They hastened things along in a few cases but Socialism fails quite nicely on its own demerits.
So does capitalism.
Just fine thank you. I have a health savings account which I have been putting money into for years now.
Great. Now, how do feel about having to pay twice as much money as the person in the next industrialized nation, and that's before you get to the expense of a serious operation or illness. You're cutting off your nose to spite your face.
That is the way that 95% of young Americans ought be handling their healthcare (that and not sitting on their asses, eating fast food, and becoming obese), but they would rather have a fancy car, extravagant vacations, and an over-sized McMansion which they cannot really afford.
For one thing, most working class Americans are far away from having a fancy car or extravagant vacations or an over-sized McMansion - they don't have the damned money. For another, not many Americans are nearly as elitist as you seem to be.
Both my doctor and I are quite satisfied with these arrangements. I receive timely and quality health care on demand and my doctor receives his payment promptly. It is amazing how well the free market works isn't it?
What's amazing is how people such as yourselves can ignore basic facts: socialized medicine provides better care and costs less money. Period.
Excuse me, but unless you are a shareholder or you have some other ownership interest in the company than it really isn't your business any more than you receiving a raise from your employer is my business as a third party.
Completely irrelevant, Watson. The point is that people like yourself like to talk about how inefficient and wasteful government is, yet completely ignore waste and inefficiency in business. For example, look at how long Ford has flirted with bankruptcy court, and GM has been in it. Both companies continue to give top executives top pay regardless of their performance or how far sales and stock prices fall.
In the socialist scenario the government confiscates your money (i.e. taxes) by threat of force whereas the owners are planning how to run their own business with their own money. The great mistake of socialism is the belief that it is possible to do good things (i.e. free health care for all, beer every friday, and subsidized liberal arts college education) by first doing an evil thing (i.e. confiscating the property of another at the point of the sword).
No man is an island. You have more security, freedom, education, a higher standard of living, and yes even money with taxes and government spending than you would without. Disaster preparedness. Health care. Infrastructure. Low taxes have high costs.
Health care is simple - in the US we have this funny idea about putting off death. Most other countries figured it out a long time ago. Save the 90% that is spent in the US on the last year of life. People die. Get over it. Save the money.
Yeah, that's why they have higher life expectancy and lower infant mortality rates than we do. You have any more uninformed blather or are you tapped out for the night?
These guys smoked pot. Then they drove a vehicle. Then the ended up in a car accident. Therefore, smoking pot causes accidents.
People smoke cigarettes. Some of these people then drive vehicles. Some of those people end up in car accidents. Therefore, smoking cigarettes causes car accidents.
THIS IS THE EXACT LOGIC YOU ARE USING YOU FUCKING IDIOT. Get a book on logic and read it until you get it through your thick skull that correlation does not equal causation. That these people had THC in their system is no more proof that the accident was caused by marijuana than the color of shirt they were wearing. You have to prove that they were specifically impaired by smoking pot to demonstrate that the accident was in fact caused by smoking marijuana. You have not done this, you just get more and more hysterical and become more and more of a shithead.
If what you say were true then socialism would be running the world right now and not capitalism.
Socialism hasn't failed, it just spent several decades being overthrown by the CIA. And how's our healthcare system working out for you? Do you like spending twice as much per patient for worse care as other industrialized nations?
However, one must be more careful about the total costs of central planning command and control vs the market approach.
Indeed. Don't forget how the CEO and the board need their 20% annual pay increases, regardless of performance.
Typical, tried response. Deregulation doesn't deliver on it's promises of more competition and lower prices? Say it hasn't been deregulated *enough*! Same with tax cuts that will supposedly energize the economy, but don't. It's because you haven't cut taxes *enough*!
This argument didn't hold water in the 80's, but to try and continue to push it after 7 years of Bush tax cuts and deregulation have turned up...nothing...is laughable.
How is choice between different networks and network technologies supported by multiple vendors a bad thing again?
Straw man. The problem with the U.S. phone market is that it is an oligopoly, and there is no real competition between major players Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T. You'll find the same sort of ~$50 a month plans, 2 year contracts with termination fees, and hobbled phones from each carrier. If you had one network where companies compete to offer devices and services, you'd see more choices and lower prices.
Health care - Granted, I'm young and healthy, but I work for myself and provide my own health insurance for $180 per month including dental.
