Happy Birthday to Drug War Rant, which is one year old. The Rant is focused on fighting the racist drug war, a war the government uses to steal your money, oppress people that have nothing to do with drugs, incarcerate people for minor offenses and punish harmless activity. Go read, go write and go vote.
Burning Man has released the 2004 map, and the street names are planets, in order from Mercury on out: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Sedna.
I'm sure your first question is what the hell is Sedna? For those of us who haven't taken fifth grade science in a while, Sedna isn't a social disease. It's a recently-discovered planet-like body at the edge of our solar system. It might be a planet, it might just be a big rock. But really, what's a planet if not a really big rock, so call it a planet, call it rock, just don't call it cuntface. If it's anything like my girlfriend, it hates being called cuntface.
And because this is a family-friendly blog all about the educational experience, here's a handy mnemonic to remember the order of planets. You can try to remember it Saturday night when you're tripping your face off and trying to find that guy with the thing:
My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizza Slices
I was walking on the Upper East Side today and passed a bunch of television vans, the kind that news crews use to broadcast their latest on-location lies. These vans were different from the usual ones in that they were black and unmarked-- no logos, no identifying markings at all.
It was odd enough that I walked around the entire van to figur eout where it was from. Parked behind it was another van just like it. And as I looked at that second van, my eye caught an awning. The awning, unlike the vans, did have a logo. Fox.
If I were them, I guess I would hide my face in shame too.
Polis | 0 Writebacks | #
Via Drug War Rant comes news that Drug Czar John Walters opined on the radio that meth and heroin are "vastly" less "important as a problem" than marijuana. He also said cocaine is half as "important a factor in addiction" as marijuana.
Adjust your drug use accordingly.
Polis | 3 Writebacks | #
Michelle Malkin comes out as a secuirty mom and a freak who scares her four-year-old daughter with stories about Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. She actually brags that her daughter "knows that there are bad men in the world trying to kill Americans everywhere" and doesn't mind raising a chronic bed-wetter basketcase.
Realpolitik Parenting aside, the thing about Malkin's screed that bothers me most is when she goes wandering into the fields of madness. She cites, as evidence of the growing number of terrorism-conscious mothers, a woman whose son was shot by drug traffickers. Drug traffickers!
If winning the War on Drugs is a prerequisite to winning the War on Terror, we might as well start shooting up and praying to Mecca right now.
Via Say Uncle.
Polis | 2 Writebacks | #
There's a movie about Che Guevara's days of motorcyle wandering coming out. He is played by Benicio del Toro, which is to me just about perfect. Since I've always meant to pick up his scoot diaries, maybe this will prod me. Or not.
I've never really been sure what was up with Che. Lots of people have Che shirts, but they're all young, dumb and full of class guilt or hipster irony. Or they're old, bearded and smell like dirty sock stew. I've never really been into the Che worship.
I did some googling to see what what I could see about Che. Sartre called him "the most complete human being of our age", which would be quite the recommendation coming from anybody but Sartre. I'm not sure what makes Che complete. Maybe it was his relentless womanizing. Or maybe it was his willingness to exact revolutionary justice on the very peasantry he was trying to liberate. That's the kind of thing Sartre really respected.
My favorite Che anecdote is about how he ended up the Governor of Cuba's National Bank. Right after the revolution, Castro gathered a bunch of guys to try to figure out who would do what in the new government. Somebody said, "Is anybody here an economist", and everybody was surprised when Che raised his hand. Who would question Che? He'd cut your fucking balls and shove them up your ass. Che got the job. It turns out he thought the question was "Is anybody here a Communist?"
Ultimately, Che seems like another "sacrifice the peasantry for their own good" asshole to me. I won't be buying his t-shirts any time soon. But I'm still interested in seeing the moto movie.
The movie drops on 27 August. Peep the trailer and go see it.
The NY Times reports on Albany lack of Demcratic process. Among the sins of our civic leaders:
- Of 11,474 bills to reach the floors of the House and Senate over a five-year period, not a single one was voted down.
- From 1997 through 2001, the Legislature held public hearings on less than 1 percent of the major laws it passed.
- 95% of the major laws passed by the Senate and Assembly did so with absolutely zero floor debate at all.
- Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate majority leader, Joseph Bruno have almost total power over which bills members are allowed to vote on.
- If present for any vote that day, members are presumed to vote yes on all bills unless they physically cast a negative vote. New York is the only legislature that allows (indeed, forces) "empty-seat voting".
The article also reports that "while New York has one of the most expensive Legislatures in the nation, if not the most expensive, its rate of bills that actually become laws is one of the lowest in the nation." I suppose this is a measure of efficiency, but it seems to me there is much virtue in rejecting legislation as there is in passing it.
