by Elizabeth Renter @ NaturalSociety.com

More and more we are beginning to understand that marijuana is far more than a street-level ‘drug’.

In fact, research shows that it’s a healing plant — and it doesn’t have to get you high. And as we learn more about this healing plant, we learn there are really a multitude of uses and methods to obtaining its benefits.

One of the latest methods of reaping its benefits is juicing, as one woman learned the hard way.

Juicing is a great way to get the best stuff out of plant materials. It makes digestion easy and allows your body to really make the most of what you put into it.

So, it stands to reason that many of the benefits associated with smoking, vaporizing, or eating cannabis could be enhanced through juicing.

High-aside, some argue juicing raw cannabis to be the most beneficial, and it does all of this without getting users stoned. Raw cannabis is not psychoactive. The beneficial compounds within are known as cannabidiols (CBD) and they are not the THC responsible for getting you high.

Instead, as NaturalNews reports, CBDs “bridge the gap of neurotransmission in the central nervous system, including in the brain by providing a two-way system of communication that completes a positive ‘feedback loop’”.

Dr. William Courtney, founder of Cannabis International, is largely considered the biggest proponent of raw cannabis juicing. His patient (and wife) has also become a visible advocate after a video featuring her testimony went viral.

Also a researcher, Kristen Peskuski was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis at age 16. She also had systemic lupus, endometriosis, and a host of other conditions. In her video, she details how raw cannabis helped her get rid of a prescription drug regimen that included 40 different drugs.

Also in the video, she discusses the case of a 2-year old child who was able to combat brain tumors with raw cannabis juice.

Reduce the risk of snoops thumbing through your data

by Associated Press @ TheEpochTimes.com

Phone call logs, credit card records, emails, Skype chats, Facebook message, and more: The precise nature of the NSA’s sweeping surveillance apparatus has yet to be confirmed.

But given the revelations spilling out into the media recently, there hardly seems a single aspect of daily life that isn’t somehow subject to spying or surveillance by someone.

Experts say there are steps anyone can take to improve privacy, but they only go so far.

Using anonymity services and encryption “simply make it harder, but not impossible,” said Ashkan Soltani, an independent privacy and security researcher. “Someone can always find you—it just depends on how motivated they are.”

With that caveat, here are some basic tips to enhance your privacy:

Encrypt your emails
Emails sent across the Web are like postcards. In some cases, they’re readable by anyone standing between you and its recipient. That can include your webmail company, your Internet service provider and whoever is tapped into the fiber optic cable passing your message around the globe — not to mention a parallel set of observers on the recipient’s side of the world.

Experts recommend encryption, which scrambles messages in transit, so they’re unreadable to anyone trying to intercept them. Techniques vary, but a popular one is called PGP, short for “Pretty Good Privacy.” PGP is effective enough that the U.S. government tried to block its export in the mid-1990s, arguing that it was so powerful it should be classed as a weapon.

Disadvantages: Encryption can be clunky. And to work, both parties have to be using it.

Use TOR
Like emails, your travels around the Internet can easily be tracked by anyone standing between you and the site you’re trying to reach. TOR, short for “The Onion Router,” helps make your traffic anonymous by bouncing it through a network of routers before spitting it back out on the other side. Each trip through a router provides another layer of protection, thus the onion reference.

Originally developed by the U.S. military, TOR is believed to work pretty well if you want to hide your traffic from, let’s say, eavesdropping by your local Internet service provider. And criminals’ use of TOR has so frustrated Japanese police that experts there recently recommended restricting its use. But it’s worth noting that TOR may be ineffective against governments equipped with the powers of global surveillance.

Disadvantages: Browsing the web with TOR can be painfully slow. And some services—like file swapping protocols used by many Internet users to share videos and music—aren’t compatible.

Ditch the phone
Your everyday cellphone has all kinds of privacy problems. In Britain, cellphone safety was so poor that crooked journalists made a cottage industry out of eavesdropping on their victims’ voicemails. In general, proprietary software, lousy encryption, hard-to-delete data and other security issues make a cellphone a bad bet for storing information you’d rather not share.

An even bigger issue is that cellphones almost always follow their owners around, carefully logging the location of every call, something which could effectively give governments a daily digest of your everyday life. Security researcher Jacob Appelbaum has described cellphones as tracking devices that also happen to make phone calls. If you’re not happy with the idea of an intelligence agency following your footsteps across town, leave the phone at home.

Disadvantages: Not having a cellphone handy when you really need it. Other alternatives, like using “burner” phones paid for anonymously and discarded after use, rapidly become expensive.

Cut up your credit cards
The Wall Street Journal says the NSA is monitoring American credit card records in addition to phone calls. Some cybercriminals can use the same methods. So stick to cash, or, if you’re more adventurous, use electronic currencies to move your money around if you want total privacy.

Disadvantages: Credit cards are a mainstay of the world payment system, so washing your hands of plastic money is among the most difficult moves you can make. In any case, some cybercurrency systems offer only limited protection from government snooping and many carry significant risks. The value of Bitcoin, one of the better-known forms of electronic cash, has oscillated wildly, while users of another popular online currency, Liberty Reserve, were left out of pocket after the company behind it was busted by international law enforcement.

