Archive for the ‘And Now for Something Completely Different’ Category

5 Years After: Portugal’s Drug Decriminalization Policy Shows Positive Results

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

Street drug–related deaths from overdoses drop and the rate of HIV cases crashes

In the face of a growing number of deaths and cases of HIV linked to drug abuse, the Portuguese government in 2001 tried a new tack to get a handle on the problem—it decriminalized the use and possession of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, LSD and other illicit street drugs. The theory: focusing on treatment and prevention instead of jailing users would decrease the number of deaths and infections.

Five years later, the number of deaths from street drug overdoses dropped from around 400 to 290 annually, and the number of new HIV cases caused by using dirty needles to inject heroin, cocaine and other illegal substances plummeted from nearly 1,400 in 2000 to about 400 in 2006,  according to a report released recently by the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C, libertarian think tank.

“Now instead of being put into prison, addicts are going to treatment centers and they’re learning how to control their drug usage or getting off drugs entirely,” report author Glenn Greenwald, a former New York State constitutional litigator, said during a press briefing at Cato last week.

Under the Portuguese plan, penalties for people caught dealing and trafficking drugs are unchanged; dealers are still jailed and subjected to fines depending on the crime. But people caught using or possessing small amounts—defined as the amount needed for 10 days of personal use—are brought before what’s known as a “Dissuasion Commission,” an administrative body created by the 2001 law.

Each three-person commission includes at least one lawyer or judge and one health care or social services worker. The panel has the option of recommending treatment, a small fine, or no sanction.

More…

A community of alternative thinkers

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

– Blogging has been good very for me.   Not financially but, rather, in the connections I’ve made to people out in the world whom I would have never met otherwise.

– In addition to writing for this Blog, Samadhisoft, I also publish occasional articles over on The Seitch.   I like what they are doing there and I feel honored that they let me use their site to express some of my thoughts.   A number of people contribute to The Seitch and two stand out in particular to me; the Naib, who founded the site and who is its most prolific author, and Keith Farnish, who also writes extensively there.

Keith also runs various Blogs of his own, including The Earth Blog and The Unsuitablog. 

– Recently, Keith published a book entitled, “Time’s Up! an uncivilized solution to a global crisis“.  He announced his new book on The Seitch here.

– His new book can be read on-line, here.   I’m reading it now and enjoying it.  It’s full of keen analysis of the world’s current problems and what we might do about them.   Recommended.

– On another front, I’ve recently become on-line friends with a fellow in Germany named Clinton Callahan who is the driving force behind an intentional community called Possibilica.   He also runs the Callahan Academy and has written a book (which I’ve not yet read) called, Radiant Joy Brilliant Love.

– In a recent E-Mail, Clinton included a list of things people can do if they want to directly and personally address the world and the state it is in.   It is radical and courageous stuff, just as the recommendations in Keith Farnish’s book are.

– These are creative thinkers and people who believe that words must be matched by action if one’s convictions are to be graced with integrity.   In truth, I am still playing “catch up” in this respect.   Thus far, I’m long on words and a good deal shorter on action.   But, as they say, all of the rest of my life still lies before me.

– So, I encourage you to follow and explore the links I’ve scattered here and I also encourage you to have a good look through the list of actions Clinton suggests, below.  

– Not all of us will be able to rearrange our lives so powerfully as he suggests but all of us can benefit, I think, by becoming aware that there are folks out there creating new ways of living – and calling the rest of us to join them.

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SCIENTISTS WHO TRUST THEIR OWN EVIDENCE TAKE ACTION

By Clinton Callahan

Einstein’s bomb worked, remember, so he may also be right when he said, No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. How much longer will you continue believing that the same system that created global warming and financial collapse has the ability to fix it? Here are actions to take:

It seems to me that we are at the go/no-go moment in terms of preventing the methane tipping point from avalanching into unstoppable global warming.

It could be the moment for scientists around the world who trust their own global warming evidence to withdraw from the system that propagates the global warming.

