Fascinating article this week in the NYT that suggests it’s time for a more nuanced definition of extreme grieving, what Columbia University’s Dr. M. Katherine Shear calls a “loop of suffering.”  Unlike “normal” grief, or even depression, extreme grieving persists for six months or more and strips away from life any sense of meaning or purpose.  Grieving of this sort has been linked to higher frequencies of drinking, suicide, even cancer. 

But a recent study involving MRIs arrived at an even more provocative conclusion: when an extreme griever was shown photos of a loved one, their brain received a jolt of dopamine, indicating the possible addictive qualities of memories themselves.

When your grief, though, is of the more manageable variety, you no longer have to rely exclusively on head-to-toe black.  Artist Matthew Coombes has just come out with a grief-chic line that includes everything from a single tear catcher (see above) to special finger protectors designed to preserve your cuticles in times of stress and sorrow.

In the NYT:

Are placenta teddy bears the next new toy?  I hope not, but the Placenta Teddy Bear by Alex Green was one of the toy designs showcased at the ?

In what has to be one of the most short-sighted (and cravenly politically opportunistic) moves in some time, L.A. County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley and City Atty. Carmen Trutanich have decided that the way medical marijuana dispensaries distribute cannabis to their patients is illegal and violates state laws.

But what no one is pointing out is how this is simply a bid for Cooley and Trutanich to cynically further their political ambitions. You can’t expect to run for, let’s say, State Attorney General without the support of the police and correctional officers unions, both which are—no surprise here—extremely opposed to legal marijuana sales DESPITE WHAT THE VOTERS OF CALIFORNIA WANT, for the simple reason that it would increase law enforcement budgets if marijuana sales are prohibited.

Furthermore, since medical cannabis sales are taxed—and there is, of course, discussion in the California Legislature to further raise those taxes with special levies—why in the world, in the middle of the Great Recession, would anyone think it’s SMART to leave the tax receipts from California’s biggest cash crop on the table??

Trutanich and Cooley know fully well that the vast majority of the over 800 medical marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles county are reputable businesses who go out of their way to get along with and respect their neighbors. These establishments don’t harm anyone and they help a lot of people. The attorneys say they’re going after the “greedy” dispensaries, but why?

Just tax them you idiots!

From the Los Angeles Times:

At hundreds of medical marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles, cash is changing hands, typically about $45 for an eighth of an ounce.

The dispensary owners call it a donation because state law requires their stores to operate as nonprofit collectives. But their critics—police, the district attorney and the newly elected city attorney—insist that it’s a sale and that marijuana sales remain illegal under state law.

The debate turns largely on the interpretation of one sentence in the law, but it touches on one of the biggest concerns about dispensaries in Los Angeles: that the rapid proliferation of stores is being driven by people who are hoping to profit from the so-called Green Rush and who are buying rather than growing much of their cannabis.

“The people who are simply trying to make a profit are the ones messing it up for those people that need it and those legitimate distributors who are trying to help people,” said L.A. City Councilman Dennis Zine.

Some officials challenge legality of over-the-counter medical marijuana sales

Grow Room photograph by Taryn Simon

Interesting report from The Today Show’s website featuring Dr. Sam Parnia of Weill Cornell Medical Center, author of What Happens When We Die?: A Groundbreaking Study into the Nature of Life and Death:/p>

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As of today, there is no longer any proof that Hitler died at the end of World War II.

In exchange, I propose the following potential (not mutually exclusive) theories about where he ended up after the war. Feel free to add your own.

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The Raw Story reports:

PARIS ?

About artist Anne Hardy: “Hardy’s images appear to be photographs of existing places but they are quite the opposite. They are actually carefully constructed sets, created by the artist in her studio, which she then photographs. The subjects of Hardy’s artworks are usually objects or junk which she has found in markets, DIY shops, urban skips or jumble sales. The type of objects she chooses have ranged from large antlers, brightly coloured cables, old Christmas trees, light bulbs, American basketballs, orange balloons, scientific test tubes and even butterflies. Hardy puts these everyday objects together and transforms them into unusual, almost dreamlike, environments which can be unnerving with their themes of abandonment and desolation. The fabricated scenes of Hardy’s work reflect and comment on modern life in the western world, how people try to manipulate the space around them and how objects bought can too frequently be taken for granted or thrown away.”

Anne Hardy

(via Design Crisis)

Marianne Faithfull and Anita Pallenberg, as God and the Devil, debate the legacy of the Sixties on Absolutely Fabulous, in a clip that is perhaps the greatest creation of all human endeavor ever.

Veteran SF author John Shirley has just released “The Other End,” a novel about the “apocalypse” if it had been envisioned by lefties instead of right-wing Christian nuts. It’s the left-wing response to the “Left Behind” books. Fantastic idea!

Shirley says:

THE OTHER END is an “alternative apocalypse” novel. When you have dominionists, armageddonists, right-wing theologies and theocrats creating this end-times paranoia, like the Left Behind books-the best selling books (and basis for movies) that dramatize the dominionist fantasy about the fulfillment of the Book of Revelation in the Bible, the Rapture, the destruction of non-fundamentalist-Christians, the coming of the antichrist and other hallucinatory material. The Book of Revelation was actually about the Roman empire and has nothing to do with predicting our times; the Rapture is not mentioned, the antichrist as such is not mentioned. These people made up their own bullying pseudo-theology to browbeat others into submitting to their right-wing bigotry. If you just accept their version of what a Judgment Day would be like, you’re letting them create a paradigm that affects people’s decisions. You’re letting them justify a world in which gays are oppressed and even moderate Muslims are not tolerated and art is put through an ideological filter, and people are submissive to the power brokers claiming to be Christians.

So—what if you could create your OWN end-times, your own Judgment Day? What would you create? This is mine. It isn’t God, per se, and definitely not aliens, behind it all, but it is a kind of Judgment Day—a Judgment Day that the left, instead of the right-wing, might envision.

“The Other End” is published by Cemetery Dance.

Writing in the journal Science nearly four decades ago, New York State University sociologist Erich Goode documented the media’s complicity in maintaining cannabis prohibition.

He observed: “[T]ests and experiments purporting to demonstrate the ravages of marijuana consumption receive enormous attention from the media, and their findings become accepted as fact by the public. But when careful refutations of such research are published, or when later findings contradict the original pathological findings, they tend to be ignored or dismissed.”

A glimpse of today’s mainstream media landscape indicates that little has changed—with news outlets continuing to, at best, underreport the publication of scientific studies that undermine the federal government’s longstanding pot propaganda and, at worst, ignore them all together.

Here are five recent stories the mainstream media doesn’t want you to know about pot

Continue Reading: Five Things the Corporate Media Don’t Want You to Know About Cannabis