Later On

You can’t be big time if your industry doesn’t have a lobbyist. Philip Smith reports:

The marijuana industry is growing up. On Tuesday, the National Cannabis Industry Association (NCIA) officially came into being to represent the interests of the marijuana industry and its consumers. The group aims to influence policy in Washington, DC, just the same way any other industry does — by lobbying the federal government to protect the interests of its members.

"We’ve seen such tremendous growth in this industry in the last five years," said NCIA executive director Aaron Smith. "It seems like the industry is not just surviving in the midst of economic decline, but booming. But it wasn’t represented in Washington, DC, like all sorts of other industries are. I just started talking to some of the major industry players, and just about everybody was really enthusiastic about jumping on board. This thing just blossomed."

The makeup of the NCIA’s board of directors, with about one third of its 23 members from California, one third from Colorado, and one third from the rest of the country, correlates roughly with where the cannabis business action currently is. Most of the board members represent dispensaries or associated businesses, but there’s also Kush magazine, Weedmaps.com, a pipe-market, an insurance company, and a hemp-seller.

At least three board members have . . .

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Alternate title: The Top Ten Daily Consequences of Having Evolved, which is the title Rob Dunn used for his Smithsonian article. To get you started:

Natural selection acts by winnowing the individuals of each generation, sometimes clumsily, as old parts and genes are co-opted for new roles. As a result, all species inhabit bodies imperfect for the lives they live. Our own bodies are worse off than most simply because of the many differences between the wilderness in which we evolved and the modern world in which we live. We feel the consequences every day. Here are ten.

1. Our cells are weird chimeras
Perhaps a billion years ago, a single-celled organism arose that would ultimately give rise to all of the plants and animals on Earth, including us. This ancestor was the result of a merging: one cell swallowed, imperfectly, another cell. The predator provided the outsides, the nucleus and most of the rest of the chimera. The prey became the mitochondrion, the cellular organ that produces energy. Most of the time, this ancient symbiosis proceeds amicably. But every so often, our mitochondria and their surrounding cells fight. The result is diseases, such as mitochondrial myopathies (a range of muscle diseases) or Leigh’s disease (which affects the central nervous system).

2. Hiccups
The first air-breathing fish and amphibians extracted oxygen using gills when in the water and primitive lungs when on land—and to do so, they had to be able to close the glottis, or entryway to the lungs, when underwater. Importantly, the entryway (or glottis) to the lungs could be closed. When underwater, the animals pushed water past their gills while simultaneously pushing the glottis down. We descendants of these animals were left with vestiges of their history, including the hiccup. In hiccupping, we use ancient muscles to quickly close the glottis while sucking in (albeit air, not water). Hiccups no longer serve a function, but they persist without causing us harm—aside from frustration and occasional embarrassment. One of the reasons it is so difficult to stop hiccupping is that the entire process is controlled by a part of our brain that evolved long before consciousness, and so try as you might, you cannot think hiccups away.

3. Backaches . . .

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Thanks to TYD to passing along the link. Roni Caryn Rabin reports in the NY Times:

Type 2 diabetics can significantly lower their blood sugar — and lose body fat in the bargain — with an exercise program that combines aerobics and weight lifting, a new study reports.

While that regimen is already recommended in Type 2 diabetes, researchers say the study offers some of the best evidence to date that a combined program offers greater benefits than aerobics or weight lifting by itself, even if it does not increase total exercise time.

“We can now look at individuals with diabetes right in the face and tell them, ‘This is the best exercise prescription for you,’” said the paper’s lead author, Dr. Timothy S. Church, director of preventive medicine research at Louisiana State University’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center.

Such a program consists of “about 100 minutes of higher-intensity aerobics a week, and then give yourself one to two days of resistance training for 15 to 20 minutes a day,” he said.

The study randomly divided 262 inactive Type 2 diabetics, average age 55.8, into four groups — 73 assigned to resistance training three days a week, 72 to aerobic exercise, 76 to the combination and 41 to a non-exercise comparison group. The study was notable in that almost half the participants were not white, and 63 percent were women.

After nine months of observed exercise, participants who did the combination training lowered their blood level of the glucose marker HbA1c to 7.3 percent from 7.7 percent, on average, a drop that corresponds to a significantly reduced risk of heart disease, Dr. Church said. The improvements in the other exercise groups were not significantly different from those in the non-exercise group.

Dr. Church said he was surprised but added that the findings made sense. “Diabetes is the failure to control the amount of sugar in your blood, and the biggest user of blood sugar is skeletal muscle,” he said. “The healthier your skeletal muscle, the more blood sugar it’s chewing up and taking out of the blood.”

I do the Nordic Track for aerobic exercise (currently 15 minutes per day, which is 105 minutes per week), and I do 3 hours of Pilates per week—that’s resistance training, so I think would count. I’ll be adding Pilates mat exercises and will bring out the kettlebell again in a couple of weeks.

Had a question about Honeybee Soaps [note new name: www.honeybeesoaps.net is new URL for the Web site - LG], and that brought her shaving soaps to mind. Floral Euphoria is a very pleasant soap and made a fine lather with the Plisson HMW 12. The Gillette Rocket with a Schick Platinum Plus blade provided a very smooth three-pass shave, and a splash of Pashana finishes the job in fine style.

The question was about the availability of shave sticks from Honeybee Spa. She has a lot of them—scroll down at the link to view available fragrances.

Nicholas Kusnetz reports for ProPublica:

This week, Massachusetts became the first state to post an online database of payments from drug and medical device companies to the state’s health care providers. The searchable database covers reports from more than 280 companies and subsidiaries.

