBLING[S]: None. PARENT[S]: Andrew and Linda Cho (adoptive parents).

{ R E L A T I O N S H I P   I N F O R M A T I O N }

SEXUAL PREFERENCE: Heterosexual. RELATIONSHIP STATUS: Single. SINCE WHEN: Since he was dumped while overseas.

[juggiehasmyheart17-blog]

Ordinary Days 5

Jughead had woke early the next day and went to work on the farm, not bothering to wake Betty up. Dakota reluctantly followed Jughead when he called her. They worked that day in the north field, Jughead whacking away at the weeds that covered the area. He thought back to the woman sleeping soundly in his house and the baby the grew inside her. Betty had a doctor's appointment that afternoon that he would drive her to. He imagined this was her from prenatal appointment. He didn't know how far along she was, he didn't have knack for the natural occurrences with pregnancies. Jellybean probably knew right away when she saw her how far along she was. Jellybean was always in tune to motherhood even before she was a mother herself. Jughead’s thoughts lessened as a tune from his childhood popped in his head. He imagined holding a baby wrapped in a blanket while Betty slept next to him on his bed. With the scene vivid in his head, he began to sing. Caterpillar in the tree, How you wonder who you'll be Can't go far but you can always dream Wish you may and wish you might Don't you worry hold on tight I promise you that there will come a day Butterfly fly away And yes I still don't understand It's not anything we planned Kind of makes you think it's meant to be I always knew the day would come You'd stop crawling, start to run Beautiful as beautiful can be Dakota sat next to Jughead and began to howl. Jughead stopping singing and looked at her. “Really is it that bad?” Dakota barked at him as if to say yes. Jughead laughed and figured the baby wouldn't mind his bad singing. Betty woke up to an empty bed and an empty hallway. She had quickly grow accustomed to sharing a bed with Anna and Dakota not being far off in the hallway. But this morning the house was bare and quiet. She went downstairs and poured her a cup of coffee that Jughead had ready in a pot. She sipped on her coffee slowly, the morning sickness not allowing a quicker pace. She had decided the night before she would make herself useful and do some things around the house so she walked around the house trying to find a task. She noticed an extra room in the back of the house that she hadn't seen before. It was unlocked but hard to get inside like something was pressed up against the door. She gave it a harder shove and made her way inside. There were things scattered all over the room. From clothes to knick knacks, old photo albums, and China sets. Betty decided to start organizing, she didn't know why those things were there or who they belonged to but she decided it could at least be tidy. A few hours later, the room was still quite disarrayed but she had made slight progress. She sat on the floor organizing one of the boxes when she found an old Polaroid camera. She smiled down at it and snapped a picture of the box to see if the camera still worked. She grinned when a hard copy picture came out the bottom. A rustling sound came for the kitchen which she assumed was Jughead since it was getting closer to the time of her appointment. She left the room with the camera in hand and entered the kitchen where Jughead was making sandwiches, Dakota laying at his feet. Dakota perked up at the sight of Betty, who quickly put a finger to her mouth so Dakota would stay quiet. The dog obeyed and sat still on the kitchen floor. Betty put the camera's lens up to her face and took a picture of Jughead's stance. He looked so good from behind, well really he looked good from any angle. With the sound of the camera clicking, Jughead turned around. “Where did you find that?” He asked when taking in the sight of the camera. “Oh, in that back room, I started cleaning it. Figured I'd make myself useful.” Jughead nodded, “That's my mother's camera. That back room is where all my parents’ things are.” Betty reminded Jellybean telling her just the day before that their parents had passed away a few years apart. “I'm sorry, Jughead. I'll put it back.” Jughead shook his head. “No, no. Keep it. My mom would like to know it's being used.” He said with a small smile. “Now eat up, gotta be healthy for the doctor.” He said placing two plates on the table. Betty chuckled and obliged sitting down at the table. Once they were finished their lunch, they headed off to the doctor's appointment. Like everything else in this town the closest doctor was in “downtown” Lanesboro, if you could even call it downtown. The drive would be 45 minutes and the whole way Betty leg bounced and her head raced. Jughead noticed her state and looked her way, “Are you okay?” Betty nodded and took a deep breath. “I'm just nervous. I haven't gone to the doctor yet. What if something's wrong with the baby? What if the Doctor figures out the timing is wrong? That the baby's not yours?” Jughead covered her shaking hand with his, “Relax. It's 2017 the doctor won't care.” Betty scoffed, “yeah that's what I thought too, then my mother happened.” She exclaimed shaking her head. “Your mother is not here. Relax.” He said kissing her hand softly, making her blush. The rest of the car ride went swiftly and they were parked and inside in a flash. Betty sat in the waiting room, Jughead sat next to her. She filled out the various questions about her family history, and her own health. She stopped hesitantly at the part reserved for prenatal patients. Her hand coasted over the line asking for the father's name. She let out a small sigh and scribbled along the line. Jughead Jones. She chuckled and scratched it out replacing it with Forsythe Jones. “Betty Jones?” The nurse called out making Betty stand and walk towards her. Jughead walked her walk away. Betty stopped abruptly and turned to face Jughead. “Will you come with me?” Jughead's face erupted into a smile as he stood and met her in front of the nurse. Betty smiled and put her hand into his, she needed all the support she could get. Betty took deep breathes as she laid on the cold examination table. Jughead warm hands were a stark contrast, his thumb rubbing against her hand. The nurse smiled down at her as she applied the ultrasound gel and began the screening process. Betty gripped tighter to Jughead’s hand which was turning white under her grip. He started to hum softly under his breath, a similar tune to the one he had sang in the north field that morning. Betty smiled and closed her eyes focusing on the soft tune he hummed. “Okay Mrs. Jones, would you like pictures of your ultrasound?” The nurse asked and Betty quickly replied with a yes. The nurse smiled, “Alright, I will go get your pictures and the doctor will come in and explain the results.” Betty nodded with a deep breath trying to combat her shallow breaths. She sat up on the table and close her eyes again as Jughead rubbed her back slowly. “Mrs. Jones, Mr. Jones,” The doctor announced as he entered. “You will be very please to know the baby is healthy with no signs of future illness.” Betty grinned ear to ear at the news. “I told you not to worry.” Jughead said placing a kiss on her temple, to which she blushed. “It looks as though you are 4 months along, your morning sickness should lessen.” He explained, “There are apps on your phone that can help you keep track of your baby's growth and what symptoms to expect during that month. Now would like to know the sex of the baby?” Betty looked to Jughead with questioning eyes. He shook his head, “It's your baby.” He whispered. She sigh and looked back to the doctor. “Yes, please.” The doctor stood proudly beaming, “It’s a girl.” The car ride home consisted of Betty staring at the baby's picture and her softly repeating, “it's a girl.” She snapped a quick photo with her phone and sent it to Jellybean explaining that it was a girl. Then she sent an identical message to her sister Polly. While Jellybean’s response was ecstatic, Polly's was melancholy. That's great, Betty. “I wish the baby would look like you.” Betty lamented. Jughead smiled to himself, “what does the father look like?” He asked immediately regretting it. “He has dark hair and olive skin, an Asian I would say.” “You didn't know him well?” Betty scoffed and stared out the window, “No, barely at all.” A tear rolled down her face as she thought of the whirlwind weekend that threw away her life. Jughead sighed inaudibly wishing he hadn't said a word to her. “This weekend, we can go to the store and get supplies to decorate the baby's room if you'd like.” Jughead suggested. Betty smiled softly thinking of what the room would look like. “Maybe purple? Or light blue?” “I think that would be very pretty.” Jughead said with a smile. “How about a city theme like Berkeley?” Betty shook her head with a smile. “A farm theme, after all that's where she belongs, on a farm with you and me.” They arrived home and they both went their separate ways. Neither were hungry and both exhausted from the day. Once again Dakota took a neutral place in the hallway.

[drawthe-line]

Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds

I TRIED ACID for the first time with Nao last Friday. Him, Eric, and I were planning for the entire semester to trip together, but our schedules never lined up, so finally Nao and I were just like “Fuck it, let’s just do it right after finals end.” We were going to trip Thursday morning but he had some lab things to do and he said he was going to house roll with someone else on Friday—so I thought we probably weren’t going to trip anymore, which was chill. BUT THEN he messaged me Friday morning and we were just like AIGHT LET’S DO IT.

He got us McDonald’s and we went to the usual log in front of Martinez and ate breakfast. We planned out where to go during our trip. We thought about Lawrence Hall but neither of us had been up there by foot so we thought it would’ve been too complicated for us to get back down on acid so we just settled for Big C. We took our tabs around 12:30pm, walked up to the Big C, and around 1:30-2ish we started feeling giggly.

Our conversations were just straight up childish, yet everything we talked about seemed hilarious. We were watching a bee fly by and we decided to name it “C” after the Big C… (Jesus, looking back, that conversation was just straight up weird). I remember I would bring up some deep conversation topics and Nao would be like “O SHIT ARE WE ACTUALLY GETTING DEEP, ARE WE DOING THIS” and I would be like “O SHIT YOU RIGHT” and we’d regress back to stupid conversations. We kept joking about Eric coming to save us because our trip was getting pretty intense. We felt like Eric was our father and we were Hansel and Gretel lost in the woods.

The visuals on the trip were pretty amazing, it was similar to shrooms, except no vivid patterns. It was more like my vision was wavy and distorted. When I looked out at the view of Berkeley, the trees were radiating (I don’t know how to really describe it) and the building were wiggling. Around 3-ish, colors started getting more intense—I saw additional colors to what I was currently seeing. We tried walking around because a lot of other people came to the Big C and we didn’t want to deal with them. One group asked me to take a picture and I low-key panicked inside because 1) they handed me an expensive, big ass DLSR and I didn’t want to drop it (Nao reminded me to put the strap around my neck, though) and 2) I COULD NOT SEE CLEARLY FOR SHIT SO WHO knows if that picture even turned out well.

Nao and I walked around and squatted around just staring off into the distance at nature or at the ground while listening to the Beatles. I saw glimpses of bees on the ground (but there weren’t actually bees there). When it started getting dark, Nao and I walked back to his place. We couldn’t handle being around other people and cars so we kept saying “We cannot human, we cannot car.” By then, it was 5-5:30-ish, so we decided to spend the rest of the trip watching cartoons in his room. John was studying on his bed for his 7-10pm final (poor boi) while Nao and I watched Adventure Time and Gumball.

I remember then I checked in with my body and I felt incredibly uncomfortable. It felt weird to breathe, my eyes were really dry, and my neck and spine were stiff. I kept trying to concentrate on the shows but I felt uncomfortable with my existence. I would also feel a need to do something important but I kept trying to convince myself that I had initially kept the entire day free to do acid and that I was done with finals. I remember thinking a lot about my future as a doctor as well. I would get messages on my phone but I couldn’t think in a straightforward manner. It was like I forgot everything about social constructs and I ended up not replying to anybody except for 1-2 words (which would be “LOL” or “TF”).

