Stoned thought about politics!!!

[St. Phatty]

We know that douchebag Nixon made Cannabis a schedule one drug to control the hippies and African Americans.

Could they also have done it because stoned people can see through their bullshit, by seeing things without blinders. Able to put 2 + 2 together, and not believing everything they are told?

I think that's very much one of the reasons Cannabis is illegal.

It doesn't mean that everybody who smokes it will have blinding insights. Might seem that way !

 

[slaveplanet]

https://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/29/science/don-t-blame-columbus-for-all-the-indians-ills.html


A very large study on the health of natives before the arrival of Columbus. Turns out their lifespan was around 35

"The healthiest sites for Native Americans were typically the oldest sites, predating Columbus by more than 1,000 years. Then came a marked decline."
"''Although some of the authors occasionally appear to overstate the strength of the case they can make, they are also careful to indicate the limitations of the evidence,''
''They recognize that skeletal material is the best comparative evidence we have for the human condition over such a long period of time, but it is not perfect.''

"The researchers attributed the widespread decline in health in large part to the rise of agriculture and urban living. People in South and Central America began domesticating crops more than 5,000 years ago, and the rise of cities there began more than 2,000 years ago."
"The more mobile, less densely settled populations were usually the healthiest pre-Columbians. They were taller and had fewer signs of infectious lesions in their bones than residents of large settlements. Their diet was sufficiently rich and varied, the researchers said, for them to largely avoid the symptoms of childhood deprivation, like stunting and anemia."

i read an article recently about a new study that proves that the people of the americas were killed off in a much larger fashion by the invaders than previously thought and that the effect of diseases was smaller than previously thought.

i wonder how it is possible that people living not different from indigenous people in recent history that show no sign of malnutrition and don't die at ages suggested by advocates of civilization (35 or to scare people even more... under 35 ) could have had such big nutrition and health problems on a wide scale as suggested by the study in the link you provided. especially having in mind the fact that the land was not destroyed like it was after columbus but was full of life and therefore food.
recent estimates see a population of the americas of about a 100 million by the way. a diverse land with thousands of cultures and thousands of different languages and customs.

the child mortality was much higher than today but if they outlived a certain age (i think around 25 or 30) the chance that they got 50 or 60 or older was much higher.
was also in a study i read...





excerpt from other book:
"The earliest visible populations of prehistory nonetheless do surprisingly well if we compare them to the actual record of human history rather than to our romantic images of civilized progress. Civilization has not been as successful in guaranteeing human well-being as we like to believe, at least for most of our history. Apparently, improvements in technology and organization have not entirely offset the demands of increasing population; too many of the patterns and activities of civilized lifestyles have generated costs as well as benefits.

There is no evidence either from ethnographic accounts or archaeological excavations to suggest that rates of accidental trauma or interpersonal violence declined substantially with the adoption of more civilized forms of political organization. In fact, some evidence from archaeological sites and from historical sources suggests the opposite.

Evidence from both ethnographic descriptions of contemporary hunters and the archaeological record suggests that the major trend in the quality and quantity of human diets has been downward. Contemporary hunter-gatherers, although lean and occasionally hungry, enjoy levels of caloric intake that compare favorably with national averages for many major countries of the Third World and that are generally above those of the poor in the modern world. Even the poorest recorded hunter-gatherer group enjoys a caloric intake superior to that of impoverished contemporary urban populations. Prehistoric hunter-gatherers appear to have enjoyed richer environments and to have been better nourished than most subsequent populations (primitive and civilized alike). Whenever we can glimpse the remains of anatomically modern human beings who lived in early prehistoric environments still rich in large game, they are often relatively large people displaying comparatively few signs of qualitative malnutrition. The subsequent trend in human size and stature is irregular but is more often downward than upward in most parts of the world until the nineteenth or twentieth century.

The diets of hunter-gatherers appear to be comparatively well balanced, even when they are lean. Ethnographic accounts of contemporary groups suggest that protein intakes are commonly quite high, comparable to those of affluent modern groups and substantially above world averages. Protein deficiency is almost unknown in these groups, and vitamin and mineral deficiencies are rare and usually mild in comparison to rates reported from many Third World populations. Archaeological evidence suggests that specific deficiencies, including that of iron (anemia), vitamin D (rickets), and, more controversially, vitamin C (scurvy) as well as such general signs of protein calorie malnutrition as childhood growth retardation have generally become more common in history rather than declining.


