Posts by brian murray

Why do Americans have guns?

Can someone remind me why Americans have guns? According to the Constitution it should be purely for the purpose of defending their country from enemies both domestic and foreign (or some such) but I see no evidence of that: unless a deer running away from you presents a clear and immediate threat. Is it to protect their families? Apparently not - when someone in USA chooses to 'go postal' (incidents like Columbine are so common in America they have a phrase for it) you never see a plucky US citizen with their precious gun rushing to defend the community do you?

Unconvinced

How many people read the article itself ? 'The consensus is pretty much you should not use cannabis if you want to avoid an increased risk of schizophrenia' - that is from the paper's author. Talking of 'one bad trip causing schizophrenia' makes me wonder if the Reg author understands this debate at all. The idea of using how many relatives with / without schizophrenia to 'prove' cannabis is harmless seems a bit disingenuous, after all, schizophrenia's hereditability is not well understood. I am always suspicious of research papers which use a roundabout way of proving a point when there are much easier ways to make the point, no? I.e follow up a cohort of cannabis smokers and see what happens. This has been done: a study of Scandinavian army conscripts found heavy use definitely predisposes towards schizophrenia. A meta- analysis (a summary of several best quality papers) in this month's British journal of psychiatry showed that, although the quality of the evidence is not as great as we previously thought, there is still a clear consensus that cannabis use increase paranoid symptoms generally, precipitates schizophrenia in those predisposed (not quite the same as simply bringing forward its onset) and creates schizophrenia in a small percentage who would not have got it otherwise. Funny how this research got missed in the Reg's reporting. In comparison to the numbers who use cannabis the percentage suffering may seem low, but it is not as if we are discussing the side effects of something that cures cancer or world poverty. I have seen people with schizophrenia and I do not see why people would risk that for the sake of a herb that makes you giggle. It just ain't worth it. No, I am not a govt agent and I do not care if your gran smoked it until she was 96 blah bah blah - If you think those arguments make sense then you've been at too much already.

Stand by for the headline..

Knowing the arrogance of papers like the Sun, it seems to me highly likely that instead of running an apology they'll have a headline saying 'Sun readers get our flyboys reinstated at Olympics'. I am told the Sport ran an article claiming there was a London bus on the moon, then responded to criticism with another front page article 'London bus disappears from moon'.

I used to follow Richard's policy of sending a correction / clarification to everyone's address for every asinine chain email scam that came to my inbox but unlike him, I never got an apology, just shirty comments from the embarassed plonkers who had forwarded this rubbish. This once included a hoax email about women being attacked by men with fake perfume which turned out to have been passed on by work's health and safety bod! Funny how people like that have no problem with polluting everyone else's inbox, but get tetchy when someone does the same thing to try to correct the damage they cause. Someone once said 'The public, the public, how mnay fools does it take to make a public?'