What is this? I don’t know what that is.

I’ve never tried marijuana, but I sometimes wonder if it might ease the pain in my surgically repaired shoulder, or my probable Crohn’s disease, or the titanium plate in my hand that hurts every time it rains. Unfortunately, I’ll never get to find out what it’s like to smoke “grass,” because the Montana Supreme Court ruled last week that providers of medical marijuana can have no more than three paying patients. That effectively kills the dispensary as a viable business model in this state.

It’s too bad, because when I got here in 2009, Montana’s MMJ industry was booming. The people who talked about it most were electricians, who suddenly had more work than they could handle wiring up grow houses. Medical marijuana similarly produced jobs for HVAC technicians, farm and garden suppliers, dispensary employees, et cetera. Seeing that Montana had a growth industry for the first time in decades, the legislature moved quickly to stop it.

Republicans in the 2011 legislature passed a law forbidding providers from accepting money in exchange for cannabis. A district judge found that unconstitutional, but the Supremes have essentially upheld the provision, and a once vibrant industry has been shunted back into the black market. I think that was a mistake, and one that does not comport with the conservative movement’s stated policies on every other industry. You can read all about it in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent, in which I call on gubernatorial candidate Greg Gianforte to be cool. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links, including an exciting surprise.

Cafe.com pundit Carl Diggler appears as a hostage on Russian state television.

Who could have predicted that Marco Rubio would win Minnesota last night, or that Bernie Sanders would win Colorado? Answer: Carl “The Dig” Diggler, fictional pundit and Washington insider at Cafe.com. Somehow, Diggler’s satirical Super Tuesday predictions were more accurate than those of Nate Silver and virtually every other actual pundit, including but not limited to Bill Kristol. Over at the questionably reputable International Business Times, Brendan James has a recap and interview with Diggler creators Felix Biederman and Virgil Texas, who are themselves borderline ficitonal Twitter entities. It’s a tangled web, but I am pleased that it produces more accurate predictions than, say, Bill Goddamn Kristol. On the other hand, the accuracy of these predictions was contingent on Donald Trump probably becoming the Republican nominee for president, so you have to take the good with the bad.

Google image search: Ravalli County

Last week, the Ravalli County Commission hosted a public meeting on the issue of Syrian refugees. According to the Missoulian, 500 or so residents turned out to express their overwhelming opposition to letting them settle around Hamilton. “ISIS will come after our women,” the gothically named Hollis Poe warned. State Rep. Nancy Ballance (R-Hamilton) told the crowd that refugee resettlement is “big business,” and the organizations that do it take in millions of dollars a year. The commission read a draft of its letter to the US Department of State opposing the admittance of Syrian refugees to Ravalli County, on the grounds they might be terrorists. The crowd ate it up.

There were only two flaws in the commission’s plan. For one, the State Department doesn’t control where Syrian refugees go. Once they’re allowed into the United States, refugees can go where they please, just like anyone else with a visa. Also, the number of Syrian currently trying to settle in Ravalli County stands at zero. As Chris Love of Corvallis pointed out, refugees generally want to go where there are jobs. Ravalli County has few of those, unless coming to Missoula on Friday night and driving a lifted truck up and down Higgins is a job.

But I applaud the commissioners’ decision to get out ahead of this thing and hold public hearings against Syrian refugees now, while there aren’t any around. While they’re at it, the commission should ban all sorts of people who don’t want to come to Ravalli County. You can read about my ideas on that front in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links!

There is no Combat! blog today, due to a surfeit of professional and personal obligations. While I take care of biz-nass, how about you read this alternative speech for President Richard Nixon in case the Apollo 11 astronauts didn’t make it to the moon? Props to A. Ron Galbraith for the link. I’m pretty sure this is the funniest thing Clickhole has ever done. For example:

Buzz and his husbands did not jump into space because they knew they would succeed. No, they went to space because mankind has an unquenchable thirst for strange new rocks. The moon is brimming with weird stones and boulders, and we want them. Mankind wants the baffling rocks, and even though these men exploded, we’re going to send more men to get the rocks.

This work of insane comic fantasy pleases me. We’ll be back tomorrow, probably with something that pisses me off.