Allspace in a Notshall

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 In 1923, New York repealed its state prohibition laws, leaving enforcement, for the remaining 10 years, entirely to the feds. California voters overwhelmingly did the same thing in 1932, one year before national prohibition was repealed.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

• California Voters Support Legalizing the Sale of Marijuana (yubanet.com)
• Black Community Split Over Legalizing Marijuana (npr.org)
• Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s Wrong-Headed Opposition to Marijuana Legalization (alternet.org)
• Dianne Feinstein Opposes Marijuana Legalization In California (huffingtonpost.com)
• Drug Czar Warns of “Black Market” for Marijuana (elections.firedoglake.com)

Found this on Disinfo via the Daily Mail today:

Americans who suggest Barack Obama should rot in hell are apparently deadly serious.

Nearly a quarter of Republicans believe the Democrat president ‘may be the Antichrist‘, according to a survey.

An even greater number compared him to Hitler.

More than half of the Republicans quizzed by Harris Poll, 57 per cent, believed the president was secretly Muslim, something he has consistently denied.

And 67 per cent of Republicans who responded believed Obama was a socialist, despite his central leanings.

The startling results came as lawyers representing 14 U.S. states filed lawsuits yesterday challenging an overhaul of the country’s $2.5trillion healthcare system, minutes after President Barack Obama signed the landmark legislation.

These people need to leave government service as quickly as possible. And I’m not talking about a nice retirement here either…

Related articles by Zemanta

• Quarter of Republicans think Barack Obama is ‘the Antichrist’ (telegraph.co.uk)
• AntiChristers: Nearly 25% of GOP Say Obama May be the AntiChrist (grantlawrence.blogspot.com)

Interesting article I found on NPR today.  It talks about how porn maestros have played a very influential role in the development of the Internet and its technologies.  Quotes below:

Think back to the early days of the Internet, Coopersmith says. “You had to have the hookup, you had to have the computer, you had to have the willingness to experiment a fair amount. And the people who do this tend to be young men, especially in their 20s and 30s, and this also happens to be a prime audience for pornography.”

Of course, that’s only taking into account pornographic Web sites — the Internet has also provided a private venue for sexual discussion and education. Violet Blue is a sex columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, writes for several online publications, and blogs and hosts a popular podcast called “Open Source Sex.”

“The Internet has been sexualized even before it was the Internet,” she says. Back in the days of bulletin board systems, some people would exchange what was known as “ASCII porn.”

Video technology is a place where adult sites have been especially innovative, integrating live video streams into browser windows with early “jpeg push” video. They continue to be on the cutting edge; Peter Acworth, who founded the very NSFW site kink.com, remembers a few years ago when customers were demanding live HD streams, but he couldn’t find an acceptable off-the-shelf solution.

“So we put together our own technology to be able to do so,” Acworth says. “You know, you go to CNN or anywhere else on the Web, the video you see is going to be significantly lower bandwidth.”

Very interesting read. Check it out.

Found this very informative article on Disinfo.com, discussing the effect that TV + propaganda has had on the psychology of America and the rest of the world:

It is expected that Americans will consistently prescribe to the doctrine of the television. It is subtly communicated that one should stay within the collective and never challenge the message, for doing so may be considered an aggression towards culture. The message is, “Be a good consumer; always obey authority; you know nothing; listen only to experts; be content and never question or express new ideas.” This signal is being broadcast across millions of screens, indoctrinating the unconscious minds of those who choose this as their only reality. Self-censorship occurs when these individuals become so deeply indoctrinated that they are afraid to discuss any information outside the paradigm of television-created culture; they police their thoughts to ensure they won’t conflict with this culture. Sadly, many people’s reality today does not allow any outside information to process, instead it is written off as conspiracy or blatant lies. Our consciousness has been destroyed so much that fiction has become reality. An entire lifestyle of poisonous foods, pharmaceuticals, and fluoridated water are accepted as safe and sold to us at the cost of our health and well being.

Crisis’ are created on a daily basis and broadcast across the airwaves to keep individuals in a state of panic and fear. Whether it be the threat of a pandemic or terrorism, the constant state of crisis has created a form of mental illness as we are slowly acclimated into an age of crisis. By using Hegelian dialectic, the television promotes the problem, guides our reaction, and presents the solution. The problem of terrorism was exclaimed, a strong emotional response was evoked, and it was stated that our rights need be sacrificed in order to protect us from the threat. We’ve lost personal sovereignty under the guise of terrorism; we’re stopped and searched; we’re watched by cameras as we go about our lives; and we’re encouraged to spy on our neighbors. We have been trained to accept the life of a prisoner.

Read the rest here.

I came across an article in The Washington Post this evening regarding technology, its role in our lives and what it’s doing to us and where it’s leading us.  It’s very short but brings up some valid observations.

Technology has drawn us into our interconnected webs, in the office, on the street, on the park bench, to the point that we exist virtually everywhere except in the physical world. Robert Harrison, a professor of Italian literature at Stanford University, laments that when students pass through the school’s visually stimulating campus, iPhones, BlackBerrys and all the evolving devices and apps draw them into their blinkered personal realms. “Most of the groves, courtyards, gardens, fountains, artworks, open spaces and architectural complexes have disappeared behind a cloaking device, it would seem,” he writes in his book “Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition.”

Actually, we have become symbionts, says Katherine Hayles, author of “How We Became Posthuman.” Just as a lichen is the marriage of a fungus and an algae, we now live in full partnership with digital technology, which we rely on for the infrastructure of our lives. “If every computer were to crash tomorrow, it would be catastrophic,” she says. “Millions or billions of people would die. That’s the condition of being a symbiont.”

Hayles is among a number of intellectuals who see this dependence as not necessarily bad, but as advancing civilization and, above all, just inevitable. “From Thoreau on, we have had this dream we can withdraw from our technologies and live closer to the natural world, and yet that’s not the cultural trajectory that we have followed,” says Hayles, a professor of literature at Duke University. “You could say when humans started to walk upright, we lost touch with the natural world. We lost an olfactory sense of the world, but obviously bipedalism paid big dividends.”

She argues that this has actually made us more aware of our surroundings because so many devices are driven by their location and the user’s awareness of place. “The BlackBerry might be looking for a local restaurant and a person two blocks away, not overseas. If you’re walking downtown and you can access information that’s been tagged there, that information suddenly becomes part of that location.”

You can read the entire article here.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, especially the last quote; about how you can access information about a piece of space you’re physically residing in at the moment.  It’s called augmented reality and will quickly become ubiquitous, probably in less than five years would be my guess.  Make sure to click that link to the Wikipedia article about it.  You can also read about what Google is doing with their new service Google Goggles.

Do I feel disconnected from nature as this article seems to suggest?  Not at all.  Because I ask myself, frequently, what is nature?  Aren’t we humans a part of nature, no matter what we do, what we create and what we ultimately evolve to?  Is an urban concrete jungle a part of nature?  Yes.  It is, but it’s humanity’s addition to nature.

I don’t believe that we need to reconnect with nature in anyway.  I think that with technology, we are connecting to nature in a way that has never been done before.  Technology itself is neutral.  Technology is not the question here, it’s how we’re using these tools that’s the question.  Technology is just the extension of our senses and that’s the scary part.  We are augmenting our nervous systems and ultimately our bodies.

I think that this evolutionary path of complete technological integration is unavoidable, of course, but I also believe that everything is on track, according to some predetermined or destined goal, but I come to a dead stop when I try to think of what this end goal is.  It could be a myriad of things but I, for one, cannot wait to find out what it is and am also ecstatic to be alive at a time like this.