I’ve been looking for bits of this article to copy, but it’s all pretty golden. Here’s the leading contradiction, but it just gets better (in the sense that it lays out my political views exactly):

Bob Ainsworth, the MP for Coventry North East, who previously served as a drugs minister in the Home Office and as defence secretary, has claimed that the war on drugs has been “nothing short of a disaster” and that it was time to study other options, including decriminalising possession of drugs and legally regulating their production and supply.

His comments were met with dismay by the party leadership, while fellow backbencher John Mann claimed that Ainsworth “doesn’t know what he’s talking about”.

I must comment on this part though:

“Legalisation fails to address the reasons people misuse drugs in the first place or the misery, cost and lost opportunities that dependence causes individuals, their families and the wider community.”

They’re not addressed in jail either, and jail adds to “the misery, cost and lost opportunities”.

And I love that the call for “a grown-up discussion” in the article is met with ad hominems.

Ok, I’ll stop now.

… because in Texas they hassle 77 year old country superstars for the lulz.

What is the point of cannabis prohibition again? Does anyone know?

In Soviet Texas, Cannabis smokes you!

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco is an historical-fantasy detective novel set in Southern Europe in the Middle Ages. I’ve just started it, I’m a little way in, and here are my initial impressions.

The book I am reading is an English translation of the Italian. It is presented as a fictionalization of a set of notes the author took from a rare, archaic French manuscript before it was stolen from him, which itself was a translation-slash-contemporization of an earlier Latin manuscript, written in a before-its-time dialect, that is extremely obscure, its non-fraudulent existence attested by direct citations found, again, in second-language translations of rare books found in open markets in exotic parts.

This is all clearly put to the lie immediately as Eco makes it obvious his main character and the book’s protagonist are an earlier Watson and Holmes, perhaps with shades of Chesterton’s Father Brown — or perhaps not.

Brother William’s first set of observations deduce the whereabouts of a horse he had never seen and the structure of part of the monastery by “reading the book of nature”. The signs left on the landscape by the animal’s passing and the structure’s existence. Further on the book describes parts of the abbey implied by its architecture, but which are not visible, and the opening leaves of the novel contain what I think is a mislabeled map of the abbey. Several paragraphs, so far, have been dedicated to the numerology and astrology of the design of the architecture — why a balcony has seven sides and faces West, for example.

Umberto Eco, it should be noted, is a Semiotician. His work involves a good philosophical understanding of symbolic thought — having a dense structure of pointers to things that aren’t there is an intensely interesting way for him to start a book: exactly how much can we “know” simply by parsing logical structures? Is that “real” knowledge? Etc.

“All the same,” I said, “when you read the prints in the snow and the evidence of the branches, you did not yet know Brunellus. In a certain sense those prints spoke of all horses, or at least all horses of that breed. Musn’t we say, then, that the book of nature speaks to us only of essences, as many distinguished theologians teach?”

“Not entirely, dear Adso,” my master replied. “True, that kind of print expressed to me, if you like, the idea of ‘horse,’ the verbum mentis, and would have expressed the same to me wherever I might have found it. But the print in that place and at that hour of the day told me that at least one of all possible horses had passed that way. So I found myself halfway between the perception of the concept ‘horse’ and the knowledge of an individual horse. [...] And so the ideas, which I was using earlier to imagine a horse I had not yet seen, were pure signs, as the hoofprints in the snow were signs of the idea of ‘horse’; and signs and the signs of signs are used only when we are lacking things.”

Plus, the main character eats cannabis — instead of Holmes’ preferred cocaine — which is how I assume he comes to understand all the crazy connectivity he sees.

Lame Duck Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger has reduced penalties for violation of cannabis prohibition laws to BC-style “traffic ticket” status for amounts under an ounce: $100 fine max, no jail, no record.

He said that Prop 19 went too far, but that going to jail for smoking a joint was obviously insane — that “no one cared” anymore.

Lame Duck sessions are the best and worst of politics. I hope the Democrats go absolutely nuts in the outgoing Congress…

With 80% of precincts reporting it looks as though Prop 19 has failed. This is good news for BC because, really, Canada should be first to legalize to keep our liberal cred.

It would have been nice to have a legal export market though… Maybe later.

If you’re a Californian, please head to the polls tomorrow and put the rest of the West to shame with an enlightened drugs policy. I promise to come spend tourist dollars there — you’re closer than Amsterdam.

Ginsberg likes it! But seriously, one simple question: why is it illegal in the first place?

We’ve looked at this in the past, and here is the summary of another new drugs-harm study as reported by the BBC:

One question (of several): Where’s caffeine, the most widely-abused drug in our society?

Next time you’re out drinking, think: why not just smoke a joint or pop an E instead? You’ll be doing yourself, and all of us, a favour.