This is the real deal. California is bankrupt, and the prison system is a fantastic place to retrieve billions of misspent dollars. Not only that, but a bankrupt state can stand to tax luxury items a little. This legislation is exactly the ticket for recovery… FINALLY.
Ammiano and the assembled speakers at San Francisco’s State Building also spoke calmly and methodically, at one point being drowned out by a floor-waxer. The famously funny lawmaker reined himself in, presenting “The Marijuana Control, regulation and education act (AB 390)” as a simple matter of fiscal common sense. If you believe Ammiano and his straitlaced panel, it is.
In a nutshell, here’s what the bill would do: “Remove all penalties under California law for the cultivation, transportation, sale, purchase, possession, and use of marijuana, natural THC and paraphernalia by persons over the age of 21,” “prohibit local and state law enforcement officials from enforcing federal marijuana laws (more on that later)” and establish a fee of $50 an ounce on marijuana on top of whatever pot will cost in a legal future – which legalization advocates say is about half what it costs now. This tax rate figures at about a buck a joint.
Betty Yee, the chairwoman of the Board of Equalization, called Ammiano’s proposal “a responsible measure on how to work out the regulatory framework of the legalization of marijuana.” Her board’s research indicated $1.3 billion in tax dollars could immediately head into the state’s coffers from the fee on marijuana and the sales tax on medical pot. She figured the halving of marijuana’s street price would cause a consumption increase of 40 percent, but the $50 per ounce levy would cut use by 11 percent.
Steve Gutwillig, the state director of Drug Policy Alliance, noted that regulatory measures like Ammiano’s bill can work: Teen smoking is way down, and he claims juveniles report it is easier to obtain marijuana than purchase smokes. “Marijuana arrests actually increased 18 percent in California in 2007 while all other arrests for controlled substances fell,” said Gutwillig. “This costs the state a billion dollars a year and taxpayers are footing the bill. Meanwhile, black marketers are laughing all the way to the bank.”
OUSTON – The descendants of Geronimo have sued Skull and Bones, a secret society at Yale University with ties to the Bush family, charging that its members robbed his grave in 1918 and have kept his skull in a glass case ever since.
Legend has it that Prescott S. Bush stole Geronimo’s skull.
The claim is part of a lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington on Tuesday, the 100th anniversary of Geronimo’s death. The Apache warrior’s heirs are seeking to recover all his remains, wherever they may be, and have them transferred to a new grave at the headwaters of the Gila River in New Mexico, where Geronimo was born and wished to be interred.
“I believe strongly from my heart that his spirit was never released,” Geronimo’s great-grandson Harlyn Geronimo, 61, told reporters Tuesday at the National Press Club.
Geronimo died a prisoner of war at Fort Sill, Okla., in 1909. A longstanding tradition among members of Skull and Bones holds that Prescott S. Bush – father of President George Bush and grandfather of President George W. Bush – broke into the grave with some classmates during World War I and made off with the skull, two bones, a bridle and some stirrups, all of which were put on display at the group’s clubhouse in New Haven, known as the Tomb.
The story gained some validity in 2005, when a historian discovered a letter written in 1918 from one Skull and Bones member to another saying the skull had been taken from a grave at Fort Sill along with several pieces of tack for a horse…
Members of the Skull and Bones, who guard their organization’s secrecy, could not be reached for comment. Though the society is not officially affiliated with the university, many of Yale’s most powerful alumni are members, among them both Bush presidents and Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts.
“Of all the items rumored to be in the Skull and Bones’s possession, Geronimo’s skull is one of the more plausible ones,” said Alexandra Robbins, the author of “Secrets of the Tomb” (Little Brown 2002), a book about the society. “There is a skull encased in a glass display when you walk in the door of the Tomb, and they call it Geronimo.”
I love it when profits get into the picture; privatization “always makes the industry more efficient.” Of course, there’s the nagging issue of how efficiency is quantified, and whether or not it’s desirable to achieve efficiency. In this case, the more bodies you lock up, the higher the profits, which is exactly what should happen if you’re in the business of making your prisons function as well as possible…
…except it’s not good for society to require so much capacity, and it’s not actually sustainable to grow a prison industry indefinitely. Eventually, you run out of people to put in jail… so now it’s not about profits, it’s about avoiding losses. Ah, the joys of inappropriate privatization.
