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On to the House

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Finally Barney Frank Proves Useful for Something

Now NORML is picking up on Barney Frank's appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher:

Direct Link

From the NORML Blog:

Yes indeed, for the first time in more than two decades, we will shortly have legislation in Congress that, if enacted, would end the federal prosecution of adult marijuana consumers!Based on the recommendations of the 1972 National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse (also known as the Shafer Commission), this proposal would eliminate all federal penalties prohibiting the personal use and possession of up to 100 grams (3 ½ ounces) of marijuana. Under our measure, adults who consume cannabis would no longer face arrest, prison, or even the threat of a civil fine. In addition, this bill eliminates all penalties prohibiting the not-for-profit transfers of up to one ounce of pot. In short, for the first time since 1937, the possession, use, and non-profit transfer of marijuana for personal use by adults would be legal under federal law!

Sure, I can make do with less than a QP.

Advice from Uncle Binnie

Current affairs got you down?  Tired of hearing the same old tired opinions from the blowhard pundits about Obama's preacher or Geraldine Ferraro or Eliot Spitzer or any of the other names in the news these days?

Well you're in luck because soon we will be enjoying the wit and wisdom of Uncle Binnie.  Not sure if we'll be saying "Hey Man, Ayman"... but this is a message you'll want to see and not hear whateverthefuck that means.

From Reuters:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is expected to release a new message within the next two days, the U.S.-based terrorism monitoring service SITE Institute said on Wednesday.

The message is entitled, "The Response Will Be What You See, Not What You Hear," SITE said in a release.

It said an announcement of the pending message was posted on Wednesday, the fifth anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, by the administrator of the al Qaeda-affiliated Al-Ekhlaas Internet forum.

       

This is more exciting than getting a sneak peak at John Hagee's next rant.

Whatever happened to Ayman's offer to answer our questions?  It seems he doesn't want to be rushed.

Horton Hears a Who Cares?

The one time I met Ted Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, I asked him a rather political question about why kids who read his books when they're young end up borderline illiterate by high school.  He said to me, "You've opened up a whole can of peas there and I would rather not get into it."

That exchange makes more sense to me today in light of the quotes from Ted's widow in this piece about Anti-abortion rights wackos showing up at the premiere of Horton Hears a Who. 

From Kim Masters in Slate:

Your Hollywoodland correspondent attended the glamorous premiere of Horton Hears a Who! last Saturday and was present when protesters started yelling shortly after Horton uttered his famous motto: "A person's a person, no matter how small."

We could not understand what was being shouted and thought perhaps that Seth Rogen or one of the other many vocal talents in the film was expressing love for Dr. Seuss' elephant and his signature line. But as you may have read elsewhere, anti-abortion activists had infiltrated the theater. Afterward, they handed out fliers designed to look like tickets.

None of this sat well with Audrey Geisel, widow of Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel), who attended the screening. So did Karl ZoBell, the lawyer who represents her and who has represented the interests of Dr. Seuss for some 40 years.

(snip)

ZoBell says it would be nice if these people came up with their own material. But if they don't go too far—by copping the illustrations, for example—they can use a line like "A person's a person, no matter how small," even if it wouldn't have pleased Dr. Seuss. And it wouldn't have. The Geisels were opposed to using the Dr. Seuss books for any political agenda.

Some anti-abortion Web sites claim that Audrey is a supporter of Planned Parenthood. ZoBell says he's never discussed the issue of abortion with her and can't confirm that.

Was Spitzer Just Following the Rules of Evolution?

The New York media world is all agog over a New York Times piece that shows New York Governor Elliot Spitzer arranged for a prostitute to travel with him from DC to New York... and that the entire transaction was caught on an FBI Wiretap.

The story raises the whole issue of paying for sex (even when it's free, you're paying for it, buddy) and on the same day as the Spitzer news comes out, there's this scientific gem on the matter of sex for money.

From the Future of Things:

A recent study conducted in Indonesia shows that male primates "paid" for sexual access to females in the form of pre-sex rituals, and that the success of these rituals was reduced as the number of available females went up. Although the conclusions are not decisive, it is suggested that sex is a "currency" in the monkeys' biological market.

In a recent study of macaque monkeys in Indonesia, researchers found that males performed several services in order to encourage females to agree to sexual intercourse.

