Cali Gets Sane?

A California state legislator has proposed legalizing marijuana to help deal with that state's budget shortfall. This makes so much sense its silly. Setting aside the fact that pot possession and use never should have been illegal in the first place, and legalizing it allows adults to make decisions for themselves, this makes fiscal sense.

Check out these stats. Turns out that pot is California's largest cash crop by a wide margin. Pot comes in at $14 billion per year. Remarkably the number two cash crop in Cali is fruits and vegetables, at a meager $5.7 billion per year. That difference is staggering, and speaks to just how popular marijuana is.

Tom Ammiano, the legislator proposing the law, estimates that pot would bring a billion dollars per year in to the state's tax coffers. Given that the state has a $42 billion dollar revenue shortfall right now, seems like the state could use the money.

But think about the savings this kind of law would bring with it. Enforcing marijuana prohibition in California alone costs $170 million per year. Each of the 1,500 estimated prisoners in California jails for pot offenses cost $40,000 per year. All in all, that's a lot of savings.

I hope California seriously considers passing this law. Maybe if the rest of the country sees that the world doesn't end when pot is legal, they will consider legalization as well. Maybe then we can the start turning back the tide on the costly and unjust "war on drugs."

Worlds Apart!

Sometimes you just need a shot by shot remake of Journey's Separate Ways video!

Enjoy.

The Elf Delusion.

Here's a odd little story. Apparently the people of Iceland have a longstanding, folklore based, belief in elves. Icelandic people actually believe elves are real. In fact, when Alcoa wanted to build a plant there it had to allow a government inspector in to certify that the site was elf free.

Now I suspect that most Americans consider belief in elves ridiculous, and they would be right. After all, there is no empirical evidence for the existence of elves. But America has it's own "folklore." Religion.

Without any emperical evidence millions of Americans believe in an all knowing, all powerful, god who watches over all they do. Plus he's ready to punish them for all eternity of they don't act just so. Believers get preferential government treatment in the form of tax breaks, and I suspect that if the right people thought angels inhabited a plant site we'd spend some tax money investigating.

Belief in elves is ridiculous, but so is belief in Jesus.

Defenders of Marriage.

As the California Supreme Court gets ready to rule on whether Prop 8 survives or not, I give you this cogent analysis of "defending marriage" - in song!



Here's hoping that the Cali Supremes find gay people get to keep the same rights as the rest of us. With any luck it will open the floodgates for other states to follow.

Left Behind for Socialism.

Ok the crazy ass revelations reading fundamentalists are at it again. Take a few minutes to watch this interview with Tim Lahaye, author of the crazy ass Left Behind apocolyptic revelations loving book series. Turns out Obama's a socialist!



Set aside the crazy ass - no evidence havin - the world is going to end with jesus on a white horse smiting the non-believers stuff. (We can have some fun with that in another post) Enough with this Obama is a socialist stuff! He isn't. Unless he has just been lying about his positions, Obama is a Clinton style, down the middle new Democrat.

A socialist probably would support single payer government run health care. A socialist might consider nationalizing failing banks and insurance companies instead of handing them wads of tax payer money. A socialist - and get ready for this one because it's going to blow your mind - might stand up and honestly tell people that their taxes have to go up to pay for the mess we are in right now. A socialist would actually raise taxes to pay for programs. A socialist could - you know maybe - raise the federal minimum wage to a level where people can live on it. A socialist might strongly support unions, or government funded day care for working families.

There's all kinds of things a socialist would do, but Obama isn't promising to do these things.

If he was a socialist, I would have voted for him. I didn't.

Gonzo

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas has moved on to my cable movie comfort list. It's become one of those films I can pick up at any point, watch for a while, and enjoy as much as the last time I saw it.

Hunter Thompson has long been one of my favorite writers, and I have read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas a number of times. It's a great book - although in my opinion his best was Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 - but the movie took a while to grow on me. It was jarring to see the excesses of the book shown on screen.

A few nights ago I came across the film again and stumbled right in to the "wave speech." This short part of the book is rumored to have been Thompson's favorite piece of his own writing. Seeing Johnny Depp deliver it again reminded me of what a gifted writer Thompson was.

Here is the text:

"Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

Here's Depp delivering it brilliantly:



The passage so perfectly captures his feelings of loss about the 60's, and shows the sense of hope and destiny that Baby Boomers once had. As a Gen Xer I've long raged against the failings of the Boomers - and there is a lot to rage over - but I admire that they have the 60's to look back on.

Gen X doesn't have anything similar. I can't longingly look back at the 80's and say "we were winning." I hope we get more things right in middle age than the Boomers did, but it's hard to deny that they did "young" exceptionally well.

Hunter - we miss you.

Rescue the Risky

Now that wall street and the banks have gotten their chunk of taxpayer money, the Obama administration has finally gotten around to helping average Americans by proposing a foreclosure aid package. Naturally it has been met with some skepticism because it might aid people who made bad financial decisions. (Note that sarcasm doesn't come through particularly well in print)

Really? Now we are worried about rewarding people who made bad financial decisions? We didn't seem all that worried about it when we were handing billions to banks who gave risky loans. We didn't seem to mind rewarding risky financial behavior when we gave billions to an auto industry that drove itself in to the ground. Rewarding bad behavior wasn't that big a deal when taxpayers were handing over cash to Goldman Sachs and AIG. Now that it is individual citizens though we have to worry about whether we are rewarding bad behavior.

The housing market is a mess, and we need to do something to fix it. Fact is that all of us who own, or intend to own, homes stand to benefit from stabilizing the housing market and stemming the tide of foreclosure. The fact that a few bad planners stand to benefit from this should be the least of our concerns.

Oh - and if the new administration is finally going to turn it's attention to helping the little guy, how about doing something about health care. Remember that promise?