Wait until something actually happens. You'll quickly find out that despite you're insured, you hit your benefit caps or the insurance company denies you treatment on the basis that it's "experimental". Like that girl who died waiting for a liver, even though the first liver transplant was done in the 60's.
Data Infrastructure - Everyone forgets that the United States is a big country.
No, we don't - and the land area issue is a red herring. It might explain why there is poor internet access in rural Wyoming, but not in San Francisco or New York City. Manhattan in particular has one of the densest urban populations in the world, but has the same craptacular access you'll find in the rest of the country. And it doesn't explain why Norway has 20-30 Mbps when the U.S. has triple the population density.
Hats off to Ike on the Interstate system, but even then, the argument can be made that the Interstate system is an extension of the industrial/military complex since they are a strategic asset as well as being damned nice for traveling.
LOL. Do you even know why the Internet was developed in the first place?
Rail system? Maybe for passenger/light-rail service. But even then It's rather spotty anywhere outside of the New England. All the freight rail is owned and operated by private businesses. And, yes, we can argue about tax breaks and all the rest.
The problem with Amtrak is that it's unprofitable, so it needs government subsidies to stay in business. To become profitable it needs to drop lines that lose money, but every senator insists that Amtrak continue to service the lines in their state as a condition for receiving subsidies.
Social Security: Currently is broken
Right wing myth. But you *can* thank Reagan for jacking up your payroll taxes and raiding the resulting surplus to cover the deficit made by his tax cuts for the wealthy.
And that doesn't include wasteful items like buying the maintance people new pick-up trucks that get trashed before the end of the school year, or fire chiefs getting brand new huge 4x4 SUV's every year, and a million other wasteful items. Especially when the fire board is run by the wives and family of the fireboards. So if, the government actually spent money effeicently and effective, I'll won't bitch about taxes.
Would you like some cheese to go with that? Any sizable organization, public or private, is going to have an inventory cycle for things like vehicles and computers. Of COURSE you're going to see new equipment purchases sooner or later.
At least with private industry I have the option NOT TO use/buy the product/service they are selling.
At least with government services you have a say in how they are run and paid for. At least with government services you can vote out incompetent or wasteful officials. Good luck having a say in how a corporation is run unless you are a major shareholder.
And it doesn't help when the same special interests own both parties. The Republicans are pushing for amnesty, but so is Jay Rockefeller, the Democratic chairmen of the Senate intelligence committee.
The free market doesn't cut it when it comes to infrastructure. What are the incentives for companies to run multiple lines to your house when only one (or even none) will be used at a time?
I don't agree with the government investment part.
It's the only way large swaths of the country would get it, however - otherwise anyone outside of a metropolitan area is left out. We invested in rural electricity with the Tennessee Valley Authority, and it was a very successful program.
Besides, everything the US Government does costs 5 times as much and works half as well as comparable operations by small business. Haven't you figured that out yet?
Uh, yeah. That's why we pay twice as much for worse health care than other industrialized nations. It's why freaking communist Cuba is catching up to us despite spending less than $300 per patient to our $7,000. It's why places in Europe and Asia have 100 mbps to their homes for $20-$30 a month.
Claiming that business is always more efficient than government is as naive as claiming CEO's always dump toxic waste in rivers and grope their secretaries.
Entire box had to be filled in, right kind of lead had to be used, absolutely no smudges over any of the other boxes (forget about using an eraser!). However once you handed the card in, whatever the machine reported as your mark was your mark. Use a pen or wrong kind of pencil? Too bad. Fill in a box incorrectly? Too bad. Accidently offset all the answers by one? Really, too damn bad.
So if your pencil has #3 lead instead of #2, you get a zero no matter if you answered the questions correctly, with no chance to fix it? That's not reasonable, that's bullshit.
The point is if we can expect teenagers to fill in several dozen boxes flawlessly when their grades are on the line, we can sure as hell expect adults to fill in a handfull of boxes flawlessly when they are helping to decide the future of their country.
The point of taking tests in school is to see what you've learned. The point of going to a poll on election day is to vote. Not to set up an arbitrary series of hoops to jump through and disqualify anyone who makes a trivial mistake.
As an aside I'm not sure you even understand what elitism is.
A damn sight more than you know about being reasonable.
