Failure!

The war on drugs is a failure. How long can we keep this conservative failure going? We can no longer afford prohibition. An op/ed in the NYT.

The problem is becoming so dramatic that elder statesmen, senior law enforcement officers, intellectuals and philanthropists the world over are speaking out loud and clear: The “War on Drugs” is a disastrous policy that achieves none of its aims and inflicts huge damage on global security and governance wherever it is prosecuted.

They argue that state regulation of the drug market would reduce the health and social risks posed by narcotics and generate huge tax revenues, which could be hypothecated to absorb any costs. At the moment, the vast profits from the illegal drug trade go into the pockets of organized crime syndicates and terrorist groups.

Solar Forest

Ths should be required on all mall parking lots.

Origin Of Stupidity

The Xristian Xrazies are giving out copies of Darwin's Origin Of Species with a special prebuttal argument. Here is a rebuttal.

The Man Can Set You Up!

Be Careful out there.It is a funny video, but scary too! Do not let yourself get set up.
Via Constitutional Scholar Jonathan Turley.

Help Wanted!

Via the Telegraph.co.uk/

I will pay you $1 to sit in my bathtub full of noodles while you wear a one piece bathing suit. I will not be home, nor will anyone else while you do this. I will leave the key for you, and you will sit at your leisure. DO NOT bring any sauce. I will season the pasta after I return home prior to dinner."

Click the link for other interesting Graig's list adds.

Happy Talk Like A Pirate Day

The five A's.

Warming

Warmest August ever.

RIP Mary Travers

Mary Travers from the great folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary has died from cancer. Their album Peter, Paul and Mommy was an important part of my childhood. Here is every kids favorite, Puff (the Magic Dragon).

Wow!

Almost a million Americans were arrested for marijuana last year. That is almost a third of 1%of Americans were arrested for marijuana.

Police arrested 847,864 persons for marijuana violations in 2008, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's annual Uniform Crime Report, released today. The total marks a three percent decrease in marijuana arrests from 2007, when law enforcement arrested a record 872,721 Americans for cannabis-related violations, but still remains the second highest tally of annual arrests ever reported.

Marijuana arrests now comprise one-half (49.8 percent) of all drug arrests reported in the United States.

Amazing. What a waste of time and money.

Food Care

Michael Pollan on how food affects health care.

But so far, food system reform has not figured in the national conversation about health care reform. And so the government is poised to go on encouraging America’s fast-food diet with its farm policies even as it takes on added responsibilities for covering the medical costs of that diet. To put it more bluntly, the government is putting itself in the uncomfortable position of subsidizing both the costs of treating Type 2 diabetes and the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup.[...]
As for the insurers, you would think preventing chronic diseases would be good business, but, at least under the current rules, it’s much better business simply to keep patients at risk for chronic disease out of your pool of customers, whether through lifetime caps on coverage or rules against pre-existing conditions or by figuring out ways to toss patients overboard when they become ill.[...]
The moment these new rules take effect, health insurance companies will promptly discover they have a powerful interest in reducing rates of obesity and chronic diseases linked to diet. A patient with Type 2 diabetes incurs additional health care costs of more than $6,600 a year; over a lifetime, that can come to more than $400,000. Insurers will quickly figure out that every case of Type 2 diabetes they can prevent adds $400,000 to their bottom line. Suddenly, every can of soda or Happy Meal or chicken nugget on a school lunch menu will look like a threat to future profits.

I wonder if the rules will ever take effect.

We Can Not Afford To Wait

Try This At Home

Go for it!

Food Should Go Bad!

But McDonald's food does not. I once spilled an order of fries on the floor of my truck while driving. I figured I would clean them up when they started to smell. They never did. That sat on the floor for a year and a half before I cleaned the truck up. Here is a list of reasons why you should not eat at McDonald's.

9. For those who enjoy sex, take note: erectile dysfunction is connected to endothelial dysfunction. Morgan Spurlock of Super Size Me commented that his normally healthy sexual function deteriorated in just one month when he ate only food from McDonald’s. Even his girlfriend commented on camera that “he’s having a hard time, you know, getting it up.”

Via Susie.

In The Crapper

Outhouse Interior, originally uploaded by Wally_Wabbit.

I have heard stories about snakes in out houses. I never really believed a snake would come out of the pit and bite me in the ass. But I never thought someone might be down there.

PORTLAND — When Gary Moody pleaded no contest to trespassing in 2005 for hiding in a pit toilet on White Mountain National Forest property in New Hampshire, a judge urged him to seek help for whatever had driven him to climb down there.

According to a new complaint, Moody didn't get the message.

The 49-year-old Pittston man is charged again – this time in federal court – with climbing into a pit toilet in the White Mountain National Forest.

The guy has problems. But hey, he never took pictures or video. Not very entrepreneurial, I am sure there is a market for that crap on the internet.

Mercury In Every Fish Tested

From The NYT.

When government scientists went looking for mercury contamination in fish in 291 streams around the nation, they found it in every fish they tested, the Interior Department said, even in isolated rural waterways.[...]
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said the findings underlined the need to act against mercury pollution. Emissions from coal-fired power plants are the largest source of mercury contamination in the United States.

Good Beer Is Good Buiseness

Craft beer sales are up despite the economy.

National sales of craft beer — an increasingly large part of Colorado’s economy — rose 9 percent in the first half of 2009 despite the economic downturn, the Boulder-based Brewers Association reported Monday.

The volume of craft beer produced nationally also rose by 5 percent from the first half of 2008, though year-over-year overall U.S. beer sales fell by 1.3 percent during that time period, the association reported.

Crash Your Clunkers

Handsome Johnny

Ritchie Havens. The message is just as true today.

Woodstock

Woodstock was 40 years ago.

You Can Not Negotiate With The Crazy

Rick Perlstein in the WaPo writes.

t used to be different. You never heard the late Walter Cronkite taking time on the evening news to "debunk" claims that a proposed mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for right-wing critics of the president's program, or giving the people who made those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media didn't adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of "conservative claims" to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims. Back then, a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse as "extremist" -- out of bounds.

The tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America's flora. Only now, it's being watered by misguided he-said-she-said reporting and taking over the forest. Latest word is that the enlightened and mild provision in the draft legislation to help elderly people who want living wills -- the one hysterics turned into the "death panel" canard -- is losing favor, according to the Wall Street Journal, because of "complaints over the provision."

Good thing our leaders weren't so cowardly in 1964, or we would never have passed a civil rights bill -- because of complaints over the provisions in it that would enslave whites.

You have to know you are right and do the right thing. The Republicans have no intention of bargaining in good faith. Here is Digby

Arlen Specter and Joe Sestak were interviewed yesterday at NN by Susie Madrak and Ari Melber. Specter made some news when he revealed that from the beginning the Republicans had circulated among themselves that they were going to "break Obama" --- and it didn't originate over health care, but even before the stimulus. They never had any intention of acting in good faith. This didn't surprise me either. But it certainly seems to have surprised the administration, or at least they thought they could win them over anyway. But they can't.