One need not travel to China to find indigenous cultures lacking human rights. America leads the world in percentile behind bars, thanks to ongoing persecution of hippies, radicals, and non-whites under prosecution of the war on drugs. If we’re all about spreading liberty abroad, then why mix the message at home? Peace on the home front would enhance global credibility.

The drug czar’s Rx for prison fodder costs dearly, as lives are flushed down expensive tubes. My shaman’s second opinion is that psychoactive plants are God’s gift. Behold, it’s all good. When Eve ate the apple, she knew a good apple, and an evil prohibition. Canadian Marc Emery is being extradited to prison for selling seeds that American farmers use to reduce U. S. demand for Mexican pot.

Only on the authority of a clause about interstate commerce does the CSA (Controlled Substances Act of 1970) reincarnate Al Capone, endanger homeland security, and throw good money after bad. Administration fiscal policy burns tax dollars to root out the number-one cash crop in the land, instead of taxing sales. Society rejected the plague of prohibition, but it mutated. Apparently, SWAT teams don’t need no stinking amendment.

Nixon passed the CSA on the false assurance that the Schafer Commission would later justify criminalizing his enemies. No amendments can assure due process under an anti-science law without due process itself. Psychology hailed the breakthrough potential of LSD, until the CSA shut down research, and pronounced that marijuana has no medical use, period. Drug juries exclude bleeding hearts.

The RFRA (Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993) allows Native American Church members to eat peyote, which functions like LSD. Americans shouldn’t need a specific church membership or an act of Congress to obtain their birthright freedom of religion. John Doe’s free exercise of religious liberty may include entheogen sacraments to mediate communion with his maker.

Freedom of speech presupposes freedom of thought. The Constitution doesn’t enumerate any governmental power to embargo diverse states of mind. How and when did government usurp this power to coerce conformity? The Mayflower sailed to escape coerced conformity. Legislators who would limit cognitive liberty lack jurisdiction.

Common-law must hold that adults are the legal owners of their own bodies. The Founding Fathers undersigned that the right to the pursuit of happiness is inalienable. Socrates said to know your self. Mortal lawmakers should not presume to thwart the intelligent design that molecular keys unlock spiritual doors. Persons who appreciate their own free choice of path in life should tolerate seekers’ self-exploration.

According to a paper “Computer Initiative Technology Grant” produced by Amanda Funk, Dean of Students at the George Washington Elementary School, grant money and private donations will be used to obtain two “multimedia technology exploration carts” that will be available upon completion of construction.

Each will consist of 15 laptops, a wireless hub, a black-and-white printer, 15 headsets 15 mice, 6 iPod Touch devices, an iTunes account and a set of SMART Response Clickers.

The report states “Learning with lap tops gives students the opportunity to construct their own meaning, explore individual paths to knowledge, and provides vast amounts of information at their fingertips.  With laptops and Internet access, students can visit a museum anywhere in the world, perform a virtual dissection, exchange data with students from anywhere in the world, and create multimedia presentation for a world audience.”

It continues: “The iPod touch has a vast amount of potential in the classroom to revolutionize the way students learn and teachers teach.  The applications that are available through iTunes are endless…. Vocabulary applications that students can create and share flashcards, math fact fluency applications, planetarium applications that allow easy exploration of the sky, health and nutrition applications make it easy to look up caloric values in food and create examples of healthy meals, audio books, creating podcasts, recording a sound and automatically composing music…”.

“With SMART Response interactive response systems, teachers gain accurate and immediate insight into student learning while increasing comprehension, retention and engagement.  Without leaving SMART Notebook software, teachers can easily ask questions, instantly see visual results, and continue to explore topics until they are satisfied with the level of their students’ understanding.”

Educators bemoan that students often retrogress during the middle school years. According to the report, a laptop pilot program in Beaufort, South Carolina indicated “that students with laptops demonstrated a ‘sustained level of academic achievement’ during their middle school years, as opposed to students not using laptops who tended to decline during this same period.” Also noted was “academic benefits were most significant in at-risk student populations.”

