The California Public Utilities Commission is subsidizing indoor pot grows with the state’s low-income electricity program, which means that even non-toking, non-stoner power users are contributing to the high … rate of electricity use, according to the Willits News which reports from the land of Mendo Gold.

North Coast law enforcement is finding a growing number of indoor grows where gardeners have qualified for the low-income CARE electricity assistance program. Under the program, law-abiding electricity ratepayers pay a subsidy to assist those who qualify for CARE. In a recent series of Humboldt County indoor grow raids, deputies found electricity bills showing most of the locations were being subsidized by CARE.

How wrong can a Nobel Peace Prize winner be?

This wrong: Peaceful revolution ‘only solution’.

You could believe that only by ignoring all of history and current events including those in her own country.

More realistically, one could say that peaceful revolution is preferable. But far less likely.

History proves that successful revolutions are violent: even those that are touted as “peaceful.” Violent and lasting revolutions have produced the current democratic governments of the United States, France, Mexico and others.

So-called peaceful revolutions have all involved violence and prevailed only because of the eventual moral use of violence and continued threats of violence against the counter-revolutionaries. India, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya (one hopes) and the American Civil Rights Movement all started with violence against non-violent protesters. They succeeded because the violence against the non-violent created outrage among those with a conscience who also had the the will and the power to change things.
The fall of the Soviet Union may be the best example of a peaceful revolution. Obviously preferable, but more a factor of economic decay that allowed the decline of power.

On the other hand, China’s Tiananmen Square, and the slaughter of innocents in Syria, and Iran are among many excellent — and more recent — examples of the abject failure of peaceful protest without power. If you have the guns and the will, you can always slaughter your way into the status quo.

On the other hand, if you have the guns and the will, you can make sure that democracy and human rights prevail.

NON-VIOLENCE, VIOLENCE AND HOW THREATENED VIOLENCE CREATES PEACE

UCLA Professor Bradford Stone, the hero of my book Perfect Killer, made this point when discussing the role of non-violent protest in the United States civil rights movement. Here, he is discussing the prosecution of a cold-case hate crime with Jasmine Thompson, a Black civil rights attorney. