More and more officials, including committed conservatives, are willing to concede what National Review declared in 1996: the War on Drugs is a failure, having achived too little while ignoring the real problem of addiction.
Governor Christie: The War on Drugs Isn’t Working – YouTube.
There’s a notice over at Gannett’s Sheboygan Press that they will be moving their stories’ comments to Facebook.
Two quick observations.
First, comments on Facebook are not anonymous, and the publisher surely (and correctly) hopes that this will moderate the comments posted. Since a private paper is free to publish some comments, no comments, or all comments, this is a private (rather than a First Amendment) issue.
It’s legitimate to criticize a newspaper for its coverage; it’s an infringement on that paper’s liberty to compel it to publish specific content. (It’s both ignorance of the law and a disregard of liberty to contend that the First Amendment somehow compels publication of certain speech.)
I’m a strong advocate of the existing rights of anonymous and pseudonymous speech. These rights are available to anyone, but are especially useful to minority viewpoints. In general, a citizen in a free society owes no one his or her identity before speaking. A community arrogantly and wrongly infringes on individual liberty when it thinks otherwise.
Still, the answer to private restrictions in one place is a private alternative elsewhere. People are free to publish their own, alternative websites.
Second, and tellingly, there’s little practical chance that comments will go away. Running comments (remarks that are less restricted than letters to the editor have ever been) through Facebook is a sign that there’s no going back to a pre-comment era. Few websites are more conventional than Facebook. By the time papers turn to Facebook to manage their comments, they’ve conceded the permanency of commenting.
The announcement is at the Sheboygan Press.
I’m surprised there’s one still around. There was a chance for serendipity when searching through a card catalog, despite the undeniable inefficiency of it, too:
It will be the end of an era when the public card catalog is removed from its home in room 224 of Memorial Library on the UW–Madison campus.
Via UW Madison.
Good morning.
It’s a windy day with a high-temperature of thirty-eight ahead for Whitewater, with similar conditions for both Madison and Milwaukee. Listing the weather that way leads with a tail wagging a dog: most would expect the bigger cities to appear first in the order. That’s something along the lines of the joke about a British weather forecast: “Fog in Channel; Continent Cut Off.” No matter — it’s too late (and unnecessary) to fall into conventionality now, four-and-a half years on.
For those who’ve just come off a day of Thanksgiving cooking, with Christmas and New Year’s Day yet ahead, there’s good news: Cooking can be surprisingly forgiving. Rachel Ehrenberg writes that
If your pumpkin pie recipe calls for cinnamon but you’ve used the last of it, nutmeg, ginger or cardamom will do. Out of olive oil? Try applesauce. A new in-depth analysis of recipes, reviews and suggestions from an online foodie site reveals that many recipes are more flexible than standard cookbooks suggest.
Researchers mined more than 40,000 recipes and nearly two million reviews from the website Allrecipes.com, investigating various aspects of cooking and ingredient preferences. “We wondered if the analysis would let us see how flexible recipes are,” says coauthor Lada Adamic of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Her team discovered that there’s a lot of wiggle room. The analysis, reported online November 16 at arXiv.org, identified several clusters of ingredients that can be swapped for one another.
That’s clusters of ingredients, as some substitutions won’t work, no matter how inspired they might seem to the cook. Still, it’s a reassurance (and confirmation) for those who do cook that substitutions are certainly possible (and sometimes inspired).
Today’s Google puzzle comes from Fozzie Bear of the Muppets: “I knew I was a bear of many talents, but in one episode with the help of Rowlf and a big instrument, I found a talent I never knew I had. In what episode did I discover my new talent?”
Today’s the anniversary, from 1972, of the release of the arcade version of Pong, one of the first commercial, arcade video games. Nolan Bushnell’s description of his inspiration (created by engineer Allan Alcorn): “I had to come up with a game people already knew how to play, something so simple that any drunk in any bar could play.”
He found what he was looking for —
Turns out Newt Gingrich, the man of a thousand shifting, contradictory, and I’ll-considered opinions, wants to escalate the Drug War. If there’s worse news for drug warriors than this, short of an endorsement from Syria’s Assad, I can’t imagine what that worse news might be.
In an interview with Yahoo!, Gingrich finds his model for a clampdown on drugs:
Places like Singapore have been the most successful at doing that. They’ve been very draconian. And they have communicated with great intention that they intend to stop drugs from coming into their country.
Vast, diverse America and the autocratic, city-state of Singapore: that’s Gingrich’s idea of a suitable analogue.
It’s late November, and surprisingly Mitt Romney has yet to write to me for campaign advice. (I’ll be sure to check my email again after I publish this post.) If he were to solicit my opinion, I’d recommend that Gov. Romney use all his campaign funds to put Gingrich on the air, nonstop and unscripted, for week after week.
There’s no better path to the GOP nomination for Romney that that.
Via Reason’s Blog.
I don’t support government funding for art any more than Brownback does, but as for tweeting, Sullivan owes neither Brownback nor her principal any apology. On the contrary, they owe her one for their wrongly intrusive, restrictive (and oddly creepy) concern with an eighteen-year-old citizen’s use of Twitter.
A U.S. teenager who wrote a disparaging tweet about Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback said Sunday that she is rejecting her high school principal’s demand for a written apology.
Emma Sullivan, 18, said she isn’t sorry and doesn’t think such a letter would be sincere.
