These things were a somewhat regular fixture in my young life. 
Anyone else? Are these things actually effective? Do people believe them and think they portray any kind of reality? Or are they brilliantly auto-ironic, intended instead to skewer those who believe the world really is so simple? Ah, nevermind. 
This is an issue that affects all of us. We spend billions of dollars enforcing marijuana laws, and distract good cops from enforcing real crimes. Almost a million people are arrested for marijuana possession each year. Many of them end up with permanent criminal records and are barred forever from receiving federal student aid. People don’t just have their lives ruined; some have even died as a result of marijuana law enforcement (e.g. shot to death in paramilitary style raids - yes, it happens.)
The criminalization of marijuana was pure foolishness driven by racism, hysteria and corporate special interests.
Google has been trying to prohibit people from photographing their trade show booth at the Web 2.0 Expo. I’m getting really sick of all this. While this pales in comparison to the kind of photographer harassment I’ve whined about in the past, it does demonstrate a continuing odd attitude held by many toward photographers in public places. It’s one thing if you’re a badge-drunk sheriff’s deputy in San Antonio -but quite another for a forward-thinking technology company. It makes even less sense for a company that takes pictures of public streets and buildings and then makes them publicly available.
My friend Tom was out here in Los Angeles just a few weeks ago and began feeling unwell. He thought it was food poisoning, and opted to return home to Maine early. His illness turned out to be something much more serious; he had an inoperable, malignant tumor in his brain stem.
After his return home, Tom and I would not get another chance to speak. We traded a couple of e-mails as they struggled to diagnose his condition, but that would be all.
Thanks, ABC, for an hour of “debate” that (unless I missed one) didn’t cover a single substantive issue. Thanks for asking about flag pins, people the candidates met 40 years ago, sniper fire, and favorite ice cream (or did I make that one up?)
It’s borderline criminal - and we wonder why good people don’t give a shit about politics. Thanks for the circus; you could at least have fed me during it.
Pending a thirty-day comment period during which I’m confident fewer than ten people will make a sound, Federal law enforcement agencies will now collect DNA of arrestees via a cheek swab. Since we slept through the legislation getting passed, I doubt the ACLU’s efforts will wake anyone. But innocent people - have no fear! If you’re not convicted, you can “ask” them to destroy the sample. Yeah.
Here’s a fun little list of brain oddities. I remember as a kid my brother and I used to fuck with our heads by saying the same thing over and over again, say for a minute or so, until the phrase seemed so ridiculous that it no longer felt real - it would take on an alien, unrecognizable sense. Try it yourself - pick a word, or a phrase, anything that makes sense to you at the moment. Repeat it to yourself at a comfortable pace over a period of a minute or so. It will shortly seem absurd.
Today was one of those days that reminds me why I love living - and as a bonus, doing it here. The sun was shining and it was well above 80. The birds were singing away and frantically going about their springtime business. I have some (sparrows, I think) nesting on the north side of the house. I hear so many different birdsongs day and night that I’ve started checking eNature.com to try to identify them.
ABC is reporting that the “National Security Principals Committee” held dozens of meetings in the White House specifically planning who and how to torture. The principals conspiring to commit these war crimes included the vice president, then-CIA director George Tenet, Attorney General John Ashcroft, National Security Advisor Condi Rice, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and then-Secretary of State Colin Powell. According to ABC, Ashcroft at one point asked, “why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.”
Whenever I hear about a poll telling me what a group of Americans think, I generally write it off. Now, folks, I don’t think everyone is stupid - I just think the average American is too distracted or preoccupied or apathetic to pay attention to the stuff that some of us feel is important.
“… We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government…”
You’ll remember my post from a while back regarding photographer harassment of yours truly by a law-man in San Antonio. Well, this happened to a guy today and I find it totally ridiculous on so many levels. Also, I love their choice of language - “we have the authority to ask them to remove the picture.” Yes, and the photographer has the authority to tell you to fuck yourself.
You’ll remember my post about jury nullification in the drug war. The TIME article sparked some fascinating conversation among some lawyers, prosecutors and others over at Mark Bennett’s blog.
Years ago, I read Pinchbeck’s Breaking Open the Head, and found it to be a good and interesting book, even if somewhat inconclusive.
Somehow I missed Rolling Stone’s profile of him over a year ago. It’s a really interesting story - his influences and where they took him. I saw Pinchbeck on the Colbert Report a few months ago talking about his new book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl and I was quite confused.
Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen pen a good article on Politico about the endless Clinton BS.
“The notion of the Democratic contest being a dramatic cliffhanger is a game of make-believe… Journalists, for instance, have become partners with the Clinton campaign in pretending that the contest is closer than it really is.”
I agree wholeheartedly - the media is accused of being in love with Obama - but, I ask: had he lost twelve contests in a row as Clinton did prior to Ohio, would he have been portrayed as still relevant?
Why Bear Stearns? A quick lesson in the trillions cooking beneath, and why the Fed cares, and why you should care.
“Over the weekend, the Federal Reserve engineered a $30-billion dollar Saint Paddy’s day present for the JP Morgan bank by handing them the corpse of Bear Stearns. The object of the game is to prevent the ‘assets’ of Bear Stearns from going to the auction block, on which they would be discovered to be nearly worthless, which would instantly render all similar assets held by the other big banks to be similarly worthless, and would result in a universal margin call that would pretty much unwind the hallucinated ‘wealth’ acquired over the past ten years.”
The unraveling of the financial fauxconomy appears to be accelerating. After lying earlier in the week about their liquidity problems, Bear Stearns is on the brink of collapse. Today’s emergency bailout - hastily orchestrated in the wee hours of Friday morning - was the first such move by the US Federal Reserve since the Great Depression. The Fed is authorized to take such action only under “unusual and exigent circumstances,” and the threat of a full market seizure certainly qualifies.
OK - got a few phone calls and e-mails from y’all so I guess I need to say something about this. The primary thing I find disturbing about the news surrounding Governor Spitzer is his hypocrisy. He has prosecuted these operations in the past - apparently with great fanfare and pride. I have not followed his career very closely, but people who have worked with him tell me he is a good, competent guy, if sometimes a bit socially and professionally clumsy. Read the rest of this entry »
The lead writers for HBO’s show The Wire wrote a great piece in TIME this week railing against the War on Drugs. Their suggested approach: jury nullification. They say,
“If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun’s manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.
JHK says,
“I’m concerned that the American people will hate the new president if he tells them the truth: that an old way of life is over and a new one has to begin now. We’re about to find out how much ‘change’ the public can really stand.”