In any case, the popular impression that nutrition has improved through history reflects twentieth-century affluence and seems to have as much to do with class privilege as with an overall increase in productivity. Neither the lower classes of prehistoric and classical empires nor the contemporary Third World have shared in the improvement in caloric intake; consumption of animal protein seems to have declined for all but privileged groups.

There is no clear evidence that the evolution of civilization has reduced the risk of resource failure and starvation as successfully as we like to believe. Episodes of starvation occur among hunter-gatherer bands because natural resources fail and because they have limited ability either to store or to transport food. The risk of starvation is offset, in part, by the relative freedom of hunter-gatherers to move around and find new resources, but it is clear that with limited technology of transport they can move neither far nor fast enough to escape severe fluctuations in natural resources. But each of the strategies that sedentary and civilized populations use to reduce or eliminate food crises generate costs and risks as well as benefits. The supplementation of foraging economies by small-scale cultivation may help to reduce the risk of seasonal hunger, particularly in crowded and depleted environments. The manipulation and protection of species involved in farming may help to reduce the risk of crop failure. The storage of food in sedentary communities may also help protect the population against seasonal shortages or crop failure. But these advantages may be outweighed by the greater vulnerability that domestic crop species often display toward climatic fluctuations or other natural hazards, a vulnerability that is then exacerbated by the specialized nature or narrow focus of many agricultural systems. The advantages are also offset by the loss of mobility that results from agriculture and storage, the limits and failures of primitive storage systems, and the vulnerability of sedentary communities to political expropriation of their stored resources.

The major infectious diseases experienced by isolated hunting and gathering bands are likely to have been of two types: zoonotic diseases, caused by organisms whose life cycles were largely independent of human habits; and chronic diseases, handed directly from person to person, the transmission of which were unlikely to have been discouraged by small group size. Of the two categories, the zoonotic infections are undoubtedly the more important. They are likely to have been severe or even rapidly fatal because they were poorly adapted to human hosts. Moreover, zoonotic diseases may have had a substantial impact on small populations by eliminating productive adults. But in another respect their impact would have been limited because they did not pass from person to person.

By virtue of mobility and the handling of animal carcasses, hunter-gatherers are likely to have been exposed to a wider range of zoonotic infections than are more civilized populations. Mobility may also have exposed hunter-gatherers to the traveler's diarrhea phenomenon in which local microvariants of any parasite (including zoonoses) placed repeated stress on the body's immune response.

The chronic diseases, which can spread among small isolated groups, appear to have been relatively unimportant, although they undoubtedly pose a burden of disease that can often be rapidly eliminated by twentieth-century medicine. First, such chronic diseases appear to provoke relatively little morbidity in those chronically exposed. Moreover, the skeletal evidence suggests that even yaws and other common low-grade infections (periostitis) associated with infections by organisms now common to the human environment were usually less frequent and less severe among small, early mobile populations than among more sedentary and dense human groups. Similar arguments appear to apply to tuberculosis and leprosy, judging from the record of the skeletons. Even though epidemiologists now concede that tuberculosis could have spread and persisted in small groups, the evidence suggests overwhelmingly that it is primarily a disease of dense urban populations.

Similarly, chronic intestinal infestation by bacterial, protozoan, and helminth parasites, although displaying significant variation in occurrence according to the natural; environment, generally appears to be minimized by small group size and mobility. At least, the prevalence of specific parasites and the parasite load, or size of the individual dose, is minimized, although in some environments mobility actually appears to have increased the variety of parasites encountered. Ethnographic observations suggest that parasite loads are often relatively low in mobile bands and commonly increase as sedentary lifestyles are adopted. Similar observations imply that intestinal infestations are commonly more severe in sedentary populations than in their more mobile neighbors. The data also indicate that primitive populations often display better accommodation to their indigenous parasites (that is, fewer symptoms of disease in proportion to their parasite load) than we might otherwise expect. The archaeological evidence suggests that, insofar as intestinal parasite loads can be measured by their effects on overall nutrition (for example, on rates of anemia), these infections were relatively mild in early human populations but became increasingly severe as populations grew larger and more sedentary. In one case where comparative analysis of archaeological mummies from different periods has been undertaken, there is direct evidence of an increase in pathological intestinal bacteria with the adoption of sedentism. In another case, analysis of feces has documented an increase in intestinal parasites with sedentism.