Watching Gumball was fucking mind-blowing. Nothing in the show obeyed the laws of… anything, so whenever something unexpected happened, Nao and I would look at each other and freak out about how insane the show was. Around 8-9pm our stomachs were growling but we couldn’t decide on what to eat and we didn’t have an appetite for anything. We pulled up delivery websites (because we didn’t want to deal with walking outside and human interaction), but there were too many options so we continued to watch Gumball. Finally, at 10pm, we just ordered pizza. Around 12am, I just wanted the trip to end, so Nao and I smoked weed to try sobering up. NOPE, at this point I was just high and still seeing shit, so I decided to leave and get some sleep. I didn’t get quality sleep at all. I kept dozing off and waking up throughout the night. I got up the next morning somewhat rested.

Overall, acid was pretty interesting. Not as fun, trippy, and introspective as shrooms, but nonetheless a pretty good experience. I’ve seen and heard bad acid trips but mine was chill. Maybe like a 5-6/10 experience? Not bad.

[michaelsprocess-blog]

Updated Personas

Aaron Patrick​

Age​

26​

Residence​

House Small Yard​

About​

Aaron is a freshly graduated business student who just rented his first home in the suburbs just outside of downtown. He plays a lot of soccer in his free time, outside of working for a corporate 9-5 job in finance during the week. At his new place he has a small 25 ft x 25ft yard that is just grass. He hopes to liven things up a bit . He doesn’t have much knowledge on gardening at all or what plant is native and what isn’t. As news of the impact climate change is having on our planet increases, Aaron has a drive to try to help in any way he can.

Diane Collins​

Age​

30​

Residence​

House ¼ acre​

About​

Diane is a 30-year-old who is married and has two kids. When she is not caring for her kids with her husband, she is working part-time at a global non-profit in downtown Milwaukee. She and her family are vegetarians and love to grow their own food in their small elevated garden. They take family hikes and visit the park quite often. They wish their yard had some more foliage for the kids to discover insects, and birds, and small animals. She knows how to grow vegetables but isn’t sure where to start with native plants. They have a problem with an invasive species of weed that is growing all over their grass making it hard for them to grow plants in the past.

Greg Howard​

Age​

40​

Residence​

Home on the lake lots of sun​

About​

Greg is an CEO of an engineering firm in downtown Milwaukee. Greg got his doctorate in engineering from the university of California Berkeley, and lives in the suburbs outside of the city with his family of his and wife and three kids. They have two dogs that love to run around in the acre and a half of land. Greg and his family stay very active and go on trips to state and national parks very often. They love the outdoors and their yard where they grow veggies and play with their dogs. They are hoping to plant more trees and other native plants in order to bring more wildlife into their yards. Greg and his wife plan on being at the home for a very long time, and would like their yard to flourish without the constant maintenance of mowing the lawn.

[kittynpc]

Marijuana Can Benefit Millions In Pain

Change 2 or the privilege to Medical Marijuana would utilize restorative cannabis legitimate under certain wellbeing conditions. Patients or parental figures with an issued permit by a doctor would likewise be permitted to go to enrolled cannabis treatment focuses (Ballotpedia 2014). Not simply anybody can get a medicinal Marijuana permit however. People must be determined to have a "crippling ailment, for example, malignant growth, HIV or glaucoma. The Florida Department of Health would be in charge of managing medicinal cannabis and it would likewise issue recognizable proof cards and create systems for treatment focuses. In the accompanying entries I will talk about the upsides and downsides of weed, how destitute individuals can get it in the event that they can't manage the cost of it and how I for one feel about change 2 and the sanctioning of weed.

Medicinal pot Marijuana has numerous medical advantages, for example, alleviating constant torment because of a disease or assuaging worry following a long or occupied day. The proof is demonstrated by research that pot can soothe specific kinds of torment, sickness, spewing, and other crippling indications brought about by such ailments as malignant growth and AIDS in patients all around the world (ProCon 2014). Sanjay Gupta, MD, Chief Medical Correspondent for CNN referenced that weed doesn't have a high potential for maltreatment and there are genuine applications. Likewise "Some of the time Marijuana is the main thing that works", said Gupta. Joint pain is another regular sickness, more often than not in more seasoned grown-ups, with no momentum fix and pot has been demonstrated to help mitigate the indications of this malady also. Rheumatology revealed in 2006 that "In examination with the fake treatment, the CBM [cannabis-based medicine] delivered measurably noteworthy upgrades in torment on development, torment very still and nature of rest (ProCon 2014). Despite the fact that there are a few real advantages of medicinal weed, there are as yet the individuals who differ and contend that the sanctioning of therapeutic Marijuana would be unsafe to society.

The ones who are against Amendment 2 and the legitimate utilization of pot contend it might be impeding to society by causing an expansion in wrongdoing. Cleric Ron Allen guaranteed that cannabis would expand wrongdoing and neediness in Berkeley and he clarifies, "Exploration discloses to us that weed has similar consequences for the joy focal framework in the cerebrum as heroin and rocks." (OpposingViews 2014) Supporters of pot like Mason Tvert, of the Marijuana Policy Project can't help contradicting Allen, expressing that Allen didn't have even an inkling what he was discussing and weed has been demonstrated to be less poisonous and less addictive than different medications. "The truth of the matter is that Medical relationship the nation over and over 80% of Americans figure Marijuana can support truly sick individuals (Opposing Views) states Tvert." An investigation directed by the University of Texas at Dallas found that sanctioned cannabis may lessen violations like burglary and crime (Ferner 2014).

Another ruin of Marijuana is that it is said to be an entryway or venturing stone to other hurtful medications, for example, cocaine or courageous woman. The Eagle Forum referenced in an explanation that "Since THC is ceaselessly in the body the "high" from pot continuously reduces so pot smokers as a rule ingest different medications to get a kick (ProCon 2014)." Sue Rosche, Founder and President of the National Families in real life says, "This issue got extraordinary press inclusion and California's young people got the message, their previous month pot utilize expanded by almost 33% that year, from 6.5% to 9.2% as per the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse. It's as yet proceeding to rise: 1997-6.8%, 1998-7.4, and 1999-8.4%. Regardless of whether the utilization of weed keeps on rising and it is sanctioned, by what means will the poor family units acquire it in the event that they can't manage the cost of it?

The City of Berkeley, Calif. as of late reported another law wherein weed dispensaries should give 2% of their cannabis to low-pay individuals beginning in August of one year from now (OpposingViews). This could be a decent law that different states like Florida can use to control to utilization of weed in the event that they do choose to make it legitimate. With the gift law, poor people can gain admittance to the Marijuana they need which is known to sell for in any event $400 an ounce in California. This cost is just the road estimation of the plant-structure (what you smoke) of therapeutic cannabis, so different structures, for example, fluid or removed may cost more. The most significant part about state guideline is that poor families with "incapacitating ailments" will have an approach to get the restorative pot they have to reduce their indications.

With all the real proof indicating the astounding advantages of therapeutic weed, I concur and vote yes on change 2 which will sanction medicinal Marijuana. I have a grandma who has epilepsy seizures and if a portion of recommended Marijuana will help ease her or whatever other patient's side effects, why not give her or different patients doses by pill? The Epilepsy Foundation discharged an announcement not long ago that bolstered the privileges of patients and families living with seizures and epilepsy to get to doctor coordinated consideration, including Marijuana (OpposingViews). There is no genuine proof of anybody passing on from cannabis and my examination finished up generally positive advantages. Weighing out the advantages of restorative pot and the way that poor families may have an approach to get it, gives the province of Florida every one of the reasons and truthful proof it needs to sanction pot.

[aklsupporter]

The 'Unix Way'

It probably shouldn't, but it routinely astonishes me how much we live on the Web. Even I find myself going entire boots without using anything but the Web browser. With such an emphasis on Web-based services, one can forget to appreciate the humble operating system.

That said, we neglect our OS at the risk of radically underutilizing the incredible tools that it enables our device to be.

Most of us only come into contact with one, or possibly both, of two families of operating systems: "House Windows" and "House Practically Everything Else." The latter is more commonly known as Unix.

Windows has made great strides in usability and security, but to me it can never come close to Unix and its progeny. Though more than 50 years old, Unix has a simplicity, elegance, and versatility that is unrivalled in any other breed of OS.

This column is my exegesis of the Unix elements I personally find most significant. Doctors of computer science will concede the immense difficulty of encapsulating just what makes Unix special. So I, as decidedly less learned, will certainly not be able to come close. My hope, though, is that expressing my admiration for Unix might spark your own.

The Root of the Family Tree

If you haven't heard of Unix, that's only because its descendants don't all have the same resemblance to it -- and definitely don't share a name. MacOS is a distant offshoot which, while arguably the least like its forebears, still embodies enough rudimentary Unix traits to trace a clear lineage.

The three main branches of BSD, notably FreeBSD, have hewn the closest to the Unix formula, and continue to form the backbone of some of the world's most important computing systems. A good chunk of the world's servers, computerized military hardware, and PlayStation consoles are all some type of BSD under the hood.

Finally, there's Linux. While it hasn't preserved its Unix heritage as purely as BSD, Linux is the most prolific and visible Unix torchbearer. A plurality, if not outright majority, of the world's servers are Linux. On top of that, almost all embedded devices run Linux, including Android mobile devices.

Where Did This Indispensable OS Come From?

To give as condensed a history lesson as possible, Unix was created by an assemblage of the finest minds in computer science at Bell Labs in 1970. In their task, they set themselves simple objectives. First, they wanted an OS that could smoothly run on whatever hardware they could find since, ironically, they had a hard time finding any computers to work with at Bell. They also wanted their OS to allow multiple users to log in and run programs concurrently without bumping into each other. Finally, they wanted the OS to be simple to administer and intuitively organized. After acquiring devices from the neighboring department, which had a surplus, the team eventually created Unix.

Unix was adopted initially, and vigorously so, by university computer science departments for research purposes. The University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and the University of California Berkeley led the charge, with the latter going so far as to develop its own brand of Unix called the Berkeley Software Distribution, or BSD.

Eventually, AT&T, Bell's successor, lost interest in Unix and jettisoned it in the early 90s. Shortly following this, BSD grew in popularity, and AT&T realized what a grave mistake it had made. After what is probably still the most protracted and aggressive tech industry legal battle of all time, the BSD developers won sole custody of the de facto main line of Unix. BSD has been Unix's elder statesmen ever since, and guards one of the purest living, widely available iterations of Unix.

Organizational Structure

My conception of Unix and its accompanying overall approach to computing is what I call the "Unix Way." It is the intersection of Unix structure and Unix philosophy.

