Federalist: Drug War Unconstitutional
From The Federalist. This one is food for thought. It may be as good an argument to abolish prisons as it is to retain capital punishment.
Executing a murderer is the only way to adequately express our horror at the taking of an innocent life. Nothing else suffices. To equate the lives of killers with those of victims is the worst kind of moral equivalency. If capital punishment is state murder, then imprisonment is state kidnapping and restitution is state theft. --Don Feder
The Federalist - "DEA -- DOA" - I found some references in the latest issue of The Federalist to their analysis of the war on drugs. I had missed that issue, so I went back through my mail and found it. Sure enough, the April 27 issue (#01.17.dgst) had a long piece. They've finally figured out that the federal war on some drugs is unconstitutional. This particular war on freedom must be left to the states. They have not yet realized that selling vegetable extracts is no more criminal than ingesting them, but even this much from a "conservative" group is a God-send. I'm so Happy to see this that I published the entire piece (they don't have an archive section). There is yet hope for America.
Upon review of the "total cost" of drug prohibition, and the constitutionality of this futile exercise, The Federalist takes the position that the current "war on drugs" presents a far greater risk to liberty than the use of drugs ever has or ever will. We favor restoration of federally separated and distributed drug laws and policing authorities, with nuanced, rational dispensing of proportionate justice that distinguishes addicts or abusers who harm only themselves from those whose drug profiteering injures or endangers others. As columnist Deroy Murdock observed: "The alternative is to continue a War on Drugs that has torched $146 billion since 1990 while rolling and smoking the Bill of Rights."
David Kravets of AP via The Sacramento Bee - State Supreme Court frowns on jury nullification - practicing jury nullification is now grounds for removal from a jury in the Peoples Republik of Kalifornia. Disgusting. [unknown]
Tom Carter at The Washington Times via Cannabis News - UN Cut US Off As Drug Monitor - The United States has been voted off of the u.n. Human Rights Commission and International Narcotics Control Board. Congress may withhold dues. Hope they do. Kick the u.n. out of New York City while you're at it. [cn]
William J. Bennett at the Washington Post -
A Superb Choice For Drug Czar 
- George Bush senior's drug czar
tries to convince us that John Walters is not a
lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the key fascist drug warrior. Didn't
work. I'm not convinced. [cn]
William Raspberry at the Washington Post -
A Draco of Drugs - Bennett's article was a response to this one.
But the statistics are almost a distraction. The real issue is policy, not numbers. Walters seems to believe that we can incarcerate our way out of our drug problem -- even while many other equally hard-nosed observers are coming to believe that it might make more sense to treat drug abuse as a public health problem.
Greg Sagan at the Amarillo Globe-News - Drug war is going to burn us all - a good comparison of drugs with fire in the light of the end of drug testing in the schools of Lockney. [cn]
Drug testing in schools proceeds from an array of false assumptions: that "drugs" can captivate people against their will, that children will do what is wrong if they aren't forced to do what's right, that the innocent have nothing to hide, that the state possesses superior wisdom about what is best for each of us.
Drug testing instead establishes the idea that we are free only as long as we don't act like it, that we owe it to the state to prove we haven't done anything wrong, that "prior restraint" is a valid judicial doctrine in a free country.
...
Maybe the lesson of Lockney is to treat drugs like we treat fire.
Manage the heat, use the light.
Charley Reese at the Orlando Sentinel - Global warming? Don't work up sweat - Are we headed for global warming or another ice age? Some wise words that I wish the misanthropic greenies could hear. A "mite on the back of a flea living on a cinder" indeed!
Warm or cool, there isn't a lot we can do about it. There have been in recent geologic times about 17 ice ages. The old Earth cools down and warms up without any help at all from people. I expect it will continue to do so. Man has a huge ego, but he's hardly more than a mite on the back of a flea living on a cinder as far as the universe is concerned.
It might help to understand this flap about global warming if we pause to remember that the word "scientist" describes a vocation. Otherwise, scientists are just ordinary human beings -- fallible and subject to the whole array of vices and virtues that one finds in people. The fact that a scientist says something doesn't make it so.
...
The world is full of mysteries and one of them is certainly what the weather will be like 50 years from now. There are a lot of folks in the vocational field of science who are not much different from the old medicine men who traveled in a wagon, hawking remedies and cure-alls.
