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This godsdamned rhinovirus has reached the stage where my belly muscles hurt when I cough. Yes, I know I’m not the only one…
How’s your exciting Saturday night going?
This post is in: Music, Open Threads
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This godsdamned rhinovirus has reached the stage where my belly muscles hurt when I cough. Yes, I know I’m not the only one…
How’s your exciting Saturday night going?
This post is in: Open Threads
Making chocolate chip cookies and watching this while I wait for the Penguins game at 10. You?
This post is in: Excellent Links, The War on Your Neighbor, aka the War on Drugs
Unlike that elitist slacker ‘BoBo’ Brooks, I never smoked marijuana in high school. Tried it in college, but quickly decided that my personal cost/benefit ratio indicated I should stick with chocolate as the intoxicant of choice. But I’m glad to see, only forty years too late, “we” may finally be starting to cautiously disassociate “our” paranoia about DFHs and urban-dwellers corrupting the lily-white flower of suburban youth. David Sirota, at PandoDaily:
… “Marijuana has been illegal because of the perception of harm surrounding it — that’s how they made it illegal, that’s how it is illegal currently,” Tvert tells me in the shop’s bustling lobby. “Our opponents’ goal has been to maintain a perception of harm. So our idea has been to get people to understand that marijuana is not as harmful as they’ve been led to believe, and not as harmful as a product like alcohol that is already legal.”
Despite increasingly absurd attempts by the government’s drug-war apparatus to obscure the obvious truth, decades of medical and social science research on everything from physiological toxicity, to domestic violence to addiction has proven Tvert’s point that cannabis is less harmful than alcohol. But it was only a few years ago that Tvert’s colleague and future mentor at MPP, Steve Fox, happened upon a key political revelation in the reams of survey data about drug policy.
“He was looking at the polling and discovered that of those who think marijuana is safer than alcohol, 75 percent think it should be legal,” Tvert recounts as we wait behind a customer who is interrogating one of the shop’s staff members about THC and CBD content. “In other words, the number one indicator of whether or not you support marijuana being legal is whether you recognize it is safer than alcohol.”
From that revelation came the creation of the group headed by Tvert that was entirely focused on drawing the alcohol-marijuana comparison. Aptly named Safer Alternative For Enjoyable Recreation (aka SAFER), it was predicated on a two-step strategy.
“Rather than trying to increase the percentage of people who think marijuana should be legal, we simply tried to increase the percentage of people who understand marijuana is less harmful than alcohol, which would naturally produce an increase in the percentage of people who support legalization,” he says.
As we move up to the counter, the alcohol-marijuana comparison feels particularly relevant, even in the consumer experience. The staff’s explanation of the chemical content, sourcing, and organic profile of each strain of weed is much like the typically detailed lesson you receive when you get your growler refilled at one of this state’s many craft beer breweries. That analogous experience, in fact, may explain why Colorado was able to leapfrog seemingly more pot-friendly states to become the first in the nation to legalize cannabis….
Long Read: “How Colorado Disrupted the Drug War”Post + Comments (32)
by Betty Cracker| 169 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Damn, that Saints defender rang Percy Harvin’s bell! Poor little Gator!
But the Seachickens take the lead, which makes valued commenter Yatsano happy. Please feel free to discuss the playoffs or any other topic.
This post is in: Domestic Politics, Open Threads
It’s a gorgeous day here. The above photo was taken earlier on the bank of a brackish section of river that empties into a bay, and thence into the Gulf of Mexico. You can’t tell from the photo (unless you closely observe the moss), but it’s very windy.
Last night when I was chauffeuring the younglings around, I caught snippets of an interview with Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey, on NPR. It got me thinking about the moral implications of domestic help.
Fellowes said his background was considerably less posh than is generally assumed, meaning his family only had people in to cook and clean rather than maintaining a large live-in staff with very specific roles (bum swabber, scone butterer, etc.).
I’ve personally experienced the luxury of domestic help only for one brief period in my life, and ironically, it was the time I had the least use for a servant: I was a single 20-something, living alone in an apartment. A dear friend was in dire straits financially and had launched a cleaning service, so I agreed to be his twice-weekly customer.
While it was nice to live in a place with consistently clean floors, windows and toilets, where shelves were regularly dusted and cobwebs cleared away, I felt weird about it. I would have rather just given my friend the money, but he wouldn’t have accepted it as a gift.
This arrangement ended when I met my future husband and we moved to a different part of town. He occasionally jokes that we married under false pretenses since he assumed I was a better housekeeper than I actually am because my apartment was so clean back then.
