From the list 25 Guys to Avoid on Wall Street:
Avoid the guy who offers his clients ‘a very special opportunity’ to invest in anything. He has a problem with cocaine.
I will note the parallel between this guy and just about every ‘very special episode’ of a TV series with young characters.
They both involve drug abuse.
Everyone’s favorite hypocritical and corrupt televangelist cum politician, Pat Robertson has come out in favor of legalizing marijuana:
For a second it looked as if someone had mischievously switched teleprompter scripts on Pat Robertson, the tele-evangelist and founding member of the Christian Coalition. There he was on The 700 Club, a religious affairs TV talk show talking breezily about why America should legalise marijuana.
But this is the season for compassion and Mr Robertson – who usually makes waves nowadays only when he finds celestial or satanic cause for assorted disasters like the Haiti earthquake (a pact with the Devil to eject the French two centuries ago) or Hurricane Katrina (legalised abortion) – seemed to be serious. He said incarcerating people for taking “a couple of puffs” of pot might not be effective public or social policy.
Here’s a surprise, he’s significantly to the left of Barack Obama on this, probably because he’s at a point in his life where good government policy trumps electoral success.
Well, I have managed to find a contract closer to home, so starting in January I will be working about 18 miles from home in Westminster, MD, where I will be working on autonomous robotic vehicles.
What it means at this moment is that over lunch, I am sitting in a waiting room in Reston, VA waiting to be called back for a drug screen.
Yes, fill this cup, we need to evaluate the worthiness of your bodily fluids. Now THERE is an experce that positively reeks of our society’s tremendous respect for human dignity.
In any case, it means that I can be home with my family every night, so it is worth it.
It likely means less bloggy goodness from me, but my reader(s) will learn to deal.
Posted via mobile.
It appears that California’s Proposition 19, which would legalize and tax marijuana in the state has support fairly consistently polling ahead of opposition.
It should be noted that on human mediated polling, the initiative is down by between 1% and 4%, while in automated polling it is ahead by 10% and 16%, which Nate Silver thinks this is largely because people do not want to tell another person that they are voting for pot, though automated polls might miss minorities who tend to be more opposed to legalization.
I think that it will pass, because it is being sold on unrealistic magical thinking: If you vote for pot, and it is taxed, then California’s fiscal crisis is washed away by a font of “potro-dollars”.
This argument has a grain of truth, reduced costs of enforcement and the resulting criminality, along with the tax revenue, are not insignificant, but it’s not enough to fix the state that was ruined by the California voters and their initiative petition process.
This is good news. The 100:1 sentencing disparity was fueled by 12 part hysteria, and about 8 parts by a desire by Ronald Reagan and His Evil Minions™ to use incarceration as a way to suppress the black vote.
On Thursday, Sharon* spent 6 hours in the emergency room with severe chest pains.
It turned out that it was her long-standing problems with acid reflux, so it was not a heart attack, it was heart burn.
Well, because of Sharon’s* sensitivities, allergies, and odd interactions between her body chemistry and drugs, there is currently only one drug on the market, the proton pump inhibitor Dexilant, on the market which can address this.
She’s tried all the other ones, and they don’t work, but the insurance company drones have decided that it’s a good idea to deny the authorization to save a few bucks.
We are appealing.
How many f$#@ing trips to the ER with symptoms of a heart attack, which they cover at 100% does it take to wipe out any savings?
Well, let me give you a hint,we have already blown through that with the first trip to the ER.
Not enough bullets.
*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.
This is your spider on drugs:
Any questions?
And Marijuana hour.
I’ve set this up to post at 4:20 pm on 4/20.
As to how 420 came to mean pot, see here.
It appears rather likely that a bill legalizing, and taxing, pot will make it on the ballot in November:
Fourteen years after California decided marijuana could be used as a medicine and ignited a national movement, the state is likely to vote on whether to take another step into the vanguard of drug liberalization: legalizing the controversial weed for fun and profit.
On Wednesday, Los Angeles County elections officials must turn in their count of valid signatures collected in the county on a statewide legalization initiative. The number is virtually certain to be enough to qualify the initiative for the November ballot, according to a tally kept by state election officials.
………
The 10-page California initiative would allow anyone 21 or older to possess, share and transport up to an ounce for personal use and to grow up to 25 square feet per residence or parcel. It would allow local governments, but not the state, to authorize the cultivation, transportation and sale of marijuana and to impose taxes to raise revenues.
This last bit is particularly savvy.
By virtue of the gridlock in Sacramento, though this gridlock is a function of California voters and the initiative petition process in the first place, the state government is distrusted and despised, but by allowing local governments to license and tax, it would have the advantage of being an immediate benefit to localities.
The head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime is now saying that it was money from the drug cartels that kept the banks nominally solvent during the financial crisis:
Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were “the only liquid investment capital” available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.
This will raise questions about crime’s influence on the economic system at times of crisis. It will also prompt further examination of the banking sector as world leaders, including Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, call for new International Monetary Fund regulations. Speaking from his office in Vienna, Costa said evidence that illegal money was being absorbed into the financial system was first drawn to his attention by intelligence agencies and prosecutors around 18 months ago. “In many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system’s main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor,” he said.
There is no question: If a banker can launder drug money, and make money themselves from doing so, they will launder drug money.
Cue Captain Renault (see pic), and I do not expect any substantive law enforcement resulting from this revelation.
It would be immortal, and might have super powers:
A Sturgis woman had a blood-alcohol level of .708 percent, possibly a state record, when she was found earlier this month behind the wheel of a stolen vehicle parked on Interstate 90, according to Meade County State’s Attorney Jesse Sondreal.
