Sheriff must return 32 cannabis plants

Interesting twist:

A Fort Collins couple and their lawyer plan to visit the Larimer County sheriff’s office Wednesday in hopes of recovering 39 marijuana plants seized by narcotics officers during a raid at their home in August 2006.

A Larimer County District Court Judge ruled Monday that authorities must return the plants and growing equipment taken from James and Lisa Masters. Their lawyer described them as medical marijuana providers for themselves and about 8 to 10 other people.

Brian Vincente, lawyer for the couple, hopes authorities have taken care of the plants as provided by the state’s medical marijuana law, which was approved by voters in 2000.

“If they’ve allowed these plants to die, they’ve broken the law,” said Vincente, executive director of Sensible Colorado, a non-profit advocacy group of medical marijuana patients.

Oofta! Done!

I’m just about to upload and publish the book. — I did it. What a day.

Should you be inclined to buy a copy ($2), I’ll be interested to know what you think. And I appreciate any review you would care to post at the Lulu page.

UPDATE: I just altered the Preview so that it shows the TOC and changed the description at the link to better explain the goals of the book.

Mainstream media and Labor

Have you noticed that the mainstream media almost always view the economy and industry and daily life from the management point of view. I recently blogged about a news report in which reporters described as “good news” the fact that workers were producing more but their wages were staying flat or declining. (Strange definition of “good news” from the workers’ point of view.)

Such reporting has pernicious effects:

A few decades ago, upwards of one-third of the American workforce was unionized. Now the figure is down around 10 percent. And news media are central to the downward spiral.

As unions wither, the journalistic establishment has a rationale for giving them less ink and air time. As the media coverage diminishes, fewer Americans find much reason to believe that unions are relevant to their working lives.

But the media problem for labor goes far beyond the fading of unions from newsprint, television and radio. Media outlets aren’t just giving short shrift to organized labor. The avoidance extends to unorganized labor, too.

So often, when issues of workplaces and livelihoods appear in the news, they’re framed in terms of employer plights. The frequent emphasis is on the prospects and perils of companies that must compete.

Well, sure, firms need to compete. And working people need to feed and clothe and house themselves and their families. And workers hope to provide adequate medical care.

GOP opposes GOP healthcare plan

Ironic, eh?

Even before Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton unveiled her new healthcare plan, Republicans attacked it as socialized medicine. They neglected to mention, however, that her plan bears a striking resemblance to changes that were proposed in 1974 — by the late President Richard M. Nixon.

”It was an extremely extensive plan, as I remember, that would have given universal coverage” for healthcare, recalled Rudolph Penner, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office and economic official in the Ford administration.

Nixon introduced his Comprehensive Health Insurance Act on Feb. 6, 1974, days after he used what would be his final State of the Union address to call for universal access to health insurance.

”I shall propose a sweeping new program that will assure comprehensive health-insurance protection to millions of Americans who cannot now obtain it or afford it, with vastly improved protection against catastrophic illnesses,” he told the nation.

Nixon said his plan would build on existing employer-sponsored insurance plans and would provide government subsidies to the self-employed and small businesses to ensure universal access to health insurance. He said it wouldn’t create a new federal bureaucracy.

The Nixon plan won support from a Time magazine editorial on Feb. 18, 1974, which noted that “more and more Americans have been insisting that national health insurance is an idea whose tune [sic] has come.”

Fast-forward 33 years to the American Health Choices Plan, which Clinton outlined Sept. 17, and to similar plans by Democratic rivals Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois and former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina.

A CBS News poll earlier this year found that 64 percent of Americans support federally guaranteed health insurance for all citizens. Clinton’s plan, like Nixon’s, calls for building on the existing private-sector healthcare system and using government subsidies and tax credits to get all Americans under an umbrella of health coverage. Like Nixon, Clinton said her plan “is not government-run. There will be no new bureaucracy.”