To begin with the structural side of the equation, let's consider the filesystem. The design is a tree, with every file starting at the root and branching from there. It's just that the "tree" is inverted, with the root at the top. Every file has its proper relation to "/" (the forward slash notation called "root"). The whole of the system is contained in the directories found here. Within each directory, you can have a practically unlimited number of files or other directories, each of which can have an unlimited number of files and directories of its own, and so on.

More importantly, every directory under root has a specific purpose. I covered this a while back in a piece on the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, so I won't rehash it all here. But to give a few illustrative examples, the /boot directory stores everything your system needs to boot up. The /bin, /sbin, and /usr directories retain all your system binaries (the things that run programs). Configuration files that can alter how system-owned programs work live in /etc. All your personal files such as documents and media go in /home (to be more accurate, in your user account's directory in /home). The kind of data that changes all the time, namely logs, gets filed under /var.

In this way, Unix really lives by the old adage "a place for everything, and everything in its place." This is exactly why it's very easy to find whatever you're looking for. Most of the time, you can follow the tree one directory at a time to get to exactly what you need, simply by picking the directory whose name seems like the most appropriate place for your file to be. If that doesn't work, you can run commands like 'find' to dig up exactly what you're looking for. This organizational scheme also keeps clutter to a minimum. Things that are out-of-place stand out, at which point they can be moved or deleted.

Everything Is a File

Another convention which lends utility through elegance is the fact that everything in Unix is a file. Instead of creating another distinct digital structure for things like hardware and processes, Unix thinks of all of these as files. They may not all be files as we commonly understand them, but they are files in the computer science sense of being groups of bits.

This uniformity means that you are free to use a variety of tools for dealing with anything on your system that needs it. Documents and media files are files. Obvious as that sounds, it means they are treated like individual objects that can be referred to by other programs, whether according to their content format, metadata, or raw bit makeup.

Devices are files in Unix, too. No matter what hardware you connect to your system, it gets classified as a block device or a stream device. Users almost never mess with these devices in their file form, but the computer needs a way of classifying these devices so it knows how to interact with them. In most cases, the system invokes some program for converting the device "file" into an immediately usable form.

Block devices represent blocks of data. While block devices aren't treated like "files" in their entirety, the system can read segments of the block device by requesting a block number. Stream devices, on the other hand, are "files" that present streams of information, meaning bits that are being created or sent constantly by some process. A good example is a keyboard: it sends a stream of data as keys are pressed.

Even processes are files. Every program that you run spawns one or more processes that persist as long as the program does. Processes regularly start other processes, but can all be tracked by their unique process ID (PID) and grouped by the user that owns them. By classifying processes as files, locating and manipulating them is straightforward. This is what makes reprioritizing selfish processes or killing unruly ones possible.

To stray a bit into the weeds, you can witness the power of construing everything as a file by running the 'lsof' command. Short for "list open files," 'lsof' enumerates all files currently in use which fit certain criteria. Example criteria include whether or not the files use system network connections, or which process owns them.

Virtues of Openness

The last element I want to point out (though certainly not the last that wins my admiration) is Unix's open computing standard. Most, if not all, of the leading Unix projects are open source, which means they are accessible. This has several key implications.

First, anyone can learn from it. In fact, Linux was born out of a desire to learn and experiment with Unix. Linus Torvalds wanted a copy of Minix to study and modify, but its developers did not want to hand out its source code. In response, Torvalds simply made his own Unix kernel, Linux. He later published the kernel on the Internet for anyone else who also wanted to play with Unix. Suffice it to say that there was some degree of interest in his work.

Second, Unix's openness means anyone can deploy it. If you have a project that requires a computer, Unix can power it; and being highly adaptable due to its architecture, this makes it great for practically any application, from tinkering to running a global business.

Third, anyone can extend it. Again, due to its open-source model, anyone can take a Unix OS and run with it. Users are free to fork their own versions, as happens routinely with Linux distributions. More commonly, users can easily build their own software that runs on any type of Unix system.

This portability is all the more valuable by virtue of Unix and its derivatives running on more hardware than any other OS type. Linux alone can run on essentially all desktop or laptop devices, essentially all embedded devices including mobile devices, all server devices, and even supercomputers.

So, I wouldn't say there's nothing Unix can't do, but you'd be hard-pressed to find it.

A School of Thought, and Class Is in Session

Considering the formidable undertaking that is writing an OS, most OS developers focus their work by defining a philosophy to underpin it. None has become so iconic and influential as the Unix philosophy. Its impact has reached beyond Unix to inspire generations of computer scientists and programmers.

There are multiple formulations of the Unix philosophy, so I will outline what I take as its core tenets.

In Unix, every tool should do one thing, but do that thing well. That sounds intuitive enough, but enough programs weren't (and still aren't) designed that way. What this precept means in practice is that each tool should be built to address only one narrow slice of computing tasks, but that it should also do so in a way that is simple to use and configurable enough to adapt to user preferences regarding that computing slice.

Once a few tools are built along these philosophical lines, users should be able to use them in combination to accomplish a lot (more on that in a sec). The "classic" Unix commands can do practically everything a fundamentally useful computer should be able to do.

With only a few dozen tools, users can:

Manage processes

Manipulate files and their contents irrespective of filetype

Configure hardware and networking devices

Manage installed software

Write and compile code into working binaries

Another central teaching of Unix philosophy is that tools should not assume or impose expectations for how users will use their outputs or outcomes. This concept seems abstract, but is intended to achieve the very pragmatic benefit of ensuring that tools can be chained together. This only amplifies what the potent basic Unix toolset is capable of.

In actual practice, this allows the output of one command to be the input of another. Remember that I said that everything is a file? Program outputs are no exception. So, any command that would normally require a file can alternatively take the "file" that is the previous command's output.

Lastly, to highlight a lesser-known aspect of Unix, it privileges text handling and manipulation. The reason for this is simple enough: text is what humans understand. It is therefore what we want computational results delivered in.

Fundamentally, all computers truly do is transform some text into different text (by way of binary so that it can make sense of the text). Unix tools, then, should let users edit, substitute, format, and reorient text with no fuss whatsoever. At the same time, Unix text tools should never deny the user granular control.

In observing the foregoing dogmas, text manipulation is divided into separate tools. These include the likes of 'awk', 'sed', 'grep', 'sort', 'tr', 'uniq', and a host of others. Here, too, each is formidable on its own, but immensely powerful in concert.

True Power Comes From Within

Regardless of how fascinating you may find them, it is understandable if these architectural and ideological distinctions seem abstruse. But whether or not you use your computer in a way that is congruent with these ideals, the people who designed your computer's OS and applications definitely did. These developers, and the pioneers before them, used the mighty tools of Unix to craft the computing experience you enjoy every day.

Nor are these implements relegated to some digital workbench in Silicon Valley. All of them are there -- sitting on your system anytime you want to access them -- and you may have more occasion to use them than you think. The majority of problems you could want your computer to solve aren't new, so there are usually old tools that already solve them. If you find yourself performing a repetitive task on a computer, there is probably a tool that accomplishes this for you, and it probably owes its existence to Unix.

In my time writing about technology, I have covered some of these tools, and I will likely cover yet more in time. Until then, if you have found the "Unix Way" as compelling as I have, I encourage you to seek out knowledge of it for yourself. The Internet has no shortage of this, I assure you. That's where I got it. 

[kathleenseiber]

New take on same-sex behavior in animals asks ‘why not?’

It’s time to reframe the question from “why do animals engage in same-sex behavior” to “why not?” researchers argue in a new article.

Over the years, scientists have recorded same-sex sexual behavior in more than 1,500 animal species, from snow geese to common toads. And for just as long evolutionary biologists studying these behaviors have grappled with what has come to be known as a “Darwinian paradox��: How can these behaviors be so persistent when they offer no opportunity to produce offspring?

Writing in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, the authors suggest that these behaviors may actually have been part of the original, ancestral condition in animals and have persisted because they have few—if any—costs and perhaps some important benefits.

The benefits of same-sex behavior in animals

“We propose a shift in our thinking on the sexual behaviors of animals,” says lead author Julia Monk, a doctoral candidate in the Yale University’s School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. “We’re excited to see how relaxing traditional constraints on evolutionary theory of these behaviors will allow for a more complete understanding of the complexity of animal sexual behaviors.”

For the paper, the researchers explain that they use the terms “same-sex behaviors” (SSBs) and “different-sex behaviors” (DSBs) rather than terms such as homosexuality or heterosexuality to avoid conflation with terms for human sexual identities.

Typically, research into these behaviors has rested on two assumptions, the authors say. The first is that same-sex behavior (SSB) has high costs because individuals spend time and energy on activities that have no potential for reproductive success. The other is that same-sex behaviors emerged independently in different animal lineages.

They argue that a combination of same-sex and different-sex sexual behaviors is an original condition for all sexually producing animals—and that these tendencies likely evolved in the earliest forms of sexual behavior.

They also dispute the assumption that because different-sex behaviors are essential for sexual reproduction selection—or the tendency of beneficial traits that promote increases in population, size, or resilience—will eliminate sexual behaviors that do not immediately result in reproduction.

On the contrary, they suggest that SSB is not always—and maybe even seldom—very costly. This would suggest that this behavior is actually what evolutionary biologists call “neutral,” meaning that it has neither negative nor positive effects and therefore persists because there’s no reason for natural selection to weed it out.

Moreover, the authors suggest that not only are same-sex behaviors often “not costly,” but can be advantageous from a natural selection perspective because individuals are more likely to mate with more partners. Many species aren’t inherently monogamous but instead try to mate with more than one individual. In many species it can be difficult for individuals to even discern between different sexes.

“So, if you’re too picky in targeting what you think is the opposite sex, you just mate with fewer individuals. On the other hand, if you’re less picky and engage in both SSB and DSB, you can mate with more individuals in general, including individuals of a different sex,” says coauthor Max Lambert, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley’s environmental science, policy, and management department.

Ideas holding us back

For example, scientists have found that male burying beetles engage in increased same-sex behavior when they perceive a higher cost of missed mating opportunities with females. This suggests that engaging with different-sex behaviors exclusively is actually disadvantageous because it reduces chances to display mating potential when mating opportunities are rare.

Such examples only hint at what scientists don’t know about same-sex behaviors in animals, Lambert says. There are thousands of examples of SSB in animals, he says, yet most of these observations occurred by chance and scientists rarely if ever actively study how often these behaviors occur compared with different-sex sexual behaviors.

“So far, most biologists have considered SSB as extremely costly and, consequently, something that is aberrant,” he says. “This strong assumption has stopped us as a community from actively studying how often and under what conditions SSB is happening. Given our casual observations suggest that SSB seems to happen pretty commonly across thousands of species, imagine what we would have learned if we had assumed this was something interesting and not just a rampant accident.”

