via BLDBLG I found ediblegeography.com – their current top story links to a New York Times feature about the rediscovery of the Ebling Brewing Company’s beer-aging caves in the Bronx.

HMO stocks rise as public option wanes in US reform

NEW YORK, Dec 9 (Reuters) – Shares of U.S. health insurers rose on Wednesday after efforts to overhaul the health system moved away from creating a government-run insurance plan long viewed as damaging to the industry.

That Reuters dispatch tells you all you need to know about the Democrats’ scuttling of the already-watered-down “Public Option.”

My belief in the utility of national electoral politics remains nearly nonexistent. Current events have done nothing to modify that opinion.

I know you’re all curious about the effects of drugs. Here’s a totally realistic simulation…

NOTE: Do NOT consume any drugs before viewing this website.

Cribbed from rhizome.org.

Don’t you just love it when you stumble onto a whole net niche you never knew about? I suppose I could have guessed it was out there, but I just discovered the world of retro design blogs…

My favorite so far is SO MUCH PILEUP, which offers such excellent features as Classic Bank Logos, weekly “Philately Fridays” with gems like these:

and don’t miss all the beautiful animated tv logos like these CBC bumpers!

Boston.com offers these easy instructions to help you hallucinate with common household items.

ping pong hallucination

h/t Watson

CBC News tells us that a Canadian court has found that medical marijuana users should be able to purchase from growers other than the government:

Currently, medical users can grow their own marijuana, but third-party growers can’t supply the drug to more than one user at a time, a restriction that lawyers for the plaintiffs argued effectively gave Health Canada a monopoly on the distribution of medical marijuana.

Stayner said in his January ruling that the restrictions on the supply of medical marijuana were arbitrary and caused sick users major difficulty in gaining access to the drug.

“In my view it is not tenable for the government, consistently with the right established in other courts for qualified medical users to have reasonable access to marijuana, to force them either to buy from the government contractor, grow their own or be limited to the unnecessarily restrictive system of designated producers,” he wrote.

The government has contracted one firm, Prairie Plant Systems Inc. in Flin Flon, Man., to provide the drug to patients.

Today’s Boston Globe brings us the story of Neurontin, a so-called “blockbuster” drug that generated more than $2,000,000,000 per year in worldwide sales for its maker, the Pfizer company.

It turns out that Pfizer deliberately buried the evidence that Neurontin didn’t work as advertised:

“We must delay publication of [study] 224, as its results were not positive,” wrote Pfizer marketing executive John Marino in a September 2000 e-mail to Angela Crespo, senior manager of major markets for Neurontin.

Later that month, Michael Rowbotham, Neurontin team leader, e-mailed Crespo about the problem of Dr. John Reckless, an investigator on the study who was pressing Pfizer to publish the results for ethical reasons. Along with delaying publication for as long as possible “it will be more important how WE write up the study,” Rowbotham wrote. “We are not allowing him to write it up himself.”

No one could have predicted that creating a huge financial incentive for corporations to demonstrate the efficacy of their patent medicines would lead them to put profit over health and science! Who could have imagined such unethical behavior on the part of a giant pharmaceutical company?

There are more black men in US prisons today than there were slaves in 1840, and they are being used for the same purpose; working for private corporations at 16 to 20 cents an hour. Half the states have private, for-profit prisons whose lobbyists are demanding longer mandatory-minimum prison sentences. Indeed, American blacks are incarcerated at nearly eight times the level of South African blacks during the height of apartheid.

That’s from an incredible op-ed in Saturday’s Boston Globe by Jack A. Cole, the Executive Director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. Amazing, courageous, timely, truthful — is it any wonder this isn’t even an issue in the presidential campaign?