Many major vector-borne infections may also have been less important among prehistoric hunter-gatherers than they are in the modern world. The habits of vectors of such major diseases as malaria, schistosomiasis, and bubonic plague suggest that among relatively small human groups without transportation other than walking these diseases are unlikely to have provided anything like the burden of morbidity and mortality that they inflicted on historic and contemporary populations.

Epidemiological theory further predicts the failure of most epidemic diseases ever to spread in small isolated populations or in groups of moderate size connected only by transportation on foot. Moreover, studies on the blood sera of contemporary isolated groups suggest that, although small size and isolation is not a complete guarantee against the transmission of such diseases in the vicinity, the spread from group to group is at best haphazard and irregular. The pattern suggests that contemporary isolates are at risk to epidemics once the diseases are maintained by civilized populations, but it seems to confirm predictions that such diseases would and could not have flourished and spread because they would not reliably have been transmitted in a world inhabited entirely by small and isolated groups in which there were no civilized reservoirs of diseases and all transportation of diseases could occur only at the speed of walking human beings.

In addition, overwhelming historical evidence suggests that the greatest rates of morbidity and death from infection are associated with the introduction of new diseases from one region of the world to another by processes associated with civilized transport of goods at speeds and over distances outside the range of movements common to hunting and gathering groups. Small-scale societies move people among groups and enjoy periodic aggregation and dispersal, but they do not move the distances associated with historic and modern religious pilgrimages or military campaigns, nor do they move at the speed associated with rapid modern forms of transportation. The increase in the transportation of people and exogenous diseases seems likely to have had far more profound effects on health than the small burden of traveler's diarrhea imposed by the small-scale movements of hunter-gatherers.

Prehistoric hunting and gathering populations may also have had one other important advantage over many more civilized groups. Given the widely recognized (and generally positive or synergistic) association of malnutrition and disease, the relatively good nutrition of hunter-gatherers may further have buffered them against the infections they did encounter.

In any case, the record of the skeletons appears to suggest that severe episodes of stress that disrupted the growth of children (acute episodes of infection or epidemics and/or episodes of resource failure and starvation) did not decline and if anything became increasingly common with the evolution of civilization in prehistory.

There is also evidence, primarily from ethnographic sources, that primitive populations suffer relatively low rates of many degenerative diseases compared, at least, to the more affluent of modern societies, even after corrections are made for the different distribution of adult ages. Primitive populations (hunter-gatherers, subsistence farmers, and all groups who do not subsist on modern refined foods) appear to enjoy several nutritional advantages over more affluent modern societies that protect them from many of the diseases that now afflict us. High bulk diets, diets with relatively few calories in proportion to other nutrients, diets low in total fat (and particularly low in saturated fat), and diets high in potassium and low in sodium, which are common to such groups, appear to help protect them against a series of degenerative conditions that plague the more affluent of modern populations, often in proportion to their affluence. Diabetes mellitus appears to be extremely rare in primitive groups (both hunter-gatherers and farmers) as are circulatory problems, including high blood pressure, heart disease, and strokes. Similarly, disorders associated with poor bowel function, such as appendicitis, diverticulosis, hiatal hernia, varicose veins, hemorrhoids, and bowel cancers, appear rare. Rates of many other types of cancer particularly breast and lung appear to be low in most small-scale societies, even when corrected for the small proportion of elderly often observed; even those cancers that we now consider to be diseases of under-development, such as Burkitt's lymphoma and cancer of the liver, may be the historical product of changes in human behavior involving food storage or the human-assisted spread of vector-borne infections. The record of the skeletons suggests, through the scarcity of metastases in bone, that cancers were comparatively rare in prehistory.
The history of human life expectancy is much harder to describe or summarize with any precision because the evidence is so fragmentary and so many controversies are involved in its interpretation. But once we look beyond the very high life expectancies of mid-twentieth century affluent nations, the existing data also appear to suggest a pattern that is both more complex and less progressive than we are accustomed to believe.

