Although the two plants are of the same species, hemp plants grown for fiber used to make rope are different from marijuana plants grown for flowers that produce THC (the “drug part”) in many physiological and practical ways. As different as a wolf from a shih tzu, or a crabapple from a honeycrisp.

For the most part, THC is produced in the flower of the cannabis plant. Most cannabis plants are either male or female (not both), and only female plants produce flowers.

Since hemp plants are cultivated for fiber, they usually have thick, strong, stalks. It’s better to grow them taller as opposed to wider, to fit more plants in a field. Both male and female plants can be used for fiber. Female hemp plants do grow small flowers, and those flowers do produce small amounts of THC, but not enough to be worth harvesting. Legally, modern hemp plants grown for fiber have less than one third of one percent THC content.

Since marijuana plants are cultivated for flowers, they usually have multiple, branching stalks, and they often spread and grow bushy at the top. It’s better to grow them wider as opposed to taller, so each plant can spread out and produce multiple flower stalks. The thin, branching stalks of these relatively short female marijuana plants could be used for fiber, but there’s probably not enough material there to be worth the effort. Meanwhile, many producers claim their marijuana flower to have 25% THC content or more.

It’s thought that cannabis flowers produce THC for at least two reasons. One is that the compound is sticky and helps hold on to pollen that might drift past from nearby male plants. Another reason is that it acts as a sunscreen for the flowers. The flowers produce THC to capture pollen, and also to protect themselves from the sun when they are wide open and waiting for the pollen to come.

Cannabis seeds don’t contain any THC (except whatever small amount may be left over from the flowers that produced them). All else being equal, the seeds of a hemp plant and the seeds of a marijuana plant should have the same value as a food source or industrial resource. Seeds from marijuana plants are rarer, though not necessarily more valuable.

One reason marijuana seeds are rare is that cannabis flowers produce way more THC when they are left unfertilized. The plant is producing THC in order to attract pollen, so as long as there is no pollen around, the plant just keeps producing more THC. It is by far most efficient to keep THC-producing female plants isolated from male plants. But this means those flowers are never fertilized and never produce any new seeds.

Long ago, it was common for marijuana bud to have seeds. Cannabis flowers grown outdoors are much more difficult to keep from being fertilized. Seedless marijuana bud, “sinsemilla,” was an uncommon treat for many illicit cannabis consumers in the '70s, '80s, or even into the '90s. More recently, relaxed legal regulation and technological advances have made controlled indoor marijuana growing much easier and more effective, and much more common. These days the paradigm has flipped, and it’s highly unusual (and maybe a little insulting) to find seeds in any flower purchased for THC consumption.

This case involved charges of fraud made against Trump’s company by the State of New York. This was a civil case, not a criminal case. The consequences were not supposed to be criminal.

The defamation lawsuits brought by E. Jean Carroll were also civil cases. She was not charging Trump with the crime of raping her many years ago; She was suing him (twice) for lying about whether he raped her many years ago. (She won both times.)

I think I get where you are coming from, though. When a person is rich enough to pay the fine, and also shameless enough to revel in the infamy of being found liable in a civil dispute, it can seem like that person doesn’t end up suffering any significant consequence for their actions at all.

$355M is a lot of money. Add in the $83M owed to Carroll and these recent fines top $400M, which is an estimated amount of Trump’s liquid assets. Trump is now likely running out of cash-on-hand, which could explain his recent takeover of the Republican National Committee – the GOP’s fundraising (and fund-spending) organization.

Criminal consequences come from criminal cases. Trump has invested most of his legal defense against the criminal cases he is facing. Pending criminal cases involving Trump include:

1.) A RICO (“Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations”) case charged by the State of Georgia, against Trump and several others who allegedly conspired to steal the state’s 16 electoral votes, including by having the President call (Republican) Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and ask him to “find 11,780 votes” for him. Four people in that case have already accepted a plea deal. This case is currently delayed by a motion to disqualify the DA because she had a romantic relationship with a lawyer her office hired to help prosecute the case.

2.) A federal case against Trump for retaining classified documents. A year or so ago, it was found that former President Trump and former VP Mike Pence had kept classified documents after they left office, and that when Joe Biden left the office of VP in 2017, he also kept some classified documents. Both Pence and Biden complied with federal investigation and surrendered the documents immediately when asked. Unlike Pence and Biden, Trump did not comply with federal investigation, and instead took action to conceal the classified documents in his possession. This case is being heard in a Florida courtroom, because Trump was storing these stolen national secrets in a spare bathroom at Mar-A-Lago. The judge is a Trump appointee, and has demonstrated a tendency to rule in Trumps favor whenever she can, but if she shows too much bias she may get taken off the case.

