$words[rand()]

Via Unrea­son­able Faith

Recently the Inde­pen­dent Sci­en­tific Com­mit­tee on Drugs pub­lished a report in The Lancet rank­ing twenty pop­u­lar recre­ational drugs based on the harm caused to the both user and oth­ers around them. The drugs were judged indi­vid­u­ally on six­teen total harm cri­te­ria cov­er­ing phys­i­cal, psy­cho­log­i­cal, and social harm. The cat­e­gories were then weighted by impor­tance (like­li­hood to cause death is worth more points than like­li­hood to cause fam­ily prob­lems, harm to soci­ety is worse than harm to the indi­vid­ual, etc.) The results ended up rank­ing alco­hol as the most harm­ful by far (72÷100), fol­lowed by a close bat­tle between heroin and crack cocaine (55 and 54/100, respec­tively), then metham­phet­a­mine at the #4 spot (32÷100) and trail­ing off from there down to hal­lu­cino­genic mush­rooms at #20 with 6/100.

These results should be unsur­pris­ing to any­one who has read any sim­i­lar reports in the past. They also line up quite well with the argu­ments often made in favor of loos­en­ing or elim­i­nat­ing exist­ing drug laws (the “alco­hol is legal, why isn’t this?” argu­ment). Unfor­tu­nately they have almost no asso­ci­a­tion with the rank­ings used in mod­ern drug laws almost any­where in the world. In the major­ity of the world alco­hol and tobacco are legal and often sold directly by or under the close watch of the gov­ern­ment, yet in the name of “reduc­ing harm” the major­ity if not all of the rest of the drugs on this list are not only ille­gal but also carry stiff penal­ties for mere possession.

Of course the log­i­cal thing to do when sci­ence indi­cates pol­icy is wrong is to amend pol­icy, right? After all, the UK has a sci­en­tific board involved with their drug pol­icy, unlike the USA where the DEA is free to basi­cally set pol­icy as they see fit (fox watch­ing the hen­house, any­one?). Nope, of course when a gov­ern­ment is shown to be wrong by its sci­en­tists, the first thing they do is fire them, then change the law so they’re not needed, and finally go entirely in the oppo­site direc­tion and not only remove the require­ment that harm be demon­strated but instead assume any newly dis­cov­ered recre­ational drugs should be restricted until they are deter­mined to be OK by unspec­i­fied criteria.

It seems another coun­try is fol­low­ing America’s lead of ignor­ing sci­en­tific evi­dence for polit­i­cal gain: When the sci­en­tists don’t come up with the answers you want, don’t change your ideas, just get rid of the scientists.

I don’t get it. Why is it so hard to get a gov­ern­ment to admit that when com­pared to legal recre­ational drugs many ille­gal ones are less harm­ful, some­times to a sig­nif­i­cant extent?

Here are my thoughts on how to struc­ture sane drug laws:

• NEVER crim­i­nal­ize per­sonal drug pos­ses­sion. All this does is give crim­i­nal records to those who are in most cases oth­er­wise pro­duc­tive mem­bers of soci­ety and restrict those who may have real prob­lems from get­ting help for fear of per­se­cu­tion and/or prosecution.
• Base ALL pol­icy on sci­ence and sci­ence alone. Media and politi­cian fueled fear rarely makes for accu­rate pol­icy, so stan­dards should be set and then fol­lowed with­out spe­cial treat­ment for any substances.
• Reg­u­late the drugs you do allow, but only as nec­es­sary to ensure qual­ity and safety
• Revisit all poli­cies reg­u­larly. New stud­ies bring new evi­dence to light all the time and some­times changes will be needed.

On top of that, some­thing I believe applies to all laws rather than just drug pol­icy, is to have goals for the law based on testable cri­te­ria. If after a cer­tain time the goals have not been met, maybe it’s time for another look. Is the goal still worth­while? How close did this pol­icy come to meet­ing the goal? If it came close, can it be tweaked? If it missed by a lot or made things worse, what’s a dif­fer­ent approach?

Cur­rent pol­icy is sold to us as reduc­ing harm to soci­ety and cut­ting back on crime, when in real­ity it’s wast­ing bil­lions in enforce­ment and cor­rec­tional resources, ruin­ing lives, and fuel­ing an enor­mously prof­itable black mar­ket which funds almost all lev­els of crime. Sci­ence and pol­icy are at odds and two of the most pow­er­ful coun­tries in the world are work­ing to keep it that way. We need to keep pres­sure on our politi­cians to resolve this.

To whom it may concern:

Over the past two days there has been a lot of talk about your new data plans, par­tic­u­larly the removal of the “unlim­ited” option. While I believe there should be a third tier for the heav­ier users, I can under­stand the rea­sons for mov­ing to an entirely metered struc­ture and do not have any prob­lems with that part. Where I do have a prob­lem is the addi­tional $20 per month charge for users of inter­net tethering.

