Chemo Chronicles: From fug to fugue

Despite the nausea, constipation, and other sundry physical effects of the cancer chemotherapy we’re undergoing, we’d have to say the worst impact has been the creeping mental miasma.

Regular esnl readers have no doubt detected the results in the decline of frequency and depth of our posts, initially the result of the simple shock that comes from learning your body has turned on itself, followed by the physical shock of two surgeries.

Besides the loss of a cancerous bladder and prostate, we also find ourselves with a new means of draining our kidneys, thanks to the removal of a section of intestine and its reshaping into a conduct to carry urine from our surgically truncated uterers into a puckering pink urine-dripping extrusion [stoma] to the right of our navel.

There was pain after both surgeries [the first via catheter, the second by a large incision now commemorated in in a scar running betwixt navel to pubis, we stopped taking painkillers two days after leaving the hospital, leaving us an unwanted surplus of Percocets.

While the process of getting used to wearing what’s colorfully called an “urostomy bag” proved something of a trial, we managed to adapt to the stoma-drip-catching self-adhesive bags with the minimum of extra trips to the laundry.

But the biopsy showed the cancer, a rather rare micropapillary breed, had spread to at least one lymph node, and hence the four-month chemo regime, starting with our first double hit 8 January.

Of our three monthly sessions, the first is the real shit-kicker, a double dose of chemical cocktails administered over five hours. The nausea began on the second day, and lingered two more days, kept in relative check by another two-part chemical cocktail. Nine days of constipation began on the second day after the session, adding a whole new level of discomfort and ended only by a trip to the emergency room.

What still lingered was a peculiar sort of mental lethargy, a lingering mentational malady which allowed us to read a dozen hours a day but without the fuel to synthesize my responses into writing. Hence the decline in frequency of posting.

Our progeny and several friends had been urging us to get a medical marijuana letter, so we finally did, overcoming our natural inclination to add our name to yet another list.

So we became a member of a local medical marijuana club, and have now procured our first-ever California-legal weed. The only previous legal drugs we’d experienced had been our first dose of LSD in 1966, swallowed the night before it became illegal in Nevada, and hashish we bought at an Amsterdam coffee house in 2006 on the same trip where we bought a batch of just-plucked Psilocybin mushrooms procured from one of those now-closed Smart Shops legally offering both ’shrooms and live peyote cacti.

We mention this because we’re no strangers to cannabis, and we’ve done more than our share [1966-72] of psychedelics, with 2006 being our last experience of the latter.

We learned a lot about mind-altering drugs during our three-year service as scribe and block print carver for a Tantric Hindu artist and non-guru guru. The Tantrics and Shavites have developed a Prime Directive of cannabis use which we still follow: Never consume or ingest cannabis within three hours of eating. The reason is simple: Cannabis pulls blood into the brain, and when you consume while you’re digesting you create a conflict, with blood craved by the brain diverted to the digestive system, and leading to lethargy and sleepiness.

29 January 2013, Panasonic DMZ-ZS19, ISO 400, 12.5 mm, 1/50 sec, f5

With a chemo-sensitized gut, we followed the rules today, and the result has been a distinct lifting of the mental lethargy, using the fruits of our visit to the Berkeley club a block from Casa esnl: A free Rhino Pellet [a cinnamon cookie made with cannabis-infused butter], an oral nocturnal cannabis and essential oil tincture [left], and a pinch of hash to brighten up our minor remnant of some seven-year-old Humboldt homegrown.

Our stomach is calm, our energy and mood increased to the point we tackled some serious house cleaning/organizing, and we’ve also done more posts than usual.

Intimations of other benefits

We also bear in mind that a growing body of research indicates that a non-psychoactive component of cannabis inhibits growth in cancer cells.

As San Francisco Chronicle reporter Victoria Colliver wrote last 18 September:

A growing body of early research shows a compound found in marijuana – one that does not produce the plant’s psychotropic high – seems to have the ability to “turn off” the activity of a gene responsible for metastasis in breast and other types of cancers.

Two scientists at San Francisco’s California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute first released data five years ago that showed how this compound – called cannabidiol – reduced the aggressiveness of human breast cancer cells in the lab.