Evidence for evolution

Although Creationists stubbornly resist acknowledging evolution, this is going to be hard to explain:

… When [Darwin] suggested, in The Descent of Man (1871), that humans and apes shared a common ancestor, it was a revolutionary idea, and it remains one today. Yet nothing provides more convincing evidence for the “theory” of evolution than the viruses contained within our DNA. Until recently, the earliest available information about the history and the course of human diseases, like smallpox and typhus, came from mummies no more than four thousand years old. Evolution cannot be measured in a time span that short. Endogenous retroviruses provide a trail of molecular bread crumbs leading millions of years into the past.

Darwin’s theory makes sense, though, only if humans share most of those viral fragments with relatives like chimpanzees and monkeys. And we do, in thousands of places throughout our genome. If that were a coincidence, humans and chimpanzees would have had to endure an incalculable number of identical viral infections in the course of millions of years, and then, somehow, those infections would have had to end up in exactly the same place within each genome. The rungs of the ladder of human DNA consist of three billion pairs of nucleotides spread across forty-six chromosomes. The sequences of those nucleotides determine how each person differs from another, and from all other living things. The only way that humans, in thousands of seemingly random locations, could possess the exact retroviral DNA found in another species is by inheriting it from a common ancestor.

Molecular biology has made precise knowledge about the nature of that inheritance possible. With extensive databases of genetic sequences, reconstructing ancestral genomes has become common, and retroviruses have been found in the genome of every vertebrate species that has been studied. Anthropologists and biologists have used them to investigate not only the lineage of primates but the relationships among animals—dogs, jackals, wolves, and foxes, for example—and also to test whether similar organisms may in fact be unrelated.

The entire article is worth reading, but given this smoking-gun quality of evidence for the fact of evolution, how will Creationists respond? (Beyond stubborn, pig-headed, blind denial, I mean.)

Book news

I have received all readers’ comments, and the book should become available later today. As one would expect (from what I’ve learned about usability testing), with four readers the comments I got had very little overlap. Usability tests usually involve 5-7 people—beyond that number, the rate of new findings drops off fairly quickly, but up to 5-7 provides much information with amazingly little overlap: different people really notice different things.

So: it’s looking good and I’m going through it one last time. 103 pages now, and close to 42,000 words.

VA poorly managed these days

The measures tell the story:

The Department of Veterans Affairs fell farther behind this year in its attempts to give veterans timely decisions on their disability claims, new records show.

The latest numbers are in an annual report the VA prepares for Congress detailing a range of short- and long-term goals for its disability, health and other benefit programs. Overall, the agency either has fallen behind or has made no progress in improving its performance in more than half of what it lists as its key goals.

In the benefits measure the VA has said is “most critical to veterans” — the speed of processing disability claims — the agency lost ground for the third year in a row.

Moreover, McClatchy has found that the VA put a positive spin on many of its numbers, and in two instances provided Congress with incorrect or incomplete figures.

The agency said it took an average of 183 days to process a claim in fiscal 2007, longer than in any of the five years tracked in the report. Processing exceeded its 2007 goal of 160 days and its long-term goal of eventually reducing processing time to 125 days.

Outright law-breaking in the White House

God, when will it stop?

The head of the federal agency investigating Karl Rove’s White House political operation is facing allegations that he improperly deleted computer files during another probe, using a private computer-help company, Geeks on Call.

Scott Bloch runs the Office of Special Counsel, an agency charged with protecting government whistleblowers and enforcing a ban on federal employees engaging in partisan political activity. Mr. Bloch’s agency is looking into whether Mr. Rove and other White House officials used government agencies to help re-elect Republicans in 2006.

At the same time, Mr. Bloch has himself been under investigation since 2005. At the direction of the White House, the federal Office of Personnel Management’s inspector general is looking into claims that Mr. Bloch improperly retaliated against employees and dismissed whistleblower cases without adequate examination.

Recently, investigators learned that Mr. Bloch erased all the files on his office personal computer late last year. They are now trying to determine whether the deletions were improper or part of a cover-up, lawyers close to the case said.

Bypassing his agency’s computer technicians, Mr. Bloch phoned 1-800-905-GEEKS for Geeks on Call, the mobile PC-help service. It dispatched a technician in one of its signature PT Cruiser wagons. In an interview, the 49-year-old former labor-law litigator from Lawrence, Kan., confirmed that he contacted Geeks on Call but said he was trying to eradicate a virus that had seized control of his computer.