3.) A federal case against Trump for his involvement in the insurrectionist attempt to disrupt the electoral vote count in congress on January 6, 2021. Trump has been indicted on four charges in this case: “conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding; and conspiracy against rights.” Trump’s defense has been that he has “absolute immunity” for any actions he took while serving as President. This claim of immunity has been denied and appealed multiple times. Trump has now asked the SCOTUS to hear his appeal, but they haven’t said if they will yet. Until they do, that case is on hold, but there’s no one else to appeal to higher than them. If SCOTUS chooses not to hear Trump’s immunity appeal, the lower court’s denial of it will stand and the case will go forward.

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This strikes me as a particularly ahistoric take. I’d like to make two points in that regard.

News Radio was the biggest gig yet for both Joe Rogan and Andy Dick, who played main characters on the show from the start. Jon Lovitz was already well known from his time on Saturday Night Live – arguably a higher-profile position than the one he took on News Radio.

Jon Lovitz wasn’t spawned by News Radio, is my first point. To the contrary: Lovitz was brought onto the show as an established big-name talent after (his friend and fellow SNL alum) Phil Hartman died.

And how did Phil Hartman die? Phil Hartman was shot and killed by his wife, Brynn Omdahl, who struggled with substance abuse. According to Lovitz, Andy Dick was said to have shared cocaine with her at a Christmas party at Hartman’s house.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lovitz-speaks-out-on-dustup-with-andy-dick/

“[Andy] was just complaining and really giving me a hard time for no reason. Phil told me that they had a Christmas party and Andy was doing cocaine and he gave it to Phil’s wife Brynn, who had been sober for 10 years. So Andy said to me, ‘Well, you shouldn’t be here,’ and I said, ‘Well, I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t given Brynn coke in the first place.’”

After this on-set exchange, Lovitz and Dick were said to have made up and were able to work professionally together on News Radio. Later, however, when Lovitz was out at a restaurant, Dick came over to his table and invoked his ostensible involvement with Hartman’s murder:

“He’s standing there with liqueur dripping down his chin and he says, ‘I put the Phil Hartman hex on you, you’re the next one to die,’” said Lovitz. “And he’s smiling, and my blood just went to my head. I wanted to smash him, but if I hit him he would have gone flying into the table behind him. He was really drunk.”

My second point is that, while Jon Lovitz maybe be a “character,” he’s an entirely different class of character than Andy Dick. (Or Joe Rogan, for that matter, just to pretend this whole long reply still has something to do with the actual OP topic.)

So like, “Biden should seize the powers of the presidency to take a more authoritarian stance against authoritarianism.” Is this really what you mean?

finger wagging is for the powerless citizenry not the president

Contrary to your premise, Biden has consistently promoted an anti-authoritarian view of how our representative democracy should work. He thinks people should vote against authoritarianism, instead of them calling on a POTUS who was elected to office because of his anti-authoritarian views to start taking authoritarian action against his authoritarian opponents.

The citizenry is not powerless. The citizenry has the most fundamental power of all: power over who is elected to office.

Just because that power can be corrupted and diminished through gerrymandering, electoral college imbalances, and two-party FPTP distortions (and a million other for-better-or-worse Constitutional safeguards against mob-rule) does not change the fact the citizenry still holds the most basic and fundamental power of all.

Tweets and finger-wagging are fine too, if you like, but if you are against fascism, I’m glad too. I hope you vote, and I hope you vote strategically instead of out of anger.

It’s not just for quality, but for authenticity too, I think.

Foods that are fermented or aged can take on a unique flavor profile, based on the unique blend of bacteria and mold and yeast in the area. Even using the same milk from the same cows and processing it the same way, cheese that is naturally aged in a cave in France might taste different from cheese that’s aged in a cave in West Virginia. Not necessarily better or worse, quality-wise, but different. Not authentic.

Weather patterns, seasonal changes, and soil conditions are also distinct and varied in different places. The same grapes grow differently in German soil than they do in Kansas. The grass that the cows eat grows differently in different places, and this can have a significant impact on the flavors of the milk and cheese.

I’m American, but I used to work in a fancy wine store that sold a lot of imported cheese and groceries. I imagine that in practice, PDO must seem like an annoying mix of over-regulation and jingoistic propaganda – especially to someone in Europe. But it does seem to serve a purpose, even if in an overbearing way.