>snip<

“The preclinical trial data is very strong, and there’s no toxicity. There’s really a lot of research to move ahead with and to get people excited,” said Sean McAllister, who along with scientist Pierre Desprez, has been studying the active molecules in marijuana – called cannabinoids – as potent inhibitors of metastatic disease for the past decade.

Red the rest.

The National Cancer Institute website is less adulatory on its Cannabis and Cannabinoids web page, noting only this:

No clinical trials of Cannabis as a treatment for cancer in humans were identified in a PubMed search; however, a single small study of intratumoral injection of delta-9-THC in patients with recurrent glioblastoma multiforme reported potential antitumoral activity.

Donald Abrams, chief of oncology at UCSF physician said this to NBC News:

“If this plant were discovered in the Amazon today, scientists would be falling all over each other to be the first to bring it to market.”

And consider this, from the Science Updates blog of Cancer Research UK:

Through many detailed experiments, handily summarised in this recent article in the journal Nature Reviews Cancer, scientists have discovered that various cannabinoids (both natural and synthetic) have a wide range of effects in the lab, including:

• Triggering cell death, through a mechanism called apoptosis
• Stopping cells from dividing
• Preventing new blood vessels from growing into tumours
• Reducing the chances of cancer cells spreading through the body, by stopping cells from moving or invading neighbouring tissue
• Speeding up the cell’s internal ‘waste disposal machine’ – a process known as autophagy – which can lead to cell death

All these effects are thought to be caused by cannabinoids locking onto the CB1 and CB2 cannabinoid receptors. It also looks like cannabinoids can exert effects on cancer cells that don’t involve cannabinoid receptors, although it isn’t yet clear exactly what’s going on there.

Read the rest.

And go here [PDF] for a 2010 metareview of medical studies, including Multiple Sclerosis, chronic pain, glaucoma, HIV/AIDS, nausea, brain cancer, and more.

And another wrapup’s here.

The bottom line: Since we’re engaged in fighting cancer, we’ll take all the help we can get.

[Oh, and as for psilocybin, see here and here.]

The u$ual $uspect$, $till unpuni$hed

Americans were robbed on a scale undreamt-of by criminals of generations past, banksters criminally reckless in their disregard for any interests save those that fattened their paychecks and bonuses.

This should’ve come as no surprise. Certainly we weren’t suddenly shocked to discover that once again, the financial system collapsed under the weight of bankster greed, leaving once again poor shlubs like thee and we to carry the freight.

Nor are we surprised to see some of the same responsible for the mess occupying positions of power, along with the return of pay raises and bonuses for the very folks whose misdeeds the rest of us will be paying for the rest of our lives. After all, it had happened before.

James S. Henry is a unique figure in being both an economist and an investigative report — and a lawyer to boot.

Here he talks with Paul Jay of The Real News Network about the Obama administration’s distinctive failure to reform either regulations or regulators:

The full transcript of the segment is posted here. An excerpt:

James S. Henry: These major institutions have basically walked away from justice when it comes to the federal government, and it’s been left to the private lawsuits and to the SEC, to the state of New York, to actually piggyback on these private lawsuits and make these cases. It begs the question of, you know, whether or Lenny Breuer and his team was really doing their job when it came to these major financial institutions. They seem to have a soft place in their hearts.

And that also extends to other kinds of corporate crime, for example the settlements that they engaged in with HSBC and the money laundering, the tap on the wrist that UBS got for being at the heart of the Libor scandal. It’s not just the bank crises; it’s also these other kind of shenanigans. So, many of us have been expecting the Justice Department to act here, but they haven’t.

Charts of the day: Prison costs in bodies, cash

From a new report [PDF] from the Congressional Research Service.

Total inmate population

Includes both government and private [contract] prison populations:

Total operational costs

Includes figures for both both salaries and expenses [S&E] and buildings and facilities:

What the hell is it with the Catholic church?

Now we’re not the religious sort, and we think the notion that eating round crackers is an act sacred cannibalism is a bit daft, but we’re also sure that some of the things we believe, seen from the perspective of the future or by a visitor from Alpha Centauri would seem equally loopy.