Nonetheless, Monk notes that scientific questioning into the persistence of same-sex sexual behaviors has long been observed through the lens of a human society that has historically judged some behaviors to be “normal” or “abnormal.” This tendency, she says, has hindered our understanding of animal behavior in that it has promoted research that only confirms pre-existing assumptions or even averts important steps in the scientific process.

“Once you really dig into the research on the behavior of animals you can’t help but be impressed by the diversity of life and how animals are out there defying our expectations all the time,” she says. “And this should lead us to question those expectations.”

Additional coauthors are from the University of Texas at Austin; the University of California, Berkeley; and the Center for Reproductive Evolution at Syracuse University.

Source: Yale University

The post New take on same-sex behavior in animals asks ‘why not?’ appeared first on Futurity.

New take on same-sex behavior in animals asks ‘why not?’ published first on https://triviaqaweb.weebly.com/

[casinoonlinestuff]

Medical Marijuana For ADHD

At the Peace in Medicine Healing Center in Sebastopol, the wares on display include dried marijuana - featuring brands like Kryptonite, Voodoo Daddy and Train Wreck - and medicinal cookies arrayed below a sign saying, "Keep Out of Reach of Your Mother."

Several Bay Area doctors who recommend medical marijuana for their patients said in recent interviews that their client base had expanded to include teenagers with psychiatric conditions including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

"It's not everybody's medicine, but for some, it can make a profound difference," said Valerie Corral, a founder of the Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana, a patients' collective in Santa Cruz that has two dozen minors as registered clients.

Because California does not require doctors to report cases involving medical marijuana, no reliable data exist for how many minors have been authorized to receive it. But Dr. Jean Talleyrand, who founded MediCann, a network in Oakland of 20 clinics who authorize patients to use the drug, said his staff members had treated as many as 50 patients ages 14 to 18 who had A.D.H.D. Bay Area doctors have been at the forefront of the fierce debate about medical marijuana, winning tolerance for people with grave illnesses like terminal cancer and AIDS. Yet as these doctors use their discretion more liberally, such support - even here - may be harder to muster, especially when it comes to using marijuana to treat adolescents with A.D.H.D.

"How many ways can one say 'one of the worst ideas of all time?' " asked Stephen Hinshaw, the chairman of the psychology department at the University of California, Berkeley. He cited studies showing that tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the active ingredient in cannabis, disrupts attention, memory and concentration - functions already compromised in people with the attention-deficit disorder.

Advocates are just as adamant, though they are in a distinct minority. "It's safer than aspirin," Dr. Talleyrand said. He and other marijuana advocates maintain that it is also safer than methylphenidate (Ritalin), the stimulant prescription drug most often used to treat A.D.H.D. That drug has documented potential side effects including insomnia, depression, facial tics and stunted growth.

In 1996, voters approved a ballot proposition making California the first state to legalize medical marijuana. Twelve other states have followed suit - allowing cannabis for several specified, serious conditions including cancer and AIDS - but only California adds the grab-bag phrase "for any other illness for which marijuana provides relief."

This has left those doctors willing to "recommend" cannabis - in the Alice-in-Wonderland world of medical marijuana, they cannot legally prescribe it - with leeway that some use to a daring degree. "You can get it for a backache," said Keith Stroup, the founder of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

Nonetheless, expanding its use among young people is controversial even among doctors who authorize medical marijuana.

Gene Schoenfeld, a doctor in Sausalito, said, "I wouldn't do it for anyone under 21, unless they have a life-threatening problem such as cancer or AIDS."

Dr. Schoenfeld added, "It's detrimental to adolescents who chronically use it, and if it's being used medically, that implies chronic use."

Dr. Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, said she was particularly worried about the risk of dependency - a risk she said was already high among adolescents and people with attention-deficit disorder.

Counterintuitive as it may seem, however, patients and doctors have been reporting that marijuana helps alleviate some of the symptoms, particularly the anxiety and anger that so often accompany A.D.H.D. The disorder has been diagnosed in more than 4.5 million children in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Researchers have linked the use of marijuana by adolescents to increased risk of psychosis and schizophrenia for people genetically predisposed to those illnesses. However, one 2008 report in the journal Schizophrenia Research suggested that the incidence of mental health problems among adolescents with the disorder who used marijuana was lower than that of nonusers.

Marijuana is "a godsend" for some people with A.D.H.D., said Dr. Edward M. Hallowell, a psychiatrist who has written several books on the disorder. However, Dr. Hallowell said he discourages his patients from using it, both because it is - mostly - illegal, and because his observations show that "it can lead to a syndrome in which all the person wants to do all day is get stoned, and they do nothing else."

Until the age of 18, patients requesting medical marijuana must be accompanied to the doctor's appointment and to the dispensaries by a parent or authorized caregiver. Some doctors interviewed said they suspected that in at least some cases, parents were accompanying their children primarily with the hope that medical authorization would allow the adolescents to avoid buying drugs on the street.

A recent University of Michigan study found that more than 40 percent of high school students had tried marijuana.

"I don't have a problem with that, as long as we can have our medical conversation," Dr. Talleyrand said, adding that patients must have medical records to be seen by his doctors.

The Medical Board of California began investigating Dr. Talleyrand in the spring, said a board spokeswoman, Candis Cohen, after a KGO-TV report detailed questionable practices at MediCann clinics, which, the report said, had grossed at least $10 million in five years.

Dr. Talleyrand and his staff members are not alone in being willing to recommend marijuana for minors - weed shop online . In Berkeley, Dr. Frank Lucido said he was questioned by the medical board but ultimately not disciplined after he authorized marijuana for a 16-year-old boy with A.D.H.D. who had tried Ritalin unsuccessfully and was racking up a record of minor arrests.

Within a year of the new treatment, he said, the boy was getting better grades and was even elected president of his special-education class. "He was telling his mother: 'My brain works. I can think,' " Dr. Lucido said.

"With any medication, you weigh the benefits against the risks," he added.

Even so, MediCann patients who receive the authorization must sign a form listing possible downsides of marijuana use, including "mental slowness," memory problems, nervousness, confusion, "increased talkativeness," rapid heartbeat, difficulty in completing complex tasks and hunger. "Some patients can become dependent on marijuana," the form also warns.

The White House's recent signals of more federal tolerance for state medical marijuana laws - which pointedly excluded sales to minors - reignited the debate over medical marijuana.

Some advocates, like Dr. Lester Grinspoon, an associate professor emeritus of psychiatry at Harvard University, suggest that medical marijuana's stigma has less to do with questions of clinical efficacy and more to do with its association, in popular culture, with illicit pleasure and addiction.

Others, like Alberto Torrico of Fremont, the majority leader of the California Assembly, argue for more oversight in general. "The marijuana is a lot more powerful these days than when we were growing up, and too much is being dispensed for nonmedical reasons," he said in an interview last week, bluntly adding, "Any children being given medical marijuana is unacceptable."

As advocates of increased acceptance try to win support, they may find their serious arguments compromised by the dispensaries' playful atmosphere.

OrganiCann, a dispensary in Santa Rosa, has a Web site advertisement listing the "medible of the week" - butterscotch rock candy - invitingly photographed in a gift box with a ribbon. OrganiCann also offers a 10 percent discount, every Friday, for customers with a valid student ID.

[richmeganews]

Can Kamala Harris Win?

So here’s the plan:

Kamala is going to walk up to Rodney Scott’s Whole Hog BBQ from the left. At 12:50 p.m., Rodney Scott will greet her. She’ll enter through the side door and order at the second register, from the woman in the red shirt. Kamala, Scott, and Maya Harris—that’s Kamala’s sister and campaign chair—will sit and eat. Kamala will then exit through the front door and walk around back to look at the smoker. She’ll reenter through the front, cross the dining room, and exit through the side door to take reporters’ questions.

To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.

Rodney Scott’s Whole Hog, on the corner of King and Grove Streets in Charleston, South Carolina, is perfect—the kind of fast-casual, deeply American spot almost any voter can get behind: local pit master anointed by Anthony Bourdain, outdoor seating under tasteful white Christmas lights, wooden tables with wrought-iron legs, red stools. In the hour leading up to Kamala’s arrival, men walking and biking slowly down Grove Street give way to police cars, followed by unmarked cars. At T minus 10, the campaign’s 23-year-old South Carolina communications director, Jerusalem Demsas, asks, “Can we get Rodney out here?” She places Scott, handsome and regionally beloved, on his mark to the left of the door. After Demsas leaves, Scott mutters, “People with warrants must be running off the block.”

It’s all happening before you can even see her, so thick and aggressive is the press: the 20-plus reporters with TV cameras, boom mics, lenses larger than some dogs. Kamala shakes Scott’s hand; touches his arm; smiles her big, open, I-am-so-happy-to-be-with-you-right-now smile. She’s shorter, even in heels, than one expects. But she’s magnetic, authoritative, warm—leaning in, nodding, gesturing with both hands, moving those hands from a voter’s biceps or shoulder to a position of deep appreciation over her heart.

Kamala wends through the scrum of press, makes her way to the counter, and finds the woman in the red shirt, who happens to be Scott’s wife. Kamala greets her with a two-handed clasp (a simple shake would come across as too formal and masculine). Then, right there, a decision needs to be made on the fly: What is Kamala going to order?

Kamala Harris—the Democratic presidential hopeful and 54-year-old junior senator from California—is a prosecutor by training. She knows well that any misstep, anything you say or do, can and will be held against you. Her fundamental, almost constitutional, understanding of this has made her cautious, at times enragingly so.

Harris’s demographic identity has always been radical. She was San Francisco’s first female district attorney, first black district attorney, first Asian American district attorney. She was then California’s first female attorney general, first black attorney general, first Asian American attorney general. She was the second black woman, ever, to win a seat in the United States Senate. But in office, she’s avoided saying or doing much that could be held against her. As attorney general, she declined to support two ballot measures to end the death penalty. She declined to support making drug possession a misdemeanor. She declined to support legalizing pot. She declined to support a ballot measure reforming California’s brutal three-strikes law. The point is: She had power. She kept most of it in reserve. More important than fixing the broken criminal-justice system, it seemed, was protecting her status as a rising star. She had earned that reputation by the time the first major profile of her was written: San Francisco Magazine, 2007. The article also described her as “maddeningly elusive.”

It takes Harris a minute, but she decides on a pulled-pork sandwich, with corn bread and collard greens, and a banana pudding to split with Maya. They sit and eat, ignoring the two dozen recording devices in their faces, talking about Scott’s vinegar-based BBQ sauce and his recipe for banana pudding—good territory for Harris, as she’s a serious cook. Nearby, there are a few appalled customers, including a family that has driven 40 minutes to celebrate the father’s birthday and has no idea what’s happening, no idea even who Harris is, and would just like this rugby squad of reporters to move aside long enough for their son to refill his drink. But for the most part, the patrons are dazzled by Harris, whose star quality drew 20,000 people to her kickoff rally in Oakland. The dynamism she displayed there made the event feel like a cause, or a concert—Kamalapalooza—and gave her campaign significant momentum. (Laurene Powell Jobs, the president of Emerson Collective, which is the majority owner of The Atlantic, has provided financial support to the Harris campaign.)