I think being proud of local food culture is more like community spirit or neighborhood pride. It’s like saying, “here’s something ingeniously delicious we created using only our limited local resources.” I don’t think of that quite the same way as “pride” about race, gender, sexuality.

A pastor usually leads a Protestant church. Catholic churches are led by priests.

Confession of sins to (God though) a priest is a rite in the Catholic church, but not in Protestant churches. Protestant churches often encourage members to ask forgiveness for their sins directly to God through prayer.

There are more Catholics than protestants in the world, but there are more protestants than Catholics in the U.S. The type of Christianity most often associated with socially conservative Republican/MAGA primary voters is Protestant “evangelical” Christianity.

Evangelicals are a hardcore subset of Protestants who take the Bible literally. They’re sometimes called “Born-again Christians” because of their belief in the importance of personal conversion. That is, you’re not really a real Christian until, as an autonomous adult, you willingly choose to surrender yourself, mind body and soul, and devote your life to (your pastor’s teachings about) the teachings of Jesus.

Anyway, now I’ve done an eight-hours-later four-paragraph TED-talk riff on what is otherwise quite a fine and clever comment. I mean no offense and hope none is taken. I mostly just wanted to note that when Nikki Haley talks about “pastors,” she isn’t talking to Catholics; she’s talking directly to the GOP evangelical voter base.

Giant food stores in Mid-Atlantic US

What does that mean though, “anti-war party,” “anti-war politician”?

Did your “anti-war party” stop being so because they’d ended the war we were in? And if so, wasn’t that a good thing, for those with an “anti-war” outlook?

Back in the late 1930s, I’m pretty sure America’s “anti-war party” was mostly isolationists and some Nazi sympathizers. It was FDR, one of the most progressive Democrats ever elected to the office, who led the country to war back then.

If your entire political belief system is based on avoiding war at all costs, you deny yourself any real-world context in exchange for that purist ideology.

Those who are anti-war above all else lose everything they have and everything they stand for, the first time someone (anyone!) else decides to threaten them with war. The first time that someone sneak-attacks their Pearl Harbor, or crashes planes into their Twin Towers, or whatever else.

Maybe war is like abortion (in this singularly metaphorical political sense). Nobody ever really wants it to happen, and most people do their best to try to avoid it for themselves and others. Yet sometimes, despite everyone’s best efforts, it ends up being the safest and healthiest way, sometimes the only way, out of an untenable situation not completely of our own making.

I’m not arguing that World War II was a “good” war and that W. Bush’s Iraq was a “bad” war. That may comport with my personal beliefs, but my real point is that everyone has their own personal beliefs. Everyone has something that is most important to them.

If you say that war is never justified for any reason, then you are also saying that your call for pacifism is more important than whatever the reason for the war may be. Not just more important for you, but for everyone else too.

There is a phone app, that pretty much allows you phone to work like the scanner gun. I’ve used it before and it works fine, but my phone’s camera is not as good as the guns at scanning barcodes.

Also, as much as I realize I am trading privacy for control, I figure there’s no need to have the grocery store’s app living on my phone, when it is just as easy for me to use the dedicated device they provide in-store.

In the produce section, they have scales that print out barcoded price stickers. I look up the item I’m weighing (or enter the PLU) and it gives me a sticker I can scan.

In the bakery section, where you can pick out individual muffins or donuts, they have barcodes printed on the self-service case above each item. I can just scan the barcode for whatever I take.

(I do also have the option of checking things out at the end, if I didn’t scan them with the gun.)

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EDIT to Add:

Ironically, the only time I remember taking something from that store without paying for it was a time that my self-scanned order had been flagged for an audit. I was trying to buy a watermelon on sale, but the sale price didn’t come up when I scanned it, so I set it aside to figure out at checkout.

When I got to checkout, my order was flagged for an audit. (Maybe even precisely because I had scanned the watermelon but then removed it from my cart when it came up at the wrong price.)

The guy running the self-checkout saw the flashing light at my register. Without comment, he came over to perform the ritual of scanning the certain number of items in my cart to reset the transaction and allow me to pay and be on my way. He and I had both been through this procedure many times. He probably performed it several times each shift he worked there.

I was distracted by the audit, however, and I forgot about the watermelon. When he scanned enough items and punched in his code, the register came up with my total and asked me how I was going to pay. I stuck in my credit card, clicked “yes” to the transaction amount, and made my way out of the store with a pilfered watermelon.

