“Marijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man. By any measure of rational analysis marijuana can be safely used within a supervised routine of medical care … The evidence in this record clearly shows that marijuana has been accepted as capable of relieving the distress of great numbers of very ill people, and doing so with safety under medical supervision. It would be unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious for DEA to continue to stand between those sufferers and the benefits of this substance in light of the evidence in this record.”
— DEA Administrative Law Judge Francis L. Young, September 6, 1988

Ooops, kinda sucks when your own judge holds extensive hearings and concludes that the whole mission of your organization is bogus. AWWWWKWARRRD!!!! Luckily the DEA just ignored him, which spawned a hilarious lawsuit questioning the DEA’s right to put it’s hands over it’s ears and shout “NHAHAHAHHA I CAN”T HEAR YOU.” In a staggering opinion, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit actually ruled that was chill from a legal perspective.

The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.

So you might be sort of astounded by how fucking insane a strategy that is, but wait! there’s more!

This week, more than six months later, the E.P.A. is set to respond to that order by releasing a watered-down version of the original proposal that offers no conclusion. Instead, the document reviews the legal and economic issues presented by declaring greenhouse gases a pollutant.

It worked! Can you fucking believe it? But remember, Impeachment is off the table as unilaterally decided by Nancy Pelosi. Even Mecha-Abe Lincoln is surprised:

This entire article is full of keepers, check it out
:::: White House via NYTimes ::::

Top:A clip from an Obama/Clinton Debate
Bottom:A Clinton ad that shows Obama darkened to look blacker with his face elongated. Additionally the text is blatant lie.

Dirty, filthy politics coming straight from the Clinton camp. This Daily Kos article is a must read
:: Blacker via Email (Thanks Chloe!) ::

that http://www.simplethings.com is a) taken and b) taken by a link farm

–>American Psychiatric Association Assembly Unanimously Backs Medical Marijuana

–>Veterans make up one in four homeless people in the United States, though they are only 11 percent of the general adult population

::John Calvin and Thomas Hobbes via Space Coyote::

::It List::
Comingled recycling, Gap: for dumping indian manufacturers that use child labor, public revelry

::Shit List
People who don’t recycle! People who throw cigarette butts on the ground, open container laws. Gap: for waiting until raids to “discover” that their factories employ children {this has been known for years}

When will companies realize that naming their entire product lines using an externally random* string of numbers and letters is not a good idea.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, just look at printers (or anything!)

• HP Photosmart Pro B9180 Photo Printer
• Canon Pixma Pro9500
• HP Officejet Pro K5400dtn Color Printer
• Xerox Phaser 6360DN
• Canon Pixma Pro9000

TOP SELLERS:

1. Hewlett Packard LaserJet 1018 Printer
2. Canon PIXMAâ„¢ MP600 All-In-One InkJet Printer

*externally random is a term that I made up. It refers to something that seems to make no sense from an outside perspective. A good and annoyingly frequent example is using acronyms without defining what they refer to first. these acronyms *have* a meaning but to the outside observer they are as good as random. in short: not effective.

This is from an okay article in salon (a surprisingly common occurence), I think it would be easier to just let the empire subside. I am at least reasonably happy that waterboarding is no longer considered reasonable. Long time readers of voodoo knickers will recall that I’ve been railing against that and strappado for years. although not like i can really claim “i told you so” props for hating on torture techniques….

If you ever surf around on the “blogosphere” or the “blagosphere” or whatever the kids are calling it these days you’ll notice that nothing ever blows up from a myspace blog. I’m not familiar with someone posting something so trenchantly insightful or fall off your keyboard hilarious on a myspace blog that it’s gotten 10s of thousands of incoming links in 48 hours. I’ve never seen slashdot, digg, or reddit link to myspace.

This doesn’t really make a lot of sense to me, it seems like at least a few of the millions of myspace blogs should be saying something diggworthy. The first thing that comes to mind is that the highly personalized nature of blog posts has a limited appeal to any sort of greater audience (ie omg drama with the bf!!). That doesn’t really fly though because LiveJournal is also personalized but there are still fairly common blog explosions on the major aggregators. Given that Myspace has the largest userbase of any of the social networking sites (it’s the #5 most accessed english website on the internet according to alexa as of this writing) I have a hard time believing that myspacers aren’t writing brilliant and incisive blog posts about the state of the world. As the tagline of technorati says “70 Million blogs out there…some of them have to be good.” A view of technorati’s top 100 blogs shows that a few are hosted in blogger, typepad and wordpress the rest have dedicated domains but not a single one is hosted on myspace.

