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3-Time Iditarod Champ Still Leads the Way Without Pot {Asylum}
Mar 16th 2010 9:13AM I don't believe that anyone pointed out that when the (unenforced) rule was put in place 26 years ago, it wasn't lawful for anyone in Alaska with or without a prescription to smoke marijuana.
The law has long since changed and marijuana for some time has been a lawful prescription drug now for people like this who have a bonafide medical reason to consume it. Applying it out of the blue NOW (after ignoring it for decades) is the equivalent of picking out any other prescription drug, say, omeprazole (prilosec) for gastric reflux, and banning it, while allowing all other prescription drugs to be used, suspiciously because one of the competitors suffered from gastric reflux while the others didn't.
The attempt is mean-spirited and probably if the intended victim weren't willing to just flip-off the cranky dwarfs who brought it up to harm him, enforcement of the dusted-off rule would be blocked as discriminatory by any judge willing to hear a request for an injunction.
Should one of the cranky sore-losers of the past three years win, that person's 'victory' will be forever tainted by an asterisk that the victory was enabled by enforcement of a now illegitimate and obsolete rule, much as some nominally broken athletic records are footnoted with caveats about longer seasons, etc.
Hot Seat - Health Care and Women {Politics Daily}
Oct 19th 2009 3:38PM So women are supposed to "care" more about healthcare than men? Or women care less than men about maintaining quality of the healthcare system, or fiscal soundness?
What an incredible insult to women.
Healthcare isn't a gender based issue. It's an issue based on the idea that everybody regardless of gender can get sick, and that everybody regardless of gender has a stake in whether they can obtain effective treatment in a reasonable time frame.
Cheerleader Sues Over Facebook Privacy Invasion {Switched}
Jul 30th 2009 9:45AM Unfortunately the courts wobble all over on matters of the constitutional rights of minor children in public school settings. Irrespective of that, and I believe a quote from a Supreme Court justice, "a student doesn't check his rights at the schoolhouse door."
The girl had every expectation of privacy in the non-public portion of facebook, or in her e-mail or snail mail. She also had a right to have whatever opinions she held.
The rationale behind certain harrassment legislation is that sometimes people find themselves in a role where they can be coerced by someone with much greater perceived power. This is true even if the perception of power or authority is actually in error, because it is real for the person being coerced.
If this is true for adults in an adult setting, it is DOUBLY true for children when dealing with authority figures such as older relatives, teachers and law enforcement officers or quasi-officers.
I don't blame a young girl for succumbing to what appears to be heavy-duty coercion from her coach. It should not be necessary for people to have the kind of rare heroic strength of personality and character to rear back and refuse outrageous requests. That some of us would have told the coach to take a hike, does not mean that she is blameworthy for not doing so, or somehow deserves all the consequences that followed from her having given in under duress. [Also, in the social life and context of a teenager, things that seem silly to the rest of us as adults, are not silly. It is easy for mature adults to say that cheerleading is fluff, and the threat of being kicked off the team is negligible. But that would be illegitimate.]
The reason we have a legal framework around natural and constitutional rights [which, by the way, are RIGHTS and NOT privileges] is so in the ordinary course of life we don't have to go eyeball-to-eyeball to see who will blink or back down first.
I hope she knocks all the irresponsible and authority-abusing school officials down like tenpins.
Plane Answers: Fear of flying, aging aircraft and more on those 'dings.' {Gadling}
Jan 14th 2009 8:30PM Leonard,
The anxiety when it expressed itself, took every bit of my considerable self-control to block from erupting into a full-blown, public and embarrassing panic attack. I'm a scientist by training and while the anxiety mercifully is long gone, I don't for a moment discount how powerful and delibitating it was in the day, because I remember.
I continued to fly (because in practical terms I had little choice) during the years when this troubled me. I would prepare for it as always, hoping I would have an hour or two before it sould set in at cruising altitude [which of course is the very safest portion of any flight], and what I noticed was that it just stopped setting in.
