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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

Fixed the pretty URLs and RSS feed (blasted mod_rewrite), added Gra­vatar sup­port, a tag cloud, and a down­load sys­tem that I may or may not ever use.

The Sub­ver­sion install/upgrade method wins again, bump­ing up to 2.7 was a sin­gle com­mand while logged in as www-data on my server and then accesing wp-admin/upgrade.php

Today is the 75^th anniver­sary of the repeal of Pro­hi­bi­tion.  As a fan of alco­hol in all its forms, I fig­ured I’d write up a bit of his­tory and my thoughts on the lessons of Prohibition.

The roots of Pro­hi­bi­tion can be traced to the mid-1800s when cer­tain Chris­t­ian groups, par­tic­u­larly Methodists and later Bap­tists.  Many states passed dry laws lead­ing up to Decem­ber 1917 when the eigh­teenth amend­ment was pro­posed.  The amend­ment took over a year before it was rat­i­fied in Jan­u­ary of 1919 when Utah approved it.  Rhode Island and Con­necti­cut were the only two states to not rat­ify the amend­ment, and in fact both put out state­ments reject­ing it.

Of course many Amer­i­cans did not like the gov­ern­ment telling them what they could drink, so the new ille­gal sta­tus didn’t really do much except cre­ate a black mar­ket.  Now what comes with a black mar­ket?  That’s right, crime.  If it weren’t for Pro­hi­bi­tion, do you really think gang­sters like Al Capone could have made as much money as they made and had the power that they had?

We all know by now that the gov­ern­ment is slow to real­ize its mis­takes, and even slower when those mis­takes are still being backed by pow­er­ful polit­i­cal groups.  Due to the incred­i­ble influ­ence of the reli­gious groups who sup­ported pro­hi­bi­tion it took four­teen years before the twenty-first amend­ment was pro­posed in Feb­ru­ary of 1933.  Once again, Utah was the state that made it offi­cial by cross­ing the 2/3 require­ment on this day 75 years ago.  South Car­olina rejected the amend­ment and North Carolina’s vot­ers decided against hav­ing a con­ven­tion to con­sider it.

I believe these lessons need to be applied to many other recreational-use drugs such as mar­i­juana.  The mod­ern alco­hol dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tem shows how to effi­ciently oper­ate and reg­u­late such drugs, and sales num­bers show how many of us are respon­si­bly using it.  I don’t see any rea­son the same can’t apply to the world’s favorite smok­able plant.

Some argue that legal­iz­ing mar­i­juana for recre­ational use will put every­one in dan­ger with peo­ple work­ing and/or dri­ving stoned.  Again I say just look at alco­hol.  The vast major­ity of the pop­u­la­tion con­sumes it safely and those who don’t are dealt with strictly.  When vapor­ized it has very lit­tle effect on res­pi­ra­tory health (unlike tobacco), not to men­tion it can be eaten, and it is impos­si­ble to over­dose with­out a direct IV injec­tion of THC (unlike alcohol).

It just seems hyp­o­crit­i­cal and point­less to make a safer and more enjoy­able drug ille­gal, fuel­ing a black mar­ket, when we could be reg­u­lat­ing qual­ity and fund­ing projects with taxed while also allow­ing our cit­i­zens to alter their state of mind as they choose.

I passed the test last week­end, but as of yes­ter­day I have a call­sign so I am offi­cially a licensed ama­teur radio oper­a­tor in the United States and any­where else where ama­teurs are gov­erned by the FCC or where the US has rec­i­p­ro­cal licens­ing agreements.

I don’t have any hard­ware yet, but I’m now look­ing for some starter gear and get­ting myself on Echolink.

Call­sign is KD8JQS

I just got back from vot­ing and sur­pris­ingly it was unevent­ful.  I say sur­pris­ingly because this is Ohio, where 2004 and 2006 elec­tions have shown sig­nif­i­cant con­cerns with the elec­tronic vot­ing machines AND on top of that they’re Diebold Accu­Vote TSX units.  Diebold of course being known for appar­ently not using a bit of their secu­rity knowl­edge gained from devel­op­ing ATMs on their vot­ing machines.

I showed up at the polling loca­tion at a bit after 8 AM, fail­ing to find it on the first pass even though there are huge signs out front say­ing “VOTE HERE”.  I blame that on being a bit hung over (yes­ter­day sucked, so Nick and I tried to invent a Jeremy Clark­son drink­ing game with a bot­tle of Skyy while watch­ing Thriller).

Here was the only real issue I had all morn­ing.  I hadn’t a clue what precinct I was in for my polling loca­tion, when I voted in 2004 there was basi­cally one place for every­one reg­is­tered on cam­pus.  The map they offered wasn’t help­ful at all, so even­tu­ally I found a list of names that I was on and caught a very tiny “D” marked in the cor­ner.  I wan­dered over to the Precinct D table, showed my ID, signed in, and was handed a smart card.  After about 5 min­utes in line I walked up and went through the system.

The UI was actu­ally quite nice, well designed, and clear.  The font ren­der­ing made it clear there was Win­dows behind it which is a bit annoy­ing, but I already knew that.  The ver­i­fi­ca­tion page was decent and I enjoyed how it printed the infor­ma­tion page by page as I looked at it on the screen, allow­ing for easy ver­i­fi­ca­tion.  The only com­plaint I have about this part of the process is that the printer was badly cho­sen.  Fonts are small and ther­mal paper just doesn’t last.

After ver­i­fy­ing my vote, the smart card popped out.  I handed it to a poll worker and headed to work.

Pharyn­gula: What word is miss­ing in this story?.