Another Albany sin, not mentioned in the article, is the statewide gerrymandering agreement between the Senate and Assembly leaders. They agree to keep the Senate Republican and the Assembly Democratic, denying voters any real choice in who governs us. It's shameful, corrupt, disgusting and should be criminal.
Polis | 3 Writebacks | #
Hegel is the common starting point of both Marx and Nietsche. He is "one of those thinkers just about all educated people think they know something about." But what if everything those educated people think they know about Hegel is wrong?
Polis | 4 Writebacks | #
Jesse, over at Pandagon, is on about the connection between trial lawyers and medical malpractice insurance. He says the link between high attorney's fees and high malpractice premiums is unproven and he implies that it is irresponsible to say it exists.
He's half right. The link might be unproven, but it definitely exists and not in the way people usually assume.
When an attorney gets paid from a judgment, his fee is taken from the client's share. It's not a fee imposed on top of what the victim has been awarded. As such, attorney fees costs doctors and insurance companies nothing.
But the fees are what motivate the lawyers to pursue the cases. Every contingency malpractice case has a probability of resulting in a fee for an attorney. The greater the probability and the greater the fee, the more a case is worth. It's expected value is higher to the attorney. By lowering the expected value, insurance companies hope to lower the value of cases to the point where lawyers stop pursuing marginal cases. In this way, medical malpractice costs will go down and permiums will supposedly go down and healthcare costs will supposedly go down.
So the link between attorney fees and medical malpractice awards is not completely faulty, but it's completely unjust to save money by capping fees and awards. Some of those marginal cases that can't find a lawyer have merit. And instead of being litigated, they will be neglected, which means we are trying to balance the books on the backs of medical malpractice victims.
It seems to me that the real problem is not attorney's fees. The real problem is that we don't trust courts and juries to accurately decide when and how much to compensate injured patients. That's a problem that won't be solved by stiffing lawyers and denying the valid claims of injured patients.
Polis | 3 Writebacks | #
What would the world be like if a different winner had emerged from Florida in 2000? What if Bush had lost and we were instead ruled by a Florida orange?
Via Boing Boing.
What does a responsible and moral foreign policy look like? In Uzbekistan, it's tying aid to human rights reforms, and not letting oil-rich countries off the hook. It means moving dictators towards democracy. It means building bridges with Muslim nations.
Surprisingly, this is exactly what we're doing. Kudos to the Bush administration for putting some teeth in its morality talk.
This aid money has been flowing for a couple years and is given to Uzbekistan in return for cooperation in fighting terror. It is worth noting that $18 million dollars only buys so much. If it buys a lot of reform, it doesn't buy much terror fighting and vice versa. From a larger point of view, though, human rights and democracy reform are terror fighting. So this is a win-win in my book.
Via Matt Yglesias.
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Reason argues convincingly that a Kerry victory isn't progress in stopping the racist drug war.
It's sad that my choices are so constrained that I'm picking between two guys who are both on the wrong side of an issue that means so much to me. Kerry could redefine the drug war debate, but he's too timid to do that. Tell me again why I should vote for him?
Polis | 5 Writebacks | #
Do we have secret prisons in Iraq? Have we disappeared people into a system where there is no recourse, no rights, no process? It's a good question, and I am highly disturbed that Bush's spokesperson won't give a straight answer.
Secret prisons aren't accidents. They're not a few bad apples. They are government consciously crossing the line into terror and horror. We should have nothing to do with them.
Polis | 2 Writebacks | #
Sometimes in the tumult of criticising the inhumanity inherent in fighting terrorists, we forget that the brutality of terrorists is worse in a really fundamental way: we at least try to be good and humane. We fail too often and sometimes don't try hard enough, but we try. Waging this war in a humane way is a value we hold dear. There is no evidence that the same can be said of those who would kill us.
A pretty good example of how the anti-terror forces try to behave themselves can be seen in this BBC interview of a boy who was captured during a failed attempt to blow himself up at an Israeli checkpoint.
He was asked how he felt when the army captured him. He responded:
I was a bit scared. The soldiers came to me and there were many of them so I was a bit scared. ... They were nice to me - they treated me well.
They were nice to him. They treated him well. That's a pretty admirable and professional way to treat a guy that just tried to kill you.
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Things Bush has admitted to not being. Curiously absent: an effective leader in the war against terror.
And similarly, a brief autobiography of Camille Paglia, as told through introductory phrases in her online column.
