Tag Archives: Drugs

News

Trump signs bill to allow states to drug-test applicants for unemployment benefits

2 Comments
Ted and Heidi Cruz have a plan to simplify the tax code
Ted Cruz and and his supportive wife Heidi

I liked this story, because not only did it talk about Ted Cruz, but it also shows a major difference between Republicans and Democrats.

The story is from the far left Dallas Morning News.

Excerpt:

President Donald Trump on Friday signed legislation backed by two Texas Republicans that will allow states to expand the pool of applicants for unemployment benefits who can be drug tested.

The bill, sponsored by Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rep. Kevin Brady of The Woodlands, nullifies a Labor Department rule that went into effect in September limiting drug tests to applicants who had a job that does regular drug screenings.

“Under the previous administration, the Department of Labor undermined the ability of states to conduct drug testing in their programs as permitted by Congress,” Cruz said in a written statement. “This rule was yet another example of executive overreach by the Obama administration, and I commend President Trump for signing this resolution into law.”

The measure traveled down a partisan path in Congress, passing through the Senate earlier this month with a party-line vote. Four Democrats in the House voted in favor of the bill in February, but no Texans.

“After 5 years of battling with the Obama Department of Labor, states like Texas will now be allowed to drug test folks on unemployment to ensure they are job ready from day one,” Brady said in a written statement. “This is a win for families, workers, job creators, and local economies.”

[…]“We are not helping anyone by leaving them in a position where they are dependent on and addicted to drugs,” Cruz said.

I find this law so reasonable that I cannot believe that anyone who has a job and pays taxes could oppose it. Now, it’s true that a lot of Democrats either don’t work or get money from government salaries, government spending, or welfare. But even so, I would expect them to see that it is wrong to waste the taxpayer dollars of honest workers and their entrepreneurial employers on people who are addicted to drugs.

I hope that this bill will clear the way for conservative governors to get people off of welfare and into the workplace.

My favorite governor is Scott Walker, and he is discussed in this recent article from the center-left The Hill.

Excerpt:

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) on Monday said he would ask the state’s Republican-led legislature to undertake one of the most aggressive welfare reform packages since a wave of new measures passed in the mid-1990s.

Walker’s plan, “Wisconsin Works for Everyone,” would impose new work requirements on both able-bodied adults with school-age children who receive state food assistance and those who receive housing assistance. Both work plans, which would be tested on a pilot basis, would require recipients to be employed for at least 80 hours per month, or to be enrolled in job training programs. Those who do not meet work requirements would see part of their benefits cut.

“We believe our public assistance programs should ask able-bodied adults to take steps toward self-sufficiency through work, while also providing comprehensive tools to help them get and keep a job,” Walker said Monday.

The Wisconsin Republican has made welfare reform a key element of his second term in office.

“In 2017, we are going to push the federal government to allow Wisconsin to go even further, to be a leader once again on welfare reform,” Walker said last week during his State of the State address.

The plan proposed Monday would expand job training programs and employer resource networks for those who receive government aid. It would create an earned income tax credit specifically aimed at getting younger Wisconsinites into the workforce, and it would require existing business license requirements to be reviewed by a state panel in hopes of reducing red tape.

 

I also expect that Walker’s plans will get no Democrat support.

It really says something about how differently Republicans and Democrats view the money they take from taxpayers. Republicans want to be responsible in how they spend taxpayer money, whereas Democrats want to waste it so they can feel generous and preen in front of crowds about how generous they are. But you can’t be generous with someone else’s money.

The best way to help a person who is dependent on government is not to keep them on drugs, and keep them on welfare. They need to guided out of drug use, and into a job. Forging your own success makes you happier than being dependent anyway.

Commentary

Debunked: study claiming shorter lifespans for gays caused by discrimination

1 Comment
Gay activist vandalizes pro-marriage sign
Gay activist vandalizes pro-marriage sign

In the New York Post, Naomi Schaefer Riley writes about a study used by gay activists to bully those who disagree with their agenda.

She writes:

The headlines were unsparing and unambiguous. “Anti-gay Stigma Shortens Lives,” wrote US News & World Report.

“Anti-Gay Communities Linked to Shorter Lives,” said Reuters. “LGB Individuals Living in Anti-Gay Communities Die Early,” according to Science Daily.

Two years ago, these stories were hard to ignore when Columbia professor Mark Hatzenbuehler found that gays and lesbians who faced prejudice in their communities had a life expectancy 12 years shorter than those who lived in more accepting areas. Just so we’re clear, that’s bigger than the lifespan gap between regular smokers and nonsmokers.

We always knew prejudice was bad, but an Ivy League researcher had found that there were significant effects on the physical health of those experiencing it.

But where, one might wonder, were the headlines when another researcher tried to replicate Hatzenbuehler’s effects and came up empty?

Last month, Mark Regnerus, a professor at UT Austin, published an article in the journal Social Science and Medicine that concluded that “ten different approaches to multiple imputation of missing data yielded none in which the effect of structural stigma on the mortality of sexual minorities was statistically significant.”

In other words, Regnerus tried seven — er, 10 — ways from Sunday to try to get the same results as Hatzenbuehler using the exact same data, but failed. Which means, he concluded, that “the original study’s . . . variable (and hence its key result) is so sensitive to subjective measurement decisions as to be rendered unreliable.”

