The War on Drugs

My great & good friend, Jeff Duntemann said today:

"We as a society spend an immense amount of money chasing people who make an immense amount of money selling chemicals for an immense amount of money to people who seem to think ingesting them is worth an immense amount of money—not to mention the risk of jail time . I've never been able to figure the payoff, however..."

The payoffs are specifically those immense amounts of money. All the Prohibition ever does is make gangsters rich, and corrupt cops. (Politicians are, by definition. already corrupt.)

Gangsters spend their ill-gotten gains bribing cops (and the DEA is the worst of that) and persuading legislators to _keep_ drugs illegal, so the price stays high. The actual cost of manufacture and distribution is peanuts -- literally. A gram of cocaine on the open market, without artificial price supports, would cost a few pennies.

Liquor (which we tried to Prohibit form 1919 to 1933) is reasonably priced -- despite about a 72% tax bite:
http://www.atr.org/special/taxbites/liquor.html

Cocaine, heroin, and pot would be similarly inexpensive, and the tax bite would solve budget shortfalls in the States as well as the Federal sphere. The money spent on boondoggles like the DEA and all the rest of the Narcotics Establishment could be spent on useful things -- like health care. Legalizing drugs would empty out prisons, which, in California spend $40,000+ per prisoner per year. Other states may get away with spending less.

"But what about crazies on drugs?" you ask. I reply: "We got plenty of crazies running around on alcohol." And what we do about them -- both -- is bag them for doing something stupid and dangerous, like Driving Under the Influence. If they commit a real crime -- holdup, assault & battery, etc., jug 'em for the real crime, not for being a pothead. To be consistent (and forswear hypocrisy) we would need to lock up alcoholics too -- and now doesn't that just strike a bit close to home, Bunky?

The experience of the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic over the past 35 or so years has been that between 2 and 4% of users develop serious problems requiring medical or psychological intervention. The remaining 96 to 98% of the user population gets along just fine. Counseling at $100 a session, 52 weeks a year is $5200 -- 13% if $40k -- at $200 a session, it is still only about 1/4 of $40k.

I know very well that I am blowing into the wind -- the Narco Establishment (gangsters, cops, legislators, and in California, the Prison Guards' Union) are too well intrenched, and too well funded, to listen to the voice of reason and cost-effective programs.

Water for Noah's Flood

Them FunDUHmentalist literalists insist that the Bible says the Flood that Noah built an Ark to survive covered the whole world -- above every mountain there is. I got to thinking about that the other day.

Now, the Radius of the Earth = 6,370 km on average

Height of Mt Everest - 8.848 km

Allowing for about 152 meters steerage way under the keel, call the flooded Earth's radius = 6,379 km

Spherical Volume = (4 * pi/3) * radius^3

(3.14159 / 3 = 1.0471967) * 4 = 4.188767

6,370^3 = 2.584748e11

4.188767 * 2.584748e11 = 1.082696e12 km^3 (cubic kilometers) = Volume of Earth now (VolNow)

6,379^3 = 2.595719e11

4.188767 * 2.595719e11 = 1.087286e12 km^3 = Vol of Earth, water covering Everest (VolEvr)

VolEvr - VolNow = 1.087286e12 - 1.082696e12 = 4.59e9 km^3

4.59e9 = 4,590,000,000 = 4.59 Billion (Milliard to Europeans) Cubic Kilometers

According to http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/1997-05/864391848.Es.r.html, the oceans'
total volume is 1.347e9 km^3.

4.59e9 km^3 / 1.347e9 km^3 = 3.41 times as much water as is in all the oceans to
flood the whole earth, to 152 meters above the top of Mt Everest.

Just where is God supposedly hiding all that extra water?

Bibliolatry and Pi

Pi is an irrational number -- one that cannot be expressed as a ratio between two integers, Modern (since the 18th Century) mathematicians are comfortable with irrational and transcendental numbers. Not so the ancients -- Pythagoras is supposed to have been so opposed to them that he drowned one of his students who had the temerity to use the idea in a proof.

