I’ve no doubt that Wisconsin’s bartenders are up on this, but for others who are unfamiliar, here’s a Pickleback —
Sounds odd, but it’s delicious. The drink reportedly originated in Williamsburg, a Brooklyn neighborhood. (About Williamsburg, I’ll have more to write later this week.)
Enjoy responsibly.
Government Accountability Board at Work.
Via GAB Webcam.
Good morning.
Wednesday will be an increasingly cloudy day in Whitewater, with a high of about twenty-three; in Denver, it will be breezy and fifty.
On this day in 1912, “English explorer Robert F. Scott and his expedition reached the South Pole, only to discover that Roald Amundsen had gotten there first.”
Most babies, it seems, have a natural facility for lip-reading:
“Babies start to lip-read when they learn to babble,” [psychologist David] Lewkowicz says. “At that time, infants respond to what they see and hear as a unified stimulus.”
….Lewkowicz and Hansen-Tift tested 179 infants from English-speaking families at age 4, 6, 8 or 12 months. Special devices tracked where babies looked when shown videos of women speaking English or a foreign language — in this case, Spanish.
From age 8 months to 1 year, babbling babies read the lips of both English and Spanish speakers, the researchers say. Nascent talkers shifted to looking mainly at the eyes of an English-speaker, but continued to home in on the mouth of a woman speaking the unfamiliar language of Spanish. Increasing familiarity with a native language narrows a youngster’s ability to perceive novel speech sounds, necessitating continued lip-reading of foreign-language speakers, the researchers say….
Google’s puzzle of the day is geographical, arithmetical: “If Sri Lanka were a member of the United States, where would it rank in terms of size?”
America regulates marijuana, mostly, by prohibition. Despite criminalizing cannabis, and spending vast sums to find, fine, arrest, and jail pot smokers, the level of actual consumption seems unchanged.
(Americans, by the way, are increasingly supportive of marijuana decriminalization. Government officials can only sell expensive ineffectiveness for so long. The trend toward decriminalization is clear.)
I’ve no interest in smoking tobacco, let alone cannabis, but one needn’t be a smoker to see the failure of present policies. Criminalization is an expensive failure, and a dishonest one, too.
Officials spend too much time lying about failures and pretending they’re successes.
What if America replaced a failed prohibition with moderate and comprehensive regulation? That’s the subject of a California initiative.
Here are excerpts of a press release from the LP about the Golden State effort:
At the last meeting of the Libertarian National Committee in December, we endorsed the California ballot initiative to “Regulate Marijuana as Wine” by a vote of 14-0 (with 2 abstentions). While most Libertarians would rather have no regulation on marijuana, we believe that this is an incremental step in the right direction….
REGULATE WINE LIKE MARIJUANA
….It’s exactly what it sounds like: A new law that gives use, possession and sale of marijuana exactly the same legal status as drinking a glass, cellaring a bottle, or selling a case of Napa Valley White Zinfandel….
California led the way on medical marijuana back in 1996 with Proposition 215. Since then, 15 more states and the District of Columbia have passed medical marijuana legislation, bringing much-needed legal relief to the millions of patients…who rely on cannabis to relieve chronic pain, restore appetite and suppress the nausea associated with cancer chemo and AIDS medications, and even to outright keep them alive…
We’ve tweaked the Prop 215 template to eliminate those weaknesses make the Regulate Marijuana Like Wine Initiative even more successful, not just in California but in the post-California national adoption phase.
Regulate Marijuana Like Wine specifies the EXACT scope of police and prosecutorial powers and the MAXIMUM fines and punishments which can be levied for infractions. It repeals all previous laws that might be used as hooks to hang a prosecution on. No more latitude for creative interpretations. No more loopholes to “up-charge” infractions so as to increase the penalties. Under this new law, smoking a joint will be treated EXACTLY like drinking a glass of merlot, traveling with an ounce of marijuana in your car will be treated EXACTLY like driving home with a bottle of chablis, and selling marijuana will be treated EXACTLY like running a liquor store.
