Genius

"Greenhouse is a browser plugin created by Nicholas Rubin, a 16-year-old programmer. It seeks out the names of elected US officials on any web-page you load in your browser and adds a pop-up link to their names listing the major donors to their campaigns."    Full story...

This discovery thanks to boingboing.net, a wonderful site wanting to be bookmarked.

The Triple-Pot Latte

There's nothing quite like the vigor and vim that comes from a large cup of strong coffee loaded with sugar. The caffeine lights the fire, and the sugar feeds the flames. What previously was urgent is suddenly imperative, what was impossible is delightfully doable.

How, one wonders, might this be improved?

The other day I ordered a latte at a local espresso stand before going on into a theater to see "The Metropolitan Opera Live in HD". They had no interesting syrups to sweeten it with. No peppermint, no hazelnut, no chocolate or vanilla. Only agave syrup. I tried it. No flavor to speak of. Its flavor was subtle, as they say.

The next other day, I was browsing online the cannabis edibles I could enjoy if I were simply to move to Colorado and what did I see?  Agave syrup.

What was inconceivable became delightfully doable.  A medium latte contains two shots of espresso. Add three shots of cannabis agave, and what do you get?  How will you know?

It's time now for this blog's yearly April 20th look at how the holy weed of the ancient San Franciscans has been doing lately, a review delayed slightly this year for ahem personal  reasons.

For those in a hurry, Huffington Post hits the highlights with their yearly review.

 11/09/2012 - Counties in Washington State drop marijuana possession cases in response to vote.

 4/05/2013 - Seattle police return marijuana taken from street dealers

 4/20/2013 - Prohibition now costs the government $20 billion a year.
Imagine the improvements if that much money were spent on education.

 May 17th - The Organization of American States said that countries should consider decriminalizing drug use.

 May 24th - Marijuana cannabinoids slow brain degradation and aging, reverse dementia

 May 25th - 47 percent of Americans say pot should be legal to grow.

 Jul 21st - A new federally funded study proves that marijuana is safe and effective as a medicine.
Not what they planned to prove, but what can they do?

"The goal of the study was to disprove the many other studies that show cannabis to be safe and effective in treating symptoms, side-effects and diseases. Guess what? The CMCR came to the same conclusion as those other studies: marijuana is medically useful and effective. Oops. That’s rather inconvenient, isn’t it?"

Aug 7th - CNN's Sanjay Gupta says Americans terribly and systematically misled about marijuana. He stated that the DEA has no scientific basis for the claim that marijuana has no medical value.

Aug 12th - A Dr. Sanjay Gupta Special: WEED shows how kids sick with epilepsy are helped by cannabidiol.

Aug 12th - AG  Eric Holder presents new Justice Department drug sentencing reforms.

Aug 18th - A report from Hempfest in Seattle:
"I haven't been to it in a few years, but I had to go do THIS one... the first one where marijuana is legal!"

Aug 19th - 82% of Americans believe that the US is losing the war on drugs.

Aug 20th - White House won't say if federal position on medical marijuana will be swayed by the Sanjay Gupta video.

 Aug 21st - State officials say DOJ has given 'tacit approval' for legal marijuana

 Aug 26th - The Senate Judiciary Committee invites AG Holder to discuss clash between fed and state marijuana laws.

 Aug 29th - DOJ will let the Washington and Colorado marijuana laws go into effect.

 Aug 30 - Is the war on drugs coming to an end?
"The Justice Department's announcement that it would not block Colorado and Washington from implementing state laws legalizing marijuana marked a sea change."

 Aug 30 - Police groups furious about AG Eric Holder's mrijuana policy 

 Sep 05 - Republican John McCain says "Maybe we should legalize. We're certainly moving that way as far as marijuana is concerned. I respect the will of the people."

 Sep 12 - Even Neo-con Grover Norquist and the tea party favor equal government tax treatment for legal marijuana businesses.

"Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform, the group that pressed congressional Republicans to sign a strict anti-tax pledge, stood alongside Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), a tea party favorite, at a Thursday press conference to advocate for the change."

At issue is a section of the federal tax code that prohibits businesses considered drug traffickers from taking basic tax deductions for business expenses.

 Sep 20th - NBC News reports that cannabidiol (CBD) turns off the cancer gene involved in metastasis findings.


