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If so, that's not necessarily a good thing:
1250-1300; Middle English: foolish, stupid < Old French: silly, simple < Latinnescius ignorant, incapable
As our ancestors used the term, it was derogatory. As has often been the case in modern language, the term has been co-opted. Today, it's a positive term. Sort of like "gay" used to mean "happy".
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This idiot, once a respected physician but now a snake-oil peddler, believes that the doctors who called for him to be removed from Columbia University faculty are somehow attempting to deprive him of his right to freedom of speech. Nothing could be further from the truth.
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Naturally, they're not about to save the money, and they sure as hell aren't going to give it back to taxpayers. No, they're looking at how to spend it. Maybe they could fill in a few potholes. Again, not likely: they want a new tax for that. Sure, $31 million could get a lot of road maintenance done, but that's kind of like asking why there are Marines on every U.S. Navy ship: sheep would be too obvious.
Never go for the obvious. Not in Portland. There's not one functional brain cell in the entire Portland City Council.
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Chuck Riley, a Democratic from Hillsboro, has some interesting perspectives. Amusingly, although he voted for universal background checks on gun sales, he was unable to explain how the law he helped to pass would work. And that was the start of things; how he got himself stuck in the proverbial tar baby:
At a recent constituent coffee town hall, Oregon state Senator Chuck Riley took heat from pro gun folks who were upset with his vote for the “universal background check” bill. Riley attempted to defend this in numerous different ways, including referencing Supreme Court decisions. When one citizen asked him about the Supreme Court upholding slavery back in the 1800s, Riley said “They were right for the time”.
Oh, my. At least Chuck seems to be aware of the fact that Democratics have historically opposed civil rights, having enacted the Jim Crow laws and founded the Ku Klux Klan. And, like slavery itself, these were "right for the time", apparently. And like a good Democratic, he seems to oppose Constitutional rights as well.
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Put this in your pipe and smoke it: marijuana grow-ops burn through tremendous amounts of energy, and that has the power councils worried. Portland General Electric says that 85% of residential transformer problems it deals with are related to indoor pot grows, and it's likely to get worse: come July, it'll be legal to grow four plants, and as a general rule - when lighting, ventilation, and other associated energy use is factored in, those four plants will consume as much electricity as 29 refrigerators.
After California legalized medical marijuana in 1996, per capita residential electricity usage increased by 50 percent in Humboldt County, according to research by Evan Mills, a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, published in the journal Energy Policy in 2012.
Enright said Mills’ research is still the “most definitive work” on energy consumption by pot growers.
Mills estimated at the time that indoor cannabis cultivation and transport of the product was responsible for 1 percent of national energy consumption or $6 billion each year. The study also looked into the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from pot gardens.
“One average kilogram of final product is associated with 4,600 kg of carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere, or that of 3 million average U.S. cars when aggregated across all national production,” Mills wrote.
If, as alarmists believe (note: I did not say "think"), carbon dioxide is killing our planet, then it is clear that a growing marijuana industry is a major contributor to climate degradation. Now the question becomes, since the great unthinking masses are busy legalizing the product - what curbs, if any, should be imposed on the industry?
Should they be obliged to pass a DEQ test each year? Should growers be required to purchase more expensive "green energy" to offset their contributions to climate degradation? Perhaps, as Boulder, Colorado has done, governments can impose a "carbon tax" on marijuana operations.
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American pharma companies are devoting their financial resources and the finest scientific minds to addressing the pressing need for maintaining an erection. Finding ways to fight antibiotic-resistant bacteria just isn't that profitable. They're not all that keen on finding cures for cancer, either.
So the folks at MIT think it'd be pretty spiffy if the feds would bump the funding for basic science back up to 1960s levels.
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The trial of the theater murderer is underway, with lawyers for Jimmy Holmes theoretically attempting to persuade jurors that he shouldn't be put to death, but should spend the rest of his life in a state mental hospital because he's nuts. In reality, they'll settle for life in prison if they can swing it.
He's unlikely to get the state hospital because although he's doubtless mentally ill, he's not insane; there was too much planning involved for a claim of insanity to fly. And insanity defenses almost never work:
Winning a trial on mental-health grounds is rare, but then again, so is a jury trial for a mass shooter, many of whom are killed by police, kill themselves or plead guilty.
A review of 160 mass shootings found killers went to trial 74 times, and just three were found insane, according to Grant Duwe, a Minnesota corrections official who wrote the book "Mass Murder in the United States: A History."
Just one mass shooter has won a mental-health case in the last two decades, Duwe said: Michael Hayes, who shot nine people, killing four, in North Carolina in 1988.
Based on that, Holmes "faces some pretty long odds," he said.
Duwe has a gift for understatement. His lawyers undoubtedly recognize that given his stockpiling of weapons, the booby-traps set up in his apartment, and - crucially - his theater selection (he drove past three other theaters in order to reach the one that advertised itself as a "gun-free" facility), no juror's going to buy the defense line that he was so crazy that he didn't know what he was doing. Mental illness can be held in check in a prison setting, and that's the best Holmes' lawyers can hope to achieve.
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But of course, overdone: Willamette Falls was an important fishing and commerce site for at least four Tribes for generations. And what became Oregon City marked the end of the Oregon Trail - though not, as some claim, because the falls were a barrier. The trail, after all, was mostly overland. Nope, they settled there because they recognized that the waterfall had some potential, if they could figure out ways to put that water power to use. And they did.
Among the first uses: a sawmill. First in the west, providing lumber to build structures. A powerhouse. Providing reliable new-fangled electricity, and the first long-distance transmission of power in America. Yes, the falls fostered development on both sides of the river, in West Linn as well as Oregon City, as sawmills and paper plants went up.
But it's kind of a stretch to include Sucker Lake (now called Lake Oswego) as part of the Heritage area; the only thing the now-tony town ever really had was an iron-smelting operation, and that had nothing to do with the falls. In fact, the town's several miles downstream. But the folks there have money, which seems to be why they're included in the Heritage area.
Six governments operate within the Willamette Falls Heritage Area boundary and are each represented on its 23-member board, including Metro, Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, Clackamas County, Oregon City, Lake Oswego and West Linn.
The inclusion of Metro and Lake Oswego seems ludicrous; the others at least make sense. But Metro pokes its nose into everything, and as noted, Lake Oswego has money. Neither have any business being on the board, because they don't have the historical background that the others bring to the table.
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If anyone on the jury decides that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev shouldn't get the death penalty, he'll likely be sent to the Supermax prison is Florence, Colorado. It's been described as "a high-tech version of Hell". Seems like a perfect place for him.
What distinguishes the ADX, as it’s known, from other federal prisons is that it was designed for solitary confinement. Many of the more than 400 prisoners are required to spend 23 hours a day alone in their 7-by-12-foot concrete cells, where they receive all their meals on trays slid through small holes in the steel doors, see limited natural light from a sliver of a window, and are permitted little contact with anyone other than guards and staff.
Is there a problem? Are we supposed to fear that conditions there will drive him insane? He's already there, so they won't drive him anywhere.
“It’s a place that strips away your humanity,” she said. “It takes away the part of us that relates to other people, how we make sense of the world and attribute value.”
But since he's demonstrated that he lacks humanity, what is there to strip away? Leftists, of course, bemoan "the right wing's bloodthirsty obsession". Um, hey - the right wing didn't kill and maim people; that was your boys, Lefties.
Good luck with efforts to "humanize" that thing.
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They swerve to miss a baby duck, but then they're run down by a produce truck. But they drove with pride.
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