This isn’t the first time that a study authored by a gay activist has run into evidential problems.

That story was reported in the far-left Politico.

They say:

One of the authors of a recent study that claimed that short conversations with gay people could change minds on same-sex marriage has retracted it.

Columbia University political science professor Donald Green’s retraction this week of a popular article published in the December issue of the academic journal Science follows revelations that his co-author allegedly faked data for the study, “When contact changes minds: An experiment on transmission of support of gay marriage.”

[…]The study received widespread coverage from The New York Times, Vox, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and others when it was released in December.

The equally leftist Washington Post is even more forceful – calling the data a complete fake.

Excerpt:

[…]…[W]hat really happened was that the data were faked by first author LaCour. Co-author Green (my colleague at Columbia) had taken his collaborator’s data on faith; once he found out, he firmly retracted the article.

Ironically, LaCour benefited (in the short term) by his strategy of completely faking it. If he’d done the usual strategy of taking real data and stretching out the interpretation, I and others would’ve been all over him for overinterpreting his results, garden of forking paths, etc. But, by doing the Big Lie, he bypassed all those statistical concerns.

But the real issue is whether the negative health (and mental health) outcomes of homosexuality can be attributed to the lifestyle itself. The gay activists want you to believe that disagreement with their choices causes the negative effects. But the science shows the opposite: even in countries where there is no “stigma” against homosexuality, the unhealthy physical and mental outcomes persist.

Life Site News reports.

Excerpt: (links removed)

While many assume that family rejection is the leading cause of depression among LBGTI individuals, a new study has found that in fact the problem appears to stem predominantly from the higher incidence of relationship problems among homosexuals.

Dr. Delaney Skerrett led a team of researchers from the Australian Institute for Suicide Research and Prevention (AISRAP) in studying suicides in Queensland. He found that a leading cause of suicide among “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex” (LGBTI) people is stress from their romantic partners.

“We tend to assume that the psychological distress LGBTI people are often going through is due to family rejection. But it seems that’s not so much the case. The conflict seems to be largely related to relationship problems, with partners,” Dr. Skerrett said.

[…][T]he study, which was published on April 2 in Asia Pacific Psychiatry, found that “LGBT individuals experienced relationship problems more often” than heterosexuals, “with relationship conflict also being more frequent than in non‐LGBT cases.”

That confirms previous studies finding that homosexuals also face higher rates of intimate partner violence than heterosexuals. A 2007 study in the Journal of Urban Health, which is published by the New York Academy of Medicine, found that 32 percent of homosexuals have been abused by at least one partner during their lifetime.

The researchers with AISRAP also found that a higher percentage of homosexuals took their lives [out] of despondency, rather than other psychological illnesses. While one-eighth of all Queensland suicide victims had been diagnosed with a psychosis that impaired their judgment, Skerrett reports “there were no such diagnoses among LGBT individuals.” The conclusion adds to the consensus that depression disproportionately besets active homosexuals.

Maybe the problem is with the person who is making the bad decisions, and not with the people who disagree with the bad decisions?

News

New study: long-term marijuana use causes decline in memory in middle age

2 Comments
I have a key that will unlock a puzzling mystery
I have a key that will unlock a puzzling mystery

Cool new study reported by Reuters.

It says:

As marijuana becomes more accessible to young and old alike in the U.S., researchers warn that long-term use of the drug may cause lasting harm to at least one type of brain function.

A new study based on following thousands of young adults into middle age finds that long-term marijuana use is linked to poorer performance on verbal memory tests, but other areas of brain function do not appear to be affected.

“We did not expect to find such a consistent association with verbal memory for chronic exposure to marijuana,” especially since the link held even when other factors like cigarette smoking, alcohol use and other behavioral factors associated with marijuana use were accounted for, said lead author Dr. Reto Auer of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland.

Auer and colleagues analyzed data from a 25-year U.S. study of young adults, which included repeated measures of marijuana exposure over time and a standardized test of verbal memory, processing speed and executive function in year 25. Almost 3,500 participants completed the standardized tests.

At the beginning of the study period in the 1980s, participants were 18 to 30 years old and more than 80 percent reported past marijuana use. Just 12 percent continued to use marijuana into middle age, according to the results in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Researchers found that as past years of marijuana use increased, verbal memory scores decreased. In practical terms, the results meant that for every additional five years of exposure, 50 percent of marijuana users would remember one less word from a list of 15 tested words.

“Recreational marijuana users use it to get high, to benefit from the transient change it produces,” Auer told Reuters Health by email. “But this transient effect might have long term consequences on the way the brain processes information and could also have direct toxic effects on neurons.”

What I am finding out as I age is that I have to keep pushing back the date of my “retirement”. I thought I  could quit working at 30, then 35, then 40. Now I am thinking 45 before I can be more free. The point is that the world is becoming a more difficult place to be independent. A lot of government spending is going on, and a lot of debt is being added to our national debt. I may never be able to stop working. And it’s a good thing that I will have all my faculties intact when I have to keep working. Be careful with exchanging short-term fun and thrills for long-term poverty. Things are not getting easier, you’ll have to work just to get by.

Related posts