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Showing posts from 2007

Blogs are silly

I tried out the whole blog thing for a while and found it tough to keep up. I abandoned it for a while, but I'm going to keep using it to post short stories I write and various other things. In case you're wondering.

Some video

Some would call me a leftist, I imagine, so I feel somewhat obligated to respond to this . Here's his argument. Something like this? Correct me if I'm being dishonest. 1) Liberals look at history and the ideologies of man, the forms of government, religion, and so forth have not stopped war, poverty, crime, injustice, etc. 2) Liberals think that since all these ideas of man have proved to be wrong, the source of all war, etc., must be found in the attempt to be right, because if nobody tried to be right we wouldn't disagree we wouldn't fight, we wouldn't go to war, which means no crime, etc. 3) Therefore, liberals conclude, we must reject all fact, reason, truth, logic, morality, and decency, just like in the song "Imagine." 4) To achieve this devious goal, liberals thus elevate everything that is wrong and tear down everything that is right. Evidence: Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. NYT breaking the Abu Ghraib scandal. Newsweek's Koran story. The

Machiavelli

Thoughts from The Prince: New principalities are the ones that present problems...you always have to give offense to those over whom you acquire power when you become a new ruler, bother by imposing troops upon them, and by countless other injuries that follow as necessary consequences of the acquisition of power. Thus, you make enemies of all those to whom you have given offense in acquiring power, and in addition you cannot keep the goodwill of those who have put you in power, for you cannot satisfy their aspirations as they thought you would. At the same time you cannot use heavy-handed methods against them, for you are obliged to them. Even if you have an overwhelmingly powerful army, you will have needed the support of the locals to take control of the province. ... But when you acquire territories in a region that has a different language, different customs, and different institutions, then you really have problems, and you need to have great good fortune and great resourcefulnes

Canadian conservatives

Apparently, the new conservative Canadian government is set to begin a US-style war on drugs. It seems that conservatives everywhere have the same sort of delusions, though one might say it's the fault of the liberals for being corrupt enough to deserve being tossed out. It's hard for me to fathom this kind of idiocy, though a few people are saying the right things . "Stephen Harper's government is expected to announce next week new measures that will retreat from harm reduction measures that help Canadians, such as the safe injection site in Vancouver," said Ms. Brown. "They are trying to do this under the guise of cracking down on illicit drug trafficking and prevention - even though all the research suggests that an ideologically-motivated war on drugs is ineffective, while programs such as the safe injection site are producing positive results." A series of reports - including the Canadian Medical Association Journal and the B.C. Centre for Excellen

Sorry...

...for the light posting over the past week. I've been visiting home and just got my wisdom teeth removed, so I've been out for a couple days. I have learned a few things, though, in my chipmunk-state. First, Lortab makes you puke on an empty stomach. Second, swallowing too much blood also makes you puke. Oh, and I busted out of the restraints at the doctors office and tried to get away when I was under anesthesia. They had to call in reinforcements to hold me down. Mysterious, doing something that out of character when you can't remember a damn thing about it.

A work in progress

The drug policy reform movement has been gaining steam for the last few years. And yet, we have failed to penetrate the mainstream discourse enough to make articles like this one, (on the front page of the NYT) about the opium trade in Afghanistan, unacceptable. Drug policy reform is not even mentioned in this article--the "model" for Afghanistan, where the drug trade is booming, is purported to be Columbia. I won't go into what's wrong with the article, as others have already done it better . I would like to talk about how we might change this mainstream attitude and make journalists and others more responsive to our arguments. Advocating drug policy reform is a fringe position. Though I don't trust polling much, something like 85% of Americans think we should continue the war on drugs. Why is this? First, we have some very powerful opponents. Politicians from both sides of the aisle have always found a convenient road to votes and power through the demonization

The drug war in Mexico

Despite several months of increasingly harsh crackdowns on drug gangs in northern Mexico and unflagging calls of " stay the course ," the Mexican government has been unable to defeat the drug gangs, indeed, they seem to be retaliating with greater and greater ferocity. It remains to be seen whether the Federales have enough power to defeat the cartels in military combat, let alone control the drug trade. To my eye, Mexico is looking more and more like another Columbia. The problem is exactly the same--for the cartels (or in Columbia, various guerilla organizations), drugs are a source of income that is on the same order of magnitude as the national GDP, so if pressed, they can actually mount a reasonable challenge to the federal military. With over 2000 people killed last year, and over 900 killed this year so far, this is open war. Just like Columbia, the American public can barely be bothered to stop watching Paris and Lindsay and notice this problem. How many people have

Russell: 4, Finals: 0

Whoo! I finished my last final on Wednesday, and I don't know what to do with myself...last night I had a dream about Stat Therm, and it's wasn't too pleasant. I guess it's rather common to have bad dreams about exams, even after they're over. Can I have fun yet?