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Dean Esmay dismisses the Valerie Plame affair. Apparently, the issue is not whether administration officials blew Plame's cover in retaliation for her husband's public criticism of the run-up to war. The real issue to Esmay and a few others is Plame's credibility and whether or not she recommended her husband for the job of investigating Nigerian uranium.
I get that Plame and her husband, Joe Wilson, may be partisan. I get that they may be liars. I don't get how they're being partisan liars excuses anybody in the administration breaking the law by publically revealing Plame to be a CIA operative.
Esmay and others say Plame wasn't undercover, so there was no cover to be blown. They base this claim on Plame working a desk job and her recent pregnancy, both of which are evidence she wasn't sent out on dangerous overseas assignments.
But the CIA told Bob Novak she was working under the guise of another agency. That agency, according to David Corn, writing for The Nation, is a private energy firm, where she was working undercover as an analyst. So, yeah, she was working a desk job and she has young kids, but it was apparently an undercover deskjob because she was doing it as a CIA agent. If the CIA itself is protecting her identity, she's covert and her CIA role is classified.
Esmay's wife, Rosemary, says Plame still can't be considered undercover because you can only be undercover if you've served outside the United States within the last five years. This is, more or less, a correct reading of the the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 as it applies to Plame. But nobody can provide anything concrete as to whether she was working overseas or not. Speculation that her circa 2000 pregnancy would have kept her in the US is just that: speculation. The fact is we're just whistling in the dark in trying to guess whether she was here, there or nowhere these past few years.
I think the jury is still out on this one. An investigation on this should be pretty short and easy to complete, especially in deciding whether Plame meets the legal definition of covert agent. If she doesn't, one would think the investigation would have been abandoned at the start when it became clear that, leak or not, the law wasn't violated.
So we'll see. There might be a legal case, there might not. But no amount of partisan bickering can excuse outing an undercover CIA agent. This woman's job was to investigate weapons of mass destruction while undercover at an energy firm. She might be legally covered by the Intelligence Identities Protection or she might not, but now that her cover is blown, her ability to contribute to the effort to contain WMDs has been compromised. And that, to me, is the real crime here.
Polis | 9 Writebacks | #
At last we can draw a straight line from gay marriage to Abu Ghraib. It's all the fault of the sodomites!
Sy Hersh has some more details on the ever-growing Abu Ghraib scandal. In addition to past allegations of abuse of women and children, he now says there are videotapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Graib.
The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking. . . . [There was] a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher.
The question is not how did this happen but whether these abuses were inevitable. Can you conquer a country without this kind of thing happening? Nobody ever has.
And if these things are inevitably part of war, we should weigh them among the costs when deciding whether to invade rather than pretending that we Americans are somehow above such abuse.
Via the Poor Man.
Polis | 1 Writebacks | #
Via Marginal Revolution comes this Tech Central Station piece on poor means less poor than it used to. The article includes several measures of quality of life, but it's main one is the percent of poor people who own various luxury appliances, like telephones, televisions, plumbing, dish washers, etc.
What interests me about this article is not it's main point, but what it implies about the digital divide. When telephones were first introduced, they were the exclusive province of wealthy people. There was a huge telephone divide. Same for TV.
As time passed, telephones and televisions became nearly ubiquitous. They dropped in price to the point where all but our nation's poorest enjoy them.
We're seeing the same thing happen with internet and computer access. Computers are cheaper than they've ever been. I see computers given away literally every day. If you're poor and live in New York, you can have a free computer (contact me in the comments and I'll hook you up). It won't be all flash and sizzle, but it will get you online. Internet access is under$10 a month and service at that price point is only improving.
The digital divide, then, is a temporary problem. A generation from now, the only people without decent access will be the same people that don't have electricity-- the very poorest percent.
And so it strikes me as a little foolish to spend a lot of social energy on remedying a problem that will remedy itself over time. We should make computers and internet access available to all, but we shouldn't worry about creating long-term solutions. Stop-gap measures that only worry about getting today's kids online are probably good enough.
Polis | 0 Writebacks | #
At first blush, this is the kind of story that gives drugs a bad name. Dude eats way more mushrooms than he should have, goes on a 3-day bender, steals cars, ends up in a distant state. He calls 911, confesses and is trying to make things right.
But when you think about it, this story should have been headlined "Dude Eats Ungodly Amount of Shrooms-- No Lasting Effects". Instead of this guy (and thousands others like him) being living proof that you can't OD on shrooms, he's a funny story about extreme intoxication.
Most people will see him as a bad example, but really he's an illustration that the bad side of mushrooms isn't all that bad.