Just what part of "correlation does not equal causation" do you not understand, dipshit? Thousands of people smoke cigarettes and then end up in car accidents. Therefore, cigarettes cause car accidents. That's the same head-up-the-ass logic that you're using. Stop being a fool and a tool and find some real examples where someone was actually proved to have been incapacitated from smoking pot.
The death has to be directly attributable to smoking pot. Diabetics and heart patients get in car crashes, but it doesn't mean those accidents were caused by insulin or blood pressure medication. Correlation does not equal causation.
There is no reason to discard a ballot for trivial errors when they can be easily found on the spot. You show up to vote on election day, fill out your ballot, and an election worker feeds it through an opscan reader. It tells you on the spot that you didn't vote for a presidential candidate and it turns out it's because you only reached 60% opacity within the circle rather than the minimum 70%. Or how you "voted" for both candidates for the same judicial office, because you accidentally filled in the wrong spot at first and didn't erase it sufficiently before marking in the second spot.
So you fix the errors or just get a new ballot. Your votes are rescanned and counted, no harm no foul. If you vote for the wrong candidate that's your own damn fault, but throwing away ballots for trivial errors in the name of "responsibility" is nothing more than holier-than-thou elitism.
If someone cannot take the time to devote a minimum amount of effort to fill out a ballot properly, perhaps they should not vote at all.
Voting is a serious activity, and votes should not be thrown away over trivial errors if they can be easily corrected. And unless you never make mistakes, perhaps you should not be throwing stones in glass houses.
Amazing how the American worker has to worker harder for less money to "compete" in "the global market" while top executives always get their 15% annual increase in compensation regardless of their actual performance.
That article's a mess: poor grammar; photos that focus more on looking arty rather than providing information (the fourth one down is near useless); horrendous distortion in some of the shots (the second one down makes the screen look like it's melting); and attempts to make the writer look smarter by using fancy words that the writer doesn't even know the meaning of (you cannot have an eliolated CPU).
Methinks you are being overly fussy. Besides, I give them points for having the review on on page instead of splitting it up into twenty pages with three paragraphs and a picture on each.
Ha! Romney is legitimately successful in business.
Did I say he wasn't?
Lots of folks inhereit and cheat their way into success, but Romney has proven some skill in business and economics. I should note that I don't support the guy, but he's certainly the most accomplished business person of both major parties tickets.
He's arguably the *only* business person in the race, aside from Gu911ani. But that's beside the point, which is: sure he's successful, but it's a lot easier to be successful if you have a fortune and connections right off the bat rather than working yourself up from nothing. And that success had made for some funny moments.
And I don't understand the relevance of the war on drugs to anything discussed here.
Dude, you need to smoke some dope and slow down. You said:
And fixing this economy and handling the war are much more important that medical marijuana
And I said:
The War on Drugs is a huge drain on this economy
Ending the war on drugs would save billions every year in enforcement, court and prison costs. Not to mention that it would end the practice of making a large chunk of the population criminals for no good reason.
OK, you honestly believe that there is not a single pot related death in the entire country?
You shouldn't have any problems finding some examples then. And it has to be directly attributable, just as the one beer you drank three hours ago didn't cause you to get in a car accident because there would still be trace amounts of alcohol in your system.
Whether that be the gateway drug effect, the stoner/motivation issues, etc.
Just like alcohol and caffeine are gateway drugs, right? The only "gateway effect": kid is told drugs are bad, including marijuana. Kid tries marijuana and realizes the cop who came to his school for the D.A.R.E. program was full of shit. Kid decides to find out of the cop was full of shit other things as well.
Doonesbury had a great cartoon on the subject a few years ago. That marijuana is illegal but cigarettes are legal is indefensible.
I think that you get into dangerous territory when you start believing that only one side has a sane argument.
But that's exactly the case. Cigarettes and alcohol claim the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans each year, compared to zero for marijuana. Even if it wouldn't actually help this man, there is no justification for the ban of marijuana.
DDT was never banned from being used for mosquito control, which involves spraying small amounts inside houses to repel mosquitoes. It's use was banned for agriculture, which was breeding resistant mosquitoes waaaay back in 1959.
Slashdot Mirror
They hastened things along in a few cases but Socialism fails quite nicely on its own demerits.
So does capitalism.
Just fine thank you. I have a health savings account which I have been putting money into for years now.
Great. Now, how do feel about having to pay twice as much money as the person in the next industrialized nation, and that's before you get to the expense of a serious operation or illness. You're cutting off your nose to spite your face.
