Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Republicans in disarray!

Second rate reporter says what?

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

After roe, women are no longer free.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

This really is a full service blog.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

The words do not have to be perfect.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

You cannot shame the shameless.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

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Reader Interactions

48Comments

  2. 2.

    MikeJ

    Can they not tell at what point in time the mistake occurred or can they not determine that they made a mistake at all?

  7. 7.

    Mr. Poppinfresh

    Did the study’s authors account for the likelihood that many of their case studies were just too fucking high to care about their mistakes?

    It’s questions like this that separate the real scientists from the poseurs.

  9. 9.

    JK

    Are Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity perpetually stoned? They’re all extremely bad at detecting when they made a mistake.

  11. 11.

    Morbo

    Having played a lot of disc golf I can say that they certainly can determine that they have made a mistake

  16. 16.

    smiley

    That proves that marijuana dependence is a myth, pot is perfectly harmless, and it should be legalized.

  20. 20.

    beltane

    Sully has been strangely silent about this incident. Maybe we’ll have to wait for him to be naturalized to hear his rant on the subject.

  21. 21.

    beltane

    @MikeJ: They’re just mellow about having made the mistake, and aren’t going to sweat the small stuff. Come drive around Vermont and you’ll see what I mean.

  25. 25.

    slag

    Hmmm…

    Drug abuse and other psychiatric conditions (eg, schizophrenia) have been associated with a diminished neural response to errors, particularly in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) thought critical to error processing.

    and

    Compared to non-believers, the religious participants showed significantly less activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a portion of the brain that helps modify behavior by signaling when attention and control are needed, usually as a result of some anxiety-producing event like making a mistake.

    Just sayin.

  26. 26.

    smiley

    On the other hand, behavioral studies using fMRI data collection are extremely cool, extremely informative, and extremely expensive.

  30. 30.

    freelancer

    @arguingwithsignposts:

    If it helps, a lot of the time our moods are inexplicable. I had a crap weekend, came to work today to find a huge pile of crap to slog through, have been strong armed into working in a different area because somebody else took the day off so now I’m doing her job and my job. and it’s the weirdest thing, because I am in a fantastic mood. I should be pissed, I should have been more productive this weekend (my place is a mess and I couldn’t even get motivated to pick it up at all). I wish I could trade some of my current exuberance for some grounded levity. Keep talking if it helps. We’re listening.

  31. 31.

    HumboldtBlue

    I just gotta say, it’s harvest season and it’s another bumper crop. Aint no mistakin’ that.

  32. 32.

    geg6

    Funny thread, but I gotta call bullshit on this. I have smoked pot for more than 35 years. I never once took a test, including the GRE, without being high. Never. I graduated undergrad summa and had a 4.0 at the completion of my master’s. I am renowned at work for my attention to detail. I sweat every possible minor detail. And believe me, when I make a mistake, I’m the one who usually catches it and I obssess about making it. For days. Perhaps I’m an anomoly, but a lot of the fellow potheads in my life (my ex, for one) are much the same. Hell, just look how well I’ve done with spelling and grammar in this post. You think that happens straight?

  34. 34.

    DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)

    Yeah, that 3.71 GPA in college, making the President’s and Dean’s lists and the Honor Roll while stoned out of my mind, was pure luck! Now I have just about finished the overhaul of the top end of my engine and replacing the front end, what should I do with all of these spare bolts and bushings? The alignment ought to be fun while stoned, maybe I can end up with a rear-steer Mustang that has three gears backward and one forward!

    Ahem. I learned a long time ago that if I make a mistake while doing work like this then someone may be hurt or killed. It keeps things in perspective.

  35. 35.

    The Fool

    Probably more true among novice smokers. Veterans like me know how to compensate.

    Also I would bet the problem is not too low awareness or lack of self-consciousness but the precise opposite: excessive self-awareness and over concentration on some aspects of a situation to the detriment of others.

    Also what is the magnitude of the effect?

  36. 36.

    smiley

    @geg6: Ha! Me too. Though I quite about 15 years ago after I went to the dentist while high.

    The notion of state dependency might apply here. Did you study high and then take the GREs while high?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-dependent_learning

    I don’t put a lot of stock in that but it’s out there.

    Seriously, though, people respond to drugs differently. For some people, pot (like alcohol) is a social drug. For others (like me), pot is an anti-social drug (like alcohol). What many people don’t realize is that perception of drug effect differs on the rising versus falling arms of the blood-concentration curve. That is, things change when you’re first getting high (from whatever) and when you start to come down. For example, people often report increased energy when they first start drinking (dancing and what not), and depression after they stop drinking (crying into their beer and confessing to everyone that it was you on the grassy knoll).

