Well, yes. Your argument would make sense if pot were currently legal. However, it's not. The growers, even the ones approved by the state for medical purposes, have to keep a low profile from the feds. Armed guards patrolling the garden are not really compatible with stealth.

Also, the only reason people are so interested in stealing the marijuana is because it's so valuable, and the only reason it's so valuable is that it's still a controlled substance. Once it is legal, secrecy and security will not be as necessary because robbing the pot garden won't be any more profitable to the thief than robbing a tobacco plantation.

Scarcity (even when artificially imposed) creates value. Value attracts thieves. Remove the scarcity, remove the value, remove the thieves. Pretty simple, actually.

While this does sound like it really ought to be true, actual peer-reviewed scientific studies have shown that pot smoke has no measurable harmful effect when it comes to lung cancer. Weird and counter-intuitive, but apparently true.

I have met a pretty large sample base of adults who smoked pot back in the 60s and 70s. They run the complete range from six-figure-salary CEO to career fuck-up jailbird, just like any other fairly large sample group. As also appears to be the case with your sample group, it is much easier to draw a correlation between heavy alcohol use and mush-brain than it is to correlate it to pot.

While it is universally accepted that some aspects of cognition are impaired when actively under the influence of marijuana, I see no evidence of long-term effects.

Did you just seriously call the person arguing to end drug prohibition a control freak?

Seriously?

Cognitive dissonance much?

Ok, I want to end our foreign wars as much as the next guy (maybe even more - my brother-in-law is risking his life in Iraq as we speak, but that's besides the point), but we can't just up and leave without making an even bigger mess than we already have. If we were to just pull out now, the power vacuum will be almost immediately filled by some very unpleasant local religious zealot warlords that will make life shitty for everyone nearby for a very long time.

We have to finish what we started or it gets even worse. That's the sad reality of the situation. It would have been better to not get involved in the first place (or at least to get involved very differently than we did), but now that we're here the only responsible action is to see it through.

No, the CIA knows better than to make a martyr out of him with simple assassination. That's why he's being discredited with sexual assault charges. Character assassination is far more effective.

It isn't "leet" unless you spelled it something like c10n3. Just tacking numbers on the end of a normal word isn't the same thing at all.

Also, this is the internet. Somebody always cares.

While it is technically possible, it seems astronomically unlikely considering the size and age of this galaxy. Our sun is not even a first generation star. First life in the galaxy should have occurred billions of years before our solar system even formed.

It most certainly is from lack of looking. So far in all of human history, all we have done is a decent (not perfect) job of looking on the moon, and made a half-assed attempt at checking a few square feet of mars (if it was teeming with life we wouldn't have missed it, but we hardly checked exhaustively). 99.99999.... % of the galaxy is still left completely unexplored. We don't have enough data to even think about making conclusions about the prevalence of life in our own solar system, let alone the rest of the galaxy.

Yes, they are good candidates for carbon-based "life like us". Given the spectroscopy results of Titan's atmosphere, I would actually be surprised if we didn't find at least simple bacteria-like life there.

However, I am certain there is more than one basic path to "life" in this universe (even in this galaxy). We arrogantly assume that other life must function in a similar manner to us, so we only bother to even consider looking in environments vaguely similar to ours for life vaguely similar to us. There may well be life on Venus, or even Mercury, or the surface of the sun, or hanging out in the Oort cloud (just not anything remotely similar to Earth life). Even our science fiction does a piss-poor job of exploring this concept.

Reading this article, I was puzzled by two things.

First: Why is this just starting to happen now? Masked vigilante heroes are older than dirt (at least in story and song). They have been portrayed in mainstream popular media since at least the 30s. By the 50s/60s, you have adults that have grown up in a world where comic book superheros have always existed. Why does it take another 50 years for people to start imitating?

Second: Why have none of these fools gotten themselves killed yet?

Are the answers to these questions related? If they are, does that mean that people are just getting stupider?

A totally contrived lack of swearing in oh-shit life-or-death situations would have been worse. The writers used "frack" instead of "fuck" so that the actors could swear with realistic emotion without pissing off the FCC. Would you rather they said things like "oh fudge" and "gosh darn it"? Or worse, not express emotion with expletives at all?

Now, I would prefer if they had just went with "fuck", because I think censorship of "naughty" words is one of the stupidest things our society does. But given the real-world puritanical limitations, I though "frack" was actually a pretty clever idea.

P.S. I agree with your point about too much technobabble on TNG. I have said before that since so many problems are solved by rigging the main deflector dish to fire an inverse tachyon pulse that there should just be a button for it on the captain's chair.

Dude, calling people out for using "gay" as a pejorative is pretty gay.

You, sir, owe me a new chair! :)

(OK, not really, but I did actually fall out of it laughing!)

"Soul Food" is the politically correct label for African-American food. Think fried chicken & waffles, collard greens, okra, grits, chitluns... Basically southern food that was traditionally popular with the less economically-advantaged people in the south.

...because it was only a week or two ago. Depending on the day, they are worth between $1.55 to $1.85 a pound at my local scrap recycling company. They pay for plastic & glass too (even non-redemption glass is worth half a cent per pound). It was my understanding that this was the norm (at least in the U.S.). Where is it that you have to pay to recycle? What gave you the impression that you could no longer recycle aluminum cans by the pound for money?

...and that's what the twinks are for...