Friday morning rapid fire

• The rules on using the names Mohamed and Jesus
• How to hold a digital camera
• This collection of anti-drug commercials. It certainly makes me never want to cook.
• Film Noir Lighting
• The marines and laser guns, it has the memorable line - "Photoshop can quickly solve all engineering challenges."

Finding humor in the little things

From CNN.com

Al Gore's son was arrested early Wednesday on suspicion of possessing marijuana and prescription drugs after deputies pulled him over for speeding, authorities say.

Al Gore III, 24, was driving a blue Toyota Prius about 100 mph on the San Diego Freeway when he was pulled over about 2:15 a.m., Sheriff's Department spokesman Jim Amormino said.

This isn't too surprising, he's been arrested for marijuana before IIRC, but he was dumb (and probably arrogant enough) enough to be going 100 miles an hour while while carrying an illegal drug and four(!) prescription drugs not prescribed to him. In a Prius, which makes it all much funnier.

Local drug war update

Today's newspaper brought mixed results. The Atlanta Police Department does seem to be cleaning itself up, indeed, much more than I expected. However, I haven't read anything about any sort of judicial accountability; they're the ones who approve the warrants, seemingly without even looking at them.

Rant Starts
Meanwhile, people like this guy send exactly the wrong message with his "How not to get busted" DVD series. The point of drug legalization is not to evade the law or get high, it's to live in a free society where people can make their own mistakes and take responsibility for them. Instead we revive the notion of demonic possession in the form of "addiction" which is a "disease", which is at the same time pitiful and criminal and a reason to treat us all like children in the hands of an all-knowing state.

The end result of protecting people from the consequences of their actions is to fill the world with fools, and that seems to be what we've done.
Rant Ends

Signs of progress

In policing Atlanta anyway

Atlanta police have virtually stopped seeking search warrants for drugs following the November shooting of an elderly woman and dropped — at least temporarily — the forced-entry tactics that led to her death, court records show.

In the six months since Kathryn Johnston died in a botched police raid, Atlanta narcotics officers have not sought a single "no-knock" search warrant, court records show. They served at least 25 no-knock warrants during a comparable six-month period a year earlier.

Reason has prevailed, at least temporarily.

Three things

• The US government converts the leader of a one million member Afghan tribe from an ally to an enemy in Afghanistan. Why aren't we just buying the opium and then burning it or selling it for legitimate purposes (there are some)? It would be much cheaper than the current fight, and also make the Afghan farmers in the most hostile areas utterly dependent on the US. Where is Nixon when you need him?
• The Snake Eater - an army of Davids helps out in the Iraq war. From concept to completion in only 30, very cool.
• Japanese Snowplow Robot!
  

Atlanta cop update

See Report: Lies involved in no-knock warrant and Town hall meeting to discuss "no-knock" warrants. The systems seems to be working, albeit quite slowly. I'd assumed that since this feel out of the news for a month that it was being covered up, it's nice to see that I might be wrong about that.

Not surprising

Cop wounded in drug raid that killed woman to retire

Curiously, the name of the APD spokesman is James Polite, which is just kind of eerie. If that's your name, are you destined for some kind of PR occupation?

Why doesn't the AJC have editors?

This is easily the most poorly written article I've seen in a long time. Granted, its all filler, and contains no new data. And being, the AJC, it mentions diversity (for no obvious reason) at least twice. The bolding defies explanation as well. Some strange passages:

It's no secret in the world of big-time drug trafficking, federal agents say: If you want to be a major player in interstate drug peddling you have to have an operation in metro Atlanta.

Recent multimillion-dollar drug busts suggest that Gwinnett County has become that place in metro Atlanta for these drug cartels.

...
In 2005, Gwinnett's local task force seized a total of $34 million in illegal drugs. Those figures dwarf the amount of drugs seized in surrounding counties. A Cobb County drug task force, for example, seized $9 million in illegal drugs last year.

The words flow like a piano through a blender.

Friday round up

• Batwings! No, really, those look very cool.
• The physics and biology of Superman's possible reproduction
• Possible cheap hyrodgen to fuel cars.
• Why women have fat thighs.
• Amazing RC Plane Demo
• Get rid of the Thumbs.db file that Windows creates in every folder.
• Julian Sanchez and the conflicts that a pro-drug legalization citizen (like myself) faces when called for Jury Duty. I had a similar internal conversation with myself last year when I was called.
  

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Quotes That Caught My Eye
Eric Hoffer

• The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility.
• We lie the loudest when we lie to ourselves.
• It is thus with most of us; we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay.
  

Ambrose Bierce

• Acquaintance, n.: A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.
• There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don't know.
• To be positive: To be mistaken at the top of one's voice.
  

H.L. Mencken

• An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
• Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
• Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
• Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
• I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.
• It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
• Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
• The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

Well worth watching

On a related note, everyone should check out the most recent BloggingHeads, which features a very interesting dialogue between James Pinkerton and Mickey Kaus. Very good bigthink about the future (and a lovely new term, technological determinism) and immigration.

One quibble is that he reiterates the theory held by most people, which is that we could reduce illegal immigration to a trickle without much effort by building a wall. It's similar to the thought that we could win the drug war if only we tried harder.

