Friday, March 27, 2009
Obama on Marijuana Legalization and the Economy?
We took votes about which questions were going to be asked, and I think 3 million people voted, or 3.5 million voted.I have to say that there was one question that was voted on that ranked fairly high, and that was whether legalizing marijuana would improve the economy [note: the live in-studio audience all starts chuckling at this point], and job creation, and ah -- I don't know what this says about the online audience, but I just want -- I don't want people to think that ah -- this was a fairly popular question -- and we want to make sure that it was answered.The answer is 'No, I don't think that is a good strategy to grow our economy.'
*note that this link is to a petition created by Nobel prize winning economist Milton Friedman and signed by hundreds of economists
- There really are people who are finding a variety of medical benefits from marijuana, and reliable studies have even verified this.
- There are people whose lives are being destroyed, not by marijuana use directly, but by a penal system which follows biased and outdated ideologies, damning to jail those who use and distribute it.
- Marijuana has been shown to be far less harmful to people than alcohol or tobacco, but those are legal, regulated, and (heavily) taxed. Simply put, that is double-think.
- The drug war is class and race war -- blacks and latino/as are disproportionately represented among those who are put in prison (according to mandatory minimum sentences, even!) as a result of non-violent drug offenses.
- Marijuana plants produce a lot of oxygen -- the planet needs more oxygen NOW, and these can grow a lot faster than forests (of course I would also recommend reforestation ASAP as well).
- Finally, there is the issue of personal freedom to do as we choose. The United States has long been touted as "the land of the free." The war on drugs, coupled with peoples' continued desire to use them is a strong test against that notion -- because of prohibition, people are not free at all to use cannabis. Every argument I've heard from proponents for restriction on this freedom are either arbitrary or circular, frequently pointing to the illegality as the reason for itself.
- The pharmaceutical industry doesn't want people to be able to grow their own pain relief.
- If marijuana is legalized, there will be massive amounts of hemp fiber available for everything from clothing to rope, to sheets, to paper, to cooking oil, to insulation, to biodegradable plastics.
- The tobacco, alcohol, and coffee industries don't want to have to give up their corner on the recreational drug market.
- The prison and corrections industry has been enjoying a real boom lately, and the big box stores who hire prison labor at slavery wages also enjoy having locked-up non-violent drug offenders to help with their profit margins.** We, as shoppers, should take very careful heed of from where we buy our products.
- Drug traffickers and dealers, despite the possibilities of getting caught, enjoy the immense profit they can make when they sell plants at 100x their natural cost to produce.
- And V.P. Joe Biden and Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel have both been fairly well linked to -- and supportive of -- the war on drugs in the past.
Health Care Reform (2 of top 10)
"Why is marijuana still illegal? Cigarettes and alcohol are far more harmful, and with the taxes put on the legal distribution of marijuana the US could make millions" Ben R, Washington, DC
"As a person with Multiple Sclerosis, I have many other MS friends who use marijuana just to feel some relief from their bodies. When can pressure be placed to reclassify Cannabis from a Schedule 1 drug (no medical benefit) to Schedule 5?" Marcia, Texas
Green Jobs and Energy (the top 2!)
""Will you consider decriminalizing the recreational/medical use of marijuana(hemp) so that the government can regulate it, tax it, put age limits on it, and create millions of new jobs and a multi-billion dollar industry right here in the U.S.?”" Green Machine, Winchester,VA
"Has your administration given any serious thought to how legalizing marijuana could help solve the economic crisis? We could tax this green product and create an influx of cash while reducing violence created by the war of drugs & illegal trafficking" Ashley, Brooklyn, NY
Financial Stability (the top 4!)
"Would you support the bill currently going through the California legislation to legalize and tax marijuana, boosting the economy and reducing drug cartel related violence?" Anthony, Warrington, PA
"Has the administration given any thought to legalizing marijuana, as a cash crop to fuel the economy? Why not make available, regulate, and tax something that that about 10 million Americans use regularly and is less harmful than tobacco or alcohol." Sarah, Atlanta, GA
"Growing up I have noticed many around me always talk about legalization of marijuana, and I always thought, why not put a tax stamp on it. If marijuana was legalized it could really change a lot of things. America had the same problem with Alcohol." Peter McNamara, Minneapolis, MN
"Could legalizing marijuana and laying a tax on it, given restriction allow the government make back some of the glaring debt considering it's inelasticity and the history of economics of prohibition?" Andy Drake, New Brunswick, NJ
Jobs (2 of the top ten)
"What are your plans for the failing, "War on Drugs", thats sucking money from tax payers and putting non-violent people in prison longer than the violent criminals?" Matt B, West Bend, WI
"President Obama, Do you plan on letting Science end the failed "War" on Marijuana for personal and medical use thus taking the strain of our prisons and police forces so that we no longer have to arrest over 800,000 non violent drug offenders?" Phill, Georgetown,MA
Budget (the top 7!)