That is the way that 95% of young Americans ought be handling their healthcare (that and not sitting on their asses, eating fast food, and becoming obese), but they would rather have a fancy car, extravagant vacations, and an over-sized McMansion which they cannot really afford.
For one thing, most working class Americans are far away from having a fancy car or extravagant vacations or an over-sized McMansion - they don't have the damned money. For another, not many Americans are nearly as elitist as you seem to be.
Both my doctor and I are quite satisfied with these arrangements. I receive timely and quality health care on demand and my doctor receives his payment promptly. It is amazing how well the free market works isn't it?
What's amazing is how people such as yourselves can ignore basic facts: socialized medicine provides better care and costs less money. Period.
Excuse me, but unless you are a shareholder or you have some other ownership interest in the company than it really isn't your business any more than you receiving a raise from your employer is my business as a third party.
Completely irrelevant, Watson. The point is that people like yourself like to talk about how inefficient and wasteful government is, yet completely ignore waste and inefficiency in business. For example, look at how long Ford has flirted with bankruptcy court, and GM has been in it. Both companies continue to give top executives top pay regardless of their performance or how far sales and stock prices fall.
In the socialist scenario the government confiscates your money (i.e. taxes) by threat of force whereas the owners are planning how to run their own business with their own money. The great mistake of socialism is the belief that it is possible to do good things (i.e. free health care for all, beer every friday, and subsidized liberal arts college education) by first doing an evil thing (i.e. confiscating the property of another at the point of the sword).
No man is an island. You have more security, freedom, education, a higher standard of living, and yes even money with taxes and government spending than you would without. Disaster preparedness. Health care. Infrastructure. Low taxes have high costs.
Health care is simple - in the US we have this funny idea about putting off death. Most other countries figured it out a long time ago. Save the 90% that is spent in the US on the last year of life. People die. Get over it. Save the money.
Yeah, that's why they have higher life expectancy and lower infant mortality rates than we do. You have any more uninformed blather or are you tapped out for the night?
In fact, you do not have a say in how they are run and paid for.
If you can't vote because you're a felon, that's your problem not mine.
Good luck trying. That sort of thing almost never happens.
Try the 2006 elections.
These guys smoked pot. Then they drove a vehicle. Then the ended up in a car accident. Therefore, smoking pot causes accidents.
People smoke cigarettes. Some of these people then drive vehicles. Some of those people end up in car accidents. Therefore, smoking cigarettes causes car accidents.
THIS IS THE EXACT LOGIC YOU ARE USING YOU FUCKING IDIOT. Get a book on logic and read it until you get it through your thick skull that correlation does not equal causation. That these people had THC in their system is no more proof that the accident was caused by marijuana than the color of shirt they were wearing. You have to prove that they were specifically impaired by smoking pot to demonstrate that the accident was in fact caused by smoking marijuana. You have not done this, you just get more and more hysterical and become more and more of a shithead.
If what you say were true then socialism would be running the world right now and not capitalism.
Socialism hasn't failed, it just spent several decades being overthrown by the CIA. And how's our healthcare system working out for you? Do you like spending twice as much per patient for worse care as other industrialized nations?
However, one must be more careful about the total costs of central planning command and control vs the market approach.
Indeed. Don't forget how the CEO and the board need their 20% annual pay increases, regardless of performance.
Typical, tried response. Deregulation doesn't deliver on it's promises of more competition and lower prices? Say it hasn't been deregulated *enough*! Same with tax cuts that will supposedly energize the economy, but don't. It's because you haven't cut taxes *enough*!
This argument didn't hold water in the 80's, but to try and continue to push it after 7 years of Bush tax cuts and deregulation have turned up...nothing...is laughable.
How is choice between different networks and network technologies supported by multiple vendors a bad thing again?
Straw man. The problem with the U.S. phone market is that it is an oligopoly, and there is no real competition between major players Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T. You'll find the same sort of ~$50 a month plans, 2 year contracts with termination fees, and hobbled phones from each carrier. If you had one network where companies compete to offer devices and services, you'd see more choices and lower prices.
Health care - Granted, I'm young and healthy, but I work for myself and provide my own health insurance for $180 per month including dental.
Wait until something actually happens. You'll quickly find out that despite you're insured, you hit your benefit caps or the insurance company denies you treatment on the basis that it's "experimental". Like that girl who died waiting for a liver, even though the first liver transplant was done in the 60's.
