Federal Budget

[Culprit]

[Tannin]

FFS!

What an appalling effort by Nick's VPT team. You've got a whole ginormous federal budget to discuss - just for example:

• Bank tax. Who will really pay it? (Ans: you.)
  
• Tax increase for people on $22,000 and up.
  
• Tax cut for people on $180,000 and up.
  
• No action on negative gearing
  
• No action on the cost of housing. (Some window-dressing to put it up a little bit higher and grab a headline though.)
  
• No criticism of it from the rabid hard-right government backbench! They hate, hate hate it - so far as they are concerned it's practically communism. But they are too scared of losing office to say a single word about it. Interesting. They know that Trumble is their only faint hope of keeping their jobs - 11 Newspolls lost in a row now, and Abbott's all-time record low is in sight - so Trumble needs to look a lot more moderate than his actual policies, so they are shutting up and bearing it. But for how much longer? Can they go another week? Probably. Another month? Doubtful. To the end of the year? Not a hope. Stand by for fireworks and long knives in backs.
  
• Zero action on climate change.
  
• Downright loopy revenue projections. In case you missed it, they are promising to get to surplus in four years time. Err ... this is the same promise Rudd made after the GFC. And Gillard made after Rudd. And Rudd made after Gillard. And Abbott made before the election. And Abbott made after the election. And Hockey made after the 2014 Horror Budget. And Morrison made after they sacked Hockey for incompetence. And now they are making it again. "Mummy, I'll do my homework next week. I really, really mean it Mummy. I couldn't do it today because the dog ate it. Honest. And I couldn't do it on Friday because a mini-tornado came along and sucked it up. And you know about the Arab Terrorist that jumped out and stole it from me last week. Really and truly mummy, next week for sure, Croos my heart and hope to get a blow job. Next week I will really do my homework! ..... Four years later .... Lather, rinse and repeat.
  
• Let's try that one again. Downright loopy revenue projections. They are basing the increased revenue projections that they need to fix the deficit with on, of all things, much higher average wages! Yes, you heard that right: higher wages. No, that wasn't the left wing of the Greens or the Socialist Alliance, it was Scot Morrison! Yep, the government which has, quite deliberately and with malice aforethought overseeen the first sustained and major drop in real Australian weekly earnings in living memory, the very same government which applauded wage rate cuts for the poorest workers in the country, the very same government which destroyed the car industry and much of the rest of manufacturing industry (notably by its insane gas export policy) .... is now "expecting" a wages explosion to fuel a tax bonanza big enough to fix the Commonwealth deficit! Stand by. Be ready for it. You know what to expect. Fast forward 18 months: Mummy, Mummy, on the way home from school today, a great big silver flying saucer came down in the middle of Carter Street and three green aliens from Arcutarius pointed an X-ray gun at me and said they'd shoot my nadgers off if I didn't give them my homework! Honest Mum! Really and truly! OW! OW! OW! OW! Le'ggo my ear! OW!"
  
• $22 billion cut to the education budget cleverly disguised as a $22 billion increase. Very neat footwork there Mr Trumble! I hadn't thought you had that in you. Nicely played. (OK, it's a lying scumbag trick, granted, but remarkably well executed.)
  
• A $60 billion tax cut for big business! Yes, $60 billion!
  
• More big cuts to tertiary education.
  
• Lots of noise and flash about massive, nation-building infrastructure spending to look good for the camera, but the actual extra money budgeted for in the life of this government, and for the two years after that as well is ... er .... zero. There is another nicely done PR stunt. Did Trumble think that one up as well? You wouldn't reckon Morrison would have the brain for it. My money is on Arfur Seenodonors as the mastermind. It's exactly the sort of deviously clever trick he used to plot for Johnnie Howard back in the day.
  
• No action to fix multinational tax rorting. Why not?
  
• Zero action on energy security. (Plenty of talk and TV interviews made while wearing funny hats. Action? Zero. Well done Ar'fur.)
  

