Tuesday, April 21st, 2009
of four links:
How do you like the tons of money (that’s $100 billion a year) hunkered down like a skunk in off-shore tax havens?
Because you never know. The Unofficial MacGyver How-To Handbook (at scribd).
Failed drug laws. The elephant in the room. Wasted money. I say again: start with legalizing marijuana. Tax the hell out of it. Use the funds to set up and maintain free drug treatment facilities. (But those who have a horse in the race as far as maintaining the status quo — think of all those jobs — will quash the idea in its crib.)
Addendum 4/25: the Wall Street Journal (Steven B. Duke) agrees with me on marijuana, cocaine, and other drugs.
A most impressive experiment has been underway in Portugal since 2001, when that country decriminalized the possession and personal use of all psychotropic drugs. According to a study just published by the Cato Institute, “judged by virtually every metric,” the Portuguese decriminalization “has been a resounding success.” Contrary to the prognostications of prohibitionists, the numbers of Portuguese drug users has not increased since decriminalization. Indeed, the percentage of the population who has ever used these drugs is lower in Portugal than virtually anywhere else in the European Union and is far below the percentage of users in the U.S.. One explanation for this startling fact is that decriminalization has both freed up funds for drug treatment and, by lifting the threat of criminal charges, encouraged drug abusers to seek that treatment.
We can try to deal with the Mexican murderers as we first dealt with Al Capone and his minions, or we can apply the lessons we learned from alcohol prohibition and finish dismantling the destructive prohibition experiment. We should begin by decriminalizing marijuana now.
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Sunday, March 22nd, 2009
The Big Takeover - published in Rolling Stone, writer Matt Taibbi.
As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren’t hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.
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Friday, March 6th, 2009
“If only I’d followed CNBC’s advice, I’d have a million dollars, provided I’d started with a hundred million dollars.”
Since we’re strictly through-the-air TV now, we miss out on the pontifications of these “smart guys” — oh, please do watch. It’s cathartic.
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Monday, February 16th, 2009
Yesterday I felt so wonderfully vindicated as I read the best explanation of why “journalists” act as oddly (establishment-supportive) as they do, their mind-numbing fluff and bluster (across the board), and why there’s a horrid dearth of the watchdog of yore.
People like Brooks don’t merely expect that political officials will ignore and violate their own campaign commitments once they get into office. They think that political officials should do that, that it’s naive and foolish if political officials actually take seriously the commitments they make to citizens during a campaign.
the political and media establishment joining together to deliberately distort American public opinion and thus render it irrelevant in what the political class does [...] The most significant fact of American political life is that political journalists (of all people) see their role primarily as defenders of, servants to, spokespeople for the Washington establishment. That’s how they obtain all of their rewards and remain relevant.
Tie this to this op-ed by Frank Rich (“They Sure Showed That Obama”) in which he describes the hysteria by the media following several moves by Obama (including the most recent stimulus) wherein the sky was falling to the Beltway insiders and talking heads but Americans in general felt diametrically opposed (or “in a parallel universe,” as Rich quotes Axelrod).
I’m further encouraged in skimming this article (to which I’ll p’rhaps return later to read in full) in which Obama is seen as savvy and practical (or as the title says, “An Eternal Optimist — But Not A Sap“). High points: clarity about goals but flexibility about tactics, constant reevaluation of efficacy of plans, elasticity, responsiveness, the long view:
and open to adjusting his own course to bring others along or simply to respond to evidence that his ideas aren’t working. But repeatedly he declared that no one should interpret that to mean he lacks any clarity about his goals: “My consistent bottom line is: How do we make sure that the American people can work, have a decent income, look after their kids and we can grow the economy.” Any compromises or course corrections, he argued, must serve those overriding priorities.
It’s very interesting that the “steering from point to point” is much in line with a book (excellent, thx Z.), on project management, advocating setting short term deliverables and inherent tasks with precision, but adopting a more flexible approach for items further out which may need to be adjusted or for which circumstances may dictate change.
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