1. Prohibition has failed to control the use and domestic production of marijuana.
2. Arrests for marijuana possession disproportionately affect blacks and Hispanics and reinforce the perception that law enforcement is biased and prejudiced against minorities
3. A regulated, legal market in marijuana would reduce marijuana sales and use among teenagers, as well as reduce their exposure to other drugs in the illegal market.
4. Legalized marijuana would reduce the flow of money from the American economy to international criminal gangs. Marijuana’s illegality makes foreign cultivation and smuggling to the United States extremely profitable, sending billions of dollars overseas in an underground economy while diverting funds from productive economic development.
5. Marijuana’s legalization would simplify the development of hemp as a valuable and diverse agricultural crop in the United States, including its development as a new bio-fuel to reduce carbon emissions.
6. Prohibition is based on lies and disinformation. Justification of marijuana’s illegality increasingly requires distortions and selective uses of the scientific record, causing harm to the credibility of teachers, law enforcement officials, and scientists throughout the country.
7. Marijuana is not a lethal drug and is safer than alcohol. It is established scientific fact that marijuana is not toxic to humans; marijuana overdoses are nearly impossible, and marijuana is not nearly as addictive as alcohol or tobacco.
8. Marijuana is too expensive for our justice system and should instead be taxed to support beneficial government programs. Law enforcement has more important responsibilities than arresting 750,000 individuals a year for marijuana possession, especially given the additional justice costs of disposing of each of these cases.
9. Marijuana use has positive attributes, such as its medical value and use as a recreational drug with relatively mild side effects. Many people use marijuana because they have made an informed decision that it is good for them.
10. Marijuana users are determined to stand up to the injustice of marijuana probation and accomplish legalization, no matter how long or what it takes to succeed.

Want to learn more? Go to Hemp News.

Rational scale to assess the harm of drugs

Related:

• North American Hemp Council
• NORML (National Organization for the Reform Marijuana Laws) Take action!
• High Times magazine
• Cannabis on Wikipedia

Strange how people can be so dumb with such obvious things such as large predatory animals. Like just a week before, a man in India died from blood loss after suffering injuries from a Tiger after sticking his arms in the zoo enclosure (to take a picture). Not too smart.

Tigers are cool.

OK, George Bush and the CIA messed up when it came to solidifying an alliance and finding chemical weapons. If the United Nations wasn’t so wimpy and wishy-washy about its own rules, then the U.S. wouldn’t have had to step in the problem in the first place (and thus save the world from an evil murderous regime, again).

Before you bash Bush, remember the answer to these questions:

• Who is killing hundreds of innocent people every month with car bombs and other cowardly acts of destruction?
• Who is stopping the people of Iraq from creating their own government and having a peaceful life?
• Who is hiding behind the name of “Islam” to excuse their terrorism?

The damn terrorist “insurgents”, that’s who.

And:

• What country freed the Iraqi population from a greedy, murdering tyrant?
• What country is helping the Iraqis create their own government?
• What country is spending billions of dollars of its own money and sacrificing hundreds of its own lives to do so?

The United States, that’s who.

Did you know that you can report spammers to the U.S. FTC? If you get spam email that you think is deceptive, forward it to spam@uce.gov. Learn more about it and the CAN-SPAM law on the FTC spam site.

Now let’s hope the FTC’s budget is increased 1,000% for this effort!

• Use pictures.
• Better yet, use multimedia–audio, video, animation, etc.
• Make it emotional.
• Use anticipation–provide a challenge, a few proposals, then lastly a solution.
• Move around; don’t stand still.
• Perform live examples–beware of technical mishaps.
• Practice your presentation.
• Time your presentation (to stay within your limit).
• Do a Q & A–admit it if you don’t know answer–ask the audience.

In case you’re not sure, the points below include mistakes on purpose; I’m feeling twisted.

1. Why don’t people put question marks at the end of sentences. I hate that!
2. People say and type the hyphen instead of a dash-very naive. Didn’t anyone take typing in High School? If you are unable to create the proper dash symbol (—), then just use two hyphens. Remember, a hyphen is used either to join words together, or to indicate a word division at the end of a line.
3. Commonly mispelled misspelled words:
   1. calendar — programmers especially need to learn this!
   2. their/they’re/there — Possessive is “their”, and the contraction of “they are” is “they’re.” Everywhere else, it is “there.”
   3. its/it’s — The apostrophe marks a contraction of “it is.” Something that belongs to it is “its.”
   4. separate — Note that the Es surround the As.
4. Apostrophes. Its bad when I remember that in the 80′s, all of my fellow student’s paper’s were wrong.
   1. Indicating letters missing. The apostrophe replaces the text. So, “cannot” is “can’t”, therefore “remember the 70′s” should be “remember the ’70s”.
   2. Indicating possession:
      1. This is the boy’s glove. [One boy owns this glove.]
      2. This is the boys’ glove. [More than one boy owns this glove.]
      3. These are the boys’ gloves. [More than one boy owns more than one glove.]
5. AND OF COURSE, WRITING IN ALL CAPS IN REALLY OBNOXIOUS.

Google’s other fine products and services makes it a fine choice for online tasks including Google Calendar, Documents and Spreadsheets, and Groups. I find Google’s web applications easier to use, faster, and just slicker than most other similar apps. Google Docs are really cool because not only can you edit docs and (simple) spreadsheets online, but you can collaborate with other people.

Yahoo! made a good effort in the new version of Yahoo! Mail, but falls short in load speed and overall performance.

And unless you pay, you get bombarded with advertising in Yahoo! Mail. MSN mail isn’t much better. And staying away from Microsoft applications is usually a good idea. Ads are much less bothersome in Gmail, in fact, I hardly notice it at all as they are subtle text ads, not big, blaring, graphical ads. The Google ads are also relevant to the content of the email, which can actually be helpful sometimes.