The Shawnee Mission East senior was taking part in a Youth in Government program last week when she sent out a tweet from the back of a crowd of students listening to Brownback’s greeting. From her cellphone, she thumbed: “Just made mean comments at gov. brownback and told him he sucked, in person (hash)heblowsalot.”
She actually made no such comment and said she was “just joking with friends.” But Brownback’s office, which monitors social media for postings containing the governor’s name, saw Sullivan’s post and contacted the Youth in Government program.
Sullivan received a scolding at school and was ordered to send Brownback an apology letter. She said Prinicipal Karl R. Krawitz even suggested talking points for the letter she was supposed to turn in Monday.
Later in the story, it seems the principal has since recognized the mess into which he’s stepped, and is now insisting this is a ‘private matter.’ It should have been a private matter (without government involvement), but the censorious actions of a publicly-paid governor and a publicly-paid school administrator offer no retreat from widespread and legitimate criticism.
Via NPR.
Update 11.28.11: Gov. Brownback apologizes via Facebook.
Good morning.
It’s a cloudy Monday ahead for Whitewater, with a high of thirty-five. Most of the state, including Madison and Milwaukee, looks to be about the same.
If you’re near Whitewater, it’s only a few days until Whitewater’s Christmas parade on Friday evening at 6 PM. There’s still time for individuals and groups to march.
NASA’s new Mars rover launched successfully on Saturday, and if all goes well, she’ll reach that neighboring planet in August 2012.
Google’s puzzle for today is from Sam Eagle, of Disney’s Muppets:
I am chagrined to learn that a well-known signer of the Declaration of Independence did not want the bald eagle to be the symbol of America.What lesser bird did he want to represent our great country?
States expect budgetary fallout from ‘supercommittee’ failure – The Washington Post wapo.st/vCnKwv
24 Nov
Camera Trap App Sends Wild Animals to Your iPhone | Wired Science | Wired.com bit.ly/sUZNsM
24 Nov
No word about the rest of Congress; President Obama to pardon two turkeys bit.ly/uHCi5n
23 Nov
The X-Files’ Well-Manicured Man John Neville dies at 86 bit.ly/uJJPbC
22 Nov
Campus police chief put on leave in pepper spray incident
21 Nov
What Will Go Wrong After the Super Committee Collapses bit.ly/u8leLZ
21 Nov
Too funny (because too predictable) EU bans claim that water can prevent dehydration – Telegraph tgr.ph/tVOKaQ
19 Nov
Supercommittee at impasse as deadline approaches Washington Post wapo.st/rR2foK
19 Nov
‘Near Poor’ – Not Quite in Poverty, but Still Struggling – NYTimes.com nyti.ms/rTVhsx
19 Nov
It’s Small Business Saturday in America on 11.26.11. I’ve been critical of government’s intervention in the marketplace (between chains and local stores), but there’s much to recommend local merchants who find success through their own, private efforts. Shoppers don’t need a politician or bureaucrat’s guidance. (“Consumers should be able to decide for themselves without the misuse of government’s imprimatur.”)
In my own case, I’ve come to rely on those local merchants who offer specialized products and services, delivered with expert guidance. I was out and about today, and I will be out again tomorrow, visiting those very merchants.
Below is a video from someone who makes an entire turkey for his cats. (Alternatively, he makes the turkey for himself, claims it’s for the felines, and merely lets the cats lick it. The former and professed motivation is the more desirable and hygienic one.)
Good morning.
I hope that your Black Friday (which is now expanding into a Black Thursday, Black Friday deals week, etc.) is a good one. The poll and comment forum will be on hiatus this week, recognizing that readers will likely be out and about. If the year has been good to you (and I very much hope that it has been), it might not be a bad day to venture out, to find a deal here or there, boost a merchant or two, and generally observe the consumer frenzy. Enjoy.
There will be posts up throughout the weekend, patiently awaiting readers’ return from shopping expeditions.
If you venture out today, or if you’re returning from overnight shopping (!), you’ll find in Whitewater a breezy day with a high temperature of fifty-six.
Saturday is the date for the launch of NASA’s Mars rover, and embedded below is a live-stream window for tomorrow’s launch:
After eight years of planning, more than $600 million in cost overruns, and a two-year delay, NASA’sMars Science Laboratory is finally ready to launch.
Now you can watch the nuclear-powered, 1-ton rover — currently the largest machine that can feasibly land on the Red Planet — take off from Cape Canaveral and begin its journey to Mars.
Liftoff is currently scheduled for 10:02 a.m. EST on Saturday, Nov. 26. NASA TV offers HD streaming of the launch (above). But if acronym-filled technobabble is hard on your ears, tune in to one of our other favorite video streams on Spaceflight Now or Spacevidcast .
The Instant Wild app, free and newly released by the Zoological Society of London, streams images to your iPhone or iPad from camera traps in Kenya, Sri Lanka, Mongolia and England’s Whipsnade Zoo. Images can also be seen via browser.
“It’s amazing for people to just be sitting in their office or walking in the street and have these images pop up,” said Jonathan Baillie, conservation program director at EDGE of Existence, a ZSL program. “I find myself in board rooms and conferences and hotels a lot, and I’d rather be in the field.”
Via Camera Trap App Sends Wild Animals to Your iPhone | Wired Science | Wired.com.
