January 24, 2014

Rick Perry for "decriminilization" of pot but not legalization

SAN ANTONIO — Gov. Rick Perry signaled Thursday that he's for the decriminalization of marijuana use — not legalization, but the softening of punishment for pot users in the border state.

His spokeswoman confirmed that Perry is staunchly opposed to legalization of marijuana because of the dangers that have been associated with the drug but is committed to policies that would lower the punishment for its use to keep smokers out of jail.“Legalization is no penalty at all, whereas decriminalization doesn't necessarily mean jail time (for minor possession offenses). It means more of a fine or counseling or some sort of program where you don't end up in jail but in a rehabilitative program,” said Lucy Nashed, a spokeswoman for Perry.“The goal is to keep people out of jails and reduce recidivism, that kind of thing,” she said, adding that decriminalization would exclude violent offenders and dealers.In Texas, an offender with less than 2 ounces of marijuana can be sentenced to up to 180 days in jail and a fine of up to $2,000. An offender with more than 5 pounds faces up to two years in jail.


http://m.mysanantonio.com/news/local/article/Gov-Rick-Perry-for-decriminalization-of-pot-5168667.php?utm_source=hootsuite&utm_campaign=hootsuite

January 24, 2014

ALMOST EVERYTHING IN “DR. STRANGELOVE” WAS TRUE

The early permissive action links were rudimentary. Placed in NATOweapons during the nineteen-sixties and known as Category A PALs, the switches relied on a split four-digit code, with ten thousand possible combinations. If the United States went to war, two people would be necessary to unlock a nuclear weapon, each of them provided with half the code. Category A PALs were useful mainly to delay unauthorized use, to buy time after a weapon had been taken or to thwart an individual psychotic hoping to cause a large explosion. A skilled technician could open a stolen weapon and unlock it within a few hours. Today’s Category D PALs, installed in the Air Force’s hydrogen bombs, are more sophisticated. They require a six-digit code, with a million possible combinations, and have a limited-try feature that disables a weapon when the wrong code is repeatedly entered.
I
Strategic Command—the organization responsible for all of America’s nuclear forces—-was investigated last summer for allegedly using counterfeit gambling chips at the Horseshoe Casino in Council Bluffs, Iowa. According to the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation, “a significant monetary amount” of counterfeit chips was involved. Giardina was relieved of his command on October 3, 2013. A few days later, Major General Michael Carey, the Air Force commander in charge of America’s intercontinental ballistic missiles, was fired for conduct “unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.” According to a report by the Inspector General of the Air Force, Carey had consumed too much alcohol during an official trip to Russia, behaved rudely toward Russian officers, spent time with “suspect” young foreign women in Moscow, loudly discussed sensitive information in a public hotel lounge there, and drunkenly pleaded to get onstage and sing with a Beatles cover band at La Cantina, a Mexican restaurant near Red Square. Despite his requests, the band wouldn’t let Carey onstage to sing or to play the guitar.
The most unlikely and absurd plot element in “Strangelove” is the existence of a Soviet “Doomsday Machine.” The device would trigger itself, automatically, if the Soviet Union were attacked with nuclear weapons. It was meant to be the ultimate deterrent, a threat to destroy the world in order to prevent an American nuclear strike. But the failure of the Soviets to tell the United States about the contraption defeats its purpose and, at the end of the film, inadvertently causes a nuclear Armageddon. “The whole point of the Doomsday Machine is lost,” Dr. Strangelove, the President’s science adviser, explains to the Soviet Ambassador, “if you keep it a secret!”A decade after the release of “Strangelove,” the Soviet Union began work on the Perimeter system—-a network of sensors and computers that could allow junior military officials to launch missiles without oversight from the Soviet leadership. Perhaps nobody at the Kremlin had seen the film. Completed in 1985, the system was known as the Dead Hand. Once it was activated, Perimeter would order the launch of long-range missiles at the United States if it detected nuclear detonations on Soviet soil and Soviet leaders couldn’t be reached. Like the Doomsday Machine in “Strangelove,” Perimeter was kept secret from the United States; its existence was not revealed until years after the Cold War ended.
http://m.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2014/01/strangelove-for-real.html

January 24, 2014

SOCIAL MOBILITY HASN’T FALLEN: WHAT IT MEANS AND DOESN’T MEAN

I’m fascinated by the finding, in an extensive new study, that social mobility in the United States has stayed pretty constant over the past few decades. This conclusion challenges the standard narratives presented by the left and the right, and its political implications will be much discussed.

But first things first: where did it come from?In one sense, the finding isn’t so surprising. While it has been widely assumed that social mobility is declining—in a speech last month, President Obama said as much—previous academic studies also failed to consistently identify any trend. Some showed a decline in mobility; at least one showed an increase; and most raised some tricky statistical issues. Perhaps the mostinfluential paper, originally published in 2006, was by Chul-In Lee, of Konkuk University, in Korea, and Gary Solon, of Michigan State University. Lee and Solon examined data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a long-running survey that tracks income and other characteristics of about five thousand families nationwide.By looking, over time, at the incomes individuals earned relative to their parents’ income, they were able to measure “intergenerational mobility”—broadly speaking, the extent to which people are able to escape their upbringings. Solon and Lee concentrated on individuals born between 1952 and 1975, and their calculations covered the two decades from 1981 to 2000, when income inequality was already growing pretty rapidly. This was their conclusion:

Our estimates are still too imprecise to rule out modest trends in either direction. For the most part, though, our results for the cohorts born between 1952 and 1975 suggest that intergenerational income mobility in the United States has not changed dramatically over the past two decades.

http://m.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2014/01/social-mobility-hasnt-fallen-what-it-means-and-doesnt-mean.html

While interesting, I still think wealth inequality is a serious problem. When a few hundred have more of the wealth than the bottom half, that means that there are people living in shit because those few hundred have been hoarding. Anyway, definitely interesting and if valid some reason for hope, maybe.

January 23, 2014

they just can't help it. GOP Congressmen says wives should (voluntarily, of course) submit

http://www.salon.com/2014/01/22/gop_congressman_wives_should_voluntarily_submit_to_their_husbands/

to their husbands.

Here we go. They can't help help it because that is who they are; archaic reactionary fuck heads.

January 22, 2014

glenn beck confesses

To playing a role in "tearing the country apart"

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/4643537?ir=Media

January 22, 2014

facebook will soon lose 80 percent of its users study says

http://business.time.com/2014/01/21/facebook-is-about-to-lose-80-of-its-users-study-says/

Social media like a disease that spreads wuickly then dies.

January 22, 2014

so has the expected wave of RW outrage over the president' pot quote not materialized because

they are in such disorder that they are polling it and trying to figure out how the whole thing fits into th general scheme of getting primaried by a libertarian nut that is for pot legalization AND eliminating the social safety net?

Did the prez. just throw another wedge between the gop factions?

January 22, 2014

the end of life is not to be happy nor to achieve pleasure and avoid pain but to do the will of God

Come what may-

MLK

January 21, 2014

misogyny and just not fucking getting it in all its glory

As a man these two things struck me this weekend as perfect examples of sexism and how the GOP is the dumbass party of it. Haley Barbour's reference to the "lady mayor" being the more benign but dead giveaway example. But the Texas GOP trying to call out Wendy Davis has got to go down in the history books. They are going to piss off some Texas women. This is about to be Clayton Williams redux. (Google him)

January 20, 2014

indulge me in a little correlation/causation latitude

legalizing pot causes NFL conference championships.