  38. 38.

    General Winfield Stuck

    @geg6:

    Pot affects people in different ways. I knew people like you when I still smoked it, some twenty years ago, who would be alert and sharp and got things done. Me, I found the nearest shade tree and thought deep and hard about nothing. My big achievement while stoned was watching every Twilight Zone rerun on the July 4 marathon, never moving from the couch except to take a whiz.

  39. 39.

    sam

    There was a story going around when I was in college about some guy who dropped some speed just before he took his blue book final. He came out raving to his friends that he’d written one of the best essay exams of his college life. Turns out, acc to the story, he’d written the whole thing on one line.

  40. 40.

    Keith G

    @arguingwithsignposts: Everyone is different and you may not be like me (which could be really lucky for you). Still, when faced with my worst despair, I took some solace in well crafted songs that gave voice to the purity of my loss. The synthesis of beauty and hurt served as a sort of balm.

    With that in mind, I point you to this most beautiful song about loss. You may want to not hear it, but in case you do:

    http://perezhilton.com/2009-09-13-subo-does-the-stones

    (Really)

  41. 41.

    cmorenc

    BAD NEWS ABOUT POT SMOKING: It kills your ambition to get anything done, and interferes with your ability for critical analytical thought.

    GOOD NEWS ABOUT POT SMOKING: You don’t give a shit, it’s all good, man!

  43. 43.

    LD50

    My big achievement while stoned was watching every Twilight Zone rerun on the July 4 marathon, never moving from the couch except to take a whiz.

    MARIWANA – UR DOIN IT RITE

  44. 44.

    El Cid

    I’d like to see what the definition of “chronic cannabis user” is.

    The most recent available study (2001) I could find not with a definition available without a payscreen described them as either former or current ‘heavy users’ who had smoked ‘more than 5,000 times’ and were smoking daily and still tested effects didn’t persist after typically 7 days.

    That’s a lot.

    **********************************

    Methods

    We recruited individuals aged 30 to 55 years in 3 groups: (1) 63 current heavy users who had smoked cannabis at least 5000 times in their lives and who were smoking daily at study entry; (2) 45 former heavy users who had also smoked at least 5000 times but fewer than 12 times in the last 3 months; and (3) 72 control subjects who had smoked no more than 50 times in their lives. Subjects underwent a 28-day washout from cannabis use, monitored by observed urine samples. On days 0, 1, 7, and 28, we administered a neuropsychological test battery to assess general intellectual function, abstraction ability, sustained attention, verbal fluency, and ability to learn and recall new verbal and visuospatial information. Test results were analyzed by repeated-measures regression analysis, adjusting for potentially confounding variables.

    Results

    At days 0, 1, and 7, current heavy users scored significantly below control subjects on recall of word lists, and this deficit was associated with users’ urinary 11-nor-9-carboxy-{Delta}9-tetrahydrocannabinol concentrations at study entry. By day 28, however, there were virtually no significant differences among the groups on any of the test results, and no significant associations between cumulative lifetime cannabis use and test scores.

    Conclusion

    Some cognitive deficits appear detectable at least 7 days after heavy cannabis use but appear reversible and related to recent cannabis exposure rather than irreversible and related to cumulative lifetime use.

  45. 45.

    John T

    @39, I heard that same story when I was in high school back in the early 90s, although in the variation I heard, the drug to blame was a joint laced with PCP.

  46. 46.

    Nabakov

    “pot smokers are slightly worse at detecting when they made a mistake”

    That’s just not not true.

    Speaking as an occasional lurker, the ongoing dogialisation of Lily has been a very charming story.

    Speaking as an Australian, I remain completely baffled by the scope and dynamics of your healthcare debate.

    Speaking as someone concerned about today’s youth, I find it highly reassuring they’re getting the message that if you smoke pot, you could end up as President of the United States.

  47. 47.

    sam

    @45

    Extraordinary the legs some stories have. I heard that story in 1965. I used the word ‘speed’, but that was anachronistic. The word wasn’t in currency then. What was dropped, acc to the story, was a quantity of diet pills. In that era, about half the housewives in America were using diet pills that were a combination of Miltown (the tranquillizer du jour) and amphetamine (in various strengths). It was said that they picked you up and smoothed you out.

  48. 48.

    Nabakov

    Also, while I’m sounding off about Balloon Juice (with a small but rather lively jazz cigarette in hand), have you ever considered getting a real live cat instead of that stuffed feline you occasionally exhibit here?

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