 Sep 26 - Colorado marijuana industry gets $1 million from an investor group. 

 Oct 17 - California is poised to legalize recreational marijuana in 2016.

 Oct 31 - One in four Americans would buy pot if it were legal. This is not a trivial market.

 Nov 05 - Portland, Maine, legalizes recreational marijuana. Adults may possess up to 2.5 ounces legally.

 Nov 09 - The NAACP supports marijuana rights:  "the NAACP's Board of Directors passed a resolution last month in support of H.R. 1523 -- the Respect States Marijuana Laws Act."


 Nov 21 - Feds and the local police raid pot shops as they prep for January openings.
"Just weeks before shops are to start selling marijuana for recreational use in Colorado, federal and local law enforcement raided stores across the Metro area Thursday morning."

 Dec 29, 2013 - Colorado prepares for legal recreational sales.

 Jan 1st, 2014  - The nation's first legal recreational pot market opened in Colorado today.

 January 3rd - Bill to legalize pot introduced in Vermont.

 Jan  6th - Ad agencies prepare for the legal marijuana market. "Their goal is to make it not only acceptable, but hip..."   Uh...

 Jan 15th - The New Hampshire House just became the first state body to ok recreational use.

 Jan 19th - President Obama says that marijuana is less dangerous than alcohol.

 Jan 27th - Bush holdover DEA chief slams Obama for saying marijuana less dangerous than alcohol.

 Feb 28th - Alaskans will be able to vote for recreational marijuana on their summer ballot

 March 9th - In California, the Democratic party platform backs legalization.

 March 10th - Colorado collects $2 million in recreational pot taxes in January alone.

 March 14th - Stephen Colbert  "The market has spoken and the market is toking."

 March 24th - A state lawmaker plans to introduce a bill to legalize recreational use in New Jersey

 April 1st - DC mayor signed a bill decriminalizing up to an ounce of marijuana.

 April 4th - Attorney General Eric Holder said that he would be glad to work with Congress to reschedule marijuana.  It isn't addictive, toxic, or lacking in medicinal uses, and it looks kind of funny up there at the top of the dangerous drug list.

 April 7th - Michelle Leonhart, Bush-holdover DEA chief, thinks marijuana legalization will kill puppies. After all, you only have to look at the dogs that have already died from the illegal usage.

 April 14th - Maryland has decriminalised marijuana. Under 10 grams is a civil offense, now.

 April 15th - Tourists flock to Colorado, where crime is down and marijuana is up.


 April 16th - Can smoking marijuana "change your brain?"   Bad science says "yes!"



 April 16th - The ZaZZZ cannabis-edibles vending machine from American Green will be installed in the Herbal Elements dispensary in Vail, Colorado. Very soon.


 April 24th - John Paul Stevens, retired Supreme Court Justice, thinks marijuana should be legalized.

 May 5th - The chief of the DEA, a Bush hold-over, refuses to support drug sentencing reforms, although her boss the Attorney General is all for them.

 May 5th - The federal government just ordered a thousand pounds of marijuana. They need to do research, so the DEA upped their yearly allotment from 21 kg to 650 kg.

 May 6th - Nobel Prize - winning economists say we should end the war on drugs.

 May 6th - An army base was broken into and covered in pot seeds. "A group of anti-war Italians opposed to a US Army base in their midst broke into said Army base last week, where they planted about 200,000 marijuana seeds, reports Stars and Stripes."

 May 8th - Oklahoma initiatives for the November ballot would make marijuana a legal, exportable cash crop.

  May 14th - Kentucky sues the DEA to free its impounded hemp seeds. They were intended for agricultural research.  The win could be big if the judge bases it on the following:

"The public interest is not served by allowing unaccountable federal agencies to exercise arbitrary and capricious powers, not rationally related to carrying out any legitimate governmental purpose."  says the Kentucky Department of Agriculture lawsuit.

 May 21st - Colorado will spend $10 million researching marijuana's medical benefits

June 3rd -  Denver Post's Marijuana Reviews are Smokin'  -  "I found my legs tethered to the ground with my head meandering in the sky.”

June 3rd - Obama signs farm bill which legalizes hemp growing.

 June 4th - NYT columnist Maureen Dowd over-ate pot candy in a lonely Colorado hotel room and lived to write about it.