So let’s forget things theological and look only at things criminal, like using the power of the priestly office as a handy dandy lever for exploiting the orifices of small children, all whilst professing to practice sacred celibacy — something which seems to happen a lot.

In a sane world, priests who do such things should be defrocked and handed over to secular authorities, but the reality has been something quite different.

Rather than strip the fucking Fathers of their office, the church often plays a shell game, shifting them from parish to parish, archdiocese to archdiocese, apparently to give them the opportunity to sample as many prepubescent bodies as possible. What other reason could there be? If the bishops and cardinals really wanted to scupper their ruts, then they could banish them to isolated, nearly empty monasteries, of which the church owns plenty.

Consider the latest nasty revelations from Los Angeles, where the central player in a vicious little coverup was a hugely popular cardinal.

From Victoria Kim, Ashley Powers, and Harriet Ryan of the Los Angeles Times:

Fifteen years before the clergy sex abuse scandal came to light, Archbishop Roger M. Mahony and a top advisor discussed ways to conceal the molestation of children from law enforcement, according to internal Catholic church records released Monday.

The archdiocese’s failure to purge pedophile clergy and reluctance to cooperate with law enforcement has previously been known. But the memos written in 1986 and 1987 by Mahony and Msgr. Thomas J. Curry, then the archdiocese’s chief advisor on sex abuse cases, offer the strongest evidence yet of a concerted effort by officials in the nation’s largest Catholic diocese to shield abusers from police. The newly released records, which the archdiocese fought for years to keep secret, reveal in church leaders’ own words a desire to keep authorities from discovering that children were being abused.

In the confidential letters, filed this month as evidence in a civil court case, Curry proposed strategies to prevent police from investigating three priests who had admitted to church officials that they abused young boys. Curry suggested to Mahony that they prevent them from seeing therapists who might alert authorities and that they give the priests out-of-state assignments to avoid criminal investigators.

Read the rest.

We suggest that the proper place for such scofflaws as Mahony is the general population of one of the state’s prisons, where inmates provide a special form of ministration to folks who sexually abuse small children.

Cardinal sins indeed.

UPDATE: It’s happened in Germany, too. And this year.

Headline of the day: Con-fidence building?

From El País:

Executives convicted of offenses will be allowed to head up Spanish banks

Headline of the day: Ah, the poor billionaire

From The Guardian:

Berlusconi accuses judges of ‘feminist’ bias over divorce deal

Milan judges reject former prime minister’s ‘persecution’ claim over €36m alimony settlement to ex-wife Veronica Lario

And that’s €36 million a month. Hell, she can even throw her own Bunga Bunga bashes! [More here.]

Quote of the day: Oarless boating up fecal creek

From James Howard Kunstler, writing at his delightfully named blog, Clusterfuck Nation:

We’re now entering the seventh year of a smoke-and-mirrors, extend-and-pretend, can-kicking phase of history in which everything possible is being done to conceal the true condition of the economy, with the vain hope of somehow holding things together until a miracle rescue remedy — some new kind of cheap or even free energy — comes on the scene to save all our complex arrangements from implosion. The chief device to delay the reckoning has been accounting fraud in banking and government, essentially misreporting everything on all balance sheets and in statistical reports to give the appearance of well-being where there is actually grave illness, like the cosmetics and prosthetics Michael Jackson used in his final years to pretend he still had a face on the front of his head.

The secondary tactic has been intervention in markets wherever possible and the intemperate manipulation of interest rates, all of which has the effect of defeating the principle purpose of markets: price discovery — the process by which the true value of things is established based on what people will freely pay. For instance the price of money-on-loan. The functionally less-than-zero percent interest rates on money loaned between giant institutions like central banks and their client “primary dealers” (the Too Big To Fails) essentially pays these outfits for borrowing, which is obviously a distortion in the natural order of things (because it violates the second law of thermodynamics: entropy) as well as an arrant racket. The campaign of intervention and manipulation also deeply impairs the other purpose of markets, capital formation, by the resultant mismanagement and misallocation of whatever real surplus wealth remains in this society. What’s more, it allows these TBTF banks to become ever-bigger monsters which hold everybody else hostage by threatening to crash the system if they are molested or interfered with.