Mr. Bloch said no documents relevant to any investigation were affected. He also says the employee claims against him are unwarranted. Mr. Bloch believes the White House may have a conflict of interest in pressing the inquiry into his conduct while his office investigates the White House political operation. Concerned about possible damage to his reputation, he cites a Washington saying, “You’re innocent until investigated.”

Clay Johnson, the White House official overseeing the Office of Personnel Management’s inquiry into Mr. Bloch, declined to comment. Depending on circumstances, erasing files or destroying evidence in a federal investigation can be considered obstruction of justice.

Mr. Bloch had his computer’s hard disk completely cleansed using a “seven-level” wipe: a thorough scrubbing that conforms to Defense Department data-security standards. The process makes it nearly impossible for forensics experts to restore the data later. He also directed Geeks on Call to erase laptop computers that had been used by his two top political deputies, who had recently left the agency.

Geeks on Call visited Mr. Bloch’s government office in a nondescript office building on M Street in Washington twice, on Dec. 18 and Dec. 21, 2006, according to a receipt reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The total charge was $1,149, paid with an agency credit card, the receipt shows. The receipt says a seven-level wipe was performed but doesn’t mention any computer virus.

Jeff Phelps, who runs Washington’s Geeks on Call franchise, declined to talk about specific clients, but said calls placed directly by government officials are unusual. He also said erasing a drive is an unusual virus treatment. “We don’t do a seven-level wipe for a virus,” he said.

Science v. Religion, round 2847290179

ThinkProgress:

In a letter sent to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) last week, 10 leading scientists in the field of adolescent sexual and reproductive health “strongly” urged Congress to “reconsider federal support for abstinence-only education programs and policies.” From their letter:

By design, abstinence programs restrict information about condoms and contraception – information that may be critical to protecting the health of young people and to preventing unplanned pregnancy, HIV infection, and infection with other sexually transmitted organisms. They ignore the health needs of sexually active youth and youth who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and questioning for counseling, health care services, and risk reduction education. Withholding lifesaving information from young people is contrary to the standards of medical ethics and to many international human rights conventions.

Read the whole letter here.

Canada going off the rails

Canada on the whole is a highly sensible nation, but occasionally the government does something totally goofy, as if seized by a (hopefully temporary) madness:

The Canadian government is about to bring down Canada’s version of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and it promises to be the worst copyright law in the developed world. It will contain an “anti-circumvention” clause that prohibits breaking the locks off your music and movies in order to move them to new devices or watch them after the company that made them goes out of business — and it will follow the US’s disastrous lead with the DMCA in that there will be no exceptions to the ban on circumvention, not even for parody, fair dealing, time shifting, or other legal uses.

This will be even worse than the last Canadian copyright proposal, the defeated Bill C-60.

But there’s hope. The last two Ministers who tried to push through a US-style copyright bill in Canada lost their jobs, thanks in large part to Canada’s coalition of artists, educators, archivists, and public-interest activists. Selling Canada’s digital future out to a handful of US companies is a bad career move for Canadian politicians.

Gear up for a fight in the New Year. The American record labels, in particular, are said to be well organised and ready to push this through on a fast track (even though they’ve abandoned DRM in the rest of the world, they view Canada as a weak sister they can push around).

If this law passes, it will mean that as soon as a device has any anti-copying stuff in it (say, a Vista PC, a set-top cable box, a console, an iPod, a Kindle, etc), it will be illegal for Canadians to modify it, improve it, or make products that interact with it unless they have permission from the (almost always US-based) manufacturer. This puts the whole Canadian tech industry at the mercy of the US industry, unable to innovate or start new businesses that interact with the existing pool of devices and media without getting a license from the States.

If this law passes, it will render all of the made-in-Canada exceptions to copyright for education, archiving, free speech and personal use will be irrelevant: if a technology has a lock that prohibits a use, your right to make that use falls by the wayside. Nevermind that you’ve got the right to record a show to watch later — or to record a politician’s speech so you can hold him to account later — the policeman in the device can take that right away with no appeal.