Data Infrastructure - Everyone forgets that the United States is a big country.
No, we don't - and the land area issue is a red herring. It might explain why there is poor internet access in rural Wyoming, but not in San Francisco or New York City. Manhattan in particular has one of the densest urban populations in the world, but has the same craptacular access you'll find in the rest of the country. And it doesn't explain why Norway has 20-30 Mbps when the U.S. has triple the population density.
Hats off to Ike on the Interstate system, but even then, the argument can be made that the Interstate system is an extension of the industrial/military complex since they are a strategic asset as well as being damned nice for traveling.
LOL. Do you even know why the Internet was developed in the first place?
Rail system? Maybe for passenger/light-rail service. But even then It's rather spotty anywhere outside of the New England. All the freight rail is owned and operated by private businesses. And, yes, we can argue about tax breaks and all the rest.
The problem with Amtrak is that it's unprofitable, so it needs government subsidies to stay in business. To become profitable it needs to drop lines that lose money, but every senator insists that Amtrak continue to service the lines in their state as a condition for receiving subsidies.
Social Security: Currently is broken
Right wing myth. But you *can* thank Reagan for jacking up your payroll taxes and raiding the resulting surplus to cover the deficit made by his tax cuts for the wealthy.
And that doesn't include wasteful items like buying the maintance people new pick-up trucks that get trashed before the end of the school year, or fire chiefs getting brand new huge 4x4 SUV's every year, and a million other wasteful items. Especially when the fire board is run by the wives and family of the fireboards. So if, the government actually spent money effeicently and effective, I'll won't bitch about taxes.
Would you like some cheese to go with that? Any sizable organization, public or private, is going to have an inventory cycle for things like vehicles and computers. Of COURSE you're going to see new equipment purchases sooner or later.
At least with private industry I have the option NOT TO use/buy the product/service they are selling.
At least with government services you have a say in how they are run and paid for. At least with government services you can vote out incompetent or wasteful officials. Good luck having a say in how a corporation is run unless you are a major shareholder.
And it doesn't help when the same special interests own both parties. The Republicans are pushing for amnesty, but so is Jay Rockefeller, the Democratic chairmen of the Senate intelligence committee.
The free market doesn't cut it when it comes to infrastructure. What are the incentives for companies to run multiple lines to your house when only one (or even none) will be used at a time?
I don't agree with the government investment part.
It's the only way large swaths of the country would get it, however - otherwise anyone outside of a metropolitan area is left out. We invested in rural electricity with the Tennessee Valley Authority, and it was a very successful program.
Besides, everything the US Government does costs 5 times as much and works half as well as comparable operations by small business. Haven't you figured that out yet?
Uh, yeah. That's why we pay twice as much for worse health care than other industrialized nations. It's why freaking communist Cuba is catching up to us despite spending less than $300 per patient to our $7,000. It's why places in Europe and Asia have 100 mbps to their homes for $20-$30 a month.
Claiming that business is always more efficient than government is as naive as claiming CEO's always dump toxic waste in rivers and grope their secretaries.
Entire box had to be filled in, right kind of lead had to be used, absolutely no smudges over any of the other boxes (forget about using an eraser!). However once you handed the card in, whatever the machine reported as your mark was your mark. Use a pen or wrong kind of pencil? Too bad. Fill in a box incorrectly? Too bad. Accidently offset all the answers by one? Really, too damn bad.
So if your pencil has #3 lead instead of #2, you get a zero no matter if you answered the questions correctly, with no chance to fix it? That's not reasonable, that's bullshit.
The point is if we can expect teenagers to fill in several dozen boxes flawlessly when their grades are on the line, we can sure as hell expect adults to fill in a handfull of boxes flawlessly when they are helping to decide the future of their country.
The point of taking tests in school is to see what you've learned. The point of going to a poll on election day is to vote. Not to set up an arbitrary series of hoops to jump through and disqualify anyone who makes a trivial mistake.
As an aside I'm not sure you even understand what elitism is.
A damn sight more than you know about being reasonable.
Just what part of "correlation does not equal causation" do you not understand, dipshit? Thousands of people smoke cigarettes and then end up in car accidents. Therefore, cigarettes cause car accidents. That's the same head-up-the-ass logic that you're using. Stop being a fool and a tool and find some real examples where someone was actually proved to have been incapacitated from smoking pot.