Contrary to assumptions once widely held, the slow growth of prehistoric populations need not imply exceedingly high rates of mortality. Evidence of low fertility and/or the use of birth control by small-scale groups suggests (if we use modern life tables) that average rates of population growth very near zero could have been maintained by groups suffering only historically moderate mortality (life expectancy of 25 to 30 years at birth with 50 to 60 percent of infants reaching adulthood figures that appear to match those observed in ethnographic and archaeological samples) that would have balanced fertility, which was probably below the averages of more sedentary modern populations. The prehistoric acceleration of population growth after the adoption of sedentism and farming, if it is not an artifact of archaeological reconstruction, could be explained by an increase in fertility or altered birth control decisions that appear to accompany sedentism and agriculture. This explanation fits the available data better than any competing hypothesis.

It is not clear whether the adoption of sedentism or farming would have increased or decreased the proportion of individuals dying as infants or children. The advantages of sedentism may have been offset by risks associated with increased infection, closer spacing of children, or the substitution of starchy gruels for mother's milk and other more nutritious weaning foods. The intensification of agriculture and the adoption of more civilized lifestyles may not have improved the probability of surviving childhood until quite recently. Rates of infant and child mortality observed in the smallest contemporary groups (or reconstructed with less certainty among prehistoric groups) would not have embarrassed most European countries until sometime in the nineteenth century and were, in fact, superior to urban rates of child mortality through most of the nineteenth century (and much of the twentieth century in many Third World cities).
There is no evidence from archaeological samples to suggest that adult life expectancy increased with the adoption of sedentism or farming; there is some evidence (complicated by the effects of a probably acceleration of population growth on cemetery samples) to suggest that adult life expectancy may actually have declined as farming was adopted. In later stages of the intensification of agriculture and the development of civilization, adult life expectancy most often increased and often increased substantially but the trend was spottier than we sometimes realize. Archaeological populations from the Iron Age or even the Medieval period in Europe and the Middle East or from the Mississippian period in North America often suggest average adult ages at death in the middle or upper thirties, not substantially different from (and sometimes lower than) those of the earliest visible populations in the same regions. Moreover, the historic improvement in adult life expectancy may have resulted at least in part from increasing infant and child mortality and the consequent "select" nature of those entering adulthood as epidemic diseases shifted their focus from adults to children.

These data clearly imply that we need to rethink both scholarly and popular images of human progress and cultural evolution. We have built our images of human history too exclusively from the experiences of privileged classes and populations, and we have assumed too close a fit between technological advances and progress for individual lives.

In scholarly terms, these data which often suggest diminishing returns to health and nutrition tend to undermine models of cultural evolution based on technological advances. They add weight to theories of cultural evolution that emphasize environmental constraints, demographic pressure, and competition and social exploitation, rather than technological or social progress, as the primary instigators of social change. Similarly, the archaeological evidence that outlying populations often suffered reduced health as a consequence of their inclusion in larger political units, the clear class stratification of health in early and modern civilizations, and the general failure of either early or modern civilizations to promote clear improvements in health, nutrition, or economic homeostasis for large segments of their populations until the very recent past all reinforce competitive and exploitative models of the origins and function of civilized states.
In popular terms, I think that we must substantially revise our traditional sense that civilization represents progress in human well-being or at least that it did so for most people for most of history prior to the twentieth century. The comparative data simply do not support that image. "


one study about aborigines in australia have shown that humans had a diet of about a hundred different animals, over a 150 different vegetables and fruits, about 80 roots. another study about african societies in arid regions show that the people there had a diet comparable to that of the aborigines.