And what did you lot spend three bloody pages yakking about? Nothing but farnarkling minor detail in the footnotes! OK, there are important issues of liberty, fairness, and probity to be sparked from the debate, but give me a break and get with the main event you bludgers.

Farnarkle me, I can't leave you kids alone for ten minutes.

Where's Wokko when you need him? (OK, he nearly always posts rubbish, but at least it's rubbish that matters.)

[think positive]

[think positive]

[think positive]

Culprit on the morning show, doctors want to charge overweight patients more! What's your next prediction? Can I get the lotto numbers please?

[Mugwump]

Last week .I sat in a bar in Oxford and watched a fellow organize a line of white powder on the table and then snort it, in full public view. This is how much fear of the law there is surrounding drug use, and this is why we have so many innocent lives smashed by this modern curse.

The only way - the only way - to reduce the harm from drugs is to enforce the law against their trafficking, sale, possession, and use. We have had sixty years of progressive legitimization and glamorization of drug use in the media, and increasing tolerance of drugs by law enforcement. The wages of this have been ruined lives, children reared in horrifying and almost insurmountable circumstances, and a vast and destructive criminal industry. Drugs were not common until the 1960s. Why then are they so common today ? Did people suddenly acquire a new susceptibility ? Or rather, were they made to seem normal and cool by music, the media and by lax laws and enforcement ?

Like everyone on here, I do not want my children criminalized for smoking a joint. But actually, that's a risk I would be prepared to take if it meant that they were unlikely to be exposed to drugs because drugs were made very rare again, as they once were. Today, all our kids are routinely exposed to hard drugs because the people who distribute and consume them feel safe in doing so. My children do not, as far as I can tell, take them, but if they do not it is because their genetics and upbringing predispose them not to. Many more vulnerable people are less likely to have those resources, and so the disadvantage and spoilage cascades down the lost generations.

we opened Pandora's little box of weed and white powder in the 1960s. It will be very difficult to close it again, but we must try before mind-altering drugs become as endemic as that other social wrecker, alcohol. Once a drug is embedded as deeply as ethanol is, there really is no turning back. i don't think drug tests for those on welfare are necessarily the answer, but as one more way of exerting pressure to avoid drug-taking and remain fit for work, it's defensible.

[think positive]

great post, and yes its very scary

[Culprit]

[think positive]

LOL!!
common sense has truly flown out the window, thats for sure!!

[David]

[Wokko]

The old left hate this budget, the right hate it too. Libertarians can't stand it, fascists can't stand it and the Trots, Marxists and idiot SJW Uni students really hate it.

I wouldn't think it was possible to hit every economic turd on the way through but this pack of idiots managed it. I hope the Senate blocks the lot.

[David]

Sorry to spoil the party, but I don't particularly hate this budget. A few major issues aside, I think it's OK for a Liberal budget and certainly has its merits. If you're pissing all of the ideological purists off, you're probably doing something right – government is always going to require compromises. The big problem with the 2014 budget was that it was an ideological statement and one that most Australians couldn't get on board with.

[Mugwump]

^^^ David, of course I did not say that these drugs fell out of the sky in the 1960s ; but if you think that the consumption of such drugs between, say, 1880 - 1960 was anywhere near that between 1960-2015, per capita, then I'd like to sell you the MCG. The crime statistics alone, since these drugs were criminalised, provide compelling evidence against that argument. Nor, indeed, does the literature or press of the time support it. The fact that Holmes used cocaine was, to Conan Doyle, a mark of how outrageously exceptional and bohemian he was. The suggestion that Holmes represented common experience in 1900 utterly fails to understand the meaning of those stories.

Since the 1960s, the narrative has been one of glamorization and tacit approval of drug use, as the law has retreated from enforcement. In 1967 Jagger and Richards were jailed for possession of dope (that tells you how the law saw drugs then). After a few days they were released after a (now famous) editorial in the Times, no less, inveighed against that enforcement. And so it went. And as the US and UK went, so too did Australia.