The new database, detailed on Monday by the Boston Globe — one of our Dollars for Docs partners — is a result of a 2008 state law regulating industry conduct. The database lists nearly $36 million spent from July through December of 2009 for speaking, consulting, food, educational programs, marketing studies and charitable donations.

Minnesota has for years posted similar payments in that state, but has not compiled each company’s reports together into one database. Minnesota’s list also does not include medical device manufacturers.

Dollars for Docs, our ongoing project examining the relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and physicians, captures payments for drug promotion and marketing across all states from seven major drug companies. The reports in Minnesota and Massachusetts are just snapshots of the national picture and, in the case of Massachusetts, a limited snapshot at that.

Massachusetts’s law requires . . .

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Steve Benen has a good post following up on the "sabotage" post:

I don’t intend to belabor the point too much more, but I’ve been encouraged this week by the broader discussion after my "sabotage" post from Saturday.

To briefly recap, I’d noticed some commentary of late suggesting an uncomfortable point about congressional Republicans: they may be tempted to keep the economy down on purpose to advance partisan goals. Matt Yglesias, for example, said the Obama White House should be prepared for "deliberate economic sabotage" from the GOP.

I made the case that this is worthy of discussion, which hasn’t gone over well with conservatives (Michael Gerson thinks I’m an "idiot"), but which nevertheless generated some noteworthy coverage at outlets such as The Week and The Atlantic. . .

Continue reading for more responses to the original post.

More information here, including a link to a 90-minute lecture on the topic.

Read about ‘em. $4.

He has some good points.

UPDATES: He responds to critics of the original post.

Two excellent posts worth clicking through to read:

James Fallows: ‘Like a Full-Body Massage’: Thinking about the TSA

Glenn Greenwald: Government yells "Terrorism" to justify TSA procedures

I’m certainly willing to believe that several incidents were the result of this phenomenon.

Mantic has seriously upgraded his video equipment and techniques. Here’s an example of the new style:

More info here.

You’ll probably need this if you’re flying for Thanksgiving. Includes some iPhone apps to send complaints.

Weight up just slightly: Sunday it was at 212.7 lbs, and then on Monday—the very next day—it was at 215.6 lbs. Today, 215.9 lbs—BUT: I did Nordic Track for 15 minutes.

In thinking about it, I believe my error was in working up too fast to 30 minutes on the Nordic Track—well, in fact, I didn’t "work up", I more or less "jumped up". The result is that I put myself at a level that I couldn’t sustain because I had not built a proper foundation.

My current plan is to stay at 15 minutes a day for a solid week. Then a solid week of 20 minutes a day. Then a week at 25 minutes, and finally stay at 30 minutes.

I notice that some lessons I learn do not stick so that I have to learn them over and over. Examples:

a. Aerobic exercise is required. When I do it and I am losing weight, I tend to think that I have discovered the secret and experiment with not exercising. For another week I will continue to lose, but then it stalls and reverses. There is no escape. Exercise is required.

b. Do not celebrate with a big meal. This lesson seems fairly obvious, but I have to learn it over and over because I seem willing to make a fool of myself for food.

I am going to try to keep both these lessons in mind over the holiday season.

As you can tell, I’m really liking Sweet Gale shaving soap, and I think I’ve figured out why: its fragrance includes things (bog myrtle, honey, single-malt Scotch whisky) that one normally doesn’t come across in shaving fragrances, along with some that are more common (mixed spices, cedarwood). In particular, the fragrance of honey and single-malt Scotch have pleasant associations for me. And, since it’s a rainy morning, it seemed a good excuse to have at the Sweet Gale once more.

I got a fine lather with the Tres Claveles horsehair shaving brush, and the iKon bulldog provided three smooth and comfortable passes. A splash of Acqua di Parma, and I’m good to go.

In reading The Horse, The Wheel, and Language, I was struck by how civilized people were: lots of settlements, villages, specialization of occupations (metalsmith, potter, etc.). Of course the focus here is on the span (roughly) from 5000-2500 BCE. And then I saw this:

From New Scientist:

2.5 million years ago: first stone tools

1.6 million years ago: tools begin to become more complex, including skillfully shaped, symmetrical hand-axes

400,000 years ago: earliest strong evidence of cooking

160,000 years ago: early humans begin to use fire to treat stone tools

120,000 years ago: early signs of pigment use suggest emergence of symbolic culture

100,000 years ago: shell beads give earliest evidence of jewelry

50,000 years ago: the “culture revolution,” including ritualistic burials, clothes-making, and complicated hunting techniques

35,000 years ago: an explosion of cave art in Europe; first surviving statue of a woman

10,000 years ago: agriculture begins

5,000 years ago: oldest known writing

4,500 years ago: Great Pyramid at Giza built

420 years ago: Shakespeare’s plays first performed in London (Can’t you just imagine the excitement at the time? “It’s the first play by Shakespeare!!! I can’t wait!!!” J )

Good Pilates class. I think I’m starting to get some of it.

I was so successful at losing weight, I got excited and realized I didn’t have to do the Nordic Track. Then I stopped losing weight, though my eating hasn’t changed. Dang.

Back to Nordic Track tomorrow, going for 15 minutes and will work my way up again.

Interesting post by Steve Benen. Some of my readers were very impressed by the Climategate "scandal" and stated that the emails (in which some scientists deplored ignorant critics and talked about whether data should be released) "proved" that all findings of global warming are incorrect. Quite a leap, but the idea was that if any scientist working on global warming studies were found to lack integrity, that whole area of science must be wrong.

Benen’s post gives these people a new way to apply their insight about integrity and the terrible harm wreaked by those who lack it. But somehow I think those readers will be silent. If they say anything, it will probably be along the lines of "That’s different" or "IOKIYAR".