If this law passes, it will make Canada into a backwards nation, lagging behind the UK, Israel and other countries that are passing new copyright laws that dismantle the idea of maximum copyright forever and in all things. Link

Amazing story

How can a  judge be so clueless about the law?

A US judge has been removed from the bench after jailing 46 people when a mobile phone began ringing during his court session and no one would own up.

The entire courtroom was sent to the cells during a domestic violence hearing when the judge, Robert Restaino, 48, “snapped” and — according to a review of his actions — “engaged in what can only be described as two hours of inexplicable madness”.

The State Commission on Judicial Conduct recommended his removal from the bench, saying Restaino acted “without any semblance of a lawful basis” and behaved like a “petty tyrant”.

For lighthouse fans

Take a look. Gorgeous.

Mandatory arbitration = raw deal

Kevin Drum again, and on a problem that the free market will not solve. It will take government regulation to make businesses (and industries) drop the “mandatory arbitration” requirements. I can’t see individual consumers being able to force the issue. Do you?

Over at Mother Jones, Stephanie Mencimer writes about the increasing number of businesses that won’t do business with you unless you sign away your right to a trial in case of dispute. In fact, there are now entire industries that refuse to deal with anyone who won’t agree in advance that all disputes be resolved by a private arbitration firm:

All of this is especially nefarious given that the vast majority of consumers who attempt to seek justice in mandatory arbitration lose. The nonprofit consumer group Public Citizen recently analyzed data the NAF provided to the state of California, one of the few states that actually requires arbitration firms to disclose information about their results. Public Citizen found that in 94 percent of 19,000 cases, NAF arbitrators ruled in favor of the businesses that hired them.

….One reason businesses often come out on top in arbitration is that arbitrators who rule for consumers have a tendency to find themselves out of work. Such was the case with Richard Neely, a former chief justice of West Virginia’s Supreme Court, who worked briefly as an arbitrator for the NAF. In an article called “Arbitration and the Godless Bloodsuckers,” Neely reported that he had refused to award a bank arbitration-related fees that he judged to be far in excess of what a court would have charged. He never got another case. Neely is not alone. A 2000 study of forced arbitration in HMO contracts found that on the rare occasion that an arbitrator made a significant award for a patient, the HMO never hired that person to arbitrate a case again.

Fun fact: when car manufacturers tried to insist on arbitration clauses in their contracts with car dealers, the dealers fought back furiously, saying that it would allow big corporations to “unilaterally deny small business automobile and truck dealers rights under state laws that are designed to bring equity to the relationship between manufacturers and dealers.” The dealers lobbied Congress to prohibit this and Congress agreed.

But guess which industry is one of the worst abusers of arbitration clauses when it comes to selling their product to consumers? Yep. Auto dealers. Read the whole thing.

Social Security from Kevin Drum’s view

Good post:

Why are Ruth Marcus and the Washington Post so obsessed with demanding that we all address Social Security’s long-term problems right this instant? It’s a mystery. Truly a mystery.

Here’s what they need to think about. The most common solutions to Social Security’s eventual shortfall are (a) a small tax increase, (b) a small reduction in the rate of growth of benefits, and (c) a small increase in the retirement age. Question: are there any advantages to implementing any of these solutions right now, rather than, say, ten years from now?

I’d say no. The advantage to waiting is obvious: projections of Social Security’s solvency are uncertain, and waiting gives us more data. Why try to project 40 years in the future if you don’t have to? Better to wait and see what direction the economy actually heads.

Balanced against that, there really aren’t any advantages to acting sooner. Social Security is currently running a surplus, so increasing payroll taxes today does nothing except increase the size of the trust fund — a meaningless exercise at best, and a positively harmful one at worst. We might need to raise taxes in the future once Social Security starts running a deficit, but raising them now does nothing at all to change either Social Security’s future obligations or the source of its future funding.

As for ideas (b) and (c), what’s the point of locking ourselves into them now? If we wait ten years, not only will we know more about the real shape of the future funding problem, but we’ll still have 25 years or more to gradually introduce any changes we think we need. Do we really need to give beneficiaries more than 25 years notice that they might have to retire one year later than they think? Or that after they retire their benefits are going to increase at a slightly slower rate than the law currently requires? I don’t see the point. 25 years is plenty of warning for changes as small as the ones we’re talking about.