The “Technology Grant” report concludes “In a world of cell phones, PDA’s, Xbox, Wii, Playstation 3, etc., technology is all around our students.  It is in their everyday life, why shouldn’t it be in schools?”

In his column, Editor Marv Adams reports “An Allentown woman, 45, was charged with open lewdness after Manheim Township police were told that she got out of her vehicle and urinated in the open at Route 501 and York Road. On a Friday. At 11:04 a.m.”

WATCHDOG: In a more civilized setting, people would just look the other way. Some people have weak bladders and the urge comes suddenly. A man can keep a cup in his car. What is a woman to do?

Columnists can get desperate to find things to write about during the holiday season. May we suggest tolerance?

While the U.S. likes to claim the Taliban is funded by heroin money the fact is 4% to Taliban, 75% captured by government officials, the police, local and regional power brokers and traffickers – in short, many of the groups now supported (or tolerated) by the United States and NATO. Who are the real drug dealing profiteers?

Source: Foreign Policy in Focus of the Institute for Policy Studies.  Here’s an article about their study.

Capitalism is the theory that ‘capital’ is the bottleneck to production, that those who have capital are in the catbird seat. I mean ‘capital’ is no longer king. Capital no longer makes you competitive – creativity and flexibility does.

Mass production isn’t completely dead – commodities are still needed, and it’s hard to compete with a huge refinery if you’re trying to produce gasoline. But the bulk of the economy has moved away from generic items.

For instance, nobody could compete with Henry Ford’s Rouge complex. He could make simple, sturdy black cars for less than anyone on the planet. Pretty soon, though, people started buying cars in color, cars with a better ride, cars that protected you better against the weather.

In Wabash, Indiana, there are a lot of little companies making artificial joints and similar orthopedic surgery gizmos. Every few months, someone working for one of those little companies figures out a way to make a better joint, he quits, and sets up his own company producing that better joint. He becomes competitive and profitable within a few months if the product is right.

Capital equipment has become relatively inexpensive. Instead of needing 100 machines to produce something that requires 100 manufacturing steps, you can get by with a half-dozen machines that are quick and easy to set up. If you need to produce 100 pieces an hour to amortize the cost of the equipment, you might need $100 million to finance your inventory of raw materials and finished goods, and huge warehouses as well. With flexible equipment, you can produce to order, making 100 pieces a month, and your inventory requirement drops to less than $50,000. You aren’t capturing the whole market, just a small niche, but that’s OK, because it’s a highly profitable niche. Nobody else produces what you produce, and it’s exactly what your customer wants. And if it’s not, you change your product. That’s easy to do, because your production equipment is highly flexible.

So instead of thousands of wage slaves, you can operate a one-man shop in your garage, or a 10-man shop in your barn. I think of it as the New Emancipation Proclamation: capitalism is dead, and the wage slaves are free.

I’ve just finished reading a series of articles at the web site Main Justice dealing with the fate of the health insurance industry’s exemption from Federal anti-trust law.

First of all, I did a little research on the McCarran-Ferguson Act of 1945 which granted the exemption in the first place.  Its original intent was not to weaken regulation of the insurance industry, but to strengthen it.  The act came about as a result of a Supreme Court decision, United States v South-Eastern Underwriters Assn. which ruled that insurance companies that sold policies across state lines were engaged in interstate commerce, and were thus subject to federal anti-trust law.

The original intent of McCarren-Ferguson was to enable the states to tightly regulate the insurance industry.  Many states had become concerned that, as a result of the Supreme Court ruling, they no longer had the authority to regulate the insurance industry within their boundaries.  It stipulated that no act of Congress could invalidate any state law dealing with the regulation of insurance unless the federal law specifically related to insurance.  The Act permitted the federal government to regulate insurance, but it also stipulated that only the states have broad authority to regulate the insurance industry unless the federal government enacts specific legislation intended to regulate insurance and displace state law.