(snip)

After observing the monkeys for about 20 months, the scientists concluded that after the males performed their grooming ritual, sexual activity more than doubled: from an average of 1.5 times an hour to 3.5 times an hour. The study also showed that the amount of time that males spent grooming hinged on the number of females available at the time. For instance, as the number of females increased, the males spent less time picking nits off the females.

(snip)

In the case of the voluntary sex life of long-tailed macaques, it means that the price that one group is willing to pay for a commodity that the other group has depends on the scarcity or abundance of that commodity on the market. Scientists assume female macaques use grooming, too, to try to maintain social relationships to benefit their offspring, or as a way to distract or appease males from becoming overly aggressive – a behavior that is quite common after a sexual encounter. In fact, when female macaques groomed males, their services decreased. 

So as you can see, Governor Spitzer, this is all just a matter of nit-picking.

The Price of Stock Footage

Ever wonder how political campaigns turn around commercials in a matter of days if not hours?  After all, doesn't it take time to script and shoot a piece featuring a family home in bed while a phone rings in the White House?

Of course not.  You just dial up Getty Images and get some stock footage on the spot.  A little editing, a little VO, and you've got a spot.

Unfortunately, in a political campaign, the actors in the stock footage can be all grown up... and supporting the other guy.

From KING-5 Seattle:

Thursday night, the Knowles family of Bonney Lake, Wash., watched the John Stewart Show and saw the ad for the first time.

"I looked and saw a girl that looked like my sister and we rewound it and sure enough it was my sister," said Brady Knowles.

The first girl in the ad is young Casey Knowles. It's stock footage from 8 years ago when she worked as a TV extra - footage owned now by Getty Images and used by the Clinton campaign.

But they couldn't have picked a more unwilling star.

(snip)

"I've been campaigning for Barack Obama for a few months now," she said. "I was actually a precinct captain at the caucuses a few months ago. I attended his rally a few months ago and I'm a very, very avid supporter."

The Knowles family admit they have no control over how the footage is used. And while they see the humor of it all, they are mildly annoyed.

"I think it would be really wonderful if me and Barack Obama could get together and make a nice counter ad," she laughed.

Interesting the whole family first saw the ad on John Stewart...

A Fondness for Heresy aka We're All Doomed so Let's Party!

Thanks to Tom Buckner at alt.fan.rawilson for pointing me to this.

The thing that bothers me about the Global Warming orthodoxy is that whenever you look at the history of science, when you get to the point that "every reputable scientist in the world agrees that" x is true, x is almost certain to be disproved by the next generation of scientists. 

I'm also just fundamentally turned off by all of the "Holier than Thou" "I'm more Green than you" mentality, especially the blind fervor you find in the Bay Area. 

Now here's a guy, James Lovelock, who says returning to the days of the horse and buggy ain't gonna fix the problem. 

From the Guardian.

On the day we meet, the Daily Mail has launched a campaign to rid Britain of plastic shopping bags. The initiative sits comfortably within the current canon of eco ideas, next to ethical consumption, carbon offsetting, recycling and so on - all of which are premised on the calculation that individual lifestyle adjustments can still save the planet. This is, Lovelock says, a deluded fantasy. Most of the things we have been told to do might make us feel better, but they won't make any difference. Global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe is unstoppable.

"It's just too late for it," he says. "Perhaps if we'd gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don't have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can't say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do."

He dismisses eco ideas briskly, one by one. "Carbon offsetting? I wouldn't dream of it. It's just a joke. To pay money to plant trees, to think you're offsetting the carbon? You're probably making matters worse. You're far better off giving to the charity Cool Earth, which gives the money to the native peoples to not take down their forests."

Do he and his wife try to limit the number of flights they take? "No we don't. Because we can't." And recycling, he adds, is "almost certainly a waste of time and energy", while having a "green lifestyle" amounts to little more than "ostentatious grand gestures". He distrusts the notion of ethical consumption. "Because always, in the end, it turns out to be a scam ... or if it wasn't one in the beginning, it becomes one."

(snip)

He saves his thunder for what he considers the emptiest false promise of all - renewable energy.

"You're never going to get enough energy from wind to run a society such as ours," he says. "Windmills! Oh no. No way of doing it. You can cover the whole country with the blasted things, millions of them. Waste of time."

This is all delivered with an air of benign wonder at the intractable stupidity of people. "I see it with everybody. People just want to go on doing what they're doing. They want business as usual. They say, 'Oh yes, there's going to be a problem up ahead,' but they don't want to change anything."