Polis | 0 Writebacks | #
One of the great things about the internet is all the niche content it offers. Everything from low-fi electro synth-pop to vegetarian porn. No matter how freaky you are bent, you can find other people who are bent the same way. People used to have to go to New York to achieve that. Now you can find a Tribe or a Yahoo Group for any kink up you might think up.
Say Uncle is ticked because he can't buy booze on Sundays. I agree with him that religious laws are annoying, and I've been caught short with no wine for enough Sunday dinners that I railed against such blue laws in New York.
Being rather tactless, I used to complain to liquor stores about the Sunday closings. I implored them to lobby for their freedom and my convenience. Every shopkeep told me to go soak my head. The stores, it seemed, liked having their freedom curtailed.
The reason liquor stores like forced closings is that most liquor stores are mom and pop affairs. They're small, family businesses where everybody works and time off is precious and rare. Because all the liquor stores were closed on Sundays, shopkeeps got a day off without guilt and without losing to the competition.
The only people who wanted Sunday hours were larger stores or chain stores (which could more easily open without an owner present), liquor distributors and of course the customers. After several years of lobbying and negotiation, a compromise was reached: liquor stores could open on Sundays but they had to take at least one day a week off.
This is the best of all worlds. Customers can get their Sunday hootch, small shops can have a day off, and alcohol sales increase overall, which makes the distributors happy. The only people who aren't happy are the libertarians, but they won't be happy with anything short of complete deregulation, so no solution was going to satisfy them anyway.
Polis | 0 Writebacks | #
Reason has 10 reasons to ditch Bush, and I agree with all of them. The list ends with "making me root for John Kerry", and I couldn't agree more. Kerry is only slightly attractive by comparison to Bush, and I'm not sure how we're supposed to get all hotted up about four years of not-quite-as-bad-as-Bush.
Matt Yglesias makes the case on why Kerry would be preferable to Bush. And all those things are good (although Yglesias is wrong if he thinks Kerry will accomplish all those things). Still, wihle I want Kerry to win, I can't generate any actual enthusiasm for the man.
Polis | 1 Writebacks | #
Wired interviews John Flansburgh, of They Might Be Giants, It seems he was the genesis behind a benefit album for MoveOn called Future Soundtrack of America.
In the interview, Flansburgh admits that rock musicians shouldn't get involved in politics. And then he demonstrates why this is the case by saying "MoveOn is a great organization that stands outside of the regular partisan fray."
I like MoveOn. They are great. But nonpartisan? MoveOn is about as far above the partisan fray as Karl Rove.
Polis | 1 Writebacks | #
A few bloggers are concerned that the White House and the Office of Homeland Security are looking into postponing the election in case of terrorist attack. They smell a rat, and Josh Marshall says
The rationale is that we need to have some policy in place for a possible election postponement before some precipitating event actually occurs. But my understanding is that we already have a policy in place on postponements: i.e., we don't do them.
But he is wrong. September 11, 2001 was a primary election day in New York City. When the planes hit the World Trade Center early that morning, the polls shut down and the primary was rescheduled a few weeks later, which dramatically changed the mayoral race and helped put Michael Bloomberg in office. We didn't have a policy to postpone the primary. We just had no choice.
At the time, nobody quite knew how or when to reschedule the primary, and there was a ton of fighting about it by people with heavily vested interests. It would have gone better if we'd had a somewhat neutral plan in place, ready to apply.
It might be the case that Bush would abuse the power to reschedule an election, but he has that power any way. The only question is whether we let him use it rationally or force him to use it rashly. If there is an attack this November, elections will be delayed. In the absence planning, we'll do it ad hoc, but we'll do it. Better to nail down a plan, fight about it now, and be able to implement it rather than argue about it when the crisis hits.
Update: Matthew Yglesias pretty much agrees.
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A couple dozen people have filed suit demanding an end to marriage discrimination in Maryland. I don't know what the Maryland state constitution says, but they seem to think it's on their side. Good for them.
Of course, the Repbulican Governor and legislature are poised to intervene on the side of bigotry. Shame.
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I've been reading some bloggers who are upset about the Senate confirmation of J. Leon Holmes, which greenlights his ascent to the federal bench in Arkansas. People are upset because Holmes is a religious man and his faith moved him to write in a Catholic magazine that "the woman is to place herself under the authority of the man" in marriage and "is to subordinate herself to the husband."
He definitely sounds like a guy I wouldn't want my daughter to marry, but his religious views (if they are indeed only religious views) don't really have anything to do with his fitness for the bench. Unless somebody can point to some evidence that his religious nuttery will make him a bad judge (as opposed to a miserable person), his confirmation was probably the right decision.