Even the much-loved medical model ("usage is an illness") is used a normalisation and exculpatory gambit. After all, no-one is responsible for getting sick, are they ? It's a victimless crime - as long as you are not murdered by an iced-up head case, or trying run a casualty department or other public services, or the children of an addicted parent(s), or left caring for a psychotic. Medical models have been tried for at least 50 years - methadone was first prescribed in the 1960s - and they have done little to stem the tide. They are not wrong, as people with addiction symptoms do need willpower help, but they are not at all opposed to rigorous enforcement of laws as many drug apologists suggest.


In the end, people will believe what they want to believe, but your idea that people have been getting off their heads at the same rate for the last 100 years, and that the police are as intolerant of drug use today as they were 60 years ago, is manifestly untrue. I grew to adulthood in Melbourne in the late 1970s and 1980s, and there is simply no comparison in the prevalence of drug availability then and now. Finding dope was very possible, but you had to know where to go for it. Now, dope (and much besides) is ubiquitous in teenage life. Behind that reality is an explosion in human misery and smoked-out childhoods so obvious that it takes doublethink to deny it.

The medical model will achieve what the leftist project always seeks to achieve - vast expense on state employment to patch a problem that they make worse because they will not invest properly in (and embrace the sacrifices involved in) real prevention, while they excuse and extenuate the practitioners.

How long will we go on perpetuating courses of action that we know to be so destructive of those who start life with the least advantage ?

[Skids]

You may need to delve a little deeper in your history Mugwump.

Also remember, as recently as 1900 the earths population was only 1.6 billion.

2,737 BCE First recorded use of cannabis as medicine by Emperor Shen Neng of China.
2,000-800 BCE Bhang (dried cannabis leaves, seeds and stems) is mentioned in the Hindu sacred text Atharvaveda (Science of Charms) as "Sacred Grass", one of the five sacred plants of India. It is used by medicinally and ritually as an offering to Shiva.
1,500 BCE Cannabis cultivated in China for food and fiber. Scythians cultivate cannabis and use it to weave fine hemp cloth.
700-600 BCE The Zoroastrian Zendavesta, an ancient Persian religious text of several hundred volumes refers to bhang as the "good narcotic."
600 BCE Hemp rope appears in southern Russia.
700-300 BCE Scythian tribes leave Cannabis seeds as offerings in royal tombs.
500 BCE Scythian couple die and are buried with two small tents covering containers for burning incense. Attached to one tent stick was a decorated leather pouch containing wild Cannabis seeds. This closely matches the stories told by Herodotus. The gravesite, discovered in the late 1940s, was in Pazryk, northwest of the Tien Shan Mountains in modern-day Khazakstan. Hemp is introduced into Northern Europe by the Scythians. An urn containing leaves and seeds of the Cannabis plant, unearthed near Berlin, is found and dated to about this time. Use of hemp products spread throughout northern Europe.
430 BCE Herodotus reports on both ritual and recreation use of Cannabis by the Scythians (Herodotus The Histories 430 B.C. trans. G. Rawlinson).
200 BCE Hemp rope appears in Greece. Chinese Book of Rites mentions hemp fabric.
100 BCE First evidence of hemp paper, invented in China.
100-0 BCE The psychotropic properties of Cannabis are mentioned in the newly compiled herbal Pen Ts'ao Ching.