In plain English that means that the states have the power to regulate the insurance industry if the federal government fails to do so.  McCarran-Ferguson also stipulated that the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 (which prohibits abusive monopolies)  and the Clayton Act of 1914 (passed by the U.S. Congress as an amendment to clarify and supplement the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and  which prohibited exclusive sales contracts, local price cutting to freeze out competitors, et al, thus prohibiting abusive monopolies), apply to the business of insurance to the extent that such business is not regulated by state law.

In short, McCarran-Ferguson was designed to empower both the federal government and the individual states to keep insurance companies from becoming abusive monopolies.  How ironic that it has instead been used to enable the insurance companies to become the abusive monopolies it was intended to prevent.  This in itself would seem to suggest that it is time to eradicate any confusion or ambiguity that has arisen over the years by repealing McCarran-Ferguson and restoring the original intent which was to subject the insurance industry to state and/or federal regulation and federal anti-trust law.

Nancy Pelosi apparently saw it that way and the anti-trust exemption was stripped from the House reform bill at her insistence. Not so with the Senate Finance Committee chaired by Max Baucus and his special interest-friendly gang of three, which produced a bill apparently written by Elizabeth Fowler, a former Baucus staffer who left his employ in 2006 to become VP and Director of Policy for WellPoint Insurance and then left to go to work for Senator Baucus’s Finance Committee in 2008.  Apparently Baucus, Fowler, and WellPoint saw no need to strip the insurance industry of its anti-trust exemption, so they didn’t – even though it was never intended to actually be an anti-trust exemption.

Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy had other ideas.  He proposed an amendment to the Baucus Finance Committee Senate bill that would subject health and medical malpractice insurers to federal laws that forbid firms from fixing prices, rigging bids, or dividing up markets, an amendment initially favored by the final arbiter, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who  maintained that a repeal of the anti-trust exemption would produce more competition and better prices for consumers. President Obama seemed to agree when, in his weekly radio address, he championed revocation of the anti-trust exemption, complaining that the health insurance industry is “earning these profits and bonuses while enjoying a privileged exemption from our antitrust laws.”

You may have noticed that the bill passed by the Senate this week maintained the anti-trust exemption, though the media has largely ignored that little detail. Why, you might ask?  Nebraska Senator Ben  Nelson, a former insurance industry executive, apparently took issue with revocation of that anti-trust exemption being included in the bill.  The insurance industry had also lobbied to keep the Leahy provision out.  Harry Reid, desperate for Ben Nelson’s 60^th filibuster-proof vote, went along.

Does the continuation of the insurance anti-trust exemption really make a difference?  In a word, absolutely!

Both the Senate and House bills leave regulation of the insurance industry to the states which have never been known for holding the industry’s feet to the fire.  A study recently published by The Center for American Progress  found that “State regulatory authorities haven’t brought any consumer protection suits against insurance companies in the last five years…” The study asks whether states have the resources to enforce antitrust laws or if they are stretched too thin. The study cites Georgetown health policy professor Karen Pollitz’s recent comments to Congress: “In four states, the Insurance Commissioner is also the fire marshal.” Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) used the study to reiterate his support for a repeal of the antitrust exemption for health and medical malpractice insurers. “If we remove it, they will have to compete,” Leahy said in a conference call with reporters.

Of course we have come to learn that the minority, not the majority, rules, if the minority bears the name of Ben Nelson or Joe Lieberman (sometimes referred to as the Senator from Aetna)..

I know there are some serious reformers who think it is time to hold our collective noses and pass this bill.  I respect their opinions, but count me out.  I don’t see the insurance companies mending their ways, and now, with mandates,  they will have even more power and more money to thwart any attempt to enforce regulations that already exist or that may be enacted in the future.  This, to me, is just one more reason to “kill the bill.”

“Saving Mexico” reports from Mexico City: “To weaken the cartels, some argue the U.S. should legalize marijuana, let cocaine pass through the Caribbean and take the profit motive out of the drug trade…

“A senior Mexican official who has spent more than two decades helping  fight the government’s war on drugs summed up recently what he’s learned from his long career: ‘This war is not winnable.’