I don't really want more religious, conservative judges. But a refusal to confirm the man has to be based on more than just disagreement with his views. There has to be something about him that makes him an invalid or terrible candidate, as opposed to a merely bad one.
Polis | 9 Writebacks | #
Christopher Isherwood is an odd sort of literary figure. He is known best, perhaps, for authoring the auto-biographical books that were adapted as the play (and movie) Cabaret. He also wrote the Berlin Diaries. Isherwood is well-regarded for his works, most of which draw heavily from his life.
What's interesting about Isherwood is that he is known mainly for his memoirs even though those memoirs are the total of his life's accomplishment. Usually we read somebody's memoirs because we are already interested in them-- nobody would be reading Clinton's My Life if he hadn't been President. But we read Isherwood's memoirs because they're just some fine writing.
Isherwood's memoirs and auto-biographical fiction are worth reading even to a reader with no interest in Isherwood himself. He writes about himself and his life, tells a lot of lies, and casts himself as his own main character. Along the way, the reader meets the colorful and distinct people that populate Isherwood's life.
He write languidly, with little driving the plot (if there is a plot) and much time spent on petty things. And yet the reader is drawn and engaged. Perhaps it's because Isherwood tells of rubbing shoulders with all the famous literary figures of his day. Or perhaps it's because he has a first-hand American perspective of pre-WWII Germany. Or maybe we're fascinated by trying to figure out who is the real Christopher Isherwood.
Isherwood is also known for being gay. In his earlier works he cover this up, but eventually he comes clean with the dirty stories. In Christopher and His Kind, he retells parts of his life and it is clear that he was quite the little player. It is fascinating to see how much his memoirs were changed by his writing them from the closet.
There is an article about Isherwood in yesterday's New York Times.
I've long supported legalized prostitution because I'm all about letting people do what they want with their own bodies. So I'm excited that parts of California are moving to join Nevada in making the world safer for prostitutes.
The Sex Workers Outreach Project has qualified an initiative for the November the ballot in Berkeley. The initiative would direct Berkeley to make prositution a low policing priority and to lobby the state for decriminalization. SWOP is trying to convince San Francisco to do this as well.
This is all kinds of wonderful for libertines, libertarians and feminists alike.
Via Boing Boing.
Polis | 3 Writebacks | #
Vermont continues to outpace the rest of the nation in progressive legislation. Today it became the 9th state to legalize medical marijuana.
Although Vermont is a leader among progressive states, Governor James Douglas, who opposed the bill but would have been overridden if he vetoed it, didn't handle the bill's passage with either grace or intelligence. He refused to sign the bill, instead allowing it to come into law without his signature. He railed against marijuana as an "addictive and dangerous ... gateway drug".
To the feds, this law is a call to form a Brute Squad and start kicking in the doors of cancer victims. We'll see whether Douglas stands up for sick Vermonters when they start getting killed by feds and jailed for life.
Polis | 4 Writebacks | #
Say Uncle implies that we know the media is skewed to the left because it pays a lot of attention to Farenheit 9/11 but didn't do much to promote The Big One, Michael Moore's 1997 documentary covering his book tour, in which Moore disses Clinton's support for welfare reform and NAFTA. I think there are some good reasons why the media circus is greater over F9/11 than over The Big One:
- F9/11 won the Palm d'Or at Cannes. It's the only documentary to do so. It got a 10 minute standing ovation, another first. Sure, that sort of enthusiasm might be politically motivated, but it's still newsworthy when a political documentary wins international film's highest honor.
- It's an election year. The Big One came out in 1997-- too late to hurt Clinton electorally and too early to impact mid-term elections. F9/11 is a big deal precisely because it's election-year propaganda from a guy who has a history of making some pretty effective propaganda.
- F9/11 covers the biggest issue dividing America-- Iraq. Welfare Reform and NAFTA were big political issues, but only to political junkies. Iraq hits more people harder than NAFTA does. Lots of normally calm people get hopping mad over Iraq. The only people that got hopping mad over NAFTA were people that let politics piss them off on a daily basis. Besides, by 1997, Welfare Reform and NAFTA were no longer issues of public debate. They were signed and implemented. In the case of Iraq, we are right now trying to figure out how to deal with the situation, to understand why we're there and what our goals are.
Now, I'm not saying there's no liberal bias in news media. There is. The right-leaning news outlets are more unabashedly biased, but the lefties have their biases too. So there might be some chortling in the New York Times, but the notion that this movie's media attention is driven by bias cannot be supported by comparing it to The Big One.
Polis | 4 Writebacks | #