Don’t keep your data in America or with American companies
U.S. companies are subject to U.S. law, including the Patriot Act, whose interpretations are classified. Although the exact parameters of the PRISM data mining program revealed by the Guardian and The Washington Post remain up for debate, what we do know is that a variety of law enforcement officials—not just at the NSA—can secretly demand your electronic records without a warrant through an instrument known as a National Security Letter. Such silent requests are made by the thousands every year.

If you don’t like the sound of that, your best bet is to park your data in a European country, where privacy protections tend to be stronger.

Disadvantages: Silicon Valley’s Internet service providers tend to be better and cheaper than their foreign counterparts. What’s more, there’s no guarantee that European spy agencies don’t have NSA-like surveillance arrangements with their own companies. When hunting for a safe place to stash your data, look for smaller countries with robust human rights records. Iceland, long a hangout for WikiLeaks activists, might be a good bet.

Steer clear of malicious software
If they can’t track it, record it, or intercept it, an increasing number of spies aren’t shy about hacking their way in to steal your data outright. Edward Snowden, the NSA leaker, warned the Guardian that his agency had been on a worldwide binge of cyberattacks.

“We hack everyone everywhere,” he said.

Former officials don’t appear to contradict him. Ex-NSA chief Michael Hayden described it as “commuting to where the information is stored and extracting the information from the adversaries’ network.” In a recent interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, he boasted that “we are the best at doing it. Period.”

Malicious software used by hackers can be extremely hard to spot. But installing an antivirus program, avoiding attachments, frequently changing passwords, dodging suspicious websites, creating a firewall, and always making sure your software is up to date is a good start.

Disadvantages: Keeping abreast of all the latest updates and warily scanning emails for viruses can be exhausting.

by PF Louis @ NaturalNews.com

How did a plant that is so easily cultivated with so many uses since it was first grown in China around 6,000 BC become illegal? Even the original Declaration of Independence was written on hemp paper.

Hemp fiber was used for sails and ropes for sea-going vessels during the 17th and 18th Centuries. Up until the early 20th Century, removing hemp fiber by hand was too tedious and slow for hemp to compete with other industries propelled by the burgeoning machine age.

But as WWI broke out, a German immigrant in California, George Schlichten, invented and successfully tested the first hemp decorticator, which could mechanically strip hemp of its fiber rapidly and efficiently.

Associates of the USA’s newspaper magnate of that time, EW Scripps, showed some interest in using the decorticator on a 100-acre plot of hemp near San Diego for Scripps’ paper sources. Economic circumstances and the war discouraged their plans. [1]

During the late 1930s, editions of Popular Mechanics and Mechanical Engineering exclaimed hemp could now become a billion dollar industry because of the hemp decorticator, making it seem it was a new invention even though it had been around since 1917.

But those re-emerging headlines may have have motivated industrial and banking giants with connections in Roosevelt’s administration to rid the hemp threat to their interests. This led to the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, the first step in squashing the hemp industry.

Even the AMA was thrown off by this legislation because hemp tinctures and oils had been prescribed for several ailments.

Here’s a summarized story that names the vested interests behind that legislation: http://www.princeton.edu.

Amazing hemp benefits

(1) Medicinal: Medical marijuana or cannabis edibles and THC hemp oils have been studied internationally by reputable labs and clinics for their healing properties, especially regarding cancer, for decades.

According to GreenMedInfo founder Sayer Ji, “Indeed, the GreenMedInfo.com project has uncovered 129 distinct disease categories that may benefit from this remarkable plant thus far, and new studies are being added on a weekly basis.” [2]

Classifying marijuana as a drug without medical merit is a lie perpetuated by the Justice Department’s DEA to keep it illegal for their business of arresting and prosecuting peaceful marijuana users.

Then came a Canadian, Rick Simpson, who cured his Nova Scotia neighbors with his own cannabis or hemp oil (http://www.naturalnews.com/027756_cancer_cure_Big_Pharma.html).

(2) Foods: Hemp seeds and oils are an abundant source of perfectly balanced omega-6, omega-3, and omega-9 fatty acids. The high level of essential protein amino acids hemp offers provides a more bio-available complete protein than most all other protein sources, plant or animal. [3]

(3) Clothing: Cloth from hemp is tougher and allows for better ventilation than even cotton. You can buy hemp clothing today. Legalizing hemp would lower the costs of the imports of hemp fibers.

(4) Plastics: Around 1940, Henry Ford built a “vegetable car” with mostly hemp fibers, not including the drive train of course. The body was so strong two men with sledgehammers and axes couldn’t harm it. [4]

Properly produced hemp plastics are 100 percent biodegradable and can replace all current petroleum based chemically infested plastics. [5]

(5) Building materials: Several types of building materials, stronger and lighter than wood and concrete with better insulation properties have actually been used recently for housing. [2 - video] [5]

(6) Paper: Instead of deforesting for wood to mill paper with harsh chemicals, a process that manifests countless ecological problems, hemp fibers could be used for paper. It had been used for paper before wood pulp processing. And the paper’s quality is considered superior by many.

(7) Agriculture: Hemp is a hardy plant requiring little water and no synthetic fertilizers or herbicides. It’s a perfect rotation crop because it boosts soil health. In a relatively warm temperate climates, it can be planted and harvested twice a year.

Because it’s easy to grow and harvest with less overhead, it’s also a perfect cash crop for struggling small farms. Kentucky senator Rand Paul is pushing for a bill to legalize industrial hemp growth. It’s already happening in Colorado.