A good friend of mine sent me an L.A. Times op-ed piece on why California really should legalize marijuana in the upcoming November ballot. I like how the author, Hanna Liebman Dershowitz, focuses on the issue of Federal involvement versus states rights and how it would only require an simple amendment to the Controlled Substances Act and not a constitutional amendment.
I’ll post some highlights below but highly recommend an entire read through. It’s not that long.
The federal-state dynamic concerning marijuana is not complicated. Under our system of federalism, both the states and the feds may prohibit commerce in marijuana, but neither is required to do so. Similarly, during alcohol prohibition (1920-33), commerce in alcoholic beverages was prohibited not only by federal law (the Volstead Act) but by the laws of most states. In 1923, New York repealed its state prohibition laws, leaving enforcement, for the remaining 10 years, entirely to the feds. California voters overwhelmingly did the same thing in 1932, one year before national prohibition was repealed.
The second ball is even more significant. Voter approval of Proposition 19 would shift to the feds the responsibility and burden of justifying marijuana prohibition in the first place. Now, the Washingtonians who have never questioned decades of anti-pot propaganda can explain to the people of California why we cannot be trusted to determine our state’s marijuana policies. Let them endorse the prohibition laws’ usefulness as a tool of oppressing minorities. Let them celebrate how minor marijuana violations cost people their jobs, their housing, custody of their kids, and entrap them permanently in vast criminal justice databases. Let them justify the utter hypocrisy of the legal treatment of alcohol and tobacco, as compared with the illegal treatment of marijuana. Let them tell us how many more people will have to be prosecuted and punished before marijuana is eradicated, how much that will cost, and where the money will come from.
Proposition 19′s success in November would put the feds in a quandary, yes, but it is a quandary of their own making. Unlike alcohol prohibition, which required a constitutional amendment, Congress could fix this easily with a simple amendment to the Controlled Substances Act allowing conduct legal under state law and respecting the right of states to regulate and tax the cannabis industry. After all, determining what is a crime is traditionally handled at the state level; indeed, federal prosecutions of drug possession make up a miniscule portion of overall drug arrests.
Additional Links
I’m not lying, read it here at Huffington Post:
Republicans in the House of Representatives have introduced a measure that would green-light an Israeli bombing campaign against Iran. The resolution, H.Res. 1553 (in full below), provides explicit support for military strikes against Iran, stating that Congress supports Israel’s use of “all means necessary” against Iran “including the use of military force”. US military leaders have warned that strikes could be catastrophic to US national security interests and could engulf the Middle East in a “calamitous” regional war.
Hawkish former Bush Administration official John Bolton recently laid out the game plan to prod Israel into attacking Iran, arguing that outsiders can “create broad support” for a strike by framing it as an issue of Israel’s right to self defense. Supporters for military strikes, Bolton says, should “defend the specific tactic of pre-emptive attacks” against Iran. He urges that Congress can “make it clear” that it supports such strikes and that “having visible congressional support in place at the outset will reassure the Israeli government, which is legitimately concerned about Mr. Obama’s likely negative reaction to such an attack.”
Simulations have been conducted over the past year to assess the outcome of a preemptive military strike against Iran. One such simulation, by the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center, found that strikes would draw the US into the conflict that would engulf the region into war, and would enable Iran to use the attacks as an opportunity to unite the Iranian people and dismantle its opposition. The simulation also found that the strikes could not destroy Iran’s nuclear program but merely set it back a few years.
So we aren’t “winning” in Iraq and Afghanistan and yet we want to open up a third offensive front in Iran? Why not attack North Korea too?
According to Juan Cole, here’s what would happen if Israel was to strike Iran:
- Iran will use Shiite operatives and militiamen to kill the increasingly vulnerable remaining US troops in Iraq (once there are less than 50,000 non-combat troops in that country, they are not troops, they are hostages).
- Iran will stir up its substantial number of clients in Afghanistan to hit the United States, widening the insurgency from mainly Pashtun Taliban to include fundamentalist Tajiks and Hazaras. The US will remain mired in that war, perhaps for decades, as a result.
- Iran will probably bide its time and act in covert and hard to trace ways against US interests in the region. There could be more operations like the Khobar Towers bombing of US troops in Saudi Arabia or the 1983 attack on a Marine barracks in Beirut. All US commercial and government offices in the region would become targets.