"With over 1 out of 30 Americans controlled by the penal system, why not legalize, control, and tax marijuana to change the failed war on drugs into a money making, money saving boost to the economy? Do we really need that many victimless criminals?" Ryan Palmer, Dallas, TX
"Mr. Obama, Thank you for allowing us to ask our questions to you, unfiltered. What is your stance on legalizing marijuana federally, taxing it and regulating much like alcohol and tobacco? I believe that the Drug War has failed, and needs overhaul." Brian, Minneapolis, MN
"I am not a marijuana user, but I do believe that making marijuana legal could provide some relief as to it could be heavily taxed and regulated. Legalization of marijuana will also be a detriment to the drug cartels in Latin America." Ryan McLaughlin, Rindge, NH / Quakertown, PA
"Have you considered legalizing marijuana and taxing/regulating it like alcohol? Marijuana is America's largest cash crop. The tax revenue from marijuana sales would provide a massive source of new revenue and cut the insane costs of the "Drug War."" Matt S, Huntsville, AL
"Mr. President, we the people continue to ask you this general question, please do not fail to respond: Will you allow science and common sense to reign and end this failed WAR ON DRUGS starting with the legalization and taxation of Marijuana?" Mark B, Sterling,VA
"Should the recreational use of marijuana be legalized and taxed if it will help California reduce its budget deficit? How will you and the federal government respond if such a law is passed by the California legislature?" JHawk, Santa Barbara, CA
"Are you willing to seriously consider the idea of curtailing the failed & expensive drug war in favor of a fair, responsible policy of decriminalization? With Mexican gangs, drug-related disease, & addicition going unchecked we need another solution." T.Kapanka, San Francisco, CA
That's a lot of questions (17 out of the top 110 questions), and I imagine that they got spread out across all of those categories because among the available categories, none of them seemed to jump out easily a social policy reform, or prison reform, or marijuana reform. Funny how lack of a category for something can be a form of inhibiting conversation about it, or making it seem awkwardly shoe-horned in. In retrospect, it's no wonder that the economic angle is where the question was built on that Obama chose to answer. After reading all these questions, I find it so sad that he ended up simply answering, "No," and it really is kind of infuriating that he was so cavalier and jocular about it.
colors: Red, White, Blue, Green
mood: Sleepy
chant/prayer/mantra: May the world get back to nature one day. And not the hard way.
pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel
Labels: anti-oppression, changing the prison paradigm, coursework, drug war, economics, oppression, personal bookmarks, politics, USA
Monday, February 23, 2009
Some other people's thoughts on music and nature, along with my own...
[ David Sanjek on music fans who value the tragic stories of dysfunctional musicians]: "The word 'schadenfreude' grants these lookyloos way too much dignity."
[On why he {Stephin Merritt} subverts genres]: "Because I'm embarrassed." (He added that this is also why Andy Warhol did everything the way he did.)
[On the difference between shame and embarrassment]: "You can talk about embarrassment. You cannot talk about shame."
To me, all sound is musical in some way or another. According to musician John Cage, “Everything we do is music. And everywhere is the best seat.” While some sounds – the blaring repetition of a car alarm or the too-loud hum of a laptop's fan – do still qualify as music to me in the way John Cage describes, they're not the kind I like. Those sounds make me mad, because they are created from principles that mar the natural music of life. The car alarm was intentionally designed to cut through the baseline sounds introducing cacophony, and not blending with the beauty around it, just squawking. And the whir of computers, refrigerators, and the constant sound of the freeway's stream of cars are unfortunate byproducts of our culture's design that raise the noise floor, obscuring our ability to more perfectly perceive nature's music.