Bottom line: 2017 is a better time to deal with Social Security than 2007. Raising taxes now doesn’t accomplish anything, and if it turns out that we need to reduce benefits we can do it in 2017 just as well as we can do it today. For now, we should put Social Security on the back burner and instead spend time worrying about healthcare costs, nuclear proliferation, and global warming. Those are problems that really do need to be addressed right away.

Most journalists today are “bad stenographers”

Read Glenn Greenwald’s fascinating column today which details how greatly the mainstream media has become a propaganda outlet and little more. I would say that the journalists (by and large, with some exceptions) are bad stenographers and the pundits (with few exceptions) are gossip-mongers, not analysts.

Getting down to basics

Good discussion:

Sometimes I’ll be lying in bed and I can hear my 4-year-old and 7-year-old having a conversation in another room. It’s an odd feeling when you’ve made some humans and then the humans start to communicate on their own.

My typical reaction is: “Listen to them having their own thoughts. How DARE they?!”

Walking down the hall the other day, I overheard the following conversation — and it froze me in my tracks…

4: What does it mean to die?

7: …

4: HEY, what does it mean to die?! Does it mean you fall down?

I was tempted to go in but I wanted to hear what his big brother would say.

7: It means you stop living.

4: (A STUNNED BEAT) I DON’T WANT THAT!

7: It’s not going to happen until you’re like a hundred.

4: When is that??

7: You’re only four. It won’t happen for a long time.

4: (TAKING THIS IN, THEN) Okay.

I can’t tell you how proud I was of my 7-year-old.

Hearing them be there for each other like that, I’m confident they’ll both lead long, happy, productive lives.

That is, until the robots attack.

More on Social Security from Krugman

A commenter had a detailed objection to Krugman’s previous defense of Social Security. I wonder how he will view this new post by Krugman:

By any reasonable standard, Social Security is at most a second-tier policy issue.

There are various ways to make this point. One is to compare the fiscal problems of Social Security, such as they are, with those of the rest of the federal government. The Social Security trustees estimate the 75-year financial shortfall of the program at 0.7% of GDP. That compares with a general fund deficit – the federal deficit outside of Social Security – of 3.3% of GDP last year (that is, not even taking into account future demands on Medicare and Medicaid.) Social Security, in other words, is in much better financial shape than the rest of the government.

Another illuminating comparison is to look at the sources of projected growth in entitlements spending. The last Congressional Budget Office long-term budget projection had Social Security spending rising from 4.2 percent of GDP now to 6.4 percent by 2050, a 2.2 percentage point increase – and Social Security, remember, is currently running a surplus to prepare for that eventuality. Meanwhile, Medicare and Medicaid spending are projected to rise from 4.5 percent of GDP to 12.6 percent, three times the Social Security increase – with negligible pre-funding.

As a result, Social Security fades to insignificance in any realistic discussion of entitlements problems. Medicare’s unfunded liabilities, as estimated in the trustees’ reports, are seven times those of Social Security. The unfunded liabilities of Medicare Part D alone are twice those of Social Security.

If you’re seriously worried about America’s long-run fiscal prospects, then, you should talk a lot about the general fund deficit and the problem of rising health care costs, and hardly at all about Social Security. But that’s not how it works in DC these days.

How obsessed are Beltway types with what is really a minor problem? Here are two snapshots:

First, from commenter “Low-Tech Cyclist” at Brad DeLong’s place:

The WaPo has a subset of its unsigned editorials where it comments on what it calls “the ideas primary.”

Five of the last seven Ideas Primary editorials have been on the Social Security ‘crisis.’ There have been 15 editorials in this series. One has been on global warming – the greatest crisis of our era – and two have been on our greatest domestic crisis, the lack of universal health care and the upcoming crisis in the Medicare trust fund.

Second, from Jon Chait:

One of the oddities of the entitlement hysterics is that they are far more obsessed with the minor problems of Social Security than with the massive problems of Medicare. Indeed, if you look closely at their dire proclamations, they inevitably follow the same pattern: They begin with an ominous summation about entitlements–thus lumping together Medicare with Social Security–then swiftly proceed to demand that Social Security be shored up forthwith.