A South Dakota Highway Patrol trooper discovered Marguerite Engle, 45, on Dec. 1 passed out behind the wheel of a delivery truck reported stolen in Rapid City.
Her blood-alcohol level was almost nine times South Dakota’s legal limit of .08 percent.
Checks with local and state labs where blood-alcohol levels are tested suggest Engle’s reading may be the highest ever recorded in South Dakota, Sondreal said.
Sondreal said a state chemist recalled a sample that tested .53, but nothing higher, in his more than 30 years on the job.
By way of comparison, LD50 for alcohol, the number at which 50% of the subjects die, is 0.40% BAC.
*Richards’ abuse of a myriad of substances is legendary, and his continued survival therefore puzzling. This led the comic Bill Hicks to say that, “I picture nuclear war and two things surviving: Keith and cockroaches!“
It looks like poor harvests will create a coffee shortage in 2010.
No coffee?!?!!??
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn
The Washington Independent asks How to Hold [Afghan president Hamid] Karzai Accountable?
Truth be told, I’m not sure, but we know that his brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, is heavily involved in the drug trade, and we know that this means that he is routinely dealing with people who fund the Taliban.
I would suggest that instead of dropping a Hellfire on him when he meets with those people, that a photograph be taken, and presented to him, with the explanation that they would have fired, but they recognized his brother, and that he might not be so lucky next time, so getting his act together on purging corruption, including his dope dealer brother, should happen sooner rather than later.
The American Medical Association has decided to reclassify marijuana.
It is currently a schedule 1 controlled substance, meaning dangerous, with no medical use, and the AMA, bowing to reality, has decided that it should be legal to at least test the stuff:
The American Medical Assn. on Tuesday urged the federal government to reconsider its classification of marijuana as a dangerous drug with no accepted medical use, a significant shift that puts the prestigious group behind calls for more research.
The nation’s largest physicians organization, with about 250,000 member doctors, the AMA has maintained since 1997 that marijuana should remain a Schedule I controlled substance, the most restrictive category, which also includes heroin and LSD.
In changing its policy, the group said its goal was to clear the way to conduct clinical research, develop cannabis-based medicines and devise alternative ways to deliver the drug.
Hopefully, the progress towards sanity involving THC will continue, and perhaps, I could then go back to one of the activities of my college days.
Would you buy a used car from this man?It turns out that Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of Hamid Karzai is multi-tasking something fierce, he’s not just a major figure in Afghan opium production, but he is also on the CIA payroll:
Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.
The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.
The article then notes that this “raises questions” about our current Afghanistan policy.
Well duh!!! The army fights the Taliban, which is supported to a large degree by opium money, and the CIA pays money to one of the biggest opium producers and smugglers in the region, which would imply that in some small part, the CIA is paying the Taliban to kill American troops.
Those boyz from Langley are such kidders.
The DoJ has just issue a memo that basically suggests that prosecutors back off on busting medical marijuana providers.
I see an upsurge in the demand for Fig Newtons and ice cream sammiches.
FWIW, I support anything that moves ganja toward legalization.
This is pretty weak tea, but it is a start.
Not a part of the pale elites. What a surprise.So, victims of Paramilitary violence in Columbia, and their relatives, are celebrating a supreme court ruling forbidding the extradition of former paramilitaries to the United States on drug charges:
[Bela] Henriquez [shown] wants to find out as much as she can from the paramilitaries who murdered her father in 2001. Julio Henriquez was killed because of his work organizing poor farmers along a vital cocaine-trafficking corridor. In testimony two years ago, one of the commanders, Hernan Giraldo, confessed to ordering her father’s murder.
But she says the details were scant — and that the testimony didn’t mean that justice was served.
And then, Giraldo was extradited.
Giraldo and the other paramilitary commanders took with them a treasure trove of historical information about the links between Colombia’s elite and the paramilitaries, says Michael Reed, a lawyer with the International Center for Transitional Justice, a New York group that studies the efforts to unravel Colombia’s war crimes.
“Basically a political decision was made to trump human rights investigations and prosecutions with drug-trafficking prosecutions,” Reed says.
(emphasis mine)
No, Michael Reed is wrong. A political decision was made to make deport the paramilitaries to the United States in order to silence them. This is not about being nice to the United States, it is about silencing the professional killers hired to murder labor organizers, literacy volunteers, and anyone else who was trying to show the peons something beyond their stations.
Seriously, it actually made me feel a bit weepy.
My apologies, but the city of Amsterdam gives us a righteous take-down of Bill O’Reilly and His Evil Minions’&trade talking points on legalized weed in the Netherlands.
H/t Boing Boing.
BTW, in the comments there, you can find this ditty, Netherlands to close prisons for lack of criminals….Some hellhole, huh.
Well, it looks like Barack Obama is going to be getting some well deserved push-back on his proposal to keep the ban on needle exchange programs.
Obama put it in his budget, and the House Appropriations Committee pulled it from their budget, and it’s what comes out of the Congress at the end of the day that makes law here.
Here is the background on Barack Obama going out of his way to reverse a campaign promise, and I still think that this is a deliberate attempt to enrage the gay community in order to score points with right wingers.
That being said, Obama also opposing sane harm reduction policies with regard to drugs in the context of international diplomacy, so maybe he actually buys into this whole “War on Drugs” charade, so maybe he is just worried of being demagogued on the issue.
I’m not sure which state of mind is worse.