Frequently, I will clap my hands together when I walk into a new and interesting space. I clap not really for the purpose of dispelling evil spirits, as is the belief in some cultures, but rather just to hear the acoustic signature. Every location has an acoustic signature, but I imagine many people do not fully note the beauty of this. A hand-clap is a short, sharp sound with such a quick “attack” that it manages to carry many different frequencies of pressure waves as it propagates outward to any boundaries, where it will then bounce around before returning to the clapper's ears. At sea level, the sound's pressure wave will travel at 1100 feet/second, which means that in a cathedral like St. Mary's on Geary in San Francisco or the Cathedral of Christ the Light just north of Lake Merritt in Oakland, the sound may travel 100 feet to a wall or ceiling, then return two-tenths of a second later.
Actually, there will be the direct sound that only takes a millisecond to go the one foot from your hands to your ears, then there is the first echo, then there will be multiple echoes as the sound waves bounce back and forth. The sound is damped partially by the total distance it must travel through the air, and also by the surfaces of the walls or trees or ground as they absorb the sound. A simple example of this how is a wall made of carpet in Elvis' basement will absorb much more sound than the tiles in your bathroom. Actually, the reverberation is one of the reasons people like so much to sing in the shower. That, and the fact that the noise floor created by the shower's spray kind of covers up those off-key notes....
But even the off-key singing I like. I had a voice teacher explain to me that you want to sing each note right on key instantly, but many singers' nature is to start the note slightly flat if its in the upper registers and then sort of slide into the right pitch a fraction of a second later. To me, that's part of what is called the “attack” or the onset of a musical note. The next part is the decay, which is the portion of a note where the “voice” tapers off. This voice can be a human voice, a hammered piano string, a bowed viola string, a horn's honk, a plucked guitar string, or something entirely synthetic. Each instrument has its own unique [act with hands] attack, decay, sustain, and release.
More importantly to me is the timbre of the sound, spelled with an “i” but pronounced with an “a.” Timbre is the quality of the overtones as they relate to the fundamental pitch. Say you pluck a low E on a guitar string, you will also hear harmonics resonate at various amplitudes. There is a harmonic that occurs at half the length of the string and sounds an octave higher than the fundamental. Another harmonic occurring at 2/3rd the length of the string is the perfect fifth, and so on. Synthesizers, with their abilities of sculpting harmonic levels, feeding back, and applying low-frequency oscillators, are able to create any sound imaginable. You may play a note on an instrument, but the sound that comes out may be entirely different, depending on the timbre. With the right settings, a single note can be made to sound like a chord, or may just sound like something many people may not associate with music at all....
There's much more to say about all that's beautiful about sound, but I will just leave it at that, saying that the music to me in life is how our notes resonate and reverberate and resound. So,... Send your sound out there, and see which frequencies it resonates on, and find out how long it takes to come back.
lyrics: Something in Turkish off of a song called "Haydi Kolkola" by Grup Yorum off of The Rough Guide to Turkey
colors: 430,000,000,000,000 Hz (red) to 750,000,000,000,000 Hz (violet)
mood: Okay.
chant/prayer/mantra: May all our sound be a chorus.
pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel
Labels: coursework, music, personal bookmarks, personal religion, presence, theological sources
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Fritz Eichenberg's Woodcuts
I wonder how many people starved in the streets, or were nailed up while they were debating details on the structure of the body, spirit, nature, and origin of Christ and the Logos. Me, I always thought the function of Christ was the important part, perhaps to the degree that the Christology (what's our savior look like) seems a lot more like soteriology (how are we saved)
lyrics: "I don't care if their teeth are big. I don't care if their legs are big. I don't care if her hair is a wig. Why waste time looking at the waistline? First, I look at the purse." - First I look at the Purse, by Contours
colors: black and white
mood: how about that economy crashing down? i kind of thought it would be 1-3 years further down -- perhaps the u.s. government will be able to fend it off this time.
chant/prayer/mantra: may we look beyond all of our human constructions, and realize the true nature of all our resources.
pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel
Labels: art, christology, coursework, Dostoevsky, economics, personal religion, sacred texts, salvation, tattoos, theological sources
Friday, September 19, 2008
Christian Egalitarianism
...
...is acceptable to me.