The Hebrews (or at least the author(s) of 1 Kings) seem to have had the same problem with irrational numbers; 1 Kings 7:23 says:

"Then he [Hiram of Tyre] made the molten sea; it was round, ten cubits from brim to brim, and five cubits high, and a line of thirty cubits measured its circumference." [RSV]

This would seem to require that Pi = 3.0. Anyone who passed Basic Science in Grade School knows that Pi is approximately 3.141... -- NOT -- 3! Any honest and experienced workman, such as Hiram of Tyre certainly was, knew that a circle 10 cubits across had a circumference of 31 cubits plus a handspan (about 5 inches) and a half.

Why then, does 1 Kings 7:23 try to make it 3.0? 11th Century BC Political Correctness, as far as I can tell.

All God's handiwork must be perfect, and the circle is the expression of God's perfection -- surely no ugly irrational number like that can have anything to do with the circle! This is not really bad reasoning, given the state of formal mathematics at the time -- and for a millennium or so afterwards.

Come forward in time to September 1st, 2007. I just spent a couple of hours on IRC watching a bunch of blithering idiot innumerate Fun_DUH_mentalists justify that number 3.0 in 1 Kings. The dumbest arguments was "if you measure the angles of the diameter" D'oh -- ain't no angles in a diameter. It's a straight line. The next less dumb was "Well, 3 is close enough." Hiram of Tyre would not agree, especially when he was calculating how many bronze ingots he would need to melt to cast the thing. The arguments went on for most of 2 hours -- from dumb to dumber.

The reason these innumerate idjits were pulling laughable arguments out of . . . -- let's say "thin air" for politeness sake -- is that they worship the Bible, and are required by the tenets of that bibliolatry to consider each and every word in it as literal truth. Extreme Biblical literalism is one of the diagnostic heresies of extreme Fun_DUH_mentalism, and here it is in its most obvious form.

The educated Christian position is that Scriture tells no outright lies, and never leads the educated believer astray. Parts of the Bible (Song of Solomon, for instance) are poetry, parts are metaphor, parts are fairly sober history, parts are not. And parts reflect the political correctnesses of their times.

Pi is not ever 3.0 -- that is a singularly bad approximation, and not useful for any technical purpose. It is, however, a politically correct approximation, given the prejudices against irrationl numbers at the time.

Any engineer or scientist can give you numerous stories about Management demands for politically correct solutions that are simply incoherent and idiotic from a technical viewpoint. Politicians are even better than corporate management at that kind of exercise.

And so are mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, Bahbul-worshippin' Fun_DUH_mentalists.

1 Kings 7:23 is an example of the Bible being flat wrong.

That it is wrong in this one instance has no bearing on the believability or value of all the rest of the book. Unless you are a bilbiolator, of course. ;-)

Cranky Old Fart from the Fifties

Me, of course -- I remember things like Truman running for President against Dewey in '48, the song "Shrimp Boats are A-Comin", 6" round TV screens with magnifying glasses, the Korean War, and all that stuff. My good friend Jeff Duntemann's July 4th meditations on the U.S. set me thinkin' about what it was like in them far-off and ancient days.

A lot of old crocks my age & older have this rabid case of nostalgia for the 50s, when the Mass was in Latin, people dressed nicely, and were polite to each other -- go watch some "Mayberry RFD" or Lassie re-reruns for some examples. Sex was dirty, and the streets were clean. The screaming, in-your-face punks that masquerade as political protesters now would have got thrown in the jug for disturbing the peace in the 50s.

I remember those times very clearly (roughly 1948 through 1965) -- and don't have quite the nostalgia that my contemporaries and elders seem to have. It _WAS_ a cleaner and politer time, without doubt. People were expected to act like grown-ups, and after political campaigns were over, we settled down to the business of America -- which was Business. I confess to still liking the music of the early 50s -- the tail end of the swing era -- better than the ear-busting noise popular nowadays. Nat King Cole's "Mona Lisa", anyone?

