The government's costly War on Drugs has been the butt of many jokes, but here is a tragicomical story of an amateur gardener whose poppies put him on the wrong side of the law.
In addition to the horticultural advice, Opium for the Masses offered simple recipes for making "poppy tea" from either store-bought or homegrown poppies, and reported that a cup of this infusion (which is apparently a traditional home remedy in many cultures) would reliably relieve pain and anxiety and "produce a sense of well-being and relaxation." Bigger doses of the tea would produce euphoria and a "waking sleep" populated by dreams of a terrific vividness. Hogshire cautioned that the tea, like all opiates, was addictive if taken too many days in a row; otherwise, its only notable side effect was constipation.
As for the legal implications, Hogshire was encouragingly vague: "Opium, the juice of the poppy, is a controlled substance but it's unclear how illegal the plant itself is." Here is how I figured one might be able to toe the line safely between the cultivation of opium poppies, routine enough in the gardening world, and felony possession of opium if opium is the extruded sap of the unripe seedpod, then the dried heads used to make tea by definition did not involve one with opium. Hogshire didn't go quite that far, but he did write that "it is unclear whether it is illegal to brew tea from poppies you've purchased legally from the store." As will soon become evident, Jim Hogshire is no longer unclear on either of these points.
Despite the off-putting name, ColorWhore has a really nice palette of colors. The Greens are a bit bright, but the Browns, Blues, and Muted are very nice.
The Washington Post has a pretty balanced column about Bush's "leadership style", citing both supporters and critics, inside and outside the White House. A particularly choice quote:
Some administration officials complained that one problem with Bush's reliance on his gut instincts is that often officials who have to sell or implement a policy are unsure how he arrived at it. The president told Woodward in "Bush at War": "I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel I owe anybody an explanation."
And this, the following, is perhaps the single most infuriating thing I've heard come out of George W. Bush's lips:
"I know who I am. I know what I believe in," Bush said. "The good thing about democracy, if people like the decisions you make, they'll let you stay. If they don't, they'll send me back to Crawford. Isn't all that bad a deal, by the way."
The whole presidency is just a wonderful game! And if he does well, we'l let him stay! If he does poorly, he just has to go home to his ranch! Isn't that a great deal? Isn't it great that his decisions, good or bad, won't actually cost anyone lives or have any real ramifications? Oh isn't being president just peachy keen?
Latest essay by Garrison Keillor. We're Not In Lake Wobegon anymore Read it. Now.
Here in 2004, George W. Bush is running for reelection on a platform of tragedy—the single greatest failure of national defense in our history, the attacks of 9/11 in which 19 men with box cutters put this nation into a tailspin, a failure the details of which the White House fought to keep secret even as it ran the country into hock up to the hubcaps, thanks to generous tax cuts for the well-fixed, hoping to lead us into a box canyon of debt that will render government impotent, even as we engage in a war against a small country that was undertaken for the president’s personal satisfaction but sold to the American public on the basis of brazen misinformation, a war whose purpose is to distract us from an enormous transfer of wealth taking place in this country, flowing upward, and the deception is working beautifully.
The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few is the death knell of democracy. No republic in the history of humanity has survived this. The election of 2004 will say something about what happens to ours. The omens are not good.
Our beloved land has been fogged with fear—fear, the greatest political strategy ever. An ominous silence, distant sirens, a drumbeat of whispered warnings and alarms to keep the public uneasy and silence the opposition. And in a time of vague fear, you can appoint bullet-brained judges, strip the bark off the Constitution, eviscerate federal regulatory agencies, bring public education to a standstill, stupefy the press, lavish gorgeous tax breaks on the rich.
This is as funny as Doctor Fun: Spamusement. New cartoon each day whose caption is drawn from spam in the author's inbox. Hilarious.
(Bonus points for whoever is first to spot the trogdor reference.)
Security expert Bruce Schneier has an excellent essay about terrorism and security.
It's one thing to issue a hurricane warning, and advise people to board up their windows and remain in the basement. Hurricanes are short-term events, and it's obvious when the danger is imminent and when it's over. People respond to the warning, and there is a discrete period when their lives are markedly different. They feel there was a usefulness to the higher alert mode, even if nothing came of it.
It's quite another to tell people to remain on alert, but not to alter their plans. According to scientists, California is expecting a huge earthquake sometime in the next 200 years. Even though the magnitude of the disaster will be enormous, people just can't stay alert for 200 years. It goes against human nature. Residents of California have the same level of short-term fear and long-term apathy regarding the threat of earthquakes that the rest of the nation has developed regarding the DHS's terrorist threat alert.
A terrorist alert that instills a vague feeling of dread or panic, without giving people anything to do in response, is ineffective. Even worse, it echoes the very tactics of the terrorists. There are two basic ways to terrorize people. The first is to do something spectacularly horrible, like flying airplanes into skyscrapers and killing thousands of people. The second is to keep people living in fear. Decades ago, that was one of the IRA's major aims. Inadvertently, the DHS is achieving the same thing.
What good is the right to vote if your vote doesn't get counted, or gets dropped into the Gulf of Mexico? Slate has a depressing article about the sorry state of electoral affairs in Florida.
Gov. Bush's own task force on the 2000 election recommended that the Legislature change county election supervisors from elected to nonpartisan positions. But the Legislature did not act on this recommendation, nor on the suggestion of election reform groups that the secretary of state also be selected by a nonpartisan commission, to ensure the necessary firewall between election officials and politicians.
There are excellent reasons for this recommendation. Following the contentious 2000 recount, e-mails on former Sec. of State Katherine Harris' computer revealed that she had been in contact with Jeb Bush during the recount, contrary to both their claims. Miami Herald reporter Meg Laughlin discovered that e-mail messages sent to Jeb Bush from Harris had been deleted after the recount. Harris then had the operating system of her computer changed, a procedure that erased all its data. "What was odd about what she did," said Mark Seibel, an editor at the Herald, "was that they installed an old operating system—not a new one—which makes you wonder why they did it."
I love Usenet. What more is there to say? Godwin's Law (I especially like James' Corollary)
Also check out Benford's Law of Controversy
Doug's Applescript site is pretty famous, but I didn't realize he had a special section just for his iTunes Applescripts. (One cool one is "make bookmarkable", which makes any track have the "resume playback" feature that is enabled by default on audiobooks.
I found a great and informative page about how to fight a speeding ticket in court.
No, I didn't just get a ticket, but if you did, then read the above!
After getting fed up with iPhoto's inability to handle a large photo library (and its repeated crashes), I downloaded Picasa. OMFG this app is sweet. Windows only for now; I don't know if it'll run on Linux with WINE. It imported several over 4,000 images pretty quickly (< 1 hour) and organized them by date. The user interface isn't perfect (it's still got too many wordy options on menus and context menus etc.), but it's the best thing I've seen to date on the PC.
Slate's William Saletan has a great editorial about Kerry's acceptance speech and how Bush wrote it for him:
The theory behind Bush's hard-line style of governance came from his chief political adviser, Karl Rove. Rove believed that Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 because millions of conservatives stayed home. He believed that Bush's father lost the 1992 election by alienating the right and creating a Republican primary challenge by Pat Buchanan. So, on issue after issue, the current President Bush has played to his base. On Rove's theory, every step to the right earns Bush another conservative vote.
...
In his determination to unite the right, Bush hasn't just united the left. He has lost the center. Look at last week's New York Times/CBS News poll of registered voters....