Reading the ridiculous statistic that three-quarters of a million people were arrested last year for marijuana-related offenses just makes me want to…well…join NORML.
Category Archives: Aside
CNN’s “top story in entertainment” a few days ago was a feature on lonelygirl15 (video) including interviews with the creators and star, some clips from the “show,” and fan reactions to the outing.
The unmistakable conclusion of an Army briefing report making the rounds in Washington is that there are no more troops left to send to Iraq. Fully 2/3 of the fighting force is unfit to deploy, matériel has been cannibalized from caches around the world meant to be there in the time of a crisis, and it will take several years and at least $30 billion in equipment spending to bring the Army back up to the operational readiness it enjoyed back in 2001. Luckily, President Bush is on the case, working diligently to…make the tax cuts permanent.
Ze Frank: “First off, I’d like to apologize for whoever told you that your [college] degree would be useful. That was irresponsible of them.”
Kevin asks, err, “what’s the fucking deal with alcohol?” I’m with ya, dude. Haven’t figured out what makes it so great.
_New York Magazine_ calls lonelygirl15 the birth of a new art form. “[M]aybe this, and not some NBC shows for sale on iTunes, is the future of television–or the promised land of a new narrative form. If so, we might look back at Lonelygirl15 as Moses with a monkey puppet.”
Five years later, NYC unveils 9/11 Memorial Hole: “I firmly believe, as does every person here, that this deep, empty hole has come to stand not only for the New York City of today, but also for the transformation of the entire United States since Sept. 11, 2001,” said Reverend Charles Bourne. I’ve gazed into this hole the last couple times I’ve been to New York, and I have to agree.
The Comcast guy didn’t come for a third time. They gave me a $20 credit and apologized profusely. I still don’t have digital cable, but I do for some reason have basic, which allowed me to see a most excellent Comcast commercial that reminded me of just how “Comcastic” they are. Yeah.
Buyer of Kiko revealed — its Tucows. Makes sense.
Price list for a Star Trek wedding in Las Vegas. Better start saving your pennies, Igor.
On this Labor Day holiday, established by workers as a celebration of unionization, collective bargaining, fair wages, and safe working conditions, let us pause to reflect on the shriking American middle class. Enjoy your hamburgers.
Glenn Reynolds points to a _WSJ_ piece about the paramilitarization of US police forces and the increasing use of SWAT teams to carry out no-knock raids based on generally faulty intelligence. The use of “special weapons and tactics” is up *1300%* in the last twenty years. Among those targeted, an innocent NYC city worker in her 50s who died of a heart attack during the raid, a deaf, asthmatic Coney Island woman, who was handcuffed in the present of her two crying children and denied her asthma pump, and a Virginia optomotrist who was mistakenly shot during a raid of his house based on a police investigation of some sports betting he did with his friends. I find it not the least bit surprising that most of these egregious abuses of police power are caught up in the long-ago failed “war on drugs.”
“[M]aking a fetish of personal accountability conveniently removes the need for institutional accountability,” says Malcolm Gladwell in a column about zero-tolerance policies in the latest _New Yorker_. “To acknowledge that the causes of our actions are complex and muddy seems permissive, and permissiveness is the hallmark of an ideology now firmly in disgrace.” (via Kottke)
A fitting christening for my new cable modem — listening to an NPR report on academic studies of _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ on the occasion of the show’s finale back in 2003. Not sure how I missed this report when it was first broadcast, but at least I found it now. Good job, little cable modem! 🙂
_LA Times_: “You can send Marines back for a third or fourth time, but you have to understand you are destroying their lives,” said Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “It is not what they intended the all-volunteer military to look like.”
Instead of complex battle plans with specific outcomes and contingencies, war planning has regressed to bullet points thanks to the use of PowerPoint in the Rumsfled-headed DoD.
I don’t think kids are “exploit[ing] a generational disconnect” by blogging about things that their parents and others might find objectionable. I think the media that “exposes” this blogging by kids of famous people to embarrass them is the group exploiting generational disconnect to put down a new medium that it fears.
Looking for a fairly short and interesting appeals court case to read on your summer vacation? Check out United States v. $124,700 in US Currency. In the 8th Circuit, at least, driving with a large sum of money hidden in a container, even in the absence of any other factors, is apparently enough evidence for the government to seize the money as ill gotten gains from illegal drug trade. The War on Drugs, I guess, has reached its illogical peak. Amazingly disproportionate prison sentences, arrests of terminally ill cancer patients, and now carte blanche to just take citizens money with absolutely no proof of wrongdoing, all in the name of fighting a never-ending and unwinnable war on an amorphous concept. Hmm, wait, I’m seeing a pattern here.