0-100 CE Construction of Samaritan gold and glass paste stash box for storing hashish, coriander, or salt, buried in Siberian tomb.
23-79 Pliny the Elder's The Natural History mentions hemp rope and marijuana's analgesic effects.
47-127 Plutarch mentions Thracians using cannabis as an intoxicant.
70 Dioscorides, a physician in Nero's army, lists medical marijuana in his Pharmacopoeia.
100 Imported hemp rope appears in England.
105 Legend suggests that Ts'ai Lun invents hemp paper in China, 200 years after its actual appearance (see 100 BCE above).
130-200 Greek physician Galen prescribes medical marijuana.
200 First pharmacopoeia of the East lists medical marijuana. Chinese surgeon Hua T'o uses marijuana as an anesthetic.
300 A young woman in Jerusalem receives medical marijuana during childbirth.
570 The French queen Arnegunde is buried with hemp cloth.
500-600 The Jewish Talmud mentions the euphoriant properties of Cannabis.
850 Vikings take hemp rope and seeds to Iceland.
900 Arabs learn techniques for making hemp paper.
900-1000 Scholars debate the pros and cons of eating hashish. Use spreads throughout Arabia.
1000 Hemp ropes appear on Italian ships. Arabic physician Ibn Wahshiyah's On Poisons warns of marijuana's potential dangers.
1090-1124 In Khorasan, Persia, Hasan ibn al-Sabbah, recruits followers to commit assassinations...legends develop around their supposed use of hashish. These legends are some of the earliest written tales of the discovery of the inebriating powers of Cannabis and the use of Hashish by a paramilitary organization as a hypnotic (see U.S. military use, 1942 below). Early 12th Century Hashish smoking becomes very popular throughout the Middle East.
1155-1221 Persian legend of the Sufi master Sheik Haydar's personal discovery of Cannabis and his own alleged invention of hashish with it's subsequent spread to Iraq, Bahrain, Egypt and Syria. Another of the ealiest written narratives of the use of Cannabis as an inebriant.
1171-1341 During the Ayyubid dynasty of Egypt, Cannabis is introduced by mystic devotees from Syria.
1200 1,001 Nights, an Arabian collection of tales, describes hashish's intoxicating and aphrodisiac properties.
13th Century The oldest monograph on hashish, Zahr al-'arish fi tahrim al-hashish, was written. It has since been lost. Ibn al-Baytar of Spain provides a description of the psychoactive nature of Cannabis. Arab traders bring Cannabis to the Mozambique coast of Africa.
1271-1295 Journeys of Marco Polo in which he gives second-hand reports of the story of Hasan ibn al-Sabbah and his "assassins" using hashish. First time reports of Cannabis have been brought to the attention of Europe.
1300 Ethiopian pipes containing marijuana suggest the herb has spread from Egypt to the rest of Africa.
1378 Ottoman Emir Soudoun Scheikhouni issues one of the first edicts against the eating of hashish.
1526 Babur Nama, first emperor and founder of Mughal Empire learned of hashish in Afghanistan.
1532 French physician Rabelais's gargantua and Pantagruel mentions marijuana's medicinal effects
1533 King Henry VIII fines farmers if they do not raise hemp for industrial use.
1549 Angolan slaves brought cannabis with them to the sugar plantations of northeastern Brazil. They were permitted to plant their cannabis between rows of cane, and to smoke it between harvests.
c. 1550 The epic poem, Benk u Bode, by the poet Mohammed Ebn Soleiman Foruli of Baghdad, deals allegorically with a dialectical battle between wine and hashish.
1563 Portuguese physician Garcia da Orta reports on marijuana's medicinal effects.
1578 China's Li Shih-Chen writes of the antibiotic and antiemetic effects of marijuana.
1600 England begins to import hemp from Russia.
1606-1632 French and British cultivate Cannabis for hemp at their colonies in Port Royal (1606), Virginia (1611), and Plymouth (1632).
1616 Jamestown settlers began growing the hemp plant for its unusually strong fiber and used it to make rope, sails, and clothing.
1621 Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy suggests marijuana may treat depression.
1600-1700 Use of hashish, alcohol, and opium spreads among the population of occupied Constantinople. Hashish becomes a major trade item between Central Asia and South Asia.
1753 Linnaeus classifies Cannabis sativa.