Lovelock believes global warming is now irreversible, and that nothing can prevent large parts of the planet becoming too hot to inhabit, or sinking underwater, resulting in mass migration, famine and epidemics.

(snip)

There's more than a hint of the controversialist in his work, and it seems an unlikely coincidence that Lovelock became convinced of the irreversibility of climate change in 2004, at the very point when the international consensus was coming round to the need for urgent action. Aren't his theories at least partly driven by a fondness for heresy?

"Not a bit! Not a bit! All I want is a quiet life! But I can't help noticing when things happen, when you go out and find something. People don't like it because it upsets their ideas.
"
(snip)

Humanity is in a period exactly like 1938-9, he explains, when "we all knew something terrible was going to happen, but didn't know what to do about it". But once the second world war was under way, "everyone got excited, they loved the things they could do, it was one long holiday ... so when I think of the impending crisis now, I think in those terms. A sense of purpose - that's what people want."

(snip)

What would Lovelock do now, I ask, if he were me? He smiles and says: "Enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan."

Sounds like good advice to me.

An Ad Exec Looks at the Race

Who are you supporting for President "Just Do It" or "Sensible Shoes?"

That's how Ad Age is summing up the current Presidential contest.  I'm not sure I buy the analysis but it's certainly a captivating POV on the whole drama.

The difference is Barack seems to have created a better brand. Take a pretty good product and add a layer of hope and empowerment, and you've created evangelists, rather than supporters. You've created a movement, not just a product.

While Barack has become the "Just Do It" of the race, Hillary has been repositioned as the "sensible shoes" of the race -- tried and true, will get the job done, and a sadly safe choice.

(snip)

New York, by last count a stalwart Hillary market, is full of ad people. How have we, the experts, let her become sensible shoes? (And the ultimate question, how do sensible shoes stack up versus vintage shoes?)

True, there is a whole country out there full of sensible-shoe types. In their eyes, those flashy sneakers are just what all the kids are wearing. But when they actually venture to try on a pair, even the most sensible of sensible-shoe people may just get a glint in the eye and be inspired to jog a few steps.

McCain and the Bored Agains

Now that John McCain officially has the time to try to put together a strategy for November, the left is all of a sudden noticing the views of mainstream fundies.  I guess Huckabee had too much "aww shucks" about him to make people take a close look at the doctrinal issues.

So Right Wing Watch puts out a piece today that includes a video about McCain declaring Rod Parsley his "Spiritual Advisor" and highlighting some of the "shocking views" of this rather run of the mill televangelist.

The thing is I don't find any of this all that shocking or surprising. Other than the God wants you to have an airplane thing, the political views he expresses seem to me pretty boilerplate stuff from a right wing televangelist. I suppose the key question is whether anyone believes McCain actually believes this stuff. I suspect not but I adopt cynical poses at times. In case you hadn't noticed.

Christopher Hitchens, A British Atheist "We Can Believe In!"

As everyone (especially my hero Christopher Hitchens) knows, the first rule of good writing is to "Avoid Cliche's like the Plague."

So that's why I'm so thrilled to see Hitchens today in Slate excoriating the dull-mindedness of what gets our politicians attention these days.

It is cliché, not plagiarism, that is the problem with our stilted, room-temperature political discourse. It used to be that thinking people would say, with at least a shred of pride, that their own convictions would not shrink to fit on a label or on a bumper sticker. But now it seems that the more vapid and vacuous the logo, the more charm (or should that be "charisma"?) it exerts. Take "Yes We Can," for example. It's the sort of thing parents might chant encouragingly to a child slow on the potty-training uptake.

(snip)

Pretty soon, we should be able to get electoral politics down to a basic newspeak that contains perhaps 10 keywords: Dream, Fear, Hope, New, People, We, Change, America, Future, Together. Fishing exclusively from this tiny and stagnant pool of stock expressions, it ought to be possible to drive all thinking people away from the arena and leave matters in the gnarled but capable hands of the professional wordsmiths and manipulators. In the new jargon, certain intelligible ideas would become inexpressible. (How could one state, for example, the famous Burkean principle that many sorts of change ought to be regarded with skepticism?) In a rather poor trade-off for this veto on complexity, many views that are expressible (and "We the People Together Dream of and Hope for New Change in America" would be really quite a long sentence in the latest junk language) will, in turn, be entirely and indeed almost beautifully unintelligible.

Hear! Hear!