After 15 minutes, right on schedule, Harris sets down her napkin and walks around back. She takes some photos near the smoker with Scott’s family and looks deeply into the eyes of his adorable 10-year-old son. She tells him she’s giving a speech later and she’d like him to let her know what he thinks of it. Then she walks back through the restaurant and exits, as planned, through the side door so she can gaggle with the press. (NB: Gaggle is now a verb in American politics, meaning “to answer questions shouted at you by a group of reporters.”)

Here, again, Harris is graciously, militarily on point. All good politicians stick to a script, but Harris speaks like a woman who knows that facts are ammunition. Everything you say can and will be used against you. Just this week she’s been in the weeds, so to speak, with Reefergate, a kerfuffle that arose when Harris was asked on the Breakfast Club radio show what music she’d listened to when she smoked pot in college and she said Tupac and Snoop Dogg. Social media erupted with gotchas, as those artists didn’t release songs until after she’d graduated.

Harris’s spokesperson said that she’d been answering a different question, about the music she listens to now, but even so The New York Times, The View, MSNBC, and Fox & Friends all picked up the story. Harris’s own father, who is Jamaican, flamed her on Jamaica Global Online for insinuating that she supported legalized pot because she was Jamaican: “My dear departed grandmothers … as well as my deceased parents, must be turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker.” The uproar caused the former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau to flip out on Pod Save America: “Donald Trump is president … We cannot be talking about this fucking shit again with the Democratic candidates.”

Harris on the trail in South Carolina. Once a stiff and guarded campaigner, she’s learned how to radiate warmth. (Phyllis B. Dooney)

But Harris, today, gaggling, is in top form: We don’t need a tragedy to enact commonsense gun reform. This economy is not working for working people. Every American needs a path to success. We need to speak truth. If Harris’s campaign has a mantra, that’s it: truth truth truth truth truth. She delivers her talking points while dressed, as she always is, in her uniform of dark suit, pearls, black heels. I know—you think I shouldn’t be writing about her clothes. But the clothes themselves are a smart, cautious play, one that Hillary Clinton, frankly, could have benefited from. If you wear the same outfit every single day, pretty soon the haters will run out of snarky things to say about your appearance and move on.

[Jemele Hill: Kamala Harris’s blackness isn’t up for debate]

Among Harris’s core traits, arguably her Shakespearean-tragedy trait, the one so central to her character that it has the potential to lift her to the highest post in the land but could also take her down, is her discipline. It is what has allowed her to play the long game, to protect her future. It has also infuriated constituents over the years who wanted Harris to take a stand and fight for them today, not when she reached a higher office. Yet Harris, on the trail, seems bolder than she has in the past. She’s declared that she’s for reparations, for the Green New Deal, for decriminalizing sex work and legalizing pot. She comes across as a woman who is cashing in her chips, taking all the political and social capital she was safeguarding for all those years and putting it on the table, declaring that her moment is now. She’s a black female prosecutor; we have a racist, misogynist, possibly criminal president. All of that caretaking of her political future—what was it for if not this?

By Harris’s side, on the road, is not her husband, Doug Emhoff, a Los Angeles lawyer she married in 2014, but her sister, Maya, who was a top policy adviser for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and, before that, the vice president for democracy, rights, and justice at the Ford Foundation and the executive director of the ACLU of Northern California. When the world is following you with boom mics and long knives, Maya told me, “it’s good to know there are people with you 100 percent. Ride or die. Not going anywhere.”

Harris’s parents, Shyamala Gopalan and Donald Harris, met in Berkeley, California, in the early 1960s, in the civil-rights movement. They’d both come to the United States to study at UC Berkeley: Shyamala, at age 19, from a Brahman family in India, to pursue a doctorate in endocrinology and nutrition; Donald, from Jamaica, for a doctorate in economics. As with almost everything else in her life, Harris has a set of stock stories she tells about her upbringing, all of which are laid out in her heavily vetted, surprise-free memoir, The Truths We Hold, which was released two weeks before she announced her candidacy. (The big vulnerable reveal in it is that Harris had to take the bar exam twice.) As a girl, she loved the outdoors; her father yelled at her, “Run, Kamala! As fast as you can. Run!” Her mother sang along to Aretha Franklin; her dad played Thelonious Monk. They divorced when Harris was 7. Before that, the family attended protests together. At one, Harris, a toddler, started fussing. Her mother bent down and asked, “What do you want?”

Harris said, “Fweedom!”

Shyamala, the daughter of a diplomat father and a mother who educated fellow Indian women about birth control through a bullhorn, was barely 5 feet tall, and formidable. She was supposed to return to India for an arranged marriage. She refused. “She had literally no patience for mediocrity,” Maya said. Her outlook was: “Be your best. If you’re going to do something, be the best. Work hard, the whole way.” En route to becoming a prominent breast-cancer researcher, she raised her girls primarily as a single mother. She took Harris with her to her lab when necessary and directed her to wash test tubes. She covered the kitchen in their small apartment with waxed paper and made lollipops and other candy. If she bought gifts, she set up a game in the style of Let’s Make a Deal. What do you want—Door No. 1 (the bedroom) or Door No. 2 (the kitchen)? Inside, the girls would find a blue bike with tasseled handlebars or an Easy-Bake Oven. In Harris’s telling, Shyamala didn’t coddle. If her children came home from school with a problem, she would ask, “Well, what did you do?,” in order to push them to solve it themselves. She raised her daughters in the black community, taking them to Berkeley’s black cultural center, Rainbow Sign, where Maya Angelou read poetry and Nina Simone sang. In 1971, when Harris was 7, Shirley Chisholm dropped by. She was exploring a bid for president.

When I asked Maya about her relationship with her sister, Kamala raised her eyebrows and cocked her head, like, This had better be good. “Well, she’s a big sister and …” Maya paused and turned to Harris. “Are you going to qualify that?”

Harris, laughing, declined. So Maya continued: “She was protective … Maybe just a liiiiiiiittle bossy.” If there was a problem in the schoolyard, Harris would assess the situation and make sure Maya was okay. The two organized a children’s protest to overturn a no-playing policy in their apartment building’s empty courtyard. Do I even need to say it? They won.

When Harris was in middle school, Shyamala took a post at McGill University and moved with her daughters to Montreal. Harris attended high school there. At Howard University, in Washington, D.C., she chaired the economics society, argued on the debate team, and pledged the AKA sorority, the first black sorority in the country, whose alumnae show up at Harris’s campaign events in force, dressed in AKA pale pink and green, a squadron of extra aunts. At UC Hastings College of the Law, in San Francisco, Harris “found her calling,” as she writes in her memoir, and decided to become a prosecutor.

This was not an easy sell for her parents. Shyamala believed, as Harris writes, that America had “a deep and dark history of people using the power of the prosecutor as an instrument of injustice.” Among Shyamala’s closest friends was Mary Lewis, a professor and public intellectual who helped lead the black-consciousness movement in the Bay Area. Donald Harris, meanwhile, had become an economics professor at Stanford University, the first black man in his department and one of about 10 black faculty members total. He was a left-leaning iconoclast who wrote and taught about uneven economic development around the world, particularly across racial lines, long before many Americans had ever heard the phrase income inequality. Colleagues found his progressivism threatening—he was called “too charismatic, a pied piper leading students away from neoclassical economics,” in The Stanford Daily.

Yet growing up at protests, Harris writes, she’d seen the mechanics of fighting for “justice from the outside.” That dynamic did not appeal to her. She wanted insider power, establishment power. “When activists came marching and banging on doors,” Harris writes, “I wanted to be on the other side to let them in.” Shyamala interrogated this logic. As Harris says, both in her book and in speeches, “I had to defend my choice as one would a thesis.”

It was the choice of a woman who likes control. Even sitting with Maya, post-barbecue, in a corridor of a black church in South Carolina before a town hall—when Harris is laughing and slightly slouched in her chair, seemingly relaxed—she’s a woman who maintains a tight grip on the narrative. No detail is too small.

“I stay with her a lot when I’m in D.C.,” Maya says, trying to tell me a story about how Harris likes to take care of people. (I experienced this myself. I showed up that day with a cough, and Harris instantly offered me cough drops and green tea.)

Harris corrects Maya, quietly but firmly: “Always.”

“Always … almost always,” Maya says. “Okay, mostly.”

Harris stands her ground: “Always.”

Maya—a Stanford Law School grad and one of the youngest people ever appointed dean of a law school—drops the point.

Harris will talk about cooking, specifically and in great detail, if you ask her. She’ll even get out her iPad and show you the recipes she’s marked from The New York Times’ cooking section, which she reads in the campaign van, after events, to relax. Chicken Cacciatore With Mushrooms, Tomatoes, and Wine—what’s oppo research going to do with that? I can tell you that her go-to dinner is roast chicken and that she’s cooked almost every recipe in Alice Waters’s The Art of Simple Food. In the kitchen, she’s a fundamentalist. “Salt, olive oil, a lemon, garlic, pepper, some good mustard—you can do almost anything with those ingredients.”

But turn the discussion to this moment in her life, to taking her shot—how she’s going to both protect this opportunity and go all out; where the line is between being too cautious and too open—and the specificity disappears. First she pivots away from caution. “I wouldn’t say cautious as much as smart. We have to be smart. We have to be strategic.” (This is a favorite move. For more than a decade Harris has talked about being “smart” on crime rather than “tough” or “soft.”) Then she turns to truth. “We have to speak truths, and in speaking those truths, some people are surprised that I’m actually saying that on a stage … So we have to push it.”

Lord knows we are all desperate for a president who values truth. But that wasn’t what I was getting at. There are a great many truths in the world. I wanted to know which ones were on her mind. Where is she going to be bold? Where does she feel she needs to hold back?

[Read: How Kamala Harris is running against 2020 democrats]

“I guess a lot of how I decide [what to] talk about is based on what people tell me they want to discuss,” Harris says. “Not so much what they want to discuss as what are the concerns for them.” This is going nowhere. “Certainly I do think in specifics. And when I’m in a smaller group where there’s more latitude to have a real conversation …”

I have limited time. I drop the question and move on, which of course was Harris’s goal.

Harris at her law-school graduation in 1989, with her mother, Shyamala Gopalan (center) and her first-grade teacher, Frances Wilson. (Courtesy of Kamala Harris)

It is truly a shame that Shyamala Gopalan isn’t here for this—her two daughters together, Kamala running for president of the United States.