A very inter­est­ing point by PZ Mey­ers, why is it that white Amer­i­can con­ser­v­a­tives are exempt from the label “terrorist”?

Hell, I’m a white Amer­i­can and I’ve been told I’m sup­port­ing “the ter­ror­ists” because I’m against the PATRIOT act.  I guess being nutty on the con­ser­v­a­tive side of the spec­trum earns one spe­cial treat­ment once again.

On that note, I had a con­ver­sa­tion with a few cowork­ers today about how even if (when, I hope) Barack Obama wins the elec­tion there’s a non-trivial chance one of these right-wing nut­balls will take a shot at him.  It’s a sad state this country’s in.  I hope for the best and pre­pare for the worst.  Such an occur­ance would not end well.

Those fun­da­men­tal­ist idiots are at it again, this time try­ing to rile up the red states with an exag­ger­ated let­ter writ­ten from the per­spec­tive of an evan­gel­i­cal in 2012 under an Obama admin­is­tra­tion (PDF).

I hes­i­tate to start on this post because it’s already 11 PM and I have to work tomor­row, but I’ve been think­ing about this since Hemant Mehta posted about it yes­ter­day and I just feel I have to get some­thing out.

I’m just going to start from the top, quot­ing the parts I feel like dis­cussing and fol­low­ing them up with my thoughts.

The most far-reaching trans­for­ma­tion of Amer­i­can soci­ety came from the Supreme Court’s stun­ning affir­ma­tion, in early 2010, that homo­sex­ual “mar­riage” was a “con­sti­tu­tion­al”  right that had to be respected by all 50 states because laws bar­ring same-sex “mar­riage” vio­lated the Equal Pro­tec­tion clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Oh no, you mean Equal Pro­tec­tion means Equal for every­one?  *shock*

Sud­denly, homo­sex­ual “mar­riage” was the law of the land in all 50 states, and no state leg­is­la­ture, no state Supreme Court, no state Con­sti­tu­tional amend­ment, not even Con­gress, had any power to change it.

Well yea, I think that’s the point of the Fed­eral gov­ern­ment, it over­rides the indi­vid­ual states.  As for Con­gress, last time I checked they’ve changed the Con­sti­tu­tion twenty seven times.  It just takes a lot more polit­i­cal will and power than the fundie nut­bags can come up with so they ignore real­ity and lie because it sounds bet­ter to them.

This was a bla­tant exam­ple of cre­at­ing law by the court, for homo­sex­ual “mar­riage” was men­tioned nowhere in the Con­sti­tu­tion, nor would any of the authors have imag­ined that same-sex “mar­riage” could be derived from their words.

Mar­riage as a whole is not men­tioned in the Con­sti­tu­tion.  Would you rather have the Fed­eral Gov­ern­ment have no recog­ni­tion of mar­riage at all?  (Side Note, per­son­ally I’d much pre­fer to either split the reli­gious cer­e­mony of mar­riage from couple’s ben­e­fits as the gov­ern­ment sees them or even throw out any spe­cial treat­ment for cou­ples of any kind.  Why should some­one get a tax break just because they signed a paper and pos­si­bly bought a ring?)

Boy Scouts: “The land of the free”? The Boy Scouts no longer exist as an orga­ni­za­tion. They chose to dis­band rather than be forced to obey the Supreme Court deci­sion that they would have to hire homo­sex­ual scout­mas­ters and allow them to sleep in tents with young boys.

How is this a bad thing?  The Boy Scouts were once a decent orga­ni­za­tion that has since been taken over by the reli­gious right and unfor­tu­nately due to its past man­ages to con­tinue using pub­lic spaces at lit­tle to no cost and receive tax dol­lars even though it is heav­ily dis­crim­i­na­tory.  Pri­vate orga­ni­za­tion my ass.

As for the part about homo­sex­ual scout­mas­ters sleep­ing in tents with young boys, over­all this is just going back to one of the long-lasting claims of the anti-gay crowd, that gay men are all pedophiles.  Even with that said I could see how one could be uncom­fort­able with that sit­u­a­tion for the same rea­son you wouldn’t have a male lead­ing a Girl Scout troop and shar­ing a tent with them on some out­ing.  The idea that the BSA would be legally required to do that is absurd, but of course absur­dity doesn’t bother the reli­gious when they’re try­ing to make a point.

Gah fuck, I’m get­ting so annoyed just read­ing that let­ter that I can’t fin­ish right now.  I’ll come back to this post after I calm down.

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Orig­i­nally uploaded by fuz­heado

Food, friends, and no stress.

Fri­day night after work Nick and I went out hunt­ing beer, then came back to play Rock Band 2, dur­ing which Nevans joined us and made me look like a fool on the drums by comparison.

Sat­ur­day the Dish installer came by in the morn­ing and con­firmed that I couldn’t receive a satel­lite sig­nal, thus get­ting me out of my con­tract.  I then went out and bought stuff for the car to catch up on main­tainance and finally get it to stop com­plain­ing about my lack of washer fluid.

Sat­ur­day night Lacy came over and of course was the high­light of the week­end, she hadn’t seen Iron Man so after a House marathon we watched that and then went to bed.

This morn­ing after she left to go to work, Nick and I went up to Chardon for a bar­be­cue at some church his par­ents are affil­i­ated with.  We both noted the strange­ness of two hard­ened athe­ists attend­ing an event at a church, Catholic no less, but it was good food and a way to start off the day.  We then headed out to Welling­ton where I picked up some of my stuff that was still sit­ting around at Charlie’s place, then after a minor detour to Sam’s Club for food and Home Depot to replace the bro­ken toi­let seat here we headed home to relax with some beers and TV.