Almost done...

Three finals down, one to go. This last one is Statistical Thermodynamics, and it's going to be brutal. I just hope there's enough liquor to go round afterwards. I've been studying every waking moment, so I don't really have much to say at the moment. But what Digby said is worth reading.

Cocaine

It seems that despite a recent crackdown by the new president of Mexico, cocaine continues its long-term trend of lower prices and higher potency. Despite billions of dollars in U.S. antidrug spending and record seizures, statistics recently released by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy suggest that cocaine is as available as ever. It seems that the lessons of basic economics have still failed to sink in to the Drug Czar's office. What really interests me is how to change the debate. It is still taboo to mention drug policy reform in an article like this--true to form, we have a list of complaints about how the drug war is continuing to fail in its stated objectives, but no mention of the alternative solution that we've been trumpeting for years. My friends, I think we face a problem of marketing.

Damn.

With news that Obama has been placed under secret service protection, and the news that CBS has disabled comments for its stories about Obama due to unmanageable racist comments, I'm reminded of a recent Debbie Schlussel post : HOprah Watch: Cheapskate Oprah ENDORSES B. Hussein Obama for Prez, But Won't Give Him $$$ It's like MLK said : I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the Muslim-soundingness of their middle names. I think that was it, anyway.

Guantánamo Lawyers

I'm not terribly surprised by this, but it seems that the lawyers working for the detainees in Guantánamo are having trouble getting the detainees to trust them: Mr. Denbeaux [a lawyer] said one clients [sic] had pleaded with him to bring toothpaste. When he did on a later visit, military guards confiscated it and his client took that as proof that the lawyer was powerless. “I said, ‘They took it from me,’ ” Mr. Denbeaux recalled, “and he said: ‘What good are you? You can’t even get me toothpaste.’ ” I imagine the whole point of this exercise (along with others like trying to limit the number of visits lawyers can have to the detainees) is to create precisely the distrustful atmosphere that will limit what the lawyers can accomplish. It seems like the only hope now it to put our faith in Bush's endless overreaching. It seems like he bases his decisions on what a reasonable person would conclude is the best way to piss off the largest number of people.

A little light reading

If you've got a few hours to kill here and there, I always recommend this site; it's a excellent introduction to the history of ancient Christianity brought together in a way the layman can grasp. Plus he's got an excellent bibliography if you get interested in the subject.

Crazy!

It seems that the Jose Padilla case has been stalled by...too many jurors that don't believe the offical line about 9/11. Apparently, something like a third of the country believes that it's at least somewhat likely that government officials had something to do with 9/11. To that I can only say...wow. That's distrust.

Debate: Romney

Something I wanted to mention last night, but the physical chemistry lab report got in the way...Mitt Romney doesn't know shit about Islamic terrorism. I don't want to buy into the Democratic pitch, that this is all about one person, Osama bin Laden. Because after we get him, there's going to be another and another. This is about Shi'a and Sunni. This is about Hezbollah and Hamas and al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. This is the worldwide jihadist effort to try and cause the collapse of all moderate Islamic governments and replace them with a caliphate. It's bothersome that someone running for president knows so little about the Islamic world. I'm no scholar of Middle Eastern studies, but even I know that Hamas, Hezbollah, and al Qaeda have wildly different ideologies and goals, not to mention the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood is not jihadist at all. And no GOP candidate called him on his obvious factual error. UPDATE: Damn, you've got to be quick on t

Interesting

It seems that Ron Paul has done well in this completely unscientific and self-selecting poll about the debate last night. It's nice to see someone with some sort of relatively coherent belief system out there mixin' it up with the other GOP'ers. He'll be crushed, of course. UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan is impressed as well.

Why the title?

I imagine if people were to read this blog they might wonder why it is called what it is...it's a rather complicated answer that requires a bit of background. One might say that getting an undergraduate degree in chemistry is the process of unlearning everything you learned in intro chemistry. Sure, what they teach you there is useful in some circumstances, but it turns out it's all bullshit. I'm still not sure why they go about it this way, but I'm not a professor, and it's not my place to speculate about such things. Still, when you're in intro chem and organic chemistry (O-chem), you learn about these things called orbitals. These little devils describe what the electrons in the atom are doing, and there are various rules for how they fill up, how many electrons you can stuff in each one (two), etc. The most important ones are probably the p orbitals, because those are the bonding ones for carbon, which is the most important element to humans for obvious reas