- A fair likelihood exists that Hizbullah would do something to Israel in revenge, possibly provoking another Israel-Lebanon War. The last war did not go well for Israel, despite its massive military superiority. A fourth of Israelis were forced to move house, chemical gas facilities in Haifa were threatened (and the Dimona Nuclear plant that makes all those Israeli nuclear warheads could be), and Hizbullah had broken Israeli radio encryption and knew all the Israeli army plans beforehand.
- Not only would the democratically inclined opposition movement in Iran evaporate, but Muslim fundamentalists in Egypt, Jordan and other US allies would mobilize and perhaps gain in popularity out of anti-imperial solidarity. (Only 6% of ordinary Arabs is worried about an Iranian nuclear bomb, whereas almost all are disturbed by Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians).
- The price of oil would spike, likely to 2008 highs of $140 a barrel, throwing the world back into Depression.
- Once such hostilities began, and given these likely responses, the US could well get sucked into a third major Middle East war, against a country geographically much bigger than either Iraq or Afghanistan, and more than twice as populous as each of them. At another $1 trillion, that cost would push the US into $14 trillion in indebtedness all by itself, and since that is American annual gross domestic product, it could trigger a downgrading of American credit, making the interest servicing on existing and future loans far more expensive and, along with crippling high oil prices, beginning America’s final spiral down into poverty and weakness.
Okay, this is gross. Seems there’s been four feet of fat removed from the walls of London’s sewers. From the Independent:
Enough fat to fill nine double-decker buses is being removed from sewers under London’s Leicester Square.
A team of “flushers” equipped with full breathing apparatus has been drafted in with shovels to dig out an estimated 1,000 tonnes of putrid fat.
And powerful jets are being used to break it down.
The operation, which began in the early hours of this morning, is claimed to be the largest-ever sewer clean-up of its kind.
The build-up is the result of years of “sewer abuse” – when anything other than water, human waste and toilet paper is put down drains – according to Thames Water.
Danny Brackley, the water company’s sewer flusher, said: “We’re used to getting our hands dirty, but nothing on this scale.
“We couldn’t even access the sewer as it was blocked by a four-foot wall of solid fat.”
The clean-up is expected to last a couple of weeks.
Thames Water spends £12 million a year clearing around 55,000 sewer blockages across London and the Thames Valley.
Read the article and see a picture here.
You’re welcome.
Easily one of my favorite artists currently making music today, Venetian Snares, is set to release his next studio album on August 23rd. It’ll be called “My So-Called Life” and comes in the standard CD, Vinyl and MP3 releases. It will also be the first release on Aaron Funk’s new sublabel, Timesig.
Here is the release off the official page:
“My So-Called Life” is the first release on my brand new record label Timesig. The majority of these tracks were made quite quickly, in a day or 2 each. These are the ones I feel closest to, I can listen to one of these 10 tracks and remember that day exactly, all that I was feeling, just where my head was at, whether it was a good memory, a laugh, something that was bugging me or something bumming me out. Listening brings me back to that day, whereas hearing some of my other albums brings me back to some period in my life in general. I was explaining to a friend the other day, it was more like a collection of short stories than a novel for me. Diary entries he said, and they really are, pockets of inspiration realized within a day. For me it is remote viewing my own memories with clearer and clearer mind binoculars. All important pieces in my puzzle, this kind of filing system I have that sits outside my cognitive filing yet is clear in this system. Of course all of this probably means nothing to you but you have to write something in these things so when you send out promos nobody has to think of anything thoughtful to say about it themselves. Usually I write a bunch of preposterous shit to poke fun at that whole process but I didn’t feel like that today. Maybe tomorrow I will.
You can view the official release page at Planet Mu’s website here. Cannot wait, especially for Hajnal2!
Fascinating article at Wired today: “Leafy Green Coherence: Quantum Physics Fuels Photosynthesis”. Excerpt below:
A process called coherence allows photon energy to find the shortest path through a leaf’s surface by taking all possible paths simultaneously, then “picking” the best one. The resulting energy transfer is almost perfectly efficient.
Researchers hope these findings will guide the design of solar panels that are as efficient as nature’s, said Harel. In the meantime, scientists will continue looking for more evidence of quantum biology, which has been also been posited in the structure of DNA and operations of the mind.