“‘Economically, there is no argument or solution other than legalization, at least of marijuana,’ said the top Mexican official matter-of-factly. The official said such a move would likely shift marijuana production entirely to places like California, where the drug can be grown more efficiently and closer to consumers. ‘Mexico’s objective should be to make the U.S. self-sufficient in marijuana,’ he added with a grin.”

WATCHDOG: This old dog has long campaigned for the taxation, regulation and control of marijuana and to treat hard drugs as a health rather than a criminal justice issue.

The three greatest debacles undermining our nation is the outlandish cost of health care, the runaway military/industrial complex, and the War on Drugs. Historians will report that the trio reduced the USA to a second class nation, deeply in debt to others. When will we learn?

A wag of the tail for the WSJ!

By Dan Cohen, Santa Monica Reporter

This years’ Sherlock Holmes is not your fathers’ or your grandfathers’ Arthur Conan Doyle. But if you scratch the surface you’ll find heart of the original character, still beating steadily.

Doyle first introduced Holmes in 1887, with “A Study in Scarlett.” The character was allegedly based on one of the author’s university presidents, who impressed the young Conan Doyle with his distinctive observational and inductive skills. Readers immediately responded.

Conan Doyle went on to produce 55 more stories and four novels featuring the popular detective, whose affinity for minutia bordered on the supernatural. After he killed him off in 1893, in “The Final Problem,” there was such public outrage he brought the character back, and kept him going until 1927, three years short of his death.

More than 60 actors have played Sherlock in movies and television. Basil Rathbone took the role most famously, in a dozen or so theatrical films, released between 1939 and 1946, but the impressive list of other Holmes’ includes Michael Caine, Roger Moore, Christopher Plummer, Jonathon Pryce, Matt Frewer, and British horror stars Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, both of whom played the role several times. Even Charlton Heston took up the pipe and cape, in a 1991 television film, “The Crucifer of Blood.” My personal favorite, worth seeking out on DVD, is Robert Stephens in Billy Wilders’ offbeat “Private Life of Sherlock Holmes,” from 1970.

Now comes Robert Downey in Guy Ritchies’ “Sherlock Holmes,” a radical reimagining that takes the genre on a roller coaster ride that somehow manages to honor Doyle’s conventions. Credit that to Downey’s blazing star turn and Jude Law’s spirited Watson.

Even when this huge movie stumbles over its own hyper kinetic feet, which is fairly often, Downey keeps it standing, nobly.

Ritchie uses the same attention grabbing editing that earned his first two features, “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,” (1996,) and “Snatch,” (1998,) world wide acclaim. But here he taps the talents of an army of digital and other visual artists–I lost count after 60, in the end credits–to bring us a Victorian England full of post industrial sound and fury.

Sometimes the production design, combined with relentless movement, overwhelms the characters. On several occasions I struggled to see where they were in the frame. The room where Holmes lives and conducts his experiments, are so cluttered with paraphernalia the humans seem out of place in it. But the movie draws on so many tricky devices, sooner or later you succumb to them.

One of Ritchie’s stylistic devices is to radically speed up, then slow down his action scenes with a jerky rhythm that gives them a greater visual kick. You wouldn’t call it punch as much as crunch, because his slow motion inclines to moments of fists slamming faces or head banging, of which there are many. He loves shattering flesh.

But where the technique really pays off are scenes where Holmes’ powers of observation come into play. The stories always bothered me because there was no way to anticipate Holmes unerring ability to make sense of seemingly unrelated data. You couldn’t play along at home, in a manner of speaking, because you didn’t see what he saw. To some extent Ritchie compensates for this. He replays key sequences with Holmes’ narration, so at least we can see things from the hyper observant detectives’ point of view. It’s all after the fact, of course, but at least we get the satisfaction of his actual point of view. Some will find this irritating but after the motif was established I looked forward to it reappearing.