Arianna Huffington - Al Gore: The First Hundred Days - everybody's talking about gw's first hundred days. Ms. Huffington investigates algore's.
Day 26: Spends the day building a scale model of the ``Bridge to the 21st Century'' out of toothpicks. Then burns it down.
J.J. Johnson at Sierra Times - Klamath Falls: Civil Disobedience - and Proud of It - 12,000 farmers and others made a bucket brigade from Lake Ewauna to a now almost dry irrigation canal which was shut down by the feds supposedly to protect sucker fish. Contains a number of pictures of the event including J.J. and friend waving their confederate flags and a mirror-spectacled man holding a sign saying, "I am a Klamath Basin farmer--I am an endangered species". [sierra]
Henry Bowman at Sierra Times - Time to Feed the Hogs Yet? - Mr. Bowman answers with with a resounding, "Yes!" When I read the title I thought of the hog feeding in John Ross' Unintended Consequences. Mr. Bowman intends to recite the following should a nazi ever appear at his door with the intention of confiscating his guns. [sierra]
"Before you take one step into my home, young officer (or deputy) __________, I have a statement to make which you need to hear.
"I am fifty-nine years old; I have no wife, no children, and little or no prospects for the future. My daily routine might best be described by the vernacular expression, 'keepin' on just to keep on keepin' on'. I work. I pay taxes. I vote. I delude myself that these things make a difference somehow. My life has been, like most, a seemingly pointless progression of ups and downs, with maybe a few more downs than most. Maybe not. "I have owned guns all my life, since the age of seven, and have received considerable training, both formal and informal, in their use. I have been a peace officer on three occasions and a state-licensed private investigator as well. In all my years of gun ownership, I have pointed a gun at another human being on only one occasion, the result of which was the saving of a life without the gun being fired. All of my guns collectively have not killed as many people as Ted Kennedy's car.
"In any event, my situation and yours are almost certainly different in many ways. I suspect you have a family, perhaps a mortgage, and dreams for the future. This puts you in a position to make a life-altering decision. You can turn around, go back to the station house, and tell your watch commander that I presented you with satisfactory evidence of my having sold my firearms to an FFL dealer in another jurisdiction. Your other choice is for you and I to die today, right here and right now in this doorway, because I will not live a life of servile subjugation to the state. If I am to be stripped of even one of my 'inalienable' rights, then I have no rights at all, including the right to life.
"Oh, one more thing: I hope that your police training has made you observant enough to notice that at no time since my opening my door to you have you been able to see both of my hands. That being said, it's your call."
Jennifer L. Brown of AP via the San Francisco Chronicle - Some fear truth behind Oklahoma bombing will die with McVeigh - And how! Though this article doesn't say it, I've read analysis by bomb experts that a fertilizer bomb in a truck outside the building could not possibly have done the damage that was done. That kind of destruction would have required charges on the structural beams inside the building. We might have found evidence of this were it not for the destruction of the crime scene by federal investigators (just as they did at Waco). [unknown]
ed cummings at Politechbot - more perverse national park police surveillance - The liberty bell tower of Independence Hall in Philadelphia is now home to two large surveillance cameras able to read type on newspapers in the park. [grabbe]
I looked up glue in the Hacker's Dictionary to convince a co-worker that it was a real programming term, and encountered Blue Glue in that definition. Hehe.
[IBM; obs.] IBM's SNA (Systems Network Architecture), an incredibly losing and bletcherous communications protocol once widely favored at commercial shops that didn't know any better (like other proprietary networking protocols, it became obsolete and effectively disappeared after the Internet explosion c.1994). The official IBM definition is "that which binds blue boxes together." See fear and loathing. It may not be irrelevant that Blue Glue is the trade name of a 3M product that is commonly used to hold down the carpet squares to the removable panel floors common in dinosaur pens. A correspondent at U. Minn. reports that the CS department there has about 80 bottles of the stuff hanging about, so they often refer to any messy work to be done as `using the blue glue'.
Sun Microsystems - JSR-000014 Adding Generics to the JavaTM Programming Language - Parameterized types for Java. A compiler-only change except for the introspection API, which requires VM changes. Existing code, whether source or binary, is not broken by this language addition. Does not suffer from the runtime size explosion of the C++ template implementation. Slated for inclusion in Java 1.5; it wasn't quite ready for 1.4. This stuff makes my brain hurt, but I look forward to learning to use it. [cafe]