The government can't keep drugs out of prisons, and the Soviets had the biggest police state in history, and they had tremendous drug problems. It's ridiculous to think while we can't successfully ban inanimate objects, we can successfully ban animate ones.

I imagine we'll do what we're doing with the drug war, which is spend a lot of money and civil liberties to create self-perpetuating interest groups (much like the classic bootleggers and Baptists unions of the prohibition era) and to deal with the actual problems as poorly as possible.

For the record I think sanctions on employers is the most effective way of dealing with the total number of illegal immigrants (not that it will do that much) and the main thing we should be doing (if we insist on some collective action) is to rapidly Americanize the immigrants that are here. Put simply, we need to change the Mexicans living here into Americans of Hispanic descent and throw this whole notion of multiculturalism away (the illegal immigrants did).

What's great about America

Take a look at some shots from an underground pot farm in Tennessee. They have blast doors, escape hatches, secret entrances, you name it. As CrimeProf (where I saw it) put it "the technology is of batman-villain quality".

And all of this is from America's stoners! Take that rest of world!

Two odd things

1. The fact that Bolivia has elected a president that wants to legalize coca production is receiving very little attention.
   
2. The Cisneros Independent Counsel investigation from the Clinton era is finally wrapping up. And they're not releasing all of the report either. We really need standing ICs to investigate whatever comes up.
   

Random thoughts

• A pretty significant alliance between the US and India. You would think that this would be much bigger news, especially given the rivalry between India and Pakistan and India and China.


• Convictions in the East St Louis voter fraud trial - no surprise there really (it was all on tape). That also should have been much bigger news.


• In South Korea (the most web connected country in the world), a woman doesn't clean up after her dog and achieves blog infamy within one day. Start the link chain here.


• The Rhode Island Legislature has voted to legalize medical marijuana, without even the pressure of a voter initiative. One wonder when principal-agent theory becomes something the media talks about.


• Free Individualist Stickers - I'm pleasantly surprised by the move to brevity in bumper stickers as seen in the gold and blue "=" stickers one can see on cars in my neighborhood. The guy linked is giving out free "i" stickers (for individualism). Judging from his blog he's a Randian of some sort and a fellow IHS seminar attendee.


• Exposure Manager (run by a Winds of Change blogger apparently) is offering a deal to Instapundit readers.
  

Shaking my faith in the role of women in society

Whenever I need to feel smugly superior I read the "Woman to Woman" feature in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, where a pretentious left-leaning woman debates a cloying right-leaning woman. Naturally I was interested in this weeks topic Should medical marijuana be legalized?

The left starts out with an irrelevant racial remark, then takes the remark back, taking up about half of her column, and then somehow using up all of her remaining space to issue a strawman attack at religion (why? Who knows), then closes with

While some argue medical marijuana can be addictive, few would contend it has the same dependency risk as the medications hospitals routinely administer for debilitating pain. Conservatives aren't clamoring for hospitals to turn off the morphine drip for dying cancer patients because there?s a heroin problem in the world. But they want to draw a line in the sand over medical marijuana? Please. Show me the logic.

Which is to say..... Well, I'm not sure exactly. Marijuana is being treated differently than heroin, which is not the same thing as marijuana? Is that actually a reason?

And quote frankly, how can she miss the actual strong arguments in favor of legalizing medical marijuana, namely, federalism, wasted government resources, the fact that none of the "dangers" of marijuana apply to say, 60 year old cancer patients, the chilling effect this has on medical research and treatment, the loss of privacy, etc.

That was the logical cesspool that is left-leaning Diane Glass. Then she gets topped by right- leaning Shaunti Feldhahn. She leads with a personal story, then closes with

I suspect that pro-medical marijuana opinions are less about ensuring the availability of treatments unavailable anywhere else, and more about legally getting high.

When I oppose legalizing backyard marijuana, I am not being heartless toward those with chronic conditions who use it to relieve their suffering. By championing other effective, controlled options, I am trying to spare other individuals and the public health the even greater suffering from, yes, that 'slippery slope' that countless of us have experienced firsthand: that marijuana is not a harmless drug and its use can go terribly awry.

To answer her ad hominen attack, I support the legalization of medical marijuana, and I have no interest in getting high, legally or otherwise.

As for her closing paragraph, it so uniformly ridiculous I don't know where to begin. None of the problems associated with marijuana as a "gateway" drug (even if you believe in that as a concept) apply to the people who would take medical marijuana.

What combination of circumstances would have to exist for her statement to be true, accurate and altruistic? You would have to have cancer patients who have no interest in selecting the best treatment for their cancer, who are utterly incapable of differentiating between treatments like Marinol (incidentally, Marinol must be swallowed and kept down for a prolonged period of time, not the easiest thing to do during chemotherapy) and smoked marijuana.

It would also have to be true that outsiders, with no specific knowledge of the medical condition in question would know more about the cancer and the patient than the patient and his/her doctor. They would also have to be more concerned about this patient than the patient himself.

It would also have to be true that the same dangers that exist with marijuana as a "gateway" drug (even if you believe in the concept) apply to a 60 year old woman with breast cancer the same way they apply to 17 year old angst ridden teenagers. And what substance doesn't have the potential to go "terribly awry"?

This turned into quite a little rant.