Withdrawal from the system is neither symbolic nor philosophical. Withdrawal is swift, total and drastic. The intention is to proactively collapse the carbon economy to give humanity a chance to change direction.

This would require great personal efforts and sacrifice on the part of the scientists. It would impact our families, teams, companies and organizations with a radical change of plans. It would also require you to take your own work seriously. If you do not trust your evidence enough to take direct personal action, why should someone else?

If our withdrawal could critically disable the carbon economy, its rapid demise would avoid even greater suffering from flood, draught, worldwide famine, and continued resource wars.

Abandoning modern culture proactively as a result of trusting scientific evidence would prove that human intelligence exists. It would be like steering a careening brakeless automobile into the hillside to stop it rather than doing nothing. By intentionally crashing the car someone might survive. Flying off the cliff is suicide for all.

The choice is not actually up to political authorities. The choice is up to the creative powerhouse behind the industrial machine: you, the scientists, engineers, programmers, designers, technicians and researchers keeping things going.

To continue a carbon-hungry consumer lifestyle in the face of recent climate-change knowledge makes us no more intelligent than bacteria, consuming beyond the carrying capacity of our resources and dieing in our own wastes.

Withdrawal is simple and effective. It is nonviolent noncooperation with whatever is nonsustainable. This would include:

  • Quit your job, because almost no organization including corporate,  government, military, and education are sustainable – business assumes it is  possible to externalize true costs.
  • Sell your car, change to bicycle, public transportation, horse, and  walking.
  • Become basically vegetarian.
  • Create community; learn the soft skills of village  weaving.
  • Find your people, create sustainable culture – not money-based but  collaboration-based – collaboration is wealth, power and  satisfaction.
  • Establish local authority and local  autonomy.
  • Move out of your house or off-the-grid, e.g. straw bale passive  solar, etc.
  • With your people grow most of your own food without fertilizers,  pesticides, or tractors.
  • Avoid imported foods such as bananas, pineapples, out of season  fruits, spices, coffee, chocolate, sugar.
  • Avoid fast food chains – they abuse third world labor and  resources, pumping money away from third world economy and your local  economy.
  • Move away from mainstream pharmaceuticals and learn alternative  healing and preventative health care.
  • Home school the children, learning together how to heal yourselves  of TPP (technopenuriaphobia – the  fear of the loss of technology, as explained in the book Radiant Joy Brilliant Love www.radiant-joy.com).
  • Recognize  the Second Copernican Revolution,  that people  do not own nature. Nature owns people. Nature and people both have more value  than money.
  • Learn to make or grow most everything you need: shaving cream,  soap, toothpaste, shampoo, toilet paper, etc.
  • Shift from the disposable mentality (throw away things when they  break) to repairable mentality.
  • Stop using petrochemical plastics, packaging, newspapers, mail  order catalogues.
  • Refuse to make any garbage at all, recycle everything (look in your  garbage – it reveals the nonsustainable part of your  lifestyle).
  • Stop air flights, boat trips, exotic vacations – reorient towards  pilgrimage, restoring nature, and local outdoor adventures by  foot.
  • Get rid of most of your stuff, anything you have not touched in the  past year.
  • Avoid TV and canned entertainment – instead get with friends and  create living theater, sing, retell legends, build musical instruments, dance,  make art, engage authentic transformational processes, explore new territories  of experience.
  • Learn new communication skills; expand your abilities to be  physically, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually  intimate.
  • Avoid the paradigm of money and adopt a local paradigm of creating  abundance through giving to each other.
  • Sell your stocks, securities and investments, and deal openly with  your addiction to gambling.
  • Divest your interests in buildings or land that you do not inhabit  full-time.
  • Direct your time and energy towards befriending and nurturing  children, plants and animals, collaborating with your neighbors and effective  organizations; celebrate together a lot.
  • Change your orientation so that work is about what matters to you  rather than working to pays the bills.
  • Transform your relationship to fear so you can enter states of raw  creation and invention.
  • Implement cultural innovations that develop every person’s  beneficial potential.
  • Shift from increasing having to increasing being. Give presence rather than  presents.
  • Reorient towards personal development rather than personal possessions.  
  • Reorient from consuming  to renewing the natural  environment.
  • Develop your capacity to experience and express  love.