Which brings us to the third tactic for pretending everything is all right: complete lack of enforcement and regulation by all the authorities charged with making sure that rules are followed in money matters. This includes the alphabet soup of agencies from the Securities and Exchange Commission to the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, to the Federal Housing Authority, and so on (the list of responsible parties is very long) not to mention the Big Kahunas: the US Department of Justice, and the federal and state courts. Aside from Bernie Madoff and a few Hedge Fund mavericks nipped for insider trading and arrant fraud, absolutely nobody in the TBTF banking community has been prosecuted or even charged for the monumental swindles of our time, while the regulators have behaved in ways that would be considered criminally negligent at best, and sheer racketeering at less-than-best, in any self-respecting polity. The crime runs so deep and thick through all the levels of money management and regulation that one can say the whole system has gone rogue, up to the President of the US himself, the chief enforcement officer of the land, who has not lifted a finger to discipline any of the parties involved. The  fact that Jon Corzine, late of MF Global, is still at large says it all.

Fourth-and-finally, the news media in league with the public relations industry have undertaken a campaign of happy talk to persuade the public that everything is okay and all the machinations cited above are kosher so that there is absolutely no political agitation over these crimes against their own interest, which is to say, the public interest. The PR/media happy talk racket is also aimed at maintaining various subsidiary  fictions about the economy, such as the fibs that the housing market is bouncing back, that “recovery” is ongoing, and that the channel-stuffing monkeyshines of the car industry amount to booming sales of new vehicles. Perhaps the most pernicious big lie is the bundle of fairy tales surrounding shale oil and shale gas, including the idea that America will shortly become “energy independent” or that we have “a hundred years of shale gas” as President Obama was mis-advised to tell the nation. It is pernicious because it gives us collectively an excuse to do nothing about changing our behavior or preparing for the new arrangements in daily life that the future will require of us.

Quote of the day: Mitt’s loss, Yoo mommy’s gain

UC Berkeley law prof and Bush II torture enabler John Yoo, quoted in New York:

My mother is a geriatric psychiatrist. I thought after the election this could be really good for the family business.

A Christmas address from Julian Assange

Speaking from the balcony of the Ecuadorean embassy in London, Assange focuses on the plight of 232 journalists now behind bars and those like Bradley Manning now facing long prison sentences for exposing the secrets of those in power. He has few kind words for the mainstream press.

And then there’s his announcement that 2013 will see a million new documents posted on WikiLeaks.

From RT:

Quote of the day: In Seattle, the Dude abides!

From the blog of the Seattle Police Department, reminding folks of what they can and can’t do under the new voter-passed measure effectively legalizing private marijuana use in the state:

Does this mean you should flagrantly roll up a mega-spliff and light up in the middle of the street? No. If you’re smoking pot in public, officers will be giving helpful reminders to folks about the rules and regulations under I-502 (like not smoking pot in public).  But the police department believes that, under state law, you may responsibly get baked, order some pizzas and enjoy a Lord of the Rings marathon in the privacy of your own home, if you want to.

Also, please remember it’s still not legal to drive stoned, use marijuana in a public place or anywhere else smoking a cigarette is prohibited.

>snip<

And remember, folks: the dude abides, and so can you!

The Dude abides, and says “take it inside!”

Headline of the day: Gee, who’d a-thunk it?

From Medical Daily:

No, Teen Marijuana Use Doesn’t Cause Brain Damage, But Alcohol Does

A new study has found that while marijuana had no effect on the health of teenagers’ brain tissue, alcohol did

Video: What if Cannabis Cured Cancer?

A 2010 documentary from Len Richmond and narrated by Peter Coyote:

From IMDB:

Could the chemicals found in marijuana prevent and even heal several deadly cancers? Could the tumor regulating properties of cannabinoids someday replace the debilitating drugs, chemotherapy, and radiation that harms as often as it heals? Discover the truth about this ancient medicine as world renowned scientists in the field of cannabinoid research explain and illustrate their truly mind-blowing discoveries.

QUOTES:

“What If Cannabis Cured Cancer summarizes the remarkable research findings of recent years about the cancer-protective effects of novel compounds in marijuana. Most medical doctors are not aware of this information and its implications for prevention and treatment. If we need more evidence that our current policy on cannabis is counterproductive and foolish, here it is.”