Makes reference to
"There is [now no distinction] neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is not male [a]and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus." from Galatians 3:28. That and Romans 8:18-25 are about all the Paul I can take, however. Too toxic. Paul gets two points for two good pericope samples. Although this one kind of has a yonic invasive quality to it, it might be difficult to deal with for some folks who've been through certain Christian damage events, or who simply don't appreciate the violation of being hoovered into a giant wicker basket.
lyrics: Eddie Izzard, talking about the Stoics, on "Circle".
colors: blue, orange, and yellow, for an angel education picture i drew earlier today.
mood: metatronic, bionic, embryonic
chant/prayer/mantra: be. do. have (only a little). enjoy.
pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel
Labels: anti-oppression, Book of Romans, classism, coursework, equal rights, freedom versus freedom, heaven on earth, Multitheticalism, parousia, racism, theological sources, Universalism, Women's Rights
Thursday, May 8, 2008
A Brief Story from Yesterday's Class
Yesterday in Sufi Storytelling, the instructor surprised us by telling us we were each to deliver an impromptu 3-5 minute story, off the cuff. Here is a version of what I came up with.
How many of you have heard the story of the Robot at the Spelling Bee? [Of course, some wiseacre answered "I have"...] Well, this story might be a little different than the version you've heard. Here it is.
There was once this society of people who lived underground, because they didn't fit in with human culture. They were freaks (a term I generally use endearingly) in a way -- see, they were part eagle, part ox, part lion, and part orangutan. I'll leave you to try and picture which part is which, and you'll probably be able to come up with a visualization sufficiently freaky to get the picture.
Anyway, they lived underground, and ostracized, because the human people didn't know how to appreciate or understand them. But they wanted to get the chance to be outside in the sunshine, so they built a robot with the fanciest, shiniest, newest artificial intelligence (not just with solid logic and heuristics, but also with dynamically-reproducing seeded algorithms) they could come up with and sent it to the humans. The robot happened to arrive on the day of the spelling bee, and decided to join up.
When it was its turn, they gave it a pretty easy word. Can somebody give me a somewhat easy spelling word? [from audience: kumquat] Kumquat, well,... the robot heard the word and had not a clue, having not ever really learned anything about the human culture and its language or spelling, so it just sat there until the people said "Stupid robot, go away." And it was kicked out of the spelling bee in the first round.
It went back to the eagle-ox-lion-orangutan people and told them about the language of the humans and how they had this spelling bee ritual, so they found out a bit about it, and the robot processed what had happened, until it felt ready to go the next year. The next year, it went back and signed up again for the spelling bee. Can somebody give me a more difficult spelling word? [from audience: chartreuse] Hmm, chartreuse. Well, the robot had deciphered a little bit about the ways of the spelling bee during the last year, and learned the language, but only had a vocabulary of about 5000 words, so it didn't know "chartreuse." It asked the judges for the etymology and for it to be used in a sentence, and then said, "Well, I don't know how to spell that word, but I do know a word from our culture that apparently is quite similar." And it proceeded to tell them all about the eagle-ox-lion-orangutan word for chartreuse. Upon finishing, the judges thanked it and rang the bell to indicate that the robot was again kicked out of the spelling bee.
And every year, the robot came back for the spelling bee, knowing more and more about human culture. Each time it got to a word it didn't know (from the third year on, it was able to even advance a few rounds), instead of guessing at words it didn't know, it would teach the judges and the audience words from the eagle-ox-lion-orangutan culture. After many iterations of this process, the humans finally knew enough about the eagle-ox-lion-orangutan culture that they began to appreciate it. And when the robot reported back, the eagle-ox-lion-orangutan people were able to come above ground into the light of the sun, and live together with the humans in harmony.
\The End.
lyrics: "Here we are in the parking lot, getting ready inside our heads." -The Helvey Brothers, from Heavy Metal Parking Lot
colors: Not brown. I just (finally) found my summer chaplaincy internship at a state health facility just north of here.
mood: pretty good, tired.
chant/prayer/mantra: bless the freaks
pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel
Labels: coursework, Islam, paradigm shift, parousia, pax hominibus/bright shiny future, theology
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Currently Studying the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses of the First Amendment to the US Constitution
.Just thought I'd note that. It's really astounding to see how the interpretation of those two clauses has evolved over the years, thereby setting precedents that we have to live with. (Actually we don't have to live with them into perpetuity, because of the "redress of grievances" clause, and the likely never-to-be-written "riot clause." And presently of course we do have to live with bad laws and bad interpretations* for now, since the executive branch is actively pursuing some laws as written and interpreted by the other branches.) It's equally astounding to consider the considerations and assumptions that the members of the supreme court turn to when laying down new precedents.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I understand that being human, its essentially impossible to be non-ideological, though the ideologies of the judges show through fairly clearly when one adds a critical eye to the bright light that gets shined on the procedures and decisions they make. By that, I mean that some start from the assumption that the founding fathers/parents of this country meant to honor freedom of conscience above all else, by creating this document. And others go so far as to start from the assumption that they meant only that the nation could not establish and endorse a religion, and that people were free to go to any religious house they choose.