The death has to be directly attributable to smoking pot. Diabetics and heart patients get in car crashes, but it doesn't mean those accidents were caused by insulin or blood pressure medication. Correlation does not equal causation.
There is no reason to discard a ballot for trivial errors when they can be easily found on the spot. You show up to vote on election day, fill out your ballot, and an election worker feeds it through an opscan reader. It tells you on the spot that you didn't vote for a presidential candidate and it turns out it's because you only reached 60% opacity within the circle rather than the minimum 70%. Or how you "voted" for both candidates for the same judicial office, because you accidentally filled in the wrong spot at first and didn't erase it sufficiently before marking in the second spot.
So you fix the errors or just get a new ballot. Your votes are rescanned and counted, no harm no foul. If you vote for the wrong candidate that's your own damn fault, but throwing away ballots for trivial errors in the name of "responsibility" is nothing more than holier-than-thou elitism.
If someone cannot take the time to devote a minimum amount of effort to fill out a ballot properly, perhaps they should not vote at all.
Voting is a serious activity, and votes should not be thrown away over trivial errors if they can be easily corrected. And unless you never make mistakes, perhaps you should not be throwing stones in glass houses.
Amazing how the American worker has to worker harder for less money to "compete" in "the global market" while top executives always get their 15% annual increase in compensation regardless of their actual performance.
Disaster preparedness, healthcare, education, infrastructure.
poor repubs cry about taxes too
Cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Those mine-hardened vehicles are the popular APC now.
Too bad they've drug their feet for years on producing the damn things.
That article's a mess: poor grammar; photos that focus more on looking arty rather than providing information (the fourth one down is near useless); horrendous distortion in some of the shots (the second one down makes the screen look like it's melting); and attempts to make the writer look smarter by using fancy words that the writer doesn't even know the meaning of (you cannot have an eliolated CPU).
Methinks you are being overly fussy. Besides, I give them points for having the review on on page instead of splitting it up into twenty pages with three paragraphs and a picture on each.
Ha! Romney is legitimately successful in business.
Did I say he wasn't?
Lots of folks inhereit and cheat their way into success, but Romney has proven some skill in business and economics. I should note that I don't support the guy, but he's certainly the most accomplished business person of both major parties tickets.
He's arguably the *only* business person in the race, aside from Gu911ani. But that's beside the point, which is: sure he's successful, but it's a lot easier to be successful if you have a fortune and connections right off the bat rather than working yourself up from nothing. And that success had made for some funny moments.
And I don't understand the relevance of the war on drugs to anything discussed here.
Dude, you need to smoke some dope and slow down. You said:
And fixing this economy and handling the war are much more important that medical marijuana
And I said:
The War on Drugs is a huge drain on this economy
Ending the war on drugs would save billions every year in enforcement, court and prison costs. Not to mention that it would end the practice of making a large chunk of the population criminals for no good reason.
OK, you honestly believe that there is not a single pot related death in the entire country?
You shouldn't have any problems finding some examples then. And it has to be directly attributable, just as the one beer you drank three hours ago didn't cause you to get in a car accident because there would still be trace amounts of alcohol in your system.
Whether that be the gateway drug effect, the stoner/motivation issues, etc.
Just like alcohol and caffeine are gateway drugs, right? The only "gateway effect": kid is told drugs are bad, including marijuana. Kid tries marijuana and realizes the cop who came to his school for the D.A.R.E. program was full of shit. Kid decides to find out of the cop was full of shit other things as well.
Doonesbury had a great cartoon on the subject a few years ago. That marijuana is illegal but cigarettes are legal is indefensible.
Fair enough. I'm not a big Mitt fan, but he's a economic genius and an experienced leader.
Easy to "look" like a "genius" when your family is already wealthy.
And fixing this economy
The War on Drugs is a huge drain on this economy.
I think that you get into dangerous territory when you start believing that only one side has a sane argument.
But that's exactly the case. Cigarettes and alcohol claim the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans each year, compared to zero for marijuana. Even if it wouldn't actually help this man, there is no justification for the ban of marijuana.
DDT was never banned from being used for mosquito control, which involves spraying small amounts inside houses to repel mosquitoes. It's use was banned for agriculture, which was breeding resistant mosquitoes waaaay back in 1959.
Uh huh. I hope for your sake your flame retardant suit doesn't itch.