Cops Dealing Doritos at Post-Legalization Hempfest

[ed. I'm planning to do this, should be both historic and fun. Now if I can just find parking.]

A few things will be different at this year's Hempfest, the 22-year-old summer "protestival" on Seattle's waterfront where tens of thousands of revelers gather to use dope openly, listen to music and gaze at the Olympic Mountains in the distance.

The haze of pot smoke might smell a little more like victory, after Washington and Colorado became the first states to legalize marijuana use by adults over 21. Having won at the state level, speakers will concentrate on the reform of federal marijuana laws.

Oh, and the Seattle police — who have long turned a lenient eye on Hempfest tokers — don't plan to be writing tickets or making arrests. They'll be busy handing out Doritos.

"I think it's going to be a lot of fun," said Sgt. Sean Whitcomb, department spokesman and junk-food-dispenser-in-chief. "It's meant to be ironic. The idea of police passing out Doritos at a festival that celebrates pot, we're sure, is going to generate some buzz."

The idea isn't just to satisfy some munchies. The department has affixed labels to 1,000 bags of Doritos urging people to check out a question-and-answer post on its website, titled "Marijwhatnow? A Guide to Legal Marijuana Use In Seattle." It explains some of the nuances of Washington's law: that adults can possess up to an ounce but can't sell it or give it away, that driving under the influence of pot is illegal, and that — festivals aside — public use is illegal.

Organizers are expecting as many as 85,000 people each day of the three-day event, which begins Friday and is the first Hempfest since voters passed Initiative 502 last fall.

The vote legalized possession of marijuana and set up a system of state-licensed marijuana growers, processors and stores to sell taxed and regulated weed. Officials are still writing rules for the new pot industry, with sales scheduled to begin next year.

by Gene Johnson, AP |  Read more:

Image: Wikimedia Commons

You Know Who I Am

I cannot follow you, my love,
you cannot follow me.
I am the distance you put between
all of the moments that we will be.

You know who I am,
you’ve stared at the sun,
well I am the one who loves
changing from nothing to one.

Leonard Cohen, You Know Who I Am
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Image: Lost in Translation (2003)

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Kevin Peterson, Apart
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Google: Gmail Users Shouldn't Expect Email Privacy

[ed. Is it any wonder there's an aversion to cloud computing and storing all your personal items/information on unsecured servers?]

Gmail users have no "reasonable expectation" that their emails are confidential, Google has said in a court filing.

Consumer Watchdog, the advocacy group that uncovered the filing, called the revelation a "stunning admission." It comes as Google and its peers are under pressure to explain their role in the National Security Agency's (NSA) mass surveillance of US citizens and foreign nationals.

"Google has finally admitted they don't respect privacy," said John Simpson, Consumer Watchdog's privacy project director. "People should take them at their word; if you care about your email correspondents' privacy, don't use Gmail."

Google set out its case last month in an attempt to dismiss a class action lawsuit that accuses the tech giant of breaking wire tap laws when it scans emails in order to target ads to Gmail users.

That suit, filed in May, claims Google "unlawfully opens up, reads, and acquires the content of people's private email messages." It quotes Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman: "Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it."

"Unbeknown to millions of people, on a daily basis and for years, Google has systematically and intentionally crossed the 'creepy line' to read private email messages containing information you don't want anyone to know, and to acquire, collect, or mine valuable information from that mail," the suit claims.

by Dominic Rushie, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Walter Bieri

Ohara Koson
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Grandma’s Hands by Ernie Barnes
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Michael Johansson
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Dear Daughter: I Hope You Have Awesome Sex

There’s a piece of twaddle going around the internet called 10 Rules For Dating My Daughter, which is packed with “funny” threats like this:

“Rule Four: I’m sure you’ve been told that in today’s world, sex without utilising some kind of ‘barrier method’ can kill you. Let me elaborate: when it comes to sex, I am the barrier, and I will kill you.”

All of which boil down to the tedious, “Boys are threatening louts, sex is awful when other people do it, and my daughter is a plastic doll whose destiny I control.”

Look, I love sex. It’s fun. And because I love my daughter, I want her to have all of the same delights in life that I do, and hopefully more. I don’t want to hear about the fine details because, heck, I don’t want those visuals any more than my daughter wants mine. But in the abstract, darling, go out and play.