— Andrew Weil, M.D.

“A hugely important film”

— Julie Holland, M.D. NYU School of Medicine

Headline of the day: And they’re registered?

From the National Post:

NRA calls for armed police in every U.S. school, mental illness registry in response to Newtown massacre

Quote of the day: He’s shocked [Yeah, right]

From California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, quoted in the New York Times:

“It’s shocking, from my perspective, the number of people that we all know who are recreational marijuana users. These are incredibly upstanding citizens: Leaders in our community, and exceptional people. Increasingly, people are willing to share how they use it and not be ashamed of it.”

In San Francisco, streetcars, buses spy on you

And it’s the Department of Homeland Security that’s behind the latest invasion of public space — the installation of microphones to capture everything said by passengers on the city’s buses and streetcars.

First. A video report from RT featuring an interview with the reporter who broke the sordid tale:

RT’s program notes:

Government officials are installing high-tech audio surveillance systems in buses across the country. Almost 6 million dollars for over 350 buses and trolleys in San Francisco have been approved for the initiative already and other cities are following suit. So does it mean more safety or less privacy? Michael Brick of the Daily joins RT’s Liz Wahl to explain.

A telling excerpt from Buck’s story for The Daily:

Linked to video cameras already in wide use, the microphones will offer a formidable new tool for security and law enforcement. With the new systems, experts say, transit officials can effectively send an invisible police officer to transcribe the individual conversations of every passenger riding on a public bus.

But the deployment of the technology on buses raises urgent questions about the boundaries of legally protected privacy in public spaces, experts say, as transit officials — and perhaps law enforcement agencies given access to the systems — seem positioned to monitor audio communications without search warrants or court supervision.

>snip<

A spokesman for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, Paul Rose, declined to comment on the surveillance program. But procurement documents explain the agency’s rationale.

“The purpose of this project is to replace the existing video surveillance systems in SFMTA’s fleet of revenue vehicles with a reliable and technologically advanced system to increase passenger safety and improve reliability and maintainability of the system,” officials wrote in contract documents.

In San Francisco, the Department of Homeland Security is funding the entire cost with a grant. Elsewhere, the federal government is also providing some financial support.

Read the rest.

So much for that myth of the “liberal” San Francisco. . .

Headline of the day: The grass is always greener

. . .on the other side of the legal fence.

From the International Business Times:

Marijuana Legalization Benefits Now Include Profit Potential For Wall Street Investors: Report

Videos: Financial high crimes and misdemeanors

A pair of videos designed to get your blood boiling.

First, a sizzling episode of the Keiser Report, featuring Max and financial journalist Terri Buhl on the latest revelations of wrong doing, concentrating on Sun Trust Bank and JP Morgan’s Bear Stearns.

And we follow up with a blast from the past, the BBC’s droll 2009 docudrama The Last Days Of Lehman Brothers, starring, among others, the redoubtable James Cromwell as Hank Paulson and Michael Brandon as Jamie Dimon.

It’s a deftly done depiction of dirty doings at Domino #1.

Headline of the day: Pity the poor mass murderer

The the Dublin Journal:

Anders Behring Breivik complains about “sadistic” Norwegian prison conditions

Complaints range from not having a personal light and TV switch, censored phone calls, “screaming” prison mates and cold coffee

Headline of the day: The best pols money can buy

From CBC News:

$2B fundraising for U.S. presidential race raises concern

Hundreds of millions raised and spent without disclosure

LAPD at it again, omits a minor detail

That detail being the peculiar physical condition of a man they shot and killed.

From Joel Rubin of the Los Angeles Times:

The Los Angeles Police Department’s news release on an Oct. 12 officer-involved shooting seemed fairly routine.

Officers searching for several suspects who had fled after being stopped for questioning found one hiding under an SUV on Woodlawn Avenue in South L.A. The officers pulled the suspect out by his ankles, saw what looked like a metallic object in his hands and opened fire, critically wounding him.

But one crucial piece of information was left out of the release: The suspect’s hands were cuffed behind his back at the time and he was lying on his stomach.

Read the rest.

Gee, wonder how that little detail got overlooked?