The grocery store I shop at has handheld scanner guns for customer use. I check out a gun by scanning my loyalty card, then make my way around the store, scanning each item as I put it in my cart. When I’m done, the handheld scanner displays a barcode that I scan at the self-checkout scanner. My entire order shows up on the screen there, along with the total cost. I pay, take my receipt, and head out to the parking lot.

I like scanner-gun shopping a lot. I like it because it’s efficient, but also because it puts me in control. I can see the real price of everything I take off the shelf, in real-time. If something doesn’t ring up at the price it’s marked, I know instantly. The device keeps a running total as I shop.

Most days, my entire grocery experience involves no direct interaction with any store employee whatsoever, except maybe to exchange pleasantries with a stockperson. I do 100% of the work of checking myself out. I imagine the money the store saves on me in labor might make up for a lot of the money it loses in shrink.

But the store gets something else from my use of its scan-as-you-shop service. It gets to collect a huge amount of data on the way I shop. Not only does it record everything I buy, but it knows when and where I buy it. It knows the patterns of how I move through the store. It can compare my patterns to the patterns of all the other shoppers who use store scanner guns. It can analyze these patterns for useful information about everything from store layout to shoplifting mitigation.

One of the ways the store mitigates shrink from scanner gun shoppers who might accidentally “forget” to scan an item they put in their cart is point-of-sale audits. Not usually, but every so often and on a regular basis, my order will be flagged for an audit when I go to check out. When this happens, the cashier running the self-checkout area has to come over and scan a certain number of items in my cart, to make sure they were all included in my bill.

My main point in all of this was to offer a narrative that runs counter to the narrative I picked up from the article. I prefer to have more control over my checkout experience, and I will willingly choose to surrender personal information about my shopping habits and check-out procedures in order to gain that control, every chance I get.

Good point!

For the sake of accuracy, Hulu is owned by Disney which also owns ABC, as well as ESPN, Marvel, and Fox Entertainment (but not Fox “News”).

Meanwhile, a couple years ago, CBS and Viacom merged to become “Paramount Global” which owns both CBS and the Paramount (streaming) Network (obviously) as well as a slew of cable channels including Showtime, MTV, Nickelodeon, BET, Comedy Central….

And as noted, Comcast owns Universal which owns NBC. Their streaming service is “Peacock,” which has yet to demonstrate that it can compete against Disney’s Hulu (or CBS’s Paramount).

This may soon change, however, as licensing agreements expire and corporations begin to run their own content exclusively on their own networks. Disney-owned content will stream on Hulu, Universal-owned content will stream on Peacock, and Paramount-owned content will stream on Paramount. Same goes for all their respective cable TV channel subsidiaries.

This consolidation in media ownership gives more power to the corporations to compete against one another in the emerging streaming-service market, but it also takes power away from the people who create the content. This is a big reason why the screenwriters and SAG are on strike.

I’ve been trying to do my part by watching reruns of The Nanny in demonstration of my support.

Fuck the fascists? For sure. I fucking hate all those motherfuckers.

Except that, just about the worst thing of all about fascism is the way that it goes out of its way to dehumanize other people, just so as to make it easier to hate them.

So how about, “Fuck fascism” then? I could get behind that. But maybe still try to save some small modicum of love, as well, for all the poor souls who’ve been weak or gullible enough to have fallen for it?

Maybe give them one more chance to come out of their holes, if they’re brave enough? When I can, I always try give them one more chance to do that. In any small way whatsoever.

I don’t mean to purposefully give them “one more chance” to troll, or spew their rhetoric, or stoke hate – even though we all know that’s what they’ll do again, 99 times out of 100.

I don’t mean supporting some reddit echo chamber I am ideologically opposed to just to feed my own ego and provide them all fodder for more echo-chamber bullying and false validation. I mean using a forum for good-faith communication among honest strangers. The way forums have always been intended to be used (but never always have) since the beginning of the internet 30 years ago.

I just mean that, when thinking of another person instead of another person’s ideology, I always want to give them just one more chance to listen to me, and one more chance to talk to me, as a fellow person

One more chance to hear another point of view, one more chance to come to understand and communicate and cooperate from a place of their own standing, as opposed to just snapping back defensively from the place that their fascism has conditioned them to react from.

One more one-in-a-hundred chance that my purposeful efforts to humanize my adversary may somehow lead him to humanize me as well.

Fuck fascism, for sure. But I try not to hate a person for their good intentions. It’s said the road to hell is paved with them, but they’re still usually a whole lot more respectable than bad intentions.