If you already see the perfect storm about to hit humanity and trust your own findings, then immediately and completely extricating yourself from the system that generates the problems is appropriate. Let the system fail. It was not well thought out. Our combined population growth and harmful technological waste products grew so quickly we did not have time to make other plans. By redirecting your incredible creative capacity towards generating sustainable culture then we Homo sapiens could be true to our name.

What do you actually think about this? Does it make sense?
What are you willing to say and do along these lines?
What can you stop now? Next week? Next month?
What do the people you know say and do about this?
Many people criticize the idea of proactively collapsing the carbon economy.
Are you ready to take action even if others won’t?
How much longer will you wait before you replace talk with personal action?

For creative collaboration and support in your choices assemble a Just Stop Team www.just-stop.org.
Thank you for considering this.

Clinton Callahan, originator of Possibility Management and Phoenix Process, author of Radiant Joy Brilliant Love, founder of Callahan Academy, empowers responsible creative leadership through authentic personal development. He has traveled, lived or worked in 36 different countries, and is co-creating a sustainable-culture research ecovillage in Southern Germany called Possibilica.

US Muslim TV boss ‘beheaded wife’

Saturday, March 14th, 2009

– Well, I just don’t know how to think about this one.  A tragedy for the people involved, no doubt.   But the irony is also undeniable. 

– A man who founded a Muslim TV network in the U.S. that was aimed at countering stereotypes of Muslims has beheaded his wife – who wanted to divorce him.

– I’ll just let you read the story and think your own thoughts about it.

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The founder of a US Muslim TV network has been charged over the beheading of his wife, media reports say.

Muzzammil Hassan, 44, is accused of second degree murder of Aasiya Hassan, whose body was found last week at the TV station in New York state.

Both Mr Hassan and his wife worked at Bridges TV, a station aimed at countering stereotypes of Muslims.

Authorities said Mrs Hassan, 37, had recently filed for divorce. The couple had two children, aged four and six.

Bridges TV, a satellite-distributed news and opinion channel, was founded by Mr Hassan in 2004 and was based in a suburb in Buffalo, in upstate New York.

Mrs Hassan had filed for divorce after enduring previous incidents of domestic violence, her lawyer told the Buffalo News.

In a statement on its website, Bridges TV said it was “deeply shocked and saddened by the murder of Aasiya (Zubair) Hassan and subsequent arrest of Muzzammil Hassan”.

A family court hearing was due to address the future of the couple’s two children.

Their grandparents have travelled from Texas and Pakistan to attend the hearing, John Tregilio, a lawyer for the children, told the Buffalo News.

Mr Hassan also has two other children, aged 17 and 18, from a previous marriage, according to reports.

To the original…

Here’s another link that fill in more of this story:

Songs From the Sea: Deciphering Dolphin Language With Picture Words

Tuesday, January 13th, 2009

CUMBRIA, England and FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida, December 30

In an important breakthrough in deciphering dolphin language, researchers in Great Britain and the United States have imaged the first high definition imprints that dolphin sounds make in water.

The key to this technique is the CymaScope, a new instrument that reveals detailed structures within sounds, allowing their architecture to be studied pictorially. Using high definition audio recordings of dolphins, the research team, headed by English acoustics engineer,

John Stuart Reid, and Florida-based dolphin researcher, Jack Kassewitz, has been able to image, for the first time, the imprint that a dolphin sound makes in water. The resulting “CymaGlyphs,” as they have been named, are reproducible patterns that are expected to form the basis of a lexicon of dolphin language, each pattern representing a dolphin ‘picture word.’
Certain sounds made by dolphins have long been suspected to represent language but the complexity of the sounds has made their analysis difficult. Previous techniques, using the spectrograph, display cetacean (dolphins, whales and porpoises) sounds only as graphs of frequency and amplitude. The CymaScope captures actual sound vibrations imprinted in the dolphin’s natural environment-water, revealing the intricate visual details of dolphin sounds for the first time.Within the field of cetacean research, theory states that dolphins have evolved the ability to translate dimensional information from their echolocation sonic beam. The CymaScope has the ability to visualize dimensional structure within sound. CymaGlyph patterns may resemble what the creatures perceive from their own returning sound beams and from the sound beams of other dolphins.Reid said that the technique has similarities to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs. “Jean-Francois Champollion and