Russert’s recent harangue at the Democratic presidential debate was a classic example. He began by warning of the crisis faced by “Social Security and Medicare” but proceeded to ask no fewer than 14 questions about Social Security, and zero about Medicare. It’s as if he began fulminating against crime in the greater New York area and then immediately began demanding a large new police deployment in Chappaqua.

Look, I know this is very embarrassing to those who have been walking around thinking that hyping the Social Security issue makes them Very Serious People. But the facts are the facts – and the Beltway obsession with Social Security reflects ideology and fashion, not the real problems facing America.

“Follow the money”

So where is the money going?

Earlier today I was reading about the wind turbine manufacturer, Vestas, which is going to open a research center in the U.S. Further reading reveals Vestas produces 28% of the wind turbines world wide and is the leading producer. I decide to check out the company’s stock and find out it only trades in Denmark! Throughout my research for this blog I am finding more and more innovative, profitable, renewable energy companies that are not U.S. based or traded.

A little research was in order, so I took a short cut: My favorite renewable exchange traded fund (ETF) is the PowerShares Global Clean Energy Fund, PBD, which tracks the WilderHill New Energy Global Innovation Index, NEX. The NEX is aimed at pure play new energy companies, of which 50% must be outside the U.S. Since the index currently consists of 88 companies, the index gives a good idea of where innovative ideas are being capitalized upon.

A breakdown gives you an idea of the broad globalization of renewable energy. The 88 companies come from 21 different countries. The U.S. leads the way with 30, but that is only 34% of the index members. Canada chips in a pair, bringing North America to a total of 32. Europe with Germany and Spain (15 & 5) leading the way have a total of 35 companies on the index, beating North America. Asia follows with 16 (only 2 from China!). Australia and New Zealand are arbitrarily combined to get 3, and the balance of two are from Brazil.

I do not know the criteria the folks at WilderHill use to select the companies for this list, except the pure play preference, but I find the breakdown enlightening. Renewable energy is a rapidly growing industry, and many of the exciting players are outside the U.S. Investors who want to participate in this sector should find ways to put their money to work globally.

Article is not a recommendation to buy or sell any securities.

Google going big into renewable energy

This is heartening:

Today, Google announced RE<C — think “Renewable Electricity cheaper than Coal.” To be honest, it is hard to overestimate the importance of actions like these.

The newly created initiative, known as RE<C, will focus initially on advanced solar thermal power, wind power technologies, enhanced geothermal systems and other potential breakthrough technologies.

To achieve this, Google is planning to start $10s of millions in investments in R&D, with the anticipation of $100s of millions of investment in the coming few years.

The target: 1 gigawatt of renewable energy capacity at or below the cost of coal-generated electricity. Their initial targets are solar, wind, and “advanced geothermal,” and we’re glad to hear they didn’t leave that last one out. Geothermal has the potential to be entirely uninterrupted with an small footprint (unlike wind and solar) and new technologies are making geothermal more viable in more areas.

But, to start with, a wind and a solar firm have been identified as Google’s early bets: eSolar (solar thermal power) and Makani Power Inc (high-altitude wind). Both of these are promising arenas for affordable renewable power. Solar thermal is already approaching the price of coal (if land prices can be kept down,) and high altitude wind provides a possibility for perpetual wind power at low-low prices.

It’s important to point out that this, like all of Google’s seemingly philanthropic efforts, is an investment scheme, not a giveaway. Google wants to turn its gold into more gold, and investing in these technologies is a fantastic way to do that. That’s not to say that they aren’t doing a “good” thing…in fact, this makes far more sense to me than purely philanthropic efforts.

… The full press release:

Dragon morning

The soap was Mama Bear’s Dragon Blood soap, which I lathered with the G.B. Kent brush. A new Sputnik blade in the Edwin Jagger Georgian did a fine job—9.5 overall. I had some lather problems, not sure why. Perhaps not enough soap initially. And the aftershave was Draggon Noir.