I also remember the downsides, too -- the US had the most booooring President in the world. When Dwight D. Eisenhower would give a speech, the sales of sleeping pills took a nosedive. JFK got elected because he was a young smart-mouth with a sense of humor, unlike Ike.

Yes, there was discrimination, and rednecks -- but whoopie-doo, we still got both, and loudmouths on both sides. We _were_ working on it in the 50s, though -- boring old Ike sent the National Guard to desegregate Little Rock High School in the mid-50s. Civil Rights did not suddenly appear as an issue in the 60s.

The worst thing about the 50s was the Cold War Hysteria -- fear of the Soviet Union and nuclear war led us down the road toward destroying the real Civil Rights of the Americn people. A screaming demand of absolute security has driven the US to emulate its one-time enemy (and the European Parlour Pinks) in locking down tighter and tighter control over everything we do.

Kids born in the late 60s and the 70s grew up with the certain knowledge that they were going to die in a nuclear war -- thanks to their parents and grandparents' 50s Cold War hysteria. They are in their 30s and 40s now, and I get the feeling sometimes that they don't quite know what to do with themselves. The Yuppie thing of "eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die" may be a consequence of that. Certainly the dark undercurrents in contemporary culture -- explicit violence in movies, computer games, and things like Columbine have their roots in the 50s Cold War paranoia.

The 50s were, objectively, the most law-abiding, peaceful, and serene era in U.S. history -- totally unlike the brash, contentious and uncultured 19th Century, the slightly stuffy early 20th, the craziness of the 20s and the grinding poverty of the 30s. The late 60s -- what we think of as "The Sixties" didn't start until about a year after JFK was assassinated -- and following decades have simply been examples of the U.S. returning to its riotous redneck roots.

I would like to see a higher standard of politeness and responsibility, as well as tolerance and good humor, spread across the U.S. -- and to be fair, there still is a lot of that, especially in the Midwest, which we bi-costal folks sometime have a bit of trouble imagining. I guess as a Senior (62), I'm just gonna have to set an example -- when I'm not busy cackling and complaining. ;-)

Obama Jesus Statue

Chicago seems to be moby upset, according to CNN. A student at the Art Institute made a papier-mache statue of Obama with a not-quite-round neon halo and long flowing robes.

People have been hollering and complaining, and Obama's campaign workers are scurrying like ants to trying to "contain the damage". Poo, pish, and piffle!

Everybody knows Obama ain't Jesus. It's the job of artists to comment (often satirically) on their life & times. The thing is FUNNY!

Lighten up, Chicago!

(and all the rest of you, too!)

Khalid Haeikh Muhammed's Statement

As the Aussies say: "Fair Dinkum!"

In his statement to the military commission, Muhammad freely admits -- nay, brags on -- being a general in the religiously-motivated war against the U.S. and its interests. A general in an army commanded by Usama bin Laden.

Besides bragging on his own activities, however, he makes a serious case to the commission, asking them to be both just and merciful to other detainees, whom he describes as being more-or-less accidental victims of the battlefield, rather than active, willful combatants such as himself. Bravo, Khalid!

One interesting fact that comes out of the transcript is how many dozens of operatioons he planned and financed, and the number (4-5) that actually came off. Our security folk are doing a pretty good job, it seems

An apology to all Iranians for "300"

I would like to apologize to all Iranians, in Iran and elsewhere, for the idiocies of the movie "300".

This movie has nothing to do with the actual battle of Thermopylae, real Greeks, or real Achaemenians (or Hakhâmanišiya), the first royal dynasty of Persia. The names have been stolen to clothe cardboard characters, drawn (literally) from a comic book pandering to the battle fantasies of teenage boys.

Given that you have the scholarly resources and the knowledge of real Achaemenian dress and organization, I respectfully suggest that you turn your movie industry loose on making a historical movie from the perspective of the Persian side -- with fully-clad actors, not computer-enhanced nudity.