Thomas Young used the Rosetta Stone to discover key elements of the primer that allowed the Egyptian language to be deciphered. The CymaGlyphs produced on the CymaScope can be likened to the hieroglyphs of the Rosetta Stone. Now that dolphin chirps, click-trains and whistles can be converted into CymaGlyphs, we have an important tool for deciphering their meaning.”
More…

– Hat tip to Bruce S.

Top investors ‘hit by $50bn con’

Saturday, December 13th, 2008

Zowie!Some of the world’s wealthiest private and corporate investors are reported to be victims of an alleged $50bn fraud by Wall Street broker Bernard Madoff.

Mr Madoff is alleged to have confessed to a huge Ponzi scheme (pyramid fraud).

Reports say the main owner of the New York Mets baseball team, Fred Wilpon, and former American football team owner Norman Braman are among the victims.

Others facing losses reportedly include French bank BNP Paribas, Japan’s Nomura Holdings and Zurich’s Neue Privat Bank.

Prosecutors say Mr Madoff, ex-head of the Nasdaq stock market, has described the fraud as “one big lie”.

A federal judge has appointed a receiver to oversee Mr Madoff firm’s assets and customer accounts, while the 70-year-old banker has been released on $10m bail.

More…

– do you want more of this same stuff, Sweetpea? Look no farther. Just follow this next link for another fine story of financial integrity.

And more…

– This second article is from the NY Times and they insist that folks have an ID and a PW in order to read their stuff. You can get these for free just by signing up. However, a friend of mine suggests the website bugmenot.com :arrow: as an alternative to having to do these annoying sign ups. Check it out. Thx Bruce S. for the tip.

Judge gives 7 year old right to decide

Friday, December 12th, 2008

Seattle, WA (AP) – A seven-year old boy was at the center of a King County courtroom drama yesterday when he challenged a court ruling over who should have custody of him. The boy has a history of being beaten by his parents and the judge initially awarded custody to his aunt, in keeping with child custody law and regulation requiring that family unity be maintained to the highest degree possible.  The boy surprised the court when he proclaimed that his aunt beat him more than his parents and he adamantly refused to live with her. When the judge then suggested that he live with his grandparents, the boy cried and said that they also beat him. After considering the remainder of the immediate family and learning that domestic violence was apparently a way of life among them, the judge took the unprecedented step of allowing the boy to propose who should have custody of him. After two recesses to check legal references and confer with the child welfare officials, the judge granted temporary custody to the Seattle Seahawks, whom the boy firmly believes are not capable of beating anyone.

Australia MPs ‘face breath tests’

Sunday, December 7th, 2008

– Ah, those Aussies are a sensitive lot, eh?

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Politicians in an Australian state could be breathalysed before voting after reports of bad behaviour by MPs.

In the latest incident, New South Wales MP Andrew Fraser resigned from his frontbench role after shoving a female MP after attending a Christmas party.

Go Oz!!!In September, state police minister Matt Brown resigned after allegedly dancing in his underpants at a drunken party in his parliamentary office.

Several MPs have now backed a proposal to supply breath test kits.

“Honestly, if you are going to have breathalysers for people driving cranes you should have breathalysers for people writing laws,” New South Wales Greens MP John Kaye told the Sydney-based Daily Telegraph newspaper.

Barry O’Farrell, leader of the coalition opposition, said he would gladly submit to an alcohol test before entering parliament.

And the Speaker Richard Torbay said he would have no problem with the idea as long as tests were voluntary.