Because consensual sex isn’t something that men take from you; it’s something you give. It doesn’t lessen you to give someone else pleasure. It doesn’t degrade you to have some of your own. And anyone who implies otherwise is a man who probably thinks very poorly of women underneath the surface.

Yes, all these boys and girls and genderqueers may break your heart, and that in turn will break mine. I’ve held you, sobbing, after your boyfriend cheated on you, and it tore me in two. But you know what would tear me in two even more? To see you in a glass cage, experiencing nothing but cold emptiness at your fingers, as Dear Old Dad ensured that you got to experience nothing until he decided what you should like.

You’re not me. Nor are you an extension of my will. And so you need to make your own damn mistakes, to learn how to pick yourself up when you fall, to learn where the bandages are and to bind up your own cuts. I’ll help. I’ll be your consigliere when I can, the advisor, the person you come to when all seems lost. But I think there’s value in getting lost. I think there’s a strength that only comes from fumbling your own way out of the darkness.

by Ferrett Steinmetz, GMP |  Read more:

Image: Stewart Black/Flickr

Untei Sekine, Collection of small Rohdea japonica (detail), 1832
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A Day in the Life of the Ku Klux Klan, Uncensored

Carl, an imperial wizard of a Southern-based Ku Klux Klan realm (or state-level group), takes aim with a pellet gun at a large cockroach (on the piece of paper just below the clock), while his wife and goddaughter try to avoid getting struck by a possible ricochet.

by David Rosenberg, Salon | More photos:
Image: Anthony S. Karen

America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

Experts often suggest that crime resembles an epidemic. But what kind? Karl Smith, a professor of public economics and government at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, has a good rule of thumb for categorizing epidemics: If it spreads along lines of communication, he says, the cause is information. Think Bieber Fever. If it travels along major transportation routes, the cause is microbial. Think influenza. If it spreads out like a fan, the cause is an insect. Think malaria. But if it's everywhere, all at once—as both the rise of crime in the '60s and '70s and the fall of crime in the '90s seemed to be—the cause is a molecule.

A molecule? That sounds crazy. What molecule could be responsible for a steep and sudden decline in violent crime?

Well, here's one possibility: Pb(CH2CH3)4.

In 1994, Rick Neven was a consultant working for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development on the costs and benefits of removing lead paint from old houses. This has been a topic of intense study because of the growing body of research linking lead exposure in small children with a whole raft of complications later in life, including lower IQ, hyperactivity, behavioral problems, and learning disabilities.

But as Nevin was working on that assignment, his client suggested they might be missing something. A recent study had suggested a link between childhood lead exposure and juvenile delinquency later on. Maybe reducing lead exposure had an effect on violent crime too?

That tip took Nevin in a different direction. The biggest source of lead in the postwar era, it turns out, wasn't paint. It was leaded gasoline. And if you chart the rise and fall of atmospheric lead caused by the rise and fall of leaded gasoline consumption, you get a pretty simple upside-down U: Lead emissions from tailpipes rose steadily from the early '40s through the early '70s, nearly quadrupling over that period. Then, as unleaded gasoline began to replace leaded gasoline, emissions plummeted.

Intriguingly, violent crime rates followed the same upside-down U pattern. The only thing different was the time period: Crime rates rose dramatically in the '60s through the '80s, and then began dropping steadily starting in the early '90s. The two curves looked eerily identical, but were offset by about 20 years.

So Nevin dove in further, digging up detailed data on lead emissions and crime rates to see if the similarity of the curves was as good as it seemed. It turned out to be even better: In a 2000 paper (PDF) he concluded that if you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions from automobiles explain 90 percent of the variation in violent crime in America. Toddlers who ingested high levels of lead in the '40s and '50s really were more likely to become violent criminals in the '60s, '70s, and '80s.

And with that we have our molecule: tetraethyl lead, the gasoline additive invented by General Motors in the 1920s to prevent knocking and pinging in high-performance engines. As auto sales boomed after World War II, and drivers in powerful new cars increasingly asked service station attendants to "fill 'er up with ethyl," they were unwittingly creating a crime wave two decades later.