But if he was deceived, it wasn’t for lack of honesty on my part: I told him straight up that slovenliness is my natural state, and he was an awful slob himself: His bachelor apartment wasn’t merely untidy, it was positively squalid.
For the last 15+ years, we’ve maintained a basically hygienic but often dusty and cluttered home. We’re both capable of tolerating a high degree of domestic chaos; ongoing home renovations haven’t fazed us.
We split the household chores pretty evenly. I shoulder the lion’s share of the indoor work in exchange for not having mowed a lawn since the Clinton administration nor having had to patrol the yard for dog poop. Works for me.
My sister and sister-in-law, who are wealthy and child-free, have a cleaning lady, pool service and lawn crew. I think if you have too much shit to take care of yourself, you have too much shit. But maybe that’s just sour grapes.
Well, off to the store. I’m making fish tacos later, and we’ll watch the playoff games with friends and family. (Geaux Saints! Go Colts!)
What are y’all up to? Please feel free to discuss your philosophy on domestic help, your plans for today, football or whatever.
This post is in: NANCY SMASH!, Open Threads, Sports, Assholes
Out of pure idle curiosity, how effed up is the Meadowlands Superbowl liable to be? I mean, apart from the whole “toxic waste Superfund dump” and “Jimmy Hoffa’s burial ground” and “outdoor stadium in February” (“The NFL’s real reason, though officially unstated, for choosing the Meadowlands site is all about money. NFL owners “reward” communities that put up money for new facilities and the owners… “)?
From what I can find, sportswriters are not super happy about the “security” arrangements:
It doesn’t matter if you’ve dropped thousands of dollars on tickets. It doesn’t matter if you’ve traveled 3,000 miles to get there. And it doesn’t matter if you offer to shovel the snow that’s sure to come to the Meadowlands.
You will not be allowed to tailgate at Super Bowl XLVIII. Unless you literally stay inside your car while you do it.
“You will be allowed to have food in your car and have drink in your car,” game committee CEO Al Kelly said during a Monday news conference. “And provided you’re in the boundaries of a single parking space, you’ll be able to eat or drink right next to your car. However, you’re not going to be able to take out a lounge chair, you’re not going to be able to take out a grill, and you’re not going to be able to take up more than one parking space. And it’ll all be watched very carefully.”…
Don’t even think about hiring a taxi or limo to drop you off at the front gates. If a car doesn’t have a parking pass, it won’t get near the stadium…. Oh and by the way, there are only 13,000 parking spots for the use of fans.
Don’t even think about walking to the Super Bowl either.
“You can get your hotel to drop you off at one of the New Jersey Transit locations or get the shuttle to take you to a Fan Express location, but you cannot walk,” Smith said.
Here’s one thing you can do. Take public transportation, or as ESPN New York explains, you can take a charter bus called the Fan Express, “which will cost $51 and pick up and drop off passengers at nine locations around the region.”…
This does not sound, to my admittedly inexperienced mind, like the kind of Happy Fun Time the lite-beer and heavy-SUV marketing teams have promoted so assiduously for NFL fans. But it does sound like a target-rich environment for infotainment media and comedians looking to mine every SNAFU and FUBAR. And unless something changes really dramatically before February 2nd, Chris “I put out the traffic cones, okay?” Christie is gonna be a very easy target for mockery.
But is the blowback from Bridgegate liable to actually impact the logistics of the big game, for better or worse?
Open Thread: Can Christie Ruin the Super Bowl?Post + Comments (58)
by John Cole| 41 Comments
This post is in: Cat Blogging, Open Threads
Freshly brushed (I swear I like brushing him more than he likes being brushed, but he is just so silky smooth when he is done and I really like it because it calms me) and he immediately escaped to the highest peak on his cat tower:
Amusingly enough, his mane is enormous all the time, but when I go all pusher man and get him nipped out, I swear his mane gets wider and wider:
This is where you all admit that I, with a little bit of effort, in the attempts to shut you all the fuck up, have become much more adept with the camera. Say it, god damnit. Say it like you mean it, assholes.
Walt and I just watched Spaceballs (he’d never seen it, horror of horrors) and had some tea, but he left and now I am wired, so I think I might watch some Arrow on blue-ray. Other than if Lily puts a wet nose in the armpit, I have no intention of getting out of bed until 11 am tomorrow, and it is going to be glorious. I intend to sleep so long my back is stiff when I get out of bed. You olds know what I mean.
BTW- it occurred to me that I have been really nice to you all lately, and I need to nip that shit in the bud before you guys go all soft on me.