– More…

Obama’s Use of Complete Sentences Stirs Controversy

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

In the first two weeks since the election, President-elect Barack Obama has broken with a tradition established over the past eight years through his controversial use of complete sentences, political observers say.

Millions of Americans who watched Mr. Obama’s appearance on CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday witnessed the president-elect’s unorthodox verbal tick, which had Mr. Obama employing grammatically correct sentences virtually every time he opened his mouth.

But Mr. Obama’s decision to use complete sentences in his public pronouncements carries with it certain risks, since after the last eight years many Americans may find his odd speaking style jarring.

According to presidential historian Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota, some Americans might find it “alienating” to have a president who speaks English as if it were his first language.

“Every time Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs are in agreement,” says Mr. Logsdon. “If he keeps it up, he is running the risk of sounding like an elitist.”

The historian said that if Mr. Obama insists on using complete sentences in his speeches, the public may find itself saying, “Okay, subject, predicate, subject predicate — we get it, stop showing off.”

The president-elect’s stubborn insistence on using complete sentences has already attracted a rebuke from one of his harshest critics, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska.

“Talking with complete sentences there and also too talking in a way that ordinary Americans like Joe the Plumber and Tito the Builder can’t really do there, I think needing to do that isn’t tapping into what Americans are needing also,” she said.

– To the original on The Huffington Post

– Research thanks to Van

Liberal Politics – A New Breakthrough!

Sunday, October 26th, 2008

Washington, DC – Congress is considering sweeping legislation that will provide new benefits for many Americans. The Americans With No Abilities Act (AWNAA) is being hailed as a major legislative goal by advocates of the millions of Americans who lack any real skills or ambition.

‘Roughly 50 percent of Americans do not possess the competence and drive necessary to carve out a meaningful role for themselves in society,’ said California Senator Barbara Boxer. ‘We can no longer stand by and allow People of Inability to be ridiculed and passed over. With this legislation, employers will no longer be able to grant special favors to a small group of workers, simply because they have some idea of what they are doing.’

In a Capitol Hill press conference, House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pointed to the success of the U.S. Postal Service, which has a long-standing policy of providing opportunity without regard to performance. Approximately 74 percent of postal employees lack any job skills, making this agency the single largest U.S. employer of Persons of Inability.

Private-sector industries with good records of non-discrimination against the Inept include retail sales (72%), the airline industry (68%), and home improvement ‘warehouse’ stores (65%). At the state government level, the Department of Motor Vehicles also has an excellent record of hiring Persons of Inability (63%).

Under the Americans With No Abilities Act, more than 25 million ‘middle man’ positions will be created, with important-sounding titles but little real responsibility, thus providing an illusory sense of purpose and performance.

Mandatory non-performance-based raises and promotions will be given so as to guarantee upward mobility for even the most unremarkable employees. The legislation provides substantial tax breaks to corporations that promote a significant number of Persons of Inability into middle-management positions, and gives a tax credit to small and medium-sized businesses that agree to hire one clueless worker for every two talented hires.

Finally, the AWNAA contains tough new measures to make it more difficult to discriminate against the Non-abled, banning, for example, discriminatory interview questions such as, ‘Do you have any skills or experience that relate to this job?’

‘As a Non-abled person, I can’t be expected to keep up with people who have something going for them,’ said Mary Lou Gertz, who lost her position as a lug-nut twister at the GM plant in Flint, Michigan, due to her inability to remember rightey tightey, lefty loosey. ‘This new law should be real good for people like me,’ Gertz added.

With the passage of this bill, Gertz and millions of other untalented citizens will finally see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Said Senator Dick Durban (D-IL): ‘As a Senator with no abilities, I believe the same privileges that elected officials enjoy ought to be extended to every American with no abilities. It is our duty as lawmakers to provide each and every American citizen, regardless of his or her adequacy, with some sort of space to take up in this great nation and a good salary for doing so.’

Whew

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008

What can I say?

That’s our girl…

– Hat tips to Kiwiblog and Van for these