It was an exciting conjecture, and it prompted an immediate wave of…nothing. Nevin's paper was almost completely ignored, and in one sense it's easy to see why—Nevin is an economist, not a criminologist, and his paper was published in Environmental Research, not a journal with a big readership in the criminology community. What's more, a single correlation between two curves isn't all that impressive, econometrically speaking. Sales of vinyl LPs rose in the postwar period too, and then declined in the '80s and '90s. Lots of things follow a pattern like that. So no matter how good the fit, if you only have a single correlation it might just be a coincidence. You need to do something more to establish causality.

by Kevin Drum, Mother Jones |  Read more:
Image: Gérard DuBois

The Sense of an Ending

More than five million Americans have Alzheimer’s or similar illnesses, and that number is growing as the population ages. Without any immediate prospect of a cure, advocacy groups have begun promoting ways to offer people with dementia a comfortable decline instead of imposing on them a medical model of care, which seeks to defer death through escalating interventions. The Green House Project, based in Arlington, Virginia, pushes for the creation of small group homes in which medical care is less intrusive; the Pioneer Network, based in Chicago, urges reforms such as less reliance on psychotropic medications.

Many of these approaches overlap with the methods of the Beatitudes Campus, which, over the past decade, has become an incubator for a holistic model of care. “When you have dementia, we can’t change the way you think, but we can change the way you feel,” Alonzo said. Ann Wyatt, the consultant on residential care at the New York City chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association, calls Beatitudes a “magical place”—a phrase rarely used to describe a nursing home. She is currently coördinating an effort to implement the Beatitudes approach in several New York City facilities, including Jewish Home. “Beatitudes has sort of put the pieces together,” she told me. “It all—embarrassingly and intuitively—makes sense.”

In the advanced-dementia unit at Beatitudes, the elevator is blocked by a velvet rope attached to silver stanchions. Visitors must unhook the rope to proceed. The rope is meant to dissuade a resident from wandering onto an elevator and out of the building; a black square of carpet in front of the elevator performs the same function, since people with dementia have been shown to be unwilling to step onto such a black space, taking it to be a hole. At other nursing homes, exits are often marked with “Stop” signs, or blocked with the kind of fluorescent banners that police use to cordon off crime scenes. The velvet rope at Beatitudes makes a subtle, more positive suggestion: that residents are ensconced in an exclusive club.

The unit is on the fourth, uppermost floor of a nineteen-sixties-era medical building. Its residents are men and women who can no longer live alone safely: they may not remember the location of the bathroom in the house where they have lived for fifty years, and they may have virtually lost the power of speech. (Residents on the lower floors have less advanced dementia, or are undergoing rehab for, say, a stroke.) Across from the elevator is a large, sunny sitting room, where the nurses’ station used to be. “We took that out because they deserved the real estate, and we didn’t need it,” Alonzo told me as she showed me around what is always referred to as the “neighborhood”—a semantic adjustment meant to signal that Beatitudes is a place where residents live, rather than an institution where they are confined.

by Rebecca Mead, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Phillip Toledano

Hokkei Totoya
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Miroslava Rakovic
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...and that's why I love her...

Strawberry by tragedienne (Rustle)
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Bob Dylan

Stake my future on a hell of a past
Looks like tomorrow is coming on fast
Ain't complaining 'bout what I got
Seen better times, but who has not?

Silvio
Silver and gold
Won't buy back the beat of a heart grown cold
Silvio
I gotta go
Find out something only dead men know

Honest as the next jade rolling that stone
When I come knocking don't throw me no bone
I'm an old boll weevil looking for a home
If you don't like it you can leave me alone

I can snap my fingers and require the rain
From a clear blue sky and turn it off again
I can stroke your body and relieve your pain
And charm the whistle off an evening train

I give what I got until I got no more
I take what I get until I even the score
You know I love you and furthermore
When it's time to go you got an open door

I can tell you fancy, I can tell you plain
You give something up for everything you gain
Since every pleasure's got an edge of pain
Pay for your ticket and don't complain

One of these days and it won't be long
Going down in the valley and sing my song
I will sing it loud and sing it strong
Let the echo decide if I was right or wrong

Silvio
Silver and gold
Won't buy back the beat of a heart grown cold
Silvio
I gotta go
Find out something only dead men know

Music and Lyrics -- B. Dylan

Collagen 2013 Waldemar Strempler
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Andreas Paradise, Lafkos
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