At worst, Hillary Transue thought she might get a stern lecture when she appeared before a judge for building a spoof MySpace page mocking the assistant principal at her high school in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. She was a stellar student who had never been in trouble, and the page stated clearly at the bottom that it was just a joke.
Prosecutors say Judges Michael T. Conahan, and Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., above, took kickbacks to send teenagers to detention centers.
Instead, the judge sentenced her to three months at a juvenile detention center on a charge of harassment.
She was handcuffed and taken away as her stunned parents stood by.
“I felt like I had been thrown into some surreal sort of nightmare,” said Hillary, 17, who was sentenced in 2007. “All I wanted to know was how this could be fair and why the judge would do such a thing.”
The answers became a bit clearer on Thursday as the judge, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., and a colleague, Michael T. Conahan, appeared in federal court in Scranton, Pa., to plead guilty to wire fraud and income tax fraud for taking more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers run by PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care.
While prosecutors say that Judge Conahan, 56, secured contracts for the two centers to house juvenile offenders, Judge Ciavarella, 58, was the one who carried out the sentencing to keep the centers filled.
“In my entire career, I’ve never heard of anything remotely approaching this,” said Senior Judge Arthur E. Grim, who was appointed by the State Supreme Court this week to determine what should be done with the estimated 5,000 juveniles who have been sentenced by Judge Ciavarella since the scheme started in 2003. Many of them were first-time offenders and some remain in detention.
“You are not a lawyer” (YANAL) is a fascinating, brief, but effective introduction to the fallacy of using technological reasons for a jury to doubt certain evidence in court, thereby failing to meet the “reasonable doubt” qualification for guilt. I was a little disappointed by the picture that it paints of the modern legal system, which can disrupt your life even without you being guilty in the first place. This all comes down to the search and seizure process, which is the point of Ohm’s article. For whatever doubt you can invent, by resorting to some technological reasoning (e.g. a trojan, open wifi, etc) you will first be searched, and that might well be evidence of your crime (in the event that you actually committed a crime). If you didn’t do anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about, right? Not so fast: it’s hard to imagine anyone not being injured, one way or another, by the modern legal process. If you’ve done nothing wrong, at a minimum, you should still fear the search and seizure.
When techies think about criminal law, and in particular crimes committed online, they tend to fixate on this legal standard, dreaming up ways people can use technology to inject doubt into the evidence to avoid being convicted. I can’t count how many conversations I have had with techies about things like the “open wireless access point defense,” the “trojaned computer defense,” the “NAT-ted firewall defense,” and the “dynamic IP address defense.” Many people have talked excitedly to me about tools like TrackMeNot or more exotic methods which promise, at least in part, to inject jail-springing reasonable doubt onto a hard drive or into a network.
People who place stock in these theories and tools are neglecting an important drawback. There are another set of legal standards–the legal standards governing search and seizure–you should worry about long before you ever get to “beyond a reasonable doubt”. Omitting a lot of detail, the police, even without going to a judge first, can obtain your name, address, and credit card number from your ISP if they can show the information is relevant to a criminal investigation. They can obtain transaction logs (think apache or sendmail logs) after convincing a judge the evidence is “relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation.” If they have probable cause–another famous, but often misunderstood standard–they can read all of your stored email, rifle through your bedroom dresser drawers, and image your hard drive. If they jump through a few other hoops, they can wiretap your telephone. Some of these standards aren’t easy to meet, but all of them are well below the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard for guilt.
On Tuesday, Muzak Holdings LLC – the makers of the ambient instrumental music that has been a staple of elevators, supermarkets and the waiting rooms of thousands of dentists for 75 years – filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection amid efforts to refinance its heavy debt load. Like videotapes and CDs, Muzak’s music is in danger of being reduced to irrelevancy by the digital age. The Fort Mill, S.C., company is struggling to find audiences for its unobtrusive, watered-down versions of pop songs in a changing world where video screens are omnipresent, everyone is plugged into iPods and retailers are signing lucrative deals to play and promote the latest Top 40 hits.
David Anderson: Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!After struggling for days to get OpenOffice to download and work on my Mac Mini, only to find that the official version only works on the Intel model...
Chile: Thanks for your advice Andre. I followed what you suggested and it appears that you were right. Since the IR sensor is deep purple itself I thought the IR filter was present already but no....
Murano Glass: My main browser is Firefox because I like the feature that they offer remembering the username and passwords that you have registered or key in the browser. The second best browser...