“MARIJUANA IS THE LARGEST CASH CROP IN THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA. NUMBER TWO IS GRAPES. BUT TODAY YOU DO NOT SEE THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS RAISING ILLEGAL VINEYARDS IN OUR NATIONAL FORESTS IN COMPETITION WITH ROBERT MONDAVI. WE CAN FORCE THESE THUGS OUT OF THIS BUSINESS. WE CAN REGULATE MARIJUANA LIKE WINE.”
ENDORSEMENTS
The Libertarian Party
Gov. Gary Johnson
Congressman Dana Rohrabacher
Kenny Loggins
Judge James P. Gray (ret.)
LAPD Deputy Chief S. Downing (ret.)
Assemblymember Chris Norby
Lt. Diane Goldstein (ret.)
Ed Rosenthal
NORML Founder Keith Stroup
Thomas Chong
Rick Steves
Vivian McPeak Seattle Hempfest
Lynnette Shaw Marin Alliance
Alice Huffman President California NAACP
Rob Kampia, MPP
Norm Stamper, former Seattle Police Chief
Craig Beresh, California Cannabis Coalition
A New PATH (Parents for Addiction Treatment & Healing)
LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition)
Good morning.
Snow’s in the forecast for Whitewater, with one to three inches expected during the day. In Athens, Georgia, it will be a day of showers with a high temperature of sixty-three.
In the city today, there’s a Community Development Authority at 4:30 PM. The agenda is available online, and the meeting resumes – in both closed and open sessions – the CDA’s search for a director.
Later, at 6:30 PM, Common Council will meet.
On this day in 1900
Female Cotton Mill Workers Strike
On this date 100 female employees of the Monterey mill, affiliated with the Janesville Cotton Mills, went on strike for higher wages. According to local sources, a committee of four “good-looking young ladies” was appointed to negotiate with management. Doing piece work, the women earned only $40 a month. The company said the women “don’t know how good they’ve got it…because they are paid more than at other local cotton mills and as well as some men with families.” The women argued their monthly pay only averaged $20. Within three days, all the women were hired to work by tobacco warehouses. The Monterey mill was one of three Janesville cotton mills in operation at the turn of the century. [Source: Janesville Gazette]
Via Wisconsin Historical Society.
Google’s puzzle for today asks “Who was the first American president known to have sworn his oath of office on a book other than the Bible?”
I’m neither Irish nor English, but one needn’t be to enjoy Irish Blood, English Heart.
I’ve been dreaming of a time when
To be English is not to be baneful
To be standing by the flag not feeling
Shameful, racist or partial
Irish blood, English heart, this I’m made of
There is no-one on earth I’m afraid of
And I will die with both of my hands untied
I’ve been dreaming of a time when
The English are sick to death of Labour
And Tories, and spit upon the name of Oliver Cromwell
And denounce this royal line that still salute him
And will salute him forever
Good morning.
A chance of rain waits for Whitewater today, with a high temperature of thirty-six. In Los Angeles, the forecast calls for dense fog and a high of sixty-one.
It’s King day today, and the Washington Post has welcome news that the federal government will correct an inscription on Washington’s Martin Luther King Jr. statute to convey King’s intended meaning (rather than the careless and thoughtless result of others’ design).
Embedded below is a video commemorating the anniversary of a small but amazing achievement in amateur aviation: the launch of a Paper Airplane in Space (PARIS). Amazing and admirable —
Google’s puzzle for today asks about a bit of history: “You see sandbags piled at the junction of Friedrichstraße and Zimmerstraße. What symbol of the Cold War do they protect?”
Lavish, but defensive, spending on Gov. Walker’s behalf » FREE WHITEWATER bit.ly/wpUAXl #walker #afp
Bastiat: ‘Everyone wants to live at the expense of the State. They forget that the State lives at the expense of everyone’
Oh my:
What happened next would be funny if, you know, it didn’t involve actual, real-life people: $10 million ransom negotiated down to $120,000, being held hostage for four days, and the South Koreans leaving town before they could testify….
Via The Atlantic Wire.