It was like having experienced riding a horse when at a certain increasing pace or under certain circumstances you began to fear you are momentarily no longer fully equal to remaining safely in control. Then one day, because you'd finally become experienced enough as a rider, the same situation recurred and you realized you were able to successfully deal with most anything plausible that the horse might decide to do.
Since you don't fly any longer, Leonard, it's not clear how you will ever come to know that your anxiety has abated. I could hardly counsel you to go try again, but if perhaps someday you think about flying and discover that your gut doesn't knot quite as tightly as before, you could give it a try, maybe a short commuter express between two CA cities, or a quick weekend trip to Reno or Las Vegas.
I wish you the very best. You are not alone.
Plane Answers: Fear of flying, aging aircraft and more on those 'dings.' {Gadling}
Jan 14th 2009 6:02PM I am 57 and first flew when I was in my early 20's. Until that and many subsequent business-related and later personal flights, I never had any reason to fly because my three post h-s schools all were within a day's drive from my parents' house.
The takeoff on that first flight was not only memorable for being my first, but because it was unlike any that ever came after. The plane took off and immediately made a sharp ascent while making what seemed like a sharp turn as well. This canted ascent continued for several minutes. It was disorienting within the cabin, not to mention outside.
That said, despite some rough take-offs and landings in the following years, I never experienced much of any flying anxiety for perhaps nine years.
Then for no discernible reason -- no bad take-offs, landings, alarming Hollywood films, newspaper or magazine articles, alcohol or drug use, whatever -- out of the blue, so to speak, I began to experience a good deal of flying anxiety. After this began, the North Koreans shot down a commercial airliner and that perceived risk of intentional attack amped up my concern, even within the continental US.
While my baseline level of anxiety on any flight from that point on wasn't unmanageable, sometimes while we were cruising during the long portion of the flight I would feel that some catastrophe was looming and that the plane would suddenly lose control and crash. A drink or two didn't either precipitate this or squelch it. I would grit my teeth and endure until the plane finally landed.
This situation continued for several years. At one point when I had to change planes in Pittsburgh for the final leg of my flight home, I became convinced beforehand that the plane would take off and crash land. I spent forty-five minutes considering alternatives including renting a car to drive the remaining 600 miles. Finally I decided that being stuck in Pittsburgh was worse than what seemed to me to be an 50-50 chance of not surviving. Of course the flight was unremarkable.
About five years after this mysterious flying anxiety appeared, to my great relief and astonishment, my anxiety vanished as suddenly and mysteriously as it had materialized.
Subsequently I've flown from the US to Australia and back, and countless times across the continent and to Europe or South America without a hint of the horrific fright than used to overtake me. I mentioned this strange sequence of events once to a retired psychiatrist friend and after asking a few questions he had no explanation or comment beyond saying that he was glad for me that the problem had evaporated.
I've met a number of folks fearful of flying, but they all were terrified from Day One. I've met people who underwent therapy to cure their fear with mixed results. But I've never met anyone who was fine for years, terrified for years and then suddenly just fine again. But it can happen; it happened to me.
Hot Seat: Capitalism {Politics Daily}
Dec 25th 2008 4:42PM Oddly enough, the disasters caused by government-sponsored, crypto-guaranteed, quasi-private outfits like Fannie and Freddie, and others who were able to hide their risk-indifferent practices behind the shield of government deposit insurance, regulatory imprimaturs, etc., probably argue MOST persuasively that the philosophy of state-sponsored corporatism and so-called 'mixed economy' are if not dead, then at least seriously on the ropes.
In a free and transparent system where people or their agents were attentive to responsible .risk-management, such colossal frauds and corruption as seen in the mortgage crisis would not have remained unaired.
Fraud is the enemy of markets, and the false security of regulatory oversight and government guarantees have slowly numbed people and institutions to signs of fraud or even an interest in discovering it, just as FDA approvals or clearances numb practitioners and consumers to the need for making their own decisions (or obtaining assessments from honest 3rd party authorities) to assure them that medicine and medical devices are safe and effective rather than relying on some bureaucratic and unaccountable and politically sensitive government body.
I'd take the value of a Underwriters Laboratories seal of approval (or some independent board of expert medical specialists, like the American Association of Blood Banks) any day over some government approval.