1764 Medical marijuana appears in The New England Dispensatory.
1776 Kentucky begins growing hemp.
1794 Medical marijuana appears in The Edinburgh New Dispensary.
1798 Napoleon discovers that much of the Egyptian lower class habitually uses hashish. Soldiers returning to France bring the tradition with them, and he declares a total prohibition.
1800- Marijuana plantations flourished in Mississippi, Georgia, California, South Carolina, Nebraska, New York, and Kentucky. Also during this period, smoking hashish was popular throughout France and to a lesser degree in the US. Hashish production expands from Russian Turkestan into Yarkand in Chinese Turkestan.
1809 Antoine Sylvestre de Sacy, a leading Arabist, suggests a base etymology between the words "assassin" and "hashishin" -- subsequent linguest study disproves his theory.
1840 In America, medicinal preparations with a Cannabis base are available. Hashish is available in Persian pharmacies.
1842 Irish physician O'Shaughnessy publishes cannabis research in English medical journals.
1843 French author Gautier publishes The Hashish Club.
1846 French physician Moreau publishes Hashish and Mental Illness
1850 Cannabis is added to The U.S. Pharmacopoeia.
1850-1915 Marijuana was widely used throughout United States as a medicinal drug and could easily be purchased in pharmacies and general stores.
1854 Whittier writes the first American work to mention cannabis as an intoxicant.
1856 British tax "ganja" and "charas" trade in India.
1857 American writer Ludlow publishes The Hasheesh Eater.
1858 French poet Baudelaire publishes On the Artificial Ideal.
1870-1880 First reports of hashish smoking on the Greek mainland.
1890 Greek Department of Interior prohibits importance, cultivation and use of hashish. Hashish is made illegal in Turkey. Sir J.R. Reynolds, chief physician to Queen Victoria, prescribes medical marijuana to her.
1893-1894 The India Hemp Drugs Commission Report is issued. 70,000 to 80,000 kg per year of hashish is legally imported into India from Central Asia.
1906 In the U.S. the Pure Food and Drug Act is passed, regulating the labeling of products containing Alcohol, Opiates, Cocaine, and Cannabis, among others.
Early 20th Century Hashish smoking remains very popular throughout the Middle East.
1910 The Mexican Revolution caused an influx of Mexican immigrants who introduced the habit of recreational use (instead of it's generally medicinal use) into American society.
1914 The Harrison Act in the U.S. defined use of Marijuana (among other drugs) as a crime.
1916 United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) chief scientists Jason L. Merrill and Lyster H. Dewey created paper made from hemp pulp, which they concluded was "favorable in comparison with those used with pulp wood" in USDA Bulletin No. 404. From the book "The Emperor Wears No Clothes" by Jack Herer the USDA Bulletin N. 404 reported that one acre of hemp, in annual rotation over a 20-year period, would produce as much pulp for paper as 4.1 acres (17,000 m2) of trees being cut down over the same 20-year period. This process would use only 1/7 to 1/4 as much polluting sulfur-based acid chemicals to break down the glue-like lignin that binds the fibers of the pulp, or even none at all using soda ash. The problem of dioxin contamination of rivers is avoided in the hemp paper making process, which does not need to use chlorine bleach (as the wood pulp paper making process requires) but instead safely substitutes hydrogen peroxide in the bleaching process. ... If the new (1916) hemp pulp paper process were legal today, it would soon replace about 70% of all wood pulp paper, including computer printout paper, corrugated boxes and paper bags. However, mass production of cheap news print from hemp had not developed in any country, and hemp was a relatively easy target because factories already had made large investments in equipment to handle cotton, wool, and linen, but there were relatively small investments in hemp production.

For more....

http://www.advancedholistichealth.org/history.html

[Mugwump]

^ it's interesting skids, but it's not very relevant in explaining the explosion in mind-altering drugs in the West in the second half of the last century, and the toll it now takes on our society.