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Saturday, March 14, 2009
new reason to be hopeful for a more rational federal drug policy
Listening to:Andrew Gold, First Time in Love
Reading:Magic Seeds, Naipaul
Weather:50, trying to get sunny
Obama nominated this dude Kerlikowske for drug czar. This may be a good thing. But first, a little humorous anecdote: Liv and I were driving to work/school one morning this week and I said, "hey, have you heard anything about Obama's new drug czar?" She looked at me like I was speaking Chinese. Then she said, "What? Are you saying "drugs are?" Or do we have some kind of reigning queen of drugs or something?" Heheh. Kids are funny. No, we have a drug czar, which I always thought was kinda hilarious, too. It sounds more like the guy you would go to when you have extra money for the really kind bud.

So this Kerlikowske cat seems like a step in the right direction, even if a baby step. He was police chief in Seattle during the time the citizens voted to decriminalize medical marijuana use, and to reduce marijuana possession to the lowest law enforcement priority. This, of course, does not mean it was his idea to decrim weed, but he did preside over the police force during the implementation of this new policy in Seattle. He has first-hand experience with the positive changes this kind of policy can have on policing of real crime. With any luck he'll help shape drug policy in a new direction regarding marijuana in this nation. Not a moment too soon. I'm trying to be cautiously optimistic, but can this be the time finally that the teeter totter of the horrors of the drug war as perpetrated against peaceful productive pot smokers finally starts to tip the other way? If you'd have told me when I was 14 yrs old that our prisons would be 60% full of drug offenders and families of convicted pot smokers would lose their homes and cars in 2008 I'd have told you you were nuts. My generation was supposed to be the one to stop that madness, and change drug policy to one of harm reduction rather than lock'em up and throw away the key. So far we've failed, maybe now the revolution actually becomes evolution.

Dude, my kindle2 is so freakin awesome. It read me the NYT on my 3 hour ride to Beckley on Tuesday. I loaded 3 law review articles on it so one of these times when I'm waiting in the car for Liv to get off work or something I can give them a look. I actually downloaded them in .pdf for free through a cool service on the web, then emailed them to my kindle email addy, and all three magically appeared on my k2 for a total of 10 cents. Yep, a dime. I could have gotten them on there for free if I'd sent them to my free kindle addy and just moved them from my computer to my k2 via USB. But for a dime, I figured I'd get them wirelessly.

I totally love Andrew Gold. I've waxed poetic about his awesomeness here before, so I'll spare you his life story, and my life story of digging Andrew. But I got an email notice from my MySpace, which I very rarely ever even look at anymore. But the notice was from Andrew Gold's MySpace. So I checked it out. His MySpace has a musicplayer that autostarts, like lots of artists' pages do. I enjoyed a few tracks and then heard one that totally forced me to listen, it was so good. So I hopped on Amazon and bought the album. And another of his albums, too. I bought them as digital downloads. I've only bought a few tracks and albums this way, and it's been a bit hinky for me. History repeated itself, and it was hinky again, downloading only one of the 2 albums for me successfully. But it was beer night so off I went, away from the screen until today. This morning I surfed the help, no luck, and emailed Amazon's tech support. Got a response in about a half hour, and it was very thorough and clear. I had to jump through a bunch of annoying steps one of which is in a permanent hiccup. But fortunately I'm a multimachine mama, so I just downloaded the downloader on box #2 and grabbed the tracks that way. In the end it all worked, and is DRM-free, thank you Amazon. Lovely pop tuneage happening as we blog, so tasty.


permalink posted by cat 12:55 PM

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Comments:
Ah! I finally find out what a Kindle2 is! Not really like a kite at all!
 
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new reason to be hopeful for a more rational federal drug policy
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