Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Synthetic cannabis: it just…, in reply to Alfie,
To me the whole process of the government selecting ‘good’ legal highs and allowing them to be sold in retail outlets is fundamentally flawed. The bottom line is that these are all chemicals designed to mimic the real thing. And the latter is less harmful by a country mile.
But you've just selected the "good" ones, right there :-)
The flaw is that controlled drugs were deliberately excluded from the Psychoactive Substances Act – and with the Misuse of Drugs Act's sweeping analogue provisions, that meant most of the drugs you'd even know enough about to consider allowing for regulated sale. On the other hand, the MoDA bans a bunch of drugs you'd be crazy to consider selling in a shop. The problem is that that the present legal status of controlled drugs is completely irrelevant in a public health sense.
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Hard News: Synthetic cannabis: it just…, in reply to william blake,
And ‘faster, cheaper, less risky’ really means more profitable, just like the bootleggers selling a pint of whisky for more profit than a pint of beer. Less risky for a pot grower/ dealer but more risk to the user by ingesting dubious and untested chemicals.
Yes, that was my point. A large illicit grow takes months to deliver and is fraught with risk throughout that time. Preparing a similar amount of smokeable material with a poorly-understood chemical probably takes a couple of days.
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Sorry folks. I was a bit distracted today. This is pure trolling. Gone.
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A report on the St James. They’ve only been able to open the ground floor and the ancillary theatres (the part damaged in the fire) will never open again but the place looks remarkably like it always did. It’s strange that all the property machinations kept it closed for so long.
I was happy enough to be one of the Old People Who Arrive Early. It meant I got to stand front and centre at the railing over the orchestra pit and hear Race Banyon on the big stereo. He was as classy as always.
I was also really impressed by Thomston, who’s been talked about as the next big thing (he shares management with Lorde) and made his public performance debut last night. He brought a hell of a lot of stagecraft for a first-timer, and pulled off an epic version of his big R&B ballad ’Second to You’. A few flat spots, but mostly extremely well realised. And fascinating.
Switching the outside stage in Lorne street to a silent disco at midnight was a genius move too. I put on my headphones just as Loleatta Holloway’s ‘Love Sensation’ was kicking off. Bloody magic, that was.
The pic above is Race Banyon.
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I totally blame Chris Hocquard for the fact that I have this as an earworm today:
Christchurch’s Bon Marche became The Newz, who put out an album on Music World(!) and they were sneered at by us cool kids at the time (ie: 1979). But this is actually a great song. It was written by Phil Judd, but Split Enz only recorded it in a BBC Radio session. As Chris says, it’s got a bit of the Mott the Hoople about it.
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Envirologue: Too Big to Fail – Why…, in reply to Kumara Republic,
More on Judith Curry at RationalWiki and SourceWatch. Both name-check organisations linked to the Koch Bros.
Ah. The "how can we even know?" line. Probably the best answer is: take a look at what the global reinsurance industry is doing with its trillions of dollars. They've assessed the odds and are acting on the climate change risk. The "uncertainty" argument is disingenuous. At best.
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Hard News: Behind Baltimore, in reply to Matthew Goody,
Key stats about Freddie Gray’s Baltimore neighbourhood:
52% unemployment ...
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Hard News: Behind Baltimore, in reply to Katharine Moody,
As I understand it, you are right there – and each local police force is funded by property taxes in the main, I believe.
Crazily, the revenue gap is increasingly being filled by police use of civil forfeiture. Police forces can basically stop people and take their money and possessions – and keep them without ever laying a charge. The film touches on it, but the New Yorker's staggering 2013 story is the go-to.
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Hard News: Behind Baltimore, in reply to Matthew Goody,
Personally think David Simon is way off in his commentary. While the arguments for decriminalizing drugs are persuasive overall, to suggest that ending the war on drugs and getting back to ‘real policing’ will somehow provide the antidote to the poverty, racism and police brutality in Baltimore doesn’t really address the deep seeded anger in the community.
It still seems to me that the drug war is the major component of all the American judicial gimmickry – mandatory minimums, no-parole law – that has wrecked black communities. The conservative American Bar Association has been banging this drum for years now:
The American Bar Association, represented at the hearing by Tampa, Fla., lawyer James E. Felman, also opposed mandatory minimums. “The United States now imprisons its citizens at a rate roughly five to eight times higher than the countries of Western Europe and 12 times higher than Japan. Roughly one-quarter of all persons imprisoned in the entire world are behind bars here in the United States. In the 25 years since the advent of the mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses and the adoption of the Sentencing Guidelines, the average federal sentence has roughly tripled in length… The time has come to reverse the course of over-incarceration,” Felman said. “Sentencing by mandatory minimums is the antithesis of rational sentencing policy.”
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Hard News: Behind Baltimore, in reply to Matthew Goody,
Personally think David Simon is way off in his commentary.
I did think he got lost in describing "The Code" in this week's interview. But in the film he makes the point that in Baltimore the arrest rate for drug offences has doubled over time and the arrest for murder and serious violent offences has halved. That's a pretty stark figure
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