The story begins with a disorienting high speed chase, which ends in the lair of the film’s villain, Lord Blackwood, elegantly played by Mark Strong, a sturdy English character actor whom Ritchie has used before. Like the movie serials of old, Richie’s movie fires up the action in what seems like the middle, not unlike the Indiana Jones series.

Blackwood is foiled, sentenced and hanged, although we know he’s coming back. Before that happens, a former lover, (Rachel McAdams,) appears with an agenda set by an unknown overlord whose identity is held to the end. The script, a sometimes routine, sometimes inspired cocktail of character and plot complications, keeps every player in constant peril. As I said in the beginning, this is anything but a traditional take.

Downey is the twitching, obsessively chattering core of the movie, but beyond that, a Holmes of almost absurd physicality. He’s constantly leaping out of windows, grappling enemies or fist fighting, bare chested, for sport. Ritchie surrounds him with stunning eye candy, mainly a series of deliriously detailed London cityscapes that are almost thrown away before we can take them in. To that he’s added a propulsive score by Hans Zimmer.

Downey’s outsize performance fights for our attention with the big scale action. There are the obligatory explosions but also a number of inspired set pieces where the characters smartly interact with the brutally hard world of London’s working class. A rousing fight in a shipyard is as witty as it is spectacular. And yes, the movie pulls in several directions at once. But there’s so little is at stake it’s hyper kinetic quality actually enhances it as an entertainment. The movie’s whole purpose is to distract us, which it does, most of the time, without insulting our intelligence.

My guess is that anything less than a complete reimagining of Sherlock Holmes would have disappointed. In stuffing the production right to its breaking point Ritchie took a risk, and largely succeeded.

Too often the big studios put coal in our stocking at Christmas. They unload wheezing, middlebrow comedies, or indifferently directed action flicks that take make us feel like we’ve consumed too much popcorn and soda, even when we’re living on granola.

The new “Sherlock Holmes” may be confounding and even confusing at times, but it’s an entertainment that, against all odds, might satisfy the entire family.

A contributor asks:

“Would someone please explain to us exactly what the government is doing in the hotel and convention center business? If ever there were an ‘industry’ that should be completely dependent on private investment—primarily because of the unusually high degree of risk involved—it should be the ‘hospitality’ industry.

“I have no problem with temporary tax incentives for economically blighted areas; programs like LERTA (which gradually phase-in real estate tax INCREASES that result from site improvements) literally cost taxpayers nothing in the short term, and benefit us all greatly in the long term. I don’t even mind low-interest loans for economic development, as long as the taxpayer dollars involved are secured with real estate collateral.

“What I DO mind are the far too many giveaways of literally tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to primarily benefit already wealthy corporations. What is wrong with this picture?”

To which we reply:

There was a farmer in Australia whose string bean crop suffered from a drought so the beans were tough and almost inedible.  Nevertheless, he was able to sell them to an exporter at a profit, who in turn sold them to a US importer for a profit, who sold them to a distributor at a profit, who sold them to a chain of super markets at a profit, who sold the string beans to Mrs. Jones at a profit.

Mrs. Jones served them to Mr. Jones for dinner and he exclaimed: “The string beans are tough and almost inedible.” The next day Mrs. Jones complained to the super market, who complained to the distributor, who complained to the importer, who complained to the exporter, who complained to the farmer.

The farmer’s response was “Those string beans weren’t for eating, they were for selling!”

The irony with our Convention Center project is that the Lancaster Newspapers, Inc. didn’t make a dime from the venture and may not ever recover its investment, yet ended up with its reputation shredded. On the other hand, the High Group earned fortunes as project manager (around $55,000 a month for years!) and as contractors and S. Dale High may some day exercise his special right to have the center bear his name.

“Body of missing Maryland girl found in woods” reports:“The body of a Maryland girl who authorities say was abducted by a registered sex offender was found Friday in a wooded area near the Delaware state line after thousands of volunteers spent Christmas searching for her.”

WATCHDOG: Tears came as we read the above. Here we have the best and the worse of our species! There were more than a thousand decent people giving up their Christmas holiday to look for the missing young girl to one pervert, so there is hope for us.