Further, at this stage, a small and growing group of the justices on the supreme court believe that the laws of this country come first, rather than the freedom of conscience. If the courts are not protecting our freedom of conscience from the tyranny of the majority and from the tyranny of corrupt laws, then who??? The supreme court is a (if not THE) primary vehicle in which the nation's laws can be tried and found to be in error. Here, specifically, I am referring to the Employment Division vs. Smith case, but really, to the whole process. When a judgment is handed down that says, in effect, "Since what this religion is practicing is against the law, and the law was not written specifically to single out out that religion, that religious practice is still against the law. YET for these ideological people (who also happen to have ascended to the very seat of human justice in the US), there is no reason to assume that the government should have to prove why the law is required, or that there is no less constraining legislation that could more justly address the grievance.
In that case, the justices throw true liberty out the window, and are interested in a continuation of laws, putting written legislation and past interpretations above the inherent freedom of decision and action afforded to individuals. After all, as we join together out of a lawless "natural state" of cavepeople into social contracts where we recognize that the government has as one of its major roles that of determining the boundaries of freedom between rights of people against each other, and against the powers ceded to government in exchange for freedom from others' freedoms to. But when government goes bad, it forgets that its powers come from the people, and begins to define the freedoms with greater allowances to some parties than others, in effect breaking the contract with people whose views differ from the majority, thus violating their right to be free to express themselves as they please, as long as they are not imposing unduly on the freedom of expression of others. And yes, there is a line that must be determined there, and determining the line between the freedoms of two different entities is the purpose of courtly jurisprudence, but I would warrant with every fiber of my being that neither the lines being drawn by the the legislation, nor those practiced by the executive branch, nor those interpreted by the judicial branch -- none of those lines are drawn justly, with individuals' rights in the fore of consideration.
That's my thinking.
lyrics: "Clean up your shit, man, before I change my mind." -Beth Wood
colors: white and yellow
mood: studying hard, should be writing the above in a paper
chant/prayer/mantra: focus. focus. focus.
pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel
*just to clarify, while i am certainly critical of the government (as every true patriot should assiduously be), i think that for one to be critical and always partisan against the government is foolish. to me, being critical means to critique and examine something with open eyes, through as diverse a sequence of lenses as one can produce. then to discern the flavor of the thing (or to judge it, if you will).
the government is not all bad. there are good people within, there are bad people within, and there are people who exhibit both good and bad actions. the policies and laws are not all bad or good, nor are there interpretations. and those deciding how to carry out the laws are not all bad or good, but of course "teh george" does seem to be attempting to set a record for the former...
that's why having freedom for honest and open conversation/dialog/trialog/quadralog in our country/world is so important, and why i'm a media reform advocate. the minute a law or interpretation gets written, it starts to decay. if we can critically talk about it, our democracy survives and thrives. those who would hinder that are NOT interested in democracy. EOM.
Labels: coursework, equal rights, freedom versus freedom, media, oppression, our mission, personal religion, politics, theology
Monday, December 17, 2007
A Wrap-up Post for the Fall Semester
(The Life, Work, and Trans-national Communities of) Bawa Muhaiyaddeen: In addition to the direct wisdom given by Bawa, this course provided a brand new context for understanding how religions develop. Specifically, I found myself asking -- and coming close to finding answers to -- questions examining the differences and similarities between the roles of prophets, sheikhs/priests/ministers, in terms of introducing revelatory knowledge in the former role, or interpreting/expanding on that knowledge in the latter. And I found myself examining how the role of the latter, when expanding on the knowledge can be similar to new revelation, especially when Bawa is telling stories about past prophets.
UU Polity: Wow. If you want to have a group of people living in community, you need to have rules and principles for how we can live together. What are they, and where do they come from?
Chapel Committee: Getting involved in our community's worship life. Very involving and time-consuming.
Oakland Youth Group: Connecting back in with the energy, and syncing up with the next generation. Makes me feel old.
Edges Magazine: Volume 3 now in progress!
pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel
PS- Interstate Highway I-35 may be holy. Who knew?
Labels: coursework, religious community, theological sources
