Thots & Thoughts: Tell Me More About How Touching a Penis for the First Time Will Save the Planet
Humanity
Coronavirus shutdown could leave millions of gallons of beer wasted – Axios
Shots – Health News : NPR
Psychiatrist Philip Muskin is quarantined at home in New York City because he's been feeling a little under the weather and doesn't want to expose anyone to whatever he has. But he continues to see his patients the only way he can: over the phone.
"I've been a psychiatrist for more than 40 years; I have never FaceTimed a patient in my entire career," says Muskin, who works at Columbia University Medical Center, treating outpatients in his clinical practice, as well as people who have been hospitalized. Normally, he says he walks patients to the door, shakes their hand or touches their arm or shoulder to reassure them. "Now I'm not doing that, and that's weird to me. So it's a whole new, very unpleasant world."
Shots – Health News : NPR
Cigna, her health insurer, said it would waive out-of-pocket costs for telehealth patients seeking coronavirus screening through video conferences. So Taylor, a sales manager, talked with her physician on an Internet video call.
The doctor's office charged her $70. She protested. But "they said, 'No, it goes toward your deductible and you've got to pay the whole $70,' " she says.
Policymakers and insurers across the United States say they are eliminating copayments, deductibles and other barriers to telemedicine for patients confined at home who need to consult a doctor for any reason.
God bless the grass. 🌾
God bless the grass. 🌾
I am glad Joe Biden has said he supports legalization of marijuana on the federal level. I think it would have a lot of benefits to society if marijuana was federally legal.
For one, making marijuana federally legal would open finance up to farms that grow it and businesses that sell it. Banks can legally loan to hemp growers now with the federal regulations but their cautious for good reason – hemp is just cannabis with less THC and its easy for hemp to test too hot and be illegally diverted.
Even though hemp is now federally legal and is allowed in many states, it tends to be strictly controlled as hemp with too much THC is considered marijuana even if it’s not smoked or injested. Regulations over hemp make it hard for farmers to succeed.
Also legalizing cannabis would spur the hemp market – as if you are producing hemp as a primary crop you might as well produce cannabis on the side, similar to how many dairy farms which grow field corn for silage and high moisture corn feed also run farm stands with sweet corn.
There is a limited market for cannabis – as people can only smoke and ingest so much of it but hemp offers a lot of possibilities. A lot of products could be made with the fibers of hemp, beyond the boutique items currently sold. Cannabis might be a few acres on a farm, while hemp would be several hundred or thousand acres.
I think it’s an exciting agricultural crop and one that could get the younger generation interested in agriculture and plant science, especially in more urban areas. It’s also a great hobby for people to do on their patio, learn about plant genetics and growing their own food.
Myself, I’m not really interested in smoking pot. It’s rather expensive and not nearly as much fun as people claim. But I think we should end the war on drugs to help our cities, especially this potentially profitable agricultural crop that can be grown on a large scale, outdoors using many of the same field cultivation crops commonly used on farms across the nation.
Shots – Health News : NPR
In a nod to the effects of COVID-19 on the economy, and in what is clearly an overture to supporters of the "Medicare for All" plan pushed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Biden wants to lower the age of eligibility for Medicare from 65 to 60.
I like this idea a lot - offers more flexibility to seniors and will help older people retire earlier and peruse other activities besides corporate jobs.
Dorothy Day’s Radical Faith | The New Yorker
Eventually, Day’s Catholic Worker Movement would serve the poor in more than two hundred communities. Under her guidance, it would also develop a curiously dichotomous political agenda, taking prophetic stands against racial segregation, nuclear warfare, the draft, and armed conflict around the world, while opposing abortion, birth control, and the welfare state. That dichotomy seems especially stark today, when most people’s beliefs come more neatly packaged by partisan affiliation. But by the time she died, in 1980, Day had become one of the most prominent thinkers of the left and doers of the right. In her lifetime, it was the secularists—including Dwight Macdonald, in a two-part Profile published in this magazine, in 1952—who called Day a saint. Now, though, the cause of her sainthood is officially advancing within the Catholic Church, a development that has occasioned a new biography and a documentary, both of which explore the contentious question of who owns her legacy.