Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Wednesday, 22 May 2002

# 1:30 PM

dreams

I dreamt I was asked to perform a marriage between two of my old college friends. A full-fledged Jewish religious marriage. One is not obliged to be a rabbi to do this; however, the rabbi is less likely to make a total mess of it, which is what I did. (It would have helped if I'd had a prayer book to work with. I had to make up most of the ritual.) For some reason all this was happening on the top of a hill and everyone was wearing beach clothes.

politics

Ted Barlow has a lot of good commentary, and links to commentary, about the intelligence failures leading up to Sept. 11 and the current political arguments over same. Go read.

Meantime, Electrolite links to a bone-chilling post by Charlie Stross:

World War Three ...

... Looks as if it's going to break out in the next week. No, I'm not kidding. Two regional superpowers with a combined population of 1.2 billion people -- half the Earth's population at the time of WW2, double the combined population of the USA and USSR -- are eyeball to hairy eyeball over Kashmir. Both sides have got nukes and delivery systems capable of hitting each other's cities. They've fought three wars in the past half century, and they're both pissed.

Makes our little political dust-ups seem real insignificant by comparison.

drugs

Over here on Willamette Week Online, we got four articles about marijuana. One in particular argues that legalizing pot will kill pot culture, and that this would be a Good Thing. I am not convinced of either prong of this assertion, but it's still a fun read.

They also have a more serious interview with New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, who advocates legalization of pot and possibly other recreational drugs on the grounds that prohibition is a failure, and one with horrible side effects:

There has been the acknowledgment on my part since 1993, when I started to run for office, that the War on Drugs is a failure. I have always believed that we could not continue to arrest and incarcerate all the drug users in this country. When I stepped out on this issue, my intention was to have a dialogue, and let's include legalization as a potential alternative. Half of what we spend on law enforcement, half of what we spend on the courts, half of what we spend on the prisons is drug-related. And again, from my standpoint, I don't think there's a bigger issue facing the world today that has some practical solutions.

The elimination of drug prohibition would have a positive impact on our country. We can't continue to arrest 1.6 million people a year.

This is a position I wholeheartedly agree with; it's nice to see a serious politician (and a conservative, no less!) espousing it.

(Also from Ted Barlow.)

'zilla

Two of my all time favorite Mozilla bugs, 76431 and 101016, have been fixed. Now if they would just do something about 29838...