Closer inspection of my own blog on myspace may reveal the reason why. If you start at my myspace profile(myspace.com/titaniumdreads) and click on [view all blog entries] your taken to my blog page. the nonsensically long uri is

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.ListAll&friendID
=10085330&MyToken=5acd4cbd-b0f5-46e3-96bc-03d97574275cML

I did some logical inference hacking and discovered that I could get to the same page by going to
http://blog.myspace.com/titaniumdreads. However, there is no indication anywhere on the page that it can be accessed with a simplified uri. In fact there isn’t even a permalink the permalink is disguised as a link in the time I made the post.

The permalink is the mainstay of the blogger. If you expect to have people link to your posts you have to have a clear and concise uri. the permalink for my last entry is

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID


676-A9DD4FCF97E8C98552665480 =10085330&blogID=231822843&Mytoken=DF89AAC4-40C9-4

There is no fucking way that someone could type that. I believe that myspace is losing millions of dollars because they haven’t programmed their namespaces properly. If you could access my myspace blog through http://blog.myspace.com/titaniumdreads/?p=162 I might not have gone to the trouble to set up this website. Something this simple would be easy to forward around in email and on comments to other users. If you think that this isn’t a big deal you’re wrong. The weblogs inc network was the first to make over a million dollars in advertising with only a handful of blogs, myspace has at least 200 million users growing at a rate of 230,000 per fucking day (although most of those are probably like my friend ruthie). The creators of myspace sold it for 327 million dollars. Not long afterwards google paid 900 million for exclusive search rights. Myspace is currently working on expanding into the chinese market. this minor usability error is costing myspace hundreds of millions of dollars.

To me there’s a bigger issue here. AJ Liebling said that
Freedom of the Presses is for those that own one.” This minor programming error is holding back public discourse in a very significant way. The internet is destroying television and newspapers because *anyone* can have a voice not just the media monopolies that thrive on a cheap political system dominated by sound bites, fear-mongering, emotional appeals, and ad hominem attacks.

Myspace has the shittiest user interface but is the most popular social networking site because it gives users the freedom to create their own pages (myspace). Yet they’ve totally missed that most basic of points with their blogs. Give users the basic uri’s and the ability to embed html in blogs and myspace could make billions while invigorating the public sphere.

New Friend Requests!!!

If the profile no longer exists why do I have to deny their friend request?!?!? Shouldn’t this just disappear? gah!

dear ruthie, I totally think you’re a real person and not a porn fakesters* created by a sophisticated bot. what? you have a cam?!? only 5.99 a minute? I would have never guessed.

*see attack of the smartasses a great article from sf weekly when friendster was considered an “uber-chic” dating site.

April 19, 2007 — For the first time, investigators are saying the chemical that has sickened and killed pets in the United States may have been intentionally added to pet food ingredients by Chinese producers.

Food and Drug Administration investigators say the Chinese companies may have spiked products with the chemical melamine so that they would appear, in tests, to have more value as protein products.

Officials now suspect this possibility because a second ingredient from China, rice protein concentrate, has tested positive for melamine. So has corn gluten shipped to South Africa. That means there is a possibility for another round of recalls.

The FDA’s top veterinarian, Stephen Sundlof, says finding melamine in so many products “would certainly lend credibility to the theory that it was maybe intentional.”

Melamine, which is used to make plastics in the United States and as a fertilizer in Asia, contains nitrogen. Nitrogen can appear to boost the level of protein in products.

The revelations have led the FDA to expand the number of products it is testing as they enter the United States. So far, those inspections at the border have not turned up any melamine in wheat gluten. Tainted wheat gluten used by Menu Foods is suspected in sickening hundreds, if not thousands of pets.

Some of the tainted pet food has apparently made it into feed for hogs. Federal agencies are trying to determine if it was actually fed to animals and whether it may have reached the human food supply.

via ABC News

—Mr Gordon

That’s not good at all.

So it turns out that the government has a “reasonably complete” database of all the prescription drugs people in the US have bought…

MAPS finally put this video online - Nubs Up
YouTube only allows uploads of less than 10 minutes so it has to be cut into three parts - Nubs down
Resolution sucks - Nubs Down
Informative and Useful Content - Nubs Up
A bit cheesy….

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3