She died 10 years ago. She had colon cancer, and when the end was near, Harris visited her in the hospital while running for attorney general. “She was starting to tune things out. She’d stopped watching the news and reading the paper, which was so unlike her, and she was tired. She was sleeping a lot. And I was with her in the hospital. I was sitting next to her—here’s the bed,” Harris says, motioning to her side, “and she was turned that way. We were just spending time together. And she said, looking away, with her eyes closed, I’m sure: ‘What’s going on with the campaign?’

“I said, ‘Well, Mommy, they said they’re gonna kick my ass.’ My mother leaned over and looked at me and had the biggest smile. Just the biggest smile on her face.”

Harris laughs. I ask what the smile meant. She says, “Bring it on. Good luck to them.”

America—at least the blue parts—came to see Harris as its potential savior in June 2017, when she questioned then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions about the Russia investigation. Sessions sat at a desk before the Senate Intelligence Committee, his mouth pursed in a boyish smirk, his white hair looking as though his mother had combed it for him, Harris regal on the dais above. Here was a man thinking he was going to get away with something, as he nearly always had. Then, in view of the world and this very smart black woman 18 years his junior, he began to realize he was not.

Harris, detailed notes in hand, had no patience for his “I do not recall”s and his long-winded responses to run out the clock. She just calmly and repeatedly demanded an answer to her question: “Did you have any communication with any Russian businessmen or any Russian nationals?” Her mental clarity was terrifying.

Sessions broke down after three and a half minutes. “I’m not able to be rushed this fast!,” he said. “It makes me nervous.”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, in September 2018, cemented many Americans’ belief that Harris was the woman to go after Trump. “Have you discussed [Special Counsel Robert] Mueller or his investigation with anyone at Kasowitz Benson Torres, the law firm founded by Marc Kasowitz, President Trump’s personal lawyer?”

Harris—who, like any good prosecutor, knows not to pose a question to which she doesn’t already have the answer—asked this nearly verbatim six times, shining a hot and unflattering spotlight on Kavanaugh, who responded, in order, as capillaries appeared to burst all over his face:

1. “Ah …”

2. “I’m not remembering, but if you have something …”

3. “Kasowitz? Benson? …”

4. “Is there a person you’re talking about?”

5. “I’m not remembering, but I’m happy to be refreshed or if you want to tell me who you’re thinking of …”

6. “Do I know anyone who works at that firm? I might know … I would like to know the person you’re thinking of.”

Harris then said, “I think you’re thinking of someone and you don’t want to tell us.” Finally Senator Mike Lee of Utah raised an objection and stalled her line of questioning.

Historically, the prosecutor’s office has been a hard place to run from on the left. You will never really be the progressive. By definition, you are defending the state. On the stump, Harris reframes her prosecutorial role: “My whole life, I’ve only had one client: the people,” which sounds nice coming from the mouth of a public servant. What voter is not for that? Yet when Harris entered a courtroom stating that she was there to argue “for the people,” she was not the voice of the underdog. She was the voice of enforcement, the voice of the law.

As California attorney general, Harris referred to herself as the state’s “top cop.” (Sasha Arutyunova)

Jeff Adachi, the city’s longtime elected public defender (who died of an apparent heart attack at age 59 not long after I interviewed him for this article), met Harris when she was a first-year law student at Hastings. “Did she always have the charm and ambition she’s known for today? Yeah,” he told me. Adachi was “a little surprised,” he said, when Harris aligned herself “with law enforcement and wanting to put people behind bars,” because “we had probably talked about politics before and she was always seen as more of a liberal progressive.” But there were very few prosecutors of color at the time, and very few women, and, Adachi said, the prosecutor path was “seen as a stepping stone to do something bigger or greater.”

When Harris ran for district attorney, in 2003, she challenged Terence Hallinan, her former boss, from the right. He was entangled in Fajitagate, a preposterous scandal that involved three off-duty police officers beating up two residents and then demanding their takeout fajitas. The public saw the department as an unprofessional and incompetent bunch of good ol’ boys. (Hallinan had a low conviction rate, and he did not help his reputation when he handed members of the Fajitagate grand jury a blank indictment form and asked them to fill in the names of the officers they thought should be charged.) Harris enlisted her mother to stuff envelopes and brought an ironing board to neighborhood campaign stops, to use as a portable table. She wasn’t a natural. She felt awkward talking about herself with strangers.

She’d had a much-discussed relationship with future San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, who was 31 years older and estranged from his wife. Brown was a local kingmaker. Still, Harris did not assume that he would anoint her. During the campaign, her longtime mentee Lateefah Simon took a BART train into the Mission early one weekday. “It’s, like, 7:30 in the morning—legit,” she told me. “I’m coming up the escalator and I see Kamala Harris, by herself, in a suit at 16th and Mission.” The intersection then smelled like feces and was filled with drug dealers. Simon looked at Harris like, Are you stupid? What are you doing here, dressed like that, when people are still high from the night before?

“I’m trying to win this race!” Harris told her.

“She had on pearls!,” Simon said.

Once in office, Harris got straight to work cleaning up Hallinan’s mess. She painted the office walls, which no one had done in years. She replaced the jam-prone copy machine. If staffers tried to leave for the evening before Harris thought they should, she shouted, “Well, I guess justice has been done! Everybody’s going home.”

She endured one major scandal, over a rogue tech in her crime lab. The tech stole cocaine and mishandled evidence, which was bad enough. But then Harris, likely thinking she could address the issue quietly, failed to follow procedure and inform the defense lawyers in the cases involved. One thousand cases had to be thrown out.

Nevertheless, in her first three years as DA, San Francisco’s conviction rate rose from 52 to 67 percent. She even created a new category of crime—truancy—and punished parents who failed to send their children to school. Then, as now, no one contested the link between high-school graduation and a person’s future in a well-paying job as opposed to jail. Harris still talks about this. She stirs outrage at America’s collective failure to invest in the education of other people’s children, often citing the statistic that nearly 80 percent of all prisoners are high-school dropouts or GED recipients. But is arresting a mother whose life is so frayed that she can’t get her child to school the best way to set that child on the path to success? Many, particularly in the black community, answered no. They still do. “Identity politics is stupid,” says Phoenix Calida, a co-host of The Black Podcast, “if you’re not going to enact identity policy.”

Harris ran against the death penalty, and, in what was arguably the first and last truly controversial decision she’s made in her political career, she stuck to her position and did not seek capital punishment when a San Francisco cop was killed in the line of duty several months into her tenure. The pressure to reverse her campaign promise was intense. Senator Dianne Feinstein, who’d served as San Francisco’s mayor from 1978 to 1988, chastised Harris for not doing so at the slain officer’s funeral.

Still, Harris kept her promise—and paid for it. No police union endorsed her for 10 years. One plausible read of her political history suggests that this experience, less than a year into elected office, taught her to fear and avoid taking a stand.

Harris calls herself a progressive prosecutor, which she’s not, though she did lift up individual lives. She started one of the first prisoner reentry programs in the country, Back on Track. It helped young, first-time drug offenders find jobs and services and earn high-school degrees. But Back on Track served only 300 people; Harris never took the program to scale. She also mentored young women, among them Lateefah Simon, who went from being a high-school dropout to becoming a MacArthur genius-grant winner in 10 years, which has got to be a record.

Simon now runs the Akonadi Foundation, in Oakland, dedicated to eliminating structural racism. The two met when Simon was 22 years old, with a 4-year-old daughter. At the time, Harris was running a child-exploitation task force; Simon showed up at a meeting to advocate for young women who’d been trafficked by pimps and then charged with prostitution instead of being treated as victims of rape. Harris listened to Simon, recognized her intelligence, and took her potential seriously. “I was like, Who is this woman? No one listens to us,” Simon told me. “People hate us. We’re garbage, in policy and in public.”

Harris helped Simon raise money and throw events for her organization. She insisted that Simon enroll in college, and when Simon said that was impossible—she was already working and raising a daughter alone—Harris talked about Maya, who’d had a daughter herself at age 17 and then graduated from UC Berkeley and Stanford Law School. The powerful, polished black woman who believed that Simon could be a powerful, polished black woman too blew Simon’s mind: “This was before Olivia Pope!” But Harris’s role as DA took some getting used to. “Why would you want to do that?” Simon asked. “I so deeply knew what was happening with girls in the system, and the DA was our nemesis. The DA and the pimp, right? The DA and the pimp.”

Harris’s race for California attorney general was extremely tight—so tight that her opponent, Steve Cooley, gave a victory speech on Election Night, which he had to retract the next day. She campaigned as a progressive, figuring, perhaps, that many people think they support criminal-justice reform more than they actually do. “They like these talking points and these platitudes,” Phoenix Calida says. Let’s be smart on crime. “But her tough-on-crime policies—nobody’s really gonna complain, because they feel safe.”

Harris’s record in that office is marked more by what she didn’t do than what she did. She did not support a ballot initiative reforming California’s three-strikes law, which incarcerated people for life for petty crimes (an interesting family moment, because Maya, while working at the ACLU of Northern California, had championed a proposition to take three strikes down). She did not join the fight against solitary confinement. She did not support two state ballot propositions to end the death penalty (and when a federal court in California struck down the death penalty as unconstitutional, she appealed the decision). She did not support legalizing pot. She did not advocate for reopening several high-profile cases, including a capital one widely suspected to have resulted in a wrongful conviction. She did not prosecute Steven Mnuchin, the CEO of OneWest Bank and Trump’s pick for Treasury secretary, for more than 1,000 foreclosure violations. She did not take an aggressive stance on officer-involved shootings—most notably, she did not endorse a bill requiring independent investigations of them and declined to use the power of the office to investigate the killing of Mario Woods, who was shot 26 times by five police officers in 2015.

Harris has since taken strong progressive positions. But some of her constituents still feel burned. “California has had the most police killings, and we haven’t had any officers ever charged,” Tanya Faison, the lead organizer for Sacramento’s Black Lives Matter chapter, told me. “That was on her watch.” Sure, “it would be beautiful to have a black woman as the president,” Faison continued. But “it doesn’t matter if you’re black or not if your policies are not for black people. And her policies are not supportive of black families.”

To be fair, while in office, Harris did institute implicit-bias training for police officers. She did test a large backlog of rape kits. And she did negotiate well with the nation’s five largest mortgage firms in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis. She walked away from an offer of $4 billion of debt relief for California homeowners and called Jamie Dimon, the chairman of JPMorgan Chase. She told him his side needed to come up with more money, much more. She ended up with $20 billion.

She won her Senate seat on the night Trump was elected. By then Harris was walking the line she’s on now: using “fearless” as a campaign slogan despite letting fear stop her from taking positions. Trump has been a productive foil for her, highlighting the value of her legal training, casting her discipline as flattering and calm rather than pinched and nervous.