Before I make my points, let me quote one of your Senior Vice Pres­i­dents, Mark Collins, from his inter­view with GigaOm on the day the new plans were announced.

That capa­bil­ity is enabling some­thing you can’t do today. You can use one device and get mul­ti­ple con­nec­tions so it’s more use­ful to you. You’re going to use more data so the price is based on the value that will be delivered.

This is in response to the ques­tion “What about the $20 teth­er­ing fee? It looks like a con­ve­nience charge.”

That capa­bil­ity is only enabling some­thing you can’t do today because you locked it out in the first place. My AT&T-branded LG CU500 could not tether until I had a teth­er­ing plan, but my unlocked and unbranded Sony K850i could just fine with­out any spe­cial teth­er­ing plans. The Apple iPhone 3G and 3GS both have sup­ported teth­er­ing offi­cially since the release of the 3.0 firmware released nearly a year ago, but this was dis­abled on mod­els sold in the US because you did not want to allow it. Teth­er­ing is not some spe­cial fea­ture you are doing work to enable and deserve to be paid extra for, it’s a fea­ture all of our data-capable phones have built in which you have actively engaged in defeating.

I won’t argue the state­ment that it makes my phone and data plan more use­ful, but again this is a fea­ture that both have inher­ently had from the begin­ning and you have actively sought to remove. If I went to rent a four door sedan and found that the pas­sen­ger side and rear seats had been removed unless I paid an extra fee to have them rein­stalled, I and any other rea­son­able per­son would think that is out­ra­geous. Unfor­tu­nately you are able to take advan­tage of the fact that 99% of your users are not technology-savvy and thus do not know how much they’re being screwed.

The last part of that response is the most illog­i­cal of them all. “You’re going to use more data,” so the price increases with­out the amount of data I’m allowed to use chang­ing in the slight­est? How is me using 2GB in one month on a smart­phone dif­fer­ent from using 2GB in one month teth­er­ing to even a dozen lap­tops? Data is data, one type doesn’t put any extra load on your net­work ver­sus another.

Extra charges for teth­er­ing were accept­able when the alter­na­tive options were smartphone/dumbphone-only unlim­ited pack­ages, since yes, a teth­er­ing user is likely to use more data over­all. How­ever, if I’m already buy­ing a bucket of bits how does it mat­ter at all if I choose to use those to feed my smart­phone directly or down­load some­thing to my laptop?

To close, I have been a cus­tomer of AT&T since port­ing in from T-Mobile’s then ter­ri­ble cov­er­age in 2005. In that time I have at peak car­ried two voice lines, one iPhone data, and one Lap­top­Con­nect at the same time. I know that does not make me any­thing spe­cial, but I’m sure it’s more than most of your sin­gle non-business or fam­ily cus­tomers. I have also defended AT&T as hav­ing the best net­work for geeks due to your use of open GSM tech­nol­ogy and until recently high­est mobile data speeds. As you might guess, I will not be doing this any longer and I will be empha­siz­ing the prob­lems I have with your change to any­one who may ask about your ser­vice. I had been eye­ing the Sprint/HTC Evo 4G for a time while debat­ing mak­ing the switch, I thank you for help­ing me make my deci­sion. You can expect to see my num­ber port out in the near future.

Sin­cerely,
Sean Harlow

Sent via e-mail to Ran­dall Stephen­son, CEO and Mark Collins, VP of Voice and Data

Appar­ently Wednes­day night’s episode of South Park was cen­sored by Com­edy Cen­tral after it was deliv­ered. Matt and Trey posted this on the South Park Stu­dios news feed:

In the 14 years we’ve been doing South Park we have never done a show that we couldn’t stand behind. We deliv­ered our ver­sion of the show to Com­edy Cen­tral and they made a deter­mi­na­tion to alter the episode. It wasn’t some meta-joke on our part. Com­edy Cen­tral added the bleeps. In fact, Kyle’s cus­tom­ary final speech was about intim­i­da­tion and fear. It didn’t men­tion Muham­mad at all but it got bleeped too. We’ll be back next week with a whole new show about some­thing com­pletely dif­fer­ent and we’ll see what hap­pens to it.

Com­edy Cen­tral has failed by giv­ing in to a group of idiots who only know how to get what they want through threats. By cen­sor­ing this episode, they showed that those threats will get exactly the desired reac­tion.

Stolen from Some­thing Awful

Sat­ur­day night I was dri­ving home from a friend’s house around 11 PM. I get off I-71 at SR18 like usual and then cut in to a neigh­bor­hood that leads me around to Smith Road so I can bypass all the stop­lights on 18. A few sec­onds later I see head­lights gain­ing on me rapidly which are clearly a Crown Vic­to­ria, and as I come to a stop and the car behind comes up to me, I can see the 800-GRAB-DUI plate up front indi­cat­ing it’s a police car. I turn on to Smith and the car con­tin­ues to fol­low me at a very close dis­tance down a fairly steep hill that I have to ride my brakes on to stay at 25 MPH. Obvi­ously no one ever does 25 MPH down that hill unless they have a cop rid­ing their ass wait­ing for them to speed. (by the way, if I was to have fol­lowed as closely behind that cop as he did behind me I’d have a ticket for tail­gat­ing. why does he get a free pass?)