 

[slaveplanet]

i just remembered something else quite funny...

columbus himself said in the beginning in his diary how fit and handsome the people looked he met and how friendly they were. thankful as he was he kidnapped dozens and took them back to europe but on the journey there most of them died.

later the spaniards had big problems in colonizing the area and people they sent there died of starvation until natives helped them and gave them food and showed them what they could eat. so at least these natives were not malnourished so it seems...
thankful as they were the spaniards then went on to kill and enslave the continent...

the english also had problems colonizing the north later on and here the same happened... the native population helped them to survive, here too the nutrition seems to have been adequate...

the english also had problems with people fleeing their settlements and soldiers deserting to the indigenous because the life with them was more attractive... doesn't seem to me they had any food problems...

 

[coldcanna]

I have seen similar information to what you are talking about. And you mentioned work- in the article I read scientists were actually puzzled why people would choose to live in agricultural communities because there is much more labor involved than hunter/gathering. Maybe they were tired of living meal to meal? Maybe being constantly hunted by wild wolves and big cats is terrifying? Maybe they like more human company or more food stability? I don't claim to know what the reason was but it does seem like for whatever reason or another, given the option, hunter gathers around the world all chose to move into AG communities. Most native americans did the same thing.

 

[slaveplanet]

I have seen similar information to what you are talking about. And you mentioned work- in the article I read scientists were actually puzzled why people would choose to live in agricultural communities because there is much more labor involved than hunter/gathering. Maybe they were tired of living meal to meal? Maybe being constantly hunted by wild wolves and big cats is terrifying? Maybe they like more human company or more food stability? I don't claim to know what the reason was but it does seem like for whatever reason or another, given the option, hunter gathers around the world all chose to move into AG communities. Most native americans did the same thing.

like i already said in a previous post...

how am i supposed to change the way you think and what you believe if i don't have the authority and the power to do so ?

you want to look for reasons to keep on denying something you have been trained to deny and view as a lie or not correct.

i could tell you a thousand FACTS and the TRUTH about the world and you would still not believe me, because "you" don't want to and can't.
it is an psychological problem not one of arguments or of fact checking or discussion.

you could look at yourself, see the world with open eyes, look at nature, the civilized world we have been born into and told it is the best of all worlds, you let life teach you something... but you won't do it, because you have been trained not to.

i could tell you to look at the destruction that is apparent, tell you that cities are not what you think they are, tell you that the "arguments" you use have no substance other than that they seem to be true because you have heard,read and seen them multiple times (repetition to program you) and the authority that governs you tells you it is true and forbids you to see other truths... but it will not change the way you think because you are not free in your mind and body.

it doesn't matter to me what you believe is true or not true, i know what is and i know why you try to deny it and behave like you do, like i said people have already analyzed this "cultures" and their slaves behaviour and you don't behave like many before you and like myself before i understood (and still is an ongoing process, never ending) what was going on...

i regard the conversation with you as completed, my goal was achieved and i am satisfied you behaved just like thought you would

 

[slaveplanet]

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]"and you don't behave like many before you and like myself before i understood (and still is an ongoing process, never ending) what was going on..."

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]m[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]ea[/FONT]nt to write... "you [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]behave like [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]many before you..."[/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT]
[/FONT]

 

[coldcanna]

If you TRUELY believe what you are saying then why aren't you out living your life like that? Plenty of people in Alaska are doing exactly what you say...

The truth is that it's easy to spout ideas on a forum and it sounds romantic, but you are sitting in a house right now that has heat, electricity, Internet, running water, eating food from a grocery store, using a computer manufactured from precious medals strip-mined in the 3rd world.

I'm not speaking from unqualified ground either. I own 40 acres deep in the country. Moved here to homestead. Cut my own firewood for years, grew food and hunted. Many times lost power so had no running water. Have you ever woken up in your house and it's 45 degrees? Just saying, u live like that day in and day out u would see what I'm saying. I'm not spouting off what I'm "conditioned by society" to say, I've been there done that. Seriously, if u want to call my bluff, go shut off your main electric breaker and turn off your heat in your house. Then only eat food and game that you harvest. It's deer season right now! Come back in a few weeks and tell us how it went

 

[EsterEssence]

My thoughts on politics, lock gate, don't watch the news, don't read about it on the net, and go about my daily life, growing and making cannabis concentrates...