In Washington, she hasn’t done much—let’s be honest, who in the Senate has in recent years? She introduced a few bills: one, with Kentucky Republican Rand Paul, to study reforming the cash-bail system; another, with 13 Democratic colleagues, to begin addressing the high mortality rates black women face in childbirth. She also introduced, with fellow Democratic presidential candidate Cory Booker and Republican Tim Scott, a bill to make lynching a hate crime. This last one was classic Harris: tough on crime, seemingly progressive, entirely risk-free. It passed the Senate unanimously.

By 4:30 p.m., 1,000 people had packed into the gym of Charleston’s Royal Missionary Baptist Church, where the scoreboard read 2020 and AKA sorority sisters rolled in wearing full pink-and-green dress uniform. They are not even a little ambivalent about their candidate. She’s theirs; they love her. Who among us hasn’t been scarred by an early humiliation and retreated from hard decisions? They asked where the reserved AKA section was.

Backstage, Harris chatted her way through the photo line, a mainstay of the contemporary American political campaign: local officials and other VIPs get what is basically a school photo with the candidate—in this case, next to a state flag, backed by a royal-blue drape. She has an amazing ability to focus on the person right in front of her, even as a large and impatient crowd claps and shouts “KA-MA-LA” for her to come onstage.

“I ate with Rodney Scott today, so I’m happy,” Harris announced to cheers when she finally appeared. Microphone in hand, she slipped into a subtle southern accent. “We have to restore in our country truth and justice, truth and justice,” she said. The crowd, right there with her, called out: “Amen!” “That’s right!”

This Charleston event was a 1/20th-scale model of Harris’s campaign-kickoff rally in Oakland. There, Harris had clapped along with her 20,000 supporters as she made her way to the podium. Just the sight of a strong female candidate who was not Clinton came as a relief. Many Democrats remain traumatized by 2016, the matchup of a deliberate and dutiful woman, straining to mop up all messes, against an impetuous, state-trashing bully. But in dropping her guard a little, Harris has been trending away from Clinton and toward Michelle Obama—adopting a persona that’s less programmed, hipper, and more relaxed, all of which is more likable. Of course, we care intensely about likability, especially in our female candidates, so perhaps shucking the appearance of restraint is a prudent A-student decision as well.

Harris’s campaign is shorter on specifics than Clinton’s was (perhaps, again, in reaction to Clinton). It’s shorter on specifics than some of her fellow 2020 candidates’ campaigns, though she did lay out, in her Oakland speech, a basic platform, designed to appeal to a liberal base, not attract independents: Medicare for all; universal pre-K and debt-free college; a $500-a-month tax cut for low-income families; women’s reproductive rights; a path to citizenship for immigrants.

Then, at minute 32 of the speech, in a moment that managed to be both subtle and shocking, Harris addressed the thing almost nobody wants to say but everybody who is close to Harris thinks about: her personal risk. “As Robert Kennedy many years ago said, ‘Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.’ He also said, ‘I do not lightly dismiss the dangers and the difficulties of challenging an incumbent president, but these are not ordinary times, and this is not an ordinary election.’ ”

That line passed, and Harris moved on to pablum like “Let’s remember: In this fight we have the power of the people.” But Harris is a target. She knows it. Reports of hate crimes increased 17 percent during Trump’s first year in office. In late February, a Coast Guard officer was accused of plotting to kill Harris, along with 19 others, including journalists, activists, and Democratic politicians. The very fact of her campaign, Harris standing out there every day before crowds of thousands, presenting herself to the American people—some of whom will merely dissect her record; others of whom will see her female body and her brown skin, and want her dead—is bold and brave. “Through her career it’s been a very serious thing,” Harris’s close friend and adviser Debbie Mesloh told me. “She and I talked about it [regarding] Obama … The first day he had Secret Service. The first time I saw him in a bulletproof vest.” Even at the relatively small book talk Harris gave at the cozy Wilshire Ebell Theatre, in Los Angeles, a security guard stood behind her, not even off in the wings, visible to the audience the whole time.

After Harris finished speaking in Oakland, her family joined her onstage: her husband, Doug, who is white; her sister, Maya; Maya’s husband, Tony West, who is black (and currently the chief legal officer at Uber, formerly the third lawyer from the top in Obama’s Justice Department); Maya’s daughter, Meena; Meena’s partner and children. The family is beautiful and the family looks like the future—and not the future in which white nationalists win.

Alumnae of the AKA sorority, which Harris pledged at Howard University, turn out to her campaign events in pink-and-green dress uniform. (Phyllis B. Dooney)

It’s hard not to be ambivalent about a cautious person, particularly a person who has been working for you but holding back, saving for the future. In truth, it’s hard not to feel ambivalent about all the candidates. There are so many contenders, more of them popping up like white-haired crocuses every day. One is too old. (Well, two are too old.) One’s too mean to her staff. One said she was Native American and she’s not. One Instagrammed his trip to the dentist. So many Americans have conflicting desires for this election. They want a transformative leader who will push this country forward. They want a rescue, a captain to steady our faltering ship of state and restore the rule of law. Most of all, they want a winner—whoever that is, just tell them, they’ll vote that way. They want a sure thing. They need a sure thing. And then they feel scared and frustrated by all the options, because that’s not how the system works.

Among the many lines Harris offers on the stump is: I intend to win this. You don’t quite expect to hear a woman say that. But Harris has become very good at tapping into the emotions of a crowd of Democrats and delivering what they want to hear. The 2020 Democratic National Convention is 15 months off, though. Over the next year, the campaign is sure to get ugly—Trump hasn’t even given Harris a nickname yet. I asked her whether she thought that, as a black woman, she had an extra-narrow lane of acceptable behavior to maneuver in. “I don’t think so,” she said. Then she downgraded that sentiment. “I hope not.”

Has the United States dealt with its own racism and misogyny enough to elect a black woman president? There’s little rational basis for saying yes. But there was little rational basis for believing that a man named Barack Hussein Obama could win the White House either, let alone a huckster named Donald Trump.

That Friday night, on the 110-mile ride from Charleston to Columbia, South Carolina, Harris read recipes online. She flagged one for salted-caramel cookies and emailed it to Lily Adams, her communications director, who happens to be former Texas Governor Ann Richards’s granddaughter. (Adams later laughed and said, with genuine affection, “When do you think I’m going to bake these? I’m going to New Hampshire with you on Monday.”)

In the morning Harris, Maya, and Adams, and the whole rugby team of journalists, met up on Columbia’s Lady Street—yes, Lady Street—for some retail politics. First stop was Styled by Naida, a vintage-clothing store run by Naida Rutherford, who grew up in the foster-care system and was homeless before she steadied herself economically by hosting stylish garage sales. It was another ideal campaign stop: Rutherford, the success story, helped Harris pick out a hat and a black belt. Then, as Maya paid for the items, Harris noticed a brightly colored sequined coat, a chessboard of turquoise, purple, yellow, green, and sky blue. The jacket was just about the furthest fashion choice imaginable from Harris’s standard dark blazer. Still, Rutherford, a good saleswoman, encouraged Harris, a good candidate, to try it on, and Harris did. She looked in the mirror, the hoard of journalists to her back. “This really would be perfect for the Pride parade,” she said.

A nice, unguarded human moment. The jacket was way too big, and she’ll almost certainly never wear it anywhere but the parade. But you’d have to be a monster—and a tone-deaf politician—not to want to support Rutherford. Harris bought the coat.

That afternoon, Harris held another town hall, this time at Columbia’s Brookland Baptist Church, and sitting in her car in the church parking lot, waiting for the doors to open, was 77-year-old Gladys Carter. Carter had fought in the civil-rights movement. She was heartbroken and horrified by the turn her country had taken with Trump’s election, and she admired how Harris had handled Kavanaugh. But she had questions about criminal justice. “Some African Americans in my circle of friends have expressed concern about her actually imprisoning a lot of our people, more so than she did the others,” Carter said. “They say they have to really think hard before they’re able to trust her. She’s got to prove that she’s willing to come out and do some things differently.” At the same time, Carter felt that Americans have deeper, even more pressing problems—namely, our dangerous, lying president. Maybe a tough female prosecutor is our best hope. “This country has been controlled by white males for how many years? The way things are right now—they screwed it up.”

Harris made it home for dinner with her husband that evening. She slept in her own bed, in her own house, where she likes to relax by curling up on the couch in her sweatpants and reading more recipes. But by that night, social media had pounced on her brief moment of spontaneity, making fun of her sequined jacket, her amazing technicolor coat, harping on how stupid and frivolous it is for a woman to be trying on clothes on the presidential campaign trail.

It’s not easy out there. You can’t expect much forgiveness on Lady Street. Yet Harris, as ever, is playing the long game. She often repeats her most succinct one-line pitch to prospective voters: “We’re going to need somebody who knows how to prosecute the case against this president.”

She packed a bag for New Hampshire: all dark suits.

This article appears in the May 2019 print edition with the headline “Kamala Harris Takes Her Shot.”

The post Can Kamala Harris Win? appeared first on .

The post Can Kamala Harris Win? appeared first on .

from WordPress http://www.richmeganews.com/can-kamala-harris-win/

[johnlalford11]

Best Marijuana Collectives in California

Marijuana is bigger than ever in California. According to 2018 statistics, California makes more money from weed sales than any other state, including Colorado and Washington. This is largely thanks to the wide availability of marijuana retailers across The Golden State.

Many dispensaries in California operate as marijuana collectives. These allow you to sign up as a member to make it easy to purchase weed either in-store or get it delivered directly to your door. Whether you need weed for recreational or medical purposes, here are some of the best marijuana collectives in California.

The Herb Collective - Orange County, CA

The Herb Collective provides marijuana delivery across the Orange County area, from Anaheim all the way to San Clemente. With high-quality products, affordable prices, and 5-star ratings across Google, Yelp, and Weedmaps, it’s the best dispensary in Orange County.

You can buy marijuana online from The Herb Collective and get it delivered to your address within an hour. Just complete a simple registration form and provide a picture of your State I.D. and you can order a range of strains, concentrates, edibles, and CBD products.

The Green Team Cannabis Collective - Berkeley, CA

The Green Team is a cannabis collective delivering medical marijuana to the Berkeley area. Their menu covers everything from pre-rolled joints to cannabis cookies. You can get delivery in as little as 20 minutes providing you live in the vicinity.

Providing you have a medical recommendation, you can register online and order straight away for fast and discreet shipping. If you buy between 4-5pm you’ll even receive a free gram with your order!

CA Collective - San Jose, CA

San Jose and Bay Area residents are well covered by CA Collective. This highly rated collective is licensed to sell both medical and recreational marijuana. They offer plenty of products in their online stores, including concentrates, edibles, seeds, and various premium strains.

CA Collective is located in the Hollywood neighborhood of San Jose. However, their delivery service also covers Gilroy, Morgan Hill, and the entire Bay Area. It’s easy to become a member and order products online.