At the bot­tom of the hill there’s a stop light, I con­tin­ued on straight and the offi­cer behind me turned off back towards route 18. About that time I get a call from a friend of mine who had seen the cop pull in behind me. Appar­ently he had flipped his lights on and cut across three lanes to fol­low me, so my friend thought I had been pulled over. I had made a bit of an aggres­sive turn in to the neigh­bor­hood and it was late on a Sat­ur­day night, so at the time I just fig­ured they were out on DUI patrol and had left once it was clear I wasn’t weav­ing (or even buzzed, I hadn’t drank a drop that day).

I keep going down Smith, then turn down 57 towards my apart­ment. As I pull away from a four-way stop, I see the same Med­ina PD unit that had been fol­low­ing me (I made note of the num­ber) pull up to the other side of the inter­sec­tion and then pull in behind me again. Approach­ing my street, I see a Med­ina Town­ship unit sit­ting in the street with his rear lights on. Com­ing around the cor­ner, there are three other units includ­ing Brunswick PD, Montville PD, and another Med­ina PD car in the park­ing lot of one of the other apart­ment build­ings on my street. The car that was once again fol­low­ing me pulled in behind the Town­ship unit in the street and fired up his lights as well. There is also a mid-90s Cadil­lac in the mid­dle of it all with some younger males stand­ing around it.

At this point I’m of course inter­ested. Rarely do you see five units on scene when noth­ing of inter­est has happened.

Today I fire up the Med­ina City PD Pub­lic Infor­ma­tion Log and pull up the infor­ma­tion for the weekend:

Incident #: 10-004590

Nature of Incident: Traffic Violation

Offense Reported: Traffic-Moving Violation

Time Reported: 23:20:10

Time Occurred Between: 23:20:10 02/20/10 - 23:20:10 02/20/10

Responsible Officer: Lynn S

Complainant:

Incident Address:
Springbrook; 300 Blk
Medina, OH 44256

Narrative:
No plate light

Five units from four agen­cies, two of which are out of their juris­dic­tion, for a license plate light? Really?

Yes­ter­day Pat Robert­son made another one of his trade­mark idi­otic state­ments. In response to Maine pro­vid­ing homo­sex­ual cou­ples the right to marry, Mr. Robert­son went on CBN and opened his mouth to let this shit drib­ble out:

Here is a tran­script, snagged from Think Progress:

HOST: Mean­while, the New Hamp­shire leg­is­la­ture has also voted in favor of gay mar­riage, but Pat, the gov­er­nor there still isn’t sure if he will approve that bill.

ROBERTSON: Lee, we haven’t taken this to its ulti­mate con­clu­sion. You got polygamy out there. How can we rule that polygamy is ille­gal when you say that homo­sex­ual mar­riage is legal. What is it about polygamy that’s dif­fer­ent? Well, polygamy was out­lawed because it was con­sid­ered immoral accord­ing to bib­li­cal stan­dards. But if we take bib­li­cal stan­dards away in homo­sex­u­al­ity, what about the other? And what about bes­tial­ity and ulti­mately what about child molesta­tion and pedophilia? How can we crim­i­nal­ize these things and at the same time have con­sti­tu­tional amend­ments allow­ing same-sex mar­riage among homo­sex­u­als. You mark my words, this is just the begin­ning in a long down­ward slide in rela­tion to all the things that we con­sider to be abhorrent.

He starts off with what is actu­ally a very good point. If polygamy was made ille­gal for reli­gious rea­sons, then it most cer­tainly should not be ille­gal. Of course my posi­tion is the reverse of his, so I see it as “so why is polygamy still ille­gal?” He then steps off the logic bus and boards the crazy train by claim­ing the next steps would then be bes­tial­ity and pedophilia. There’s this lit­tle detail he’s ignor­ing of course, and that is informed adult con­sent. Homo­sex­ual mar­riages are between two con­sent­ing adults. Polygamy would also be a num­ber of mar­riages between con­sent­ing adults. Bes­tial­ity, pedophilia, and all the other things the Chris­t­ian cra­zies claim nec­es­sar­ily fol­low gay mar­riage clearly don’t.

Can some­one please tell me why peo­ple keep lis­ten­ing to this igno­rant idiot?

Video cour­tesy Media Mat­ters.
Tran­script and inspi­ra­tion to write cour­tesy Think Progress.

I hon­estly can barely believe what I’m read­ing when I go through this ad. The list of restric­tions reads like a prison.

All the ten­ants I inter­view aren’t good enough via Friendly Athe­ist