Month: February 2013

A lot of people complain about how easy it is to become a felon, and a couple of recent incidents hammer this point home. Did you know that in America, you can become a felon by letting go of balloons? A 40-year-old man faces felony charges after releasing a dozen heart-shaped, helium-filled balloons to impress…

Jeffrey Kahn used to be my Rabbi when he was in Rockford. He is now involved in other things. Jeffrey Kahn, a Reform rabbi living in Washington, D.C., remembers several congregants who approached him over the years with the same dilemma: They’d heard that marijuana could relieve their nausea from chemotherapy or their pain from…

So the Italian elections interest me. Lets start with Zero Hedge (ZH). It may come as a surprise to some, but the largest single party in the Italian Chamber as a result of today’s elections, when stripping away all alliance partners, is none other than Beppe Grillo’s Movimento 5 Stelle. With 25.53% of the votes…

The stories Drudge links these days! Sheesh. If you didn’t have a sense of perspective (which I hope most educated Americans have), you might think a few oddball stories are evidence that society is falling apart, or even that your typical American man is a 325 lb transvestite burglar. …in what will surely repulse Dr.…

Lately I’ve been thinking about how we are ruled. A lot of people want to rule us, and many of them use an excuse the notion that ‘we” are not capable of ruling ourselves. While I might be willing to concede that some of us either are not (or at least are doing a piss…

Funny. But true. globalgiving.org/projects/drugreporter

The net is abuzz with commentary that I also participated in at: We Are Ruled. Wretchard at The Belmont Club is also hitting it. With respect to Republicans he says: The closer one gets to its top, the more it looks like the ghost of Rockefeller. To which I replied (revised and extended): That is…

A nice musical arrangement. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LQSlVRdyNs What, you expect me to be watching the Oscars?

Eric Left a few links at my post And People Say The War On Drugs Is A Failure which I think deserve some wider attention. A subtitle of this post could be: Race Based Incarceration For Profit From: The Hidden History of ALEC and Prison Labor. Prison labor has already started to undercut the business…

  We Are Ruled By Coalitions Of Fears   Prompted by Jccarlton who linked to It’s For Your Own Good! – NYTs and Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism – Book Excerpt and We want to rule you because you are stupid and powerless and we are wise – Samizdata. I had a few further thoughts…

Sexism in this country can take many forms. One famous example is when a young female college student invites a professor over for a candlelight dinner and then complains (over 20 years later) that he touched her on the thigh. OK, so maybe the professor was unwise to accept the invitation. But to give some perspective,…

Would that be Hillary Clinton on the Drug War? Nope. Pablo Escobar’s hit man on the Drug War. “People like me can’t be stopped. It’s a war. They lose men, and we lose men. They lose their scruples, and we never had any. In the end, you’ll even blow up an aircraft because you believe…

I was tracking my usual haunts and came across a petition headlined The Federal Government: Eliminate laws prohibiting the use of the endocannabinoid system. Because every human being born has an endocannabinoid system, a network of receptors exclusively designed to capture cannabinoids and process them. Prohibiting the only source of cannabinoids, Cannabis, aka marijuana et…

Eric has a post up about the Mandarin mentality. Which fits into a comment I was responding to that my friend Neil made on a different post. Here is what Neil had to say. It’s probably true that drug use was not a major problem when government began prohibition efforts. It wasn’t really a problem…

These are the people Megan McArdle calls the Mandarins, due to their similarity to the Chinese ruling class scholars. Passing the tests and becoming a “scholar official” was a ticket to a very good, very secure life.  And there is something to like about a system like this . . . especially if you happen…

“The refusal of King George III to allow the colonies to operate an honest money system, which freed the ordinary man from the clutches of the money manipulators was probably the prime cause of the revolution.” Benjamin Franklin The Currency Act of 1764. The Currency Act of 1764 was passed after the French and Indian…

Funny thing that just before going to bed last night I would write about uptight feminists (including a famous anti-sex law professor here at UM), because this morning I saw a local news item that made little sense in the abstract until I factored in the prudish uptight feminist mindset that reigns at the University…

A photo I saw on Facebook earlier got me thinking about a relatively new term that has captured public attention. Sex trafficking. The above conjures up sexual slavery, which I and everyone I know is against. Yet the term is being used more and more in such a manner that it is indistinguishable from ordinary…

This guy is in favor of Medical Marijuana. He doesn’t like the cartels. Me? I’m against prohibition. Period. No one should be going to jail for marijuana. CBD Science – HPLC Analysis Weed Country – The Discovery Channel I used to live in Briceland. Update: 23 Feb 2013 1307z You can read a review of…

From Reason Magazine. How to beat a patent troll. Don’t negotiate with terrorists. Patent Trolls Eat Startups First. Here’s What You Can Do About It The author of this: A Patent Troll Wants to Charge You for Emailing Your Scans!, also writes for Network World. The patent trolls are, in effect, completely legal financial terrorists.…