Shambhala Medical Cannabis Collective - San Francisco, CA

Shambhala MCC is a medical and recreational marijuana dispensary in San Francisco. They don’t currently offer delivery. However, you can browse their online menu and pick up your order from their store in the Mission District of San Francisco.

With an impressive product range and shining reviews from customers, San Franciscans will be satisfied here.

Canna Culture Collective - San Jose, CA

Canna Cultura Collective is a medical and recreational marijuana seller located just by Communication Hill in San Jose. Anyone aged 21 or above can browse their products in-store or order for delivery online.

They deliver to everywhere in a 15-mile radius and offer a range of attractive deals- especially in their VIP Reward Program. A great choice for those in the San Jose area.

Blue Mountain Collective - San Andreas, CA

Blue Mountain Collective offers a range of products to medical marijuana patients in San Andreas. They’re open 7 days a week, providing CBD products, tinctures, vape pens, and much more to locals.

They don’t have a website but you can view their online menu and order for delivery from their WeedMaps page. Their store is located on Marshall Street, just off of E St. Charles Street. With strong reviews, this is a good choice for those in the San Andreas area.

Fresh Mint Collective - Oakland, CA

Fresh Mint Collective offer a fast and affordable delivery service in the Oakland and East Bay Area. They deliver products as far as Palo Alto at reasonable shipping costs.

All of Fresh Mint’s products are packaged nicely and shipped out discreetly. With strong reviews on Weedmaps, you can rest assured you’re getting a good service. You can browse their menu and order online from their website. New patients even get a 10% off discount code, so they’re worth trying out.

TLC Collective - Los Angeles, CA

TLC Collective is a medical and recreational dispensary located in East LA. Their menu covers flower, wax, concentrates, edibles, and tinctures, all in a range of flavors and types.

They don’t currently offer delivery, but you can check out their online menu and buy in-store. First-time patients receive $5 off their first order and they have plenty of products to suit your needs. You must provide either a state-licensed I.D. or medical recommendation to purchase.

Coast to Coast Collective - Canoga Park, CA

Coast to Coast Collective is a slick marijuana store located in Canoga Park, just northwest of Los Angeles. They grow and sell their own products, and if you visit their store you can even check out their grow rooms.

Their range of unique homegrown products makes it an awesome place to visit for marijuana lovers. You can find a range of indica, sativa, and hybrid strains here at affordable prices. They also offer concentrates and other marijuana products.

515 Broadway Collective - Sacramento, CA

515 Broadway Collective is a Sacramento based marijuana dispensary with 20 years of experience with medical marijuana. They currently offer products for both medical and adult use. While they don’t offer delivery, you can pre-order online to pick up in their store on 515 Broadway.

As with most other collectives, they offer a range of strains in addition to concentrates, edibles, and medical products. You can view their menu on their website and check out their special offers. With a long history of supplying Sacramento smokers, this is a service you can trust.

Conclusion

No matter where you are on the west coast, there’s a range of dispensaries for both medical and recreational marijuana. These are some of the best marijuana collectives in California with a good track record of satisfied customers.

Bear in mind that you must be 21 years of age or older to buy marijuana in California. You’ll also need a State I.D. to purchase or a doctor’s recommendation if you’re buying medical marijuana. You can still order online providing you scan in or provide a photo of your I.D. Once you’re all signed up to a local collective, you’ll be able to access your favorite cannabis products effortlessly.

from News About Marijuana https://www.theherbcollectiveoc.com/single-post/best-marijuana-collectives-in-california

[annyleonca]

Best Marijuana Collectives in California

Marijuana is bigger than ever in California. According to 2018 statistics, California makes more money from weed sales than any other state, including Colorado and Washington. This is largely thanks to the wide availability of marijuana retailers across The Golden State.

Many dispensaries in California operate as marijuana collectives. These allow you to sign up as a member to make it easy to purchase weed either in-store or get it delivered directly to your door. Whether you need weed for recreational or medical purposes, here are some of the best marijuana collectives in California.

The Herb Collective - Orange County, CA

The Herb Collective provides marijuana delivery across the Orange County area, from Anaheim all the way to San Clemente. With high-quality products, affordable prices, and 5-star ratings across Google, Yelp, and Weedmaps, it’s the best dispensary in Orange County.

You can buy marijuana online from The Herb Collective and get it delivered to your address within an hour. Just complete a simple registration form and provide a picture of your State I.D. and you can order a range of strains, concentrates, edibles, and CBD products.

The Green Team Cannabis Collective - Berkeley, CA

The Green Team is a cannabis collective delivering medical marijuana to the Berkeley area. Their menu covers everything from pre-rolled joints to cannabis cookies. You can get delivery in as little as 20 minutes providing you live in the vicinity.

Providing you have a medical recommendation, you can register online and order straight away for fast and discreet shipping. If you buy between 4-5pm you’ll even receive a free gram with your order!

CA Collective - San Jose, CA

San Jose and Bay Area residents are well covered by CA Collective. This highly rated collective is licensed to sell both medical and recreational marijuana. They offer plenty of products in their online stores, including concentrates, edibles, seeds, and various premium strains.

CA Collective is located in the Hollywood neighborhood of San Jose. However, their delivery service also covers Gilroy, Morgan Hill, and the entire Bay Area. It’s easy to become a member and order products online.

Shambhala Medical Cannabis Collective - San Francisco, CA

Shambhala MCC is a medical and recreational marijuana dispensary in San Francisco. They don’t currently offer delivery. However, you can browse their online menu and pick up your order from their store in the Mission District of San Francisco.

With an impressive product range and shining reviews from customers, San Franciscans will be satisfied here.

Canna Culture Collective - San Jose, CA

Canna Cultura Collective is a medical and recreational marijuana seller located just by Communication Hill in San Jose. Anyone aged 21 or above can browse their products in-store or order for delivery online.

They deliver to everywhere in a 15-mile radius and offer a range of attractive deals- especially in their VIP Reward Program. A great choice for those in the San Jose area.

Blue Mountain Collective - San Andreas, CA

Blue Mountain Collective offers a range of products to medical marijuana patients in San Andreas. They’re open 7 days a week, providing CBD products, tinctures, vape pens, and much more to locals.

They don’t have a website but you can view their online menu and order for delivery from their WeedMaps page. Their store is located on Marshall Street, just off of E St. Charles Street. With strong reviews, this is a good choice for those in the San Andreas area.

Fresh Mint Collective - Oakland, CA

Fresh Mint Collective offer a fast and affordable delivery service in the Oakland and East Bay Area. They deliver products as far as Palo Alto at reasonable shipping costs.

All of Fresh Mint’s products are packaged nicely and shipped out discreetly. With strong reviews on Weedmaps, you can rest assured you’re getting a good service. You can browse their menu and order online from their website. New patients even get a 10% off discount code, so they’re worth trying out.

TLC Collective - Los Angeles, CA

TLC Collective is a medical and recreational dispensary located in East LA. Their menu covers flower, wax, concentrates, edibles, and tinctures, all in a range of flavors and types.

They don’t currently offer delivery, but you can check out their online menu and buy in-store. First-time patients receive $5 off their first order and they have plenty of products to suit your needs. You must provide either a state-licensed I.D. or medical recommendation to purchase.

Coast to Coast Collective - Canoga Park, CA

Coast to Coast Collective is a slick marijuana store located in Canoga Park, just northwest of Los Angeles. They grow and sell their own products, and if you visit their store you can even check out their grow rooms.

Their range of unique homegrown products makes it an awesome place to visit for marijuana lovers. You can find a range of indica, sativa, and hybrid strains here at affordable prices. They also offer concentrates and other marijuana products.

515 Broadway Collective - Sacramento, CA

515 Broadway Collective is a Sacramento based marijuana dispensary with 20 years of experience with medical marijuana. They currently offer products for both medical and adult use. While they don’t offer delivery, you can pre-order online to pick up in their store on 515 Broadway.

As with most other collectives, they offer a range of strains in addition to concentrates, edibles, and medical products. You can view their menu on their website and check out their special offers. With a long history of supplying Sacramento smokers, this is a service you can trust.

Conclusion

No matter where you are on the west coast, there’s a range of dispensaries for both medical and recreational marijuana. These are some of the best marijuana collectives in California with a good track record of satisfied customers.

Bear in mind that you must be 21 years of age or older to buy marijuana in California. You’ll also need a State I.D. to purchase or a doctor’s recommendation if you’re buying medical marijuana. You can still order online providing you scan in or provide a photo of your I.D. Once you’re all signed up to a local collective, you’ll be able to access your favorite cannabis products effortlessly.

from News About Marijuana https://www.theherbcollectiveoc.com/single-post/best-marijuana-collectives-in-california

[kathleenseiber]

Common weed killer ups risk of some cancers by 40%

Exposure to glyphosate—the world’s most widely used, broad-spectrum herbicide and the primary ingredient in the weed killer Roundup—increases the risk of some cancers by more than 40 percent, according to new research.

Various reviews and international assessments have come to different conclusions about whether glyphosate leads to cancer in humans.

Now, researchers have conducted an updated meta-analysis—a comprehensive review of existing literature—and focused on the most highly exposed groups in each study. They found that the link between glyphosate and non-Hodgkin lymphoma is stronger than previously reported.

“Our analysis focused on providing the best possible answer to the question of whether or not glyphosate is carcinogenic,” says senior author Lianne Sheppard, a professor in the environmental and occupational health sciences and biostatistics departments at the University of Washington. “As a result of this research, I am even more convinced that it is.”

By examining epidemiologic studies published between 2001 and 2018, the team determined that exposure to glyphosate may increase the risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma by as much as 41 percent. The authors focused their review on epidemiological research in humans but also considered the evidence from laboratory animals.

“This research provides the most up-to-date analysis of glyphosate and its link with Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma, incorporating a 2018 study of more than 54,000 people who work as licensed pesticide applicators,” says coauthor Rachel Shaffer, a doctoral student in the environmental and occupational health sciences department.

“These findings are aligned with a prior assessment from the International Agency for Research on Cancer, which classified glyphosate as a ‘probable human carcinogen’ in 2015,” Shaffer says.

The agricultural industry started using glyphosate in 1974. Its use soared, particularly since the mid-2000s when the practice of “green burndown” began, in which glyphosate-based herbicides are applied to crops shortly before harvest. As a consequence, crops now are likely to have higher residues of glyphosate.

Researchers say more studies are needed to account for the effects of increased exposures from green burndown, which may not be fully captured in the existing studies reviewed in this new publication.

Their findings appear in the journal Mutation Research/Reviews in Mutation Research. Additional coauthors are from the University of California, Berkeley and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. The National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences and the University of Washington Retirement Association Aging Fellowship funded the research.

Source: University of Washington

The post Common weed killer ups risk of some cancers by 40% appeared first on Futurity.

Common weed killer ups risk of some cancers by 40% published first on https://triviaqaweb.weebly.com/