What will result in the long run if we are to recover at all is market institutions with greater transparency and a greater recognition on the part of participants at all levels that they themselves are responsible to find means to ensure that their financial partners are operating legitimately.
So like FEMA during Katrina, the discredit is to the inept and corruptible bureaucracy as well as the fraudsters, none of which have anything to do with free markets.
JetBlue crew has woman arrested over video of fighting passengers {Gadling}
Aug 17th 2008 11:59AM I liked Gene's comment best of all: "This is what happens when you give too much power to morons."
Mrs. Parver probably wasn't all sweetness and light while she was being intimidated, bullied and manhandled. She isn't required to be. She didn't hit back.
The gist of the matter is that nobody is required to delete anything, certainly not on the spot. If there was some question about that a competent court could make a ruling in a non-circus atmosphere and the legal system could run its course.
Refusing to comply with an improper directive is the birthright of every human being, certainly of every American.
The Republic has gone through fits of repression and police misconduct on all levels before, and in due time the people will get fed up enough to put an end to it.
There is an election coming up. Just as the country dumped Mr. Adams and his Alien & Sedition Acts (the late 18th century equivalent of the obscenely-acronymed PATRIOT Act) for Mr. Jefferson who repealed them, there's an excellent opportunity to do some housecleaning now.
I am much more fearful of the government and the authoritarian spirit of the past 7-8 years than I am of terrorists.
For that matter, in recent years just who is doing the terrorizing in America? As Pogo said, we have seen the enemy and it is us.
Bless you, Mrs. Parver, and everyone else who refuses to knuckle under to the idiocy.
AOL Straw Poll: June 27-July 4 {Politics Daily}
Jul 6th 2008 12:21PM The margin of victory in November will come from a composite of factors and dynamics. A one-on-one comparison of Obama and McCain (without the VP candidates even being known yet!) is meaningless, all the more so in a self-selected poll drawn from a non-representative demographic slice (AOL users).
There will be candidates from at least two third-parties (Libertarian and Green), votes for whose candidates in the past three elections have proved in federal races to determine the winner. The control of the US Senate changed because of one such close third-party contested race in the Northwest. The Presidency was decided in Florida in 2000 by another.
What's more there is the Ron Paul factor, although he is not running with a third party, since his supporters include the remainder of the Goldwater wing of the GOP, without whose support no GOP candidate can hope to win. Paul hasn't endorsed anyone, including McCain. Many of Paul's supporters are those who previously did not vote, a fair number are anti-war former Democrats, a fair number are anti-war Republicans and some are Libertarians who remember him from the 1988 race.
Without accounting for these factors, it's a pointless exercise to attempt any conclusions here.
World's Leading Atheist Now Believes in God {News Bloggers}
Oct 10th 2007 9:23AM Atheistic monopoly on public debate? What reality-inverted planet are you on, sir?
Anthony Flew's well-publicized change of view is years old news. He didn't exactly hide his light under a bushel. Why bring it up now other than as a commercial exercise?
Did Albert Einstein Believe in God? {News Bloggers}
Oct 10th 2007 8:36AM It has always intrigued me that so many believers behave as if they feel insecure and threatened by the very existence of atheists.
One would think the sensible reaction, if any, might be one of sadness that others are missing out on an important truth, but certainly not tub-thumping.
If you are certain that you have God on your side (however you conceive God), what can it POSSIBLY matter to you that some guy down the block has a different opinion? Or even 100 million folks? Eternal truths are such no matter how many or few their adherents.
Something is very strange and inconsistent here.
Given the near universal discrimination against atheists at least in the US, and the railing of most major religions against those who do not share their interpretation of existence, it is not especially surprising that non-believers get tired of being ridiculed and held in contempt by people who so often denigrate the tools of logic and reason the non-believers use in reaching their conclusions, even as the latter attempt to wield them themselves in defense of their beliefs.
It's surprising that it took until recently for the non-believers to take the believers to task and thrash back.
While one cannot prove a negative, it is equally important to remember that when one asserts the existence of something, the burden of proof and demonstration rests with whomever is making the assertion.
