I have mentioned before Portugal’s bold move in 2001 to decriminalize personal possession of drugs and how that led to a reduction in heroin use and deaths in its population that had reached epidemic proportions, not to mention the elimination of all the waste in policing and financial resources that goes into arresting, prosecuting, and incarcerating people who use drugs.
This video explains how it came about that Portugal took this step.
Connoisseurs of political pranks will be sorry to learn about the death yesterday of Dick Tuck at the age of 94. He was a political prankster who worked on behalf of many Democratic candidates and causes but he took particular delight in tormenting Richard Nixon.
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A court case in Cleveland into the death of a five-year old girl has taken a strange turn in which the defense has asked the judge to be allowed to present as an expert witness in forensic science someone who believes, among other things, that the Earth was created in just six days as the Bible says.
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Alexa is the name given to the voice that responds to your commands on the Amazon Echo device. In a recent post, I discussed the creepiness of having someone potentially listen to every conversation in its vicinity. As I understand it (not having one) the device is only supposed to be activated if you first say “Alexa” but apparently that is not the case.
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The ABC television network has canceled the show Roseanne because its star Roseanne Barr had sent out insulting and racist tweets about Valerie Jarrett, a close advisor to Barack Obama when he was president, one of which said “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.”.
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I am of the age group where we encounter the phenomenon of people having Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia on a fairly regular basis, either because our parents or the parents of friends or even in rare cases with people closer to our age group who succumb to early onset forms of the disease. As a result, the conversations often assume the inevitability of our own serious cognitive decline. The attitude is that it is a question of ‘when’ not ‘if’, and various strategies are bandied about as ways of delaying it.
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A Catholic bishop in Ireland says that those Catholics who voted in favor of repealing the ban on abortion have committed a sin and should go to confession. He tried to explain the vote.
He said the result indicated something “a little bit shocking” in Irish society. “There are cultural Catholics and committed Catholics… To be honest, many people would consider themselves Catholics, religion has become somewhat divorced from faith.”
He said “I think perhaps one of the problems we face is that for too long we’ve tended to rely exclusively on a model of faith formation which is addressed to young people in schools, and apart from the Sunday homily there hasn’t been serious faith formation in our parishes.
I keep plugging that truly excellent radio program This American Life and this week they had a new episode that looked at the travails of security guards at JFK airport, through the eyes of one of them, LaDonna Powell. It was a gripping show but as I listened I grew increasingly furious at how badly the supervisors treated the guards, especially the women and people of color.
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I watched the first episode of Michelle Wolf’s new comedy series The Break that will air a new half-hour episode every Sunday on Netflix. It is clear that she is going to continue with her take-no-prisoners attitude that she showed in her speech at the White House Correspondents Association dinner recently. The show was biting and funny.
The one jarring note for me was the fat-shaming jokes she did of disgraced chef Mario Batali, who has been accused of multiple acts of sexual abuse. It is true that Batali seems like an awful person but my feeling is that she would have been better served by poking fun at his behavior than his looks. Fat shaming anyone seems wrong to me because however bad the target might be as a person, it inflicts collateral damage on other people who are quite innocent. Since she is very slim, it feels even worse.
Here is a promo for the show.