June 4th - California weed industry worth $31 billion a year. "... more than the combined value of California’s ten largest agricultural commodities."

June 8th -  Denver crime falls over 10 percent in wake of pot legalization

June 8th - Mexican President open to legalization.

 June 11th - New report blasts DEA for spending 40 years obstructing marijuana science.

June 13th - Jamaica to decriminalize personal marijuana possession - less than 2 ounces in a public space is legal. In a private space...?

 June 19th - The Senate could follow the House in blocking DEA enforcement against medical marijuana use. A bill has been proposed. The House passed their version of it with surprising alacrity.

 June 19th - The Philadelphia City Council voted to decriminalize marijuana.  Up to an ounce, oh my... ...  . . . (I use www. realtor.com for all my re-location daydreams...)

 June 20th -  And finally, the pope, after cancelling his appointments for the next month, has declared recreational drugs bad. Doesn't lead to the desired results, he says. Patience, o holy one. Sometimes it takes a party or two to realize the jubilee that is going on inside you.

 Says this ancient former San Franciscan candlemaker.

Tomorrow Today

Change is ever faster and faster.

News about our government's secret surveillance of American citizens sits near the top of the headlines. While the government hopes to learn everyone's most secret secret, so does the public hope to learn the government's secrets. The government's secrets are both much more vulnerable and much more interesting, as its crimes are much more blatant and more profound than the petty crimes of the average American.

Whistle-blower Chelsea Manning, who long ago released to the public a cockpit video of an American helicopter gunner shooting down newsmen who were filming the scene of a military action, and who followed that by passing on a veritable shipping pallet of incriminating documents to universal publicizer Wikileaks --- has just written an op ed piece for the New York Times, explaining how Americans have been continuously lied to since the start of the war. She called it  "The Fog Machine Of War".  Respectability has come to her while still in prison.

Another whistle-blower, Edward Snowden, is still in Russia, but...

"Edward Snowden routinely hangs around at the New York ACLU offices by means of a BEAM telepresence robot, through which he can meet with journalists for "face-to-face" interviews."

He recently gave aid, over the video, to a reporter who was having an epileptic seizure. (He himself has had epilepsy.)


Nationalization of our local police continues. The latest embarrassment has been the discovery that, using a CIA tool called Stingray, police cars can capture the cellphone calls of people in their houses. Stingray pretends to be the nearest cell tower, capturing a call because its signal is more powerful and then making an actual link to a real cell tower. It just inserts itself into the line.  "Hi, mom... "

What is even more embarrassing to the government, the feds are trying really hard to keep the states' open records laws from revealing publicly the police-to-CIA emails that let them set up this vast fishnet. These attempts to cover their very private secrets are very public.

When I was a little kid, it was very important to know if your barn door was open, and worse, if the horse was out of the barn. The federal government is now trapped in the spotlight, trying to pretend that its horse isn't really out of the barn. Popcorn, anyone?

From 'The Independent' - Trevor Paglen documents the hidden world of governmental surveillance, from drone bases to "black sites"   But everyone's doing that these days...

   On 6/5, 65 Things We Know About NSA Surveillance That We Didn't Know a Year Ago


Terrorism, defined as "the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims" has come to America. Two recent attacks on local government by anti-government gun-toting not-quite-sane people both fulfill the definition.

One chap had just about had it with his local courthouse. He was expected to enter a plea on June 6th to eleven felony drug charges. He had other plans:

"Dennis Marx wore body armor and a gas mask. He brandished an assault rifle, an assortment of grenades, "all kinds of ammunition" and even used his silver Nissan SUV as a weapon of sorts, according to authorities. The 48-year-old man toted his own water supply and flexible handcuffs, presumably to corral hostages once he got inside the north Georgia courthouse."

Within three minutes, he was dead on the lawn. Suicide by police. He was believed to be a supporter of the Sovereign Citizens movement, which denies government's right to enforce the laws. He also was a former government employee for much of his life.

Then in Nevada, a couple of days later, two young people who had been expelled from the Bundy ranch for being too radical, decided to start the next revolution by killing two policemen. They became trapped behind a barricade in a store. The young woman shot and killed the young man and then herself.

They were of pseudo-fascist leanings, laying a 'swastika-stamped manifesto' on the dead policemen.


For those whose lives have become desperate, desperation turns to anger, and anger to violence. When one's own life is worth nothing, then neither is anyone else's.

Drastic, shameful, desperate poverty is real in America. The courts are making poverty criminal, fining the poor, and then sending them prison when they can't pay the fine:

A poor lady died on the floor of a jail. A single mother, she couldn't always get her kids to school already fed, well-dressed and on time. She was fined for their truancy. And then sent to jail because she could not produce documentary evidence for not paying the fines. She had high blood pressure and needed medication. The jailor did not give it to her. She died on the floor of her cell.

"Thousands of people have been jailed over truancy fines in this county since 2000, and two in three of those jailed have been women, according to the AP. But the criminalization of poverty is a much broader national phenomenon, with court costs and fees magnifying the statutory penalties for a variety of minor infractions such that the financial penalty snowballs into an un-payable debt for low-income people.

The results, as catalogued in a year-long National Public Radio investigation, are staggering: a 19-year-old jailed for three days after catching a smallmouth bass during rock bass season, because he couldn’t pay the fine; a homeless man sentenced to a year in jail over $2,600 in penalties incurred by shoplifting a $2 can of beer; a recovering drug user sent to jail three times for being unable to make payments on nearly $10,000 in court costs."

The crime is that of being poor in a society with an economic system designed to move money upwards.

While the devotees of fascism described further above may have an unscrewed motto or two, their pain is economic, and they rightly recognize that the power of the government enforces the pain, as in Mrs. Dinino's case. The government is at war with them.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor will be available for employment soon - he has been 'primaried' by a conservative far to his right, a rare tea-party intellectual. His upcoming departure will be "a blow to military spending."  More popcorn.

China has just demonstrated its unawareness of the world's hunger for news by arresting a very public, very popular civil rights lawyer on some very hazy, trumped-up charges:

"Police said Pu was arrested on suspicion of "creating a disturbance" and "illegally obtaining personal information." It did not provide details, but the former offense, a kind of public disorder crime, has been widely used to prosecute activists in recent months. Pu's friend said the accusations were groundless.

"Just half a year ago, civil rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang was earning accolades in the Chinese media for his work pushing for the abolition of labor camps."

The Chinese authoritarians must think that no one will ever know that they have made for him such a problem. Popcorn! We surely haven't heard the last of this.


The fascist kids who killed the cops thought they were starting a revolution, but it's been happening for a long time at a much lower level.

Low-Level Insurgencies: The Working-Class Mini-Revolts of the Twenty-First Century

In England, some chintzy folks put iron spikes in the sidewalk to prevent the homeless from sleeping nearby.  Activists recently poured concrete over those spikes, turning them back into sleeping spots.

Where government has been screwing up, it has been paying through the teeth:  New York City Agrees to Largest Occupy Wall Street Settlement Ever 

A Philadelphia school district has just paid $610,000 for taking 50,000 pictures of students for two years without their permission while they were at home, in some cases dressing and undressing, using laptops that had been loaned by the school to the students for free.

Remember the Nisour Square killings in Baghdad, in 2007?  Blackwater contractors shot their way through traffic when they got nervous.

"After years of delays, four former guards from the security firm Blackwater Worldwide are facing trial in the killings of 14 Iraqi civilians and the wounding of 18 others in bloodshed that inflamed anti-American sentiment around the globe."

Good news for the planet, as well - electric car manufacturer Tesla has just opened up its patents for use by others, adding them to the public domain. Now lots of companies can make electric cars. This will help guarantee that charging stations are available, and Tesla will still make the best electric on the market.

It all works out in the end.

Dear Mr. President

Dear Mr. President,

As you consider ways of bringing peaceful resolution to the Middle East, I hope you can remember that old U of C motto, "... and how many ways can this go wrong?" and ask it often.

May the infinite guide your footsteps, for they are ours, also.

Dan McIntyre

On, Wisconsin

Wisconsin yesterday became the 27th state in this country to legalize gay marriage. Over half of the states now allow gay marriage. In all the other states, there are actions moving through the courts. 

The next big change coming may be an end to the war on drugs. Two states so far have made a real beginning in this. Colorado will be using its new income from pot taxes to research medical uses of cannabis - something the feds never got around to. A rolling snowball may soon become an avalanche.

Power to the people. To the extent people feel deprived of power, they will sooner or later obtain it.