Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Drugs Harmfulness: the Source...
Reader Doug S. sends in an online page (free registration required) with the source study for the interesting chart on drugs harmfulness I posted about the other day. It's a legitimate, published study; their methods are fully described. After reading it, I'd call this study very interesting support for the proposition that drugs legalization is unlikely to be any more dangerous to society than (the already legal substances) alcohol and tobacco already are...
Shame...
Both parties do this sort of spinning, but this is particularly egregious:
Somehow I don't think this is going to make much difference today...
The Obama administration has secured pledges from senior Mideast leaders to continue their fitful peace negotiations until after next month's U.S. midterm elections, largely to avoid handing the Obama administration an embarrassing diplomatic setback before the Nov. 2 elections.So the peace talks have been a big flop (no surprise there, given the history for the past 80 years or so), and Obama doesn't want the flop to register on the election.
Somehow I don't think this is going to make much difference today...
Monday, November 1, 2010
Unemployment Index...
According to Google's Unemployment Index, things are looking better recently. The numbers (twiddled, as reported by the government) are still pretty grim, so I have no idea why. Click to enlarge the graph below.
Drugs Harmfulness...
The chart at right (click to enlarge) shows the various drugs ranked by harm to the user (most harmful first). Alcohol tops the rankings both by harm to users and to society.
First question that occurs to me: is the overall “harm score” normalized to per capita, or is it an aggregate score? If the latter, then alcohol's position at the top is hardly surprising. If the former, then these results are certainly surprising to me!
This study's results support the position of many drug legalization advocates (including me): the drugs prohibited today aren't any more harmful than the perfectly legal alcohol and tobacco. The illegal drugs have been demonized, much as alcohol was before Prohibition...
Morning Walk...
The air was beautiful this morning, cool and relatively dry. We woke an hour or so early, and the dogs and I were on our morning walk at 2:20 am. I'm glad I went early, because I got to see some unusual sights...
For starters, the waning moon was just barely visible above the mountains to our northeast. It's only about a third lit now, and it was further dimmed by being close to the horizon. As a consequence, the Milky Way was still visible stretching overhead. Jupiter was just above the southwestern hills, and my old friend Orion was high in the sky. The Big Dipper is fully visible, too. An altogether glorious sky this morning...
Yesterday Debbie and I attacked the dried brush in our main yard. We cleared a bit over an acre, with me whacking away with a steel-bladed brush-cutter, and Debbie rolling up the cut brush into a few big piles. As soon as we can get a burn permit, we're going to do our bit to contribute a little more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere...
The dogs found another spot visited by a night-time beastie. It was hard to persuade the three field spaniels that they should leave; they wanted to inhale that beastie's scent indefinitely. Meanwhile, Race was madly running about all over the area we cleared yesterday – he was loving the unobstructed running space...
I would have enjoyed a longer walk this morning, but work beckons...
For starters, the waning moon was just barely visible above the mountains to our northeast. It's only about a third lit now, and it was further dimmed by being close to the horizon. As a consequence, the Milky Way was still visible stretching overhead. Jupiter was just above the southwestern hills, and my old friend Orion was high in the sky. The Big Dipper is fully visible, too. An altogether glorious sky this morning...
Yesterday Debbie and I attacked the dried brush in our main yard. We cleared a bit over an acre, with me whacking away with a steel-bladed brush-cutter, and Debbie rolling up the cut brush into a few big piles. As soon as we can get a burn permit, we're going to do our bit to contribute a little more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere...
The dogs found another spot visited by a night-time beastie. It was hard to persuade the three field spaniels that they should leave; they wanted to inhale that beastie's scent indefinitely. Meanwhile, Race was madly running about all over the area we cleared yesterday – he was loving the unobstructed running space...
I would have enjoyed a longer walk this morning, but work beckons...
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Brrr... A Cold Morning in the Chaparral...
We slept in this morning, so I didn't walk the dogs until about 6:30. At that hour, the eastern sky was just starting to lighten, and I could dimly see the yard. It was 44°F (7°C) outside, and 100% relative humidity, making it feel quite cold for these parts. The dogs seemed to enjoy this very much; they were all quite frisky.
The best part for me, though, was that our yard looked almost like it was covered in snow. It obviously wasn't snow, at these temperatures – it was, instead, a very heavy dew backlit by the dawn. Just beautiful.
The best part for Mo'i was completely different. Ever since he caught a gopher yesterday, each time we take him outside he makes a beeline for the gopher hole from which he pulled the doomed gopher. That's the first time in perhaps five years that he's caught anything at all. Each time he revisits that gopher hole, he goes into his “waiting” stance, wherein he stands stock still, with his jaws just a few inches from the top of the hole, waiting for an unsuspecting gopher to stick his head out. When he was younger, he'd do this for hours on end, never giving up. I have to drag the poor guy off his gopher watch so we can walk. I wonder how long this will keep up?
The best part for me, though, was that our yard looked almost like it was covered in snow. It obviously wasn't snow, at these temperatures – it was, instead, a very heavy dew backlit by the dawn. Just beautiful.
The best part for Mo'i was completely different. Ever since he caught a gopher yesterday, each time we take him outside he makes a beeline for the gopher hole from which he pulled the doomed gopher. That's the first time in perhaps five years that he's caught anything at all. Each time he revisits that gopher hole, he goes into his “waiting” stance, wherein he stands stock still, with his jaws just a few inches from the top of the hole, waiting for an unsuspecting gopher to stick his head out. When he was younger, he'd do this for hours on end, never giving up. I have to drag the poor guy off his gopher watch so we can walk. I wonder how long this will keep up?
Service-now.com in the Financial Times!
Ok, it's only a side-bar. Ok, it's only mentioned in passing. Still, our little (but fast-growing!) company got a nice, positive mention in the Financial Times (the U.K.'s rough equivalent of the Wall Street Journal). The article itself requires (free) registration, but here's the relevant clip:
Perhaps the most striking example is the Trust’s use of software-as-a-service (SaaS). One area where SaaS has made a real difference is in IT service management: Mr Bramwell and his team now use Service-now.com’s hosted applications to respond to user computing problems.Mr. Bramwell is an employee of the Wellcome Trust in the U.K.
That service has replaced in-house applications running on the Trust’s servers and costs the charity about one-fifth of what it did.
“We are looking at more SaaS models, not just with total cost of ownership savings in mind, but also because of the business continuity and disaster recovery guarantees that these offer,” says Mr Bramwell.
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Quote of the Day...
From Dave Carter, writing over at Ricochet:
...are political ads designed to entice viewers to jam railroad spikes in their ears? It seems that I see the same ads at least 117 times per hour. From what I can tell, all of these nefarious candidates have engaged in every diabolical act except the sinking of the Lusitania and there is some conjecture about that. Are voters really deemed to have the IQ of bread mold?I'm no expert, but it sure seems that way to me, Dave. What scares me is that targeting those with the IQ of bread mold may actually be the right thing for those politicians to do...
The Lawyer's Party...
Via reader Simi L., who is on a political education roll today:
The Lawyers' Party
By Bruce Walker
A LAWYER WITH A BRIEFCASE CAN STEAL MORE THAN A THOUSAND MEN WITH GUNS. This is very interesting! I never thought about it this way.
The Democratic Party has become the Lawyers Party. Barack Obama is a lawyer. Michelle Obama is a lawyer. Hillary Clinton is a lawyer. Bill Clinton is a lawyer. John Edwards is a lawyer. Elizabeth Edwards is a lawyer. Every Democrat nominee since 1984 went to law school (although Gore did not graduate). Every Democrat vice presidential nominee since 1976, except for Lloyd Bentsen, went to law school. Look at leaders of the Democrat Party in Congress: Harry Reid is a lawyer. Nancy Pelosi is a lawyer.
The Republican Party is different. President Bush is a businessman. Vice President Cheney is a businessman. The leaders of the Republican Revolution: Newt Gingrich was a history professor. Tom Delay was an exterminator. Dick Armey was an economist. House Minority Leader Boehner was a plastic manufacturer. The former Senate Majority Leader Bill First is a heart surgeon.
Who was the last Republican president who was a lawyer? Gerald Ford, who left office 31 years ago and who barely won the Republican nomination as a sitting president, running against Ronald Reagan in 1976.
The Republican Party is made up of real people doing real work, who are often the targets of lawyers.
The Democrat Party is made up of lawyers. Democrats mock and scorn men who create wealth, like Bush and Cheney, or who heal the sick, like Frist, or who immerse themselves in history, like Gingrich and Hastert.
The Lawyers Party sees these sorts of people, who provide goods and services that people want, as the enemies of America. And, so we have seen the procession of official enemies, in the eyes of the Lawyers Party, grow.
Against whom do Hillary and Obama rail? Pharmaceutical companies, oil companies, hospitals, manufacturers, fast food restaurant chains, large retail businesses, bankers, and anyone producing anything of value in our nation.
This is the natural consequence of viewing everything through the eyes of lawyers. Lawyers solve problems by successfully representing their clients, in this case the American people. Lawyers seek to have new laws passed, they seek to win lawsuits, they press appellate courts to overturn precedent, and lawyers always pharse language to favor their side.
Confined to the narrow practice of law, that is fine. But it is an awful way to govern a great nation. When politicians as lawyers begin to view some Americans as clients and other Americans as opposing parties, then the role of the legal system in our life becomes all-consuming. Some Americans become adverse parties of our very government. We are not all litigants in some vast social class-action suit. We are citizens of a republic that promises us a great deal of freedom from laws, from courts, and from lawyers.
Today, we are drowning in laws; we are contorted by judicial decisions; we are driven to distraction by omnipresent lawyers in all parts of our once private lives. America has a place for laws and lawyers, but that place is modest and reasonable, not vast and unchecked. When the most important decision for our next president is whom he will appoint to the Supreme Court, the role of lawyers and the law in America is too big.
When House Democrats sue America in order to hamstring our efforts to learn what our enemies are planning to do to us, then the role of litigation in America has become crushing.
We cannot expect the Lawyers Party to provide real change, real reform or real hope in America Most Americans know that a republic in which every major government action must be blessed by nine unelected judges is not what Washington intended in 1789. Most Americans grasp that we cannot fight a war when ACLU lawsuits snap at the heels of our defenders. Most Americans intuit that more lawyers and judges will not restore declining moral values or spark the spirit of enterprise in our economy.
Perhaps Americans will understand that change cannot be brought to our nation by those lawyers who already largely dictate American society and business. Perhaps Americans will see that hope does not come from the mouths of lawyers but from personal dreams nourished by hard work. Perhaps Americans will embrace the truth that more lawyers with more power will only make our problems worse.
The United States has 5% of the world’s population and 66% of the world’s lawyers! Tort (Legal) reform legislation has been introduced in congress several times in the last several years to limit punitive damages in ridiculous lawsuits such as spilling hot coffee on yourself and suing the establishment that sold it to you and also to limit punitive damages in huge medical malpractice lawsuits. This legislation has continually been blocked from even being voted on by the Democrat Party. When you see that 97% of the political contributions from the American Trial Lawyers Association goes to the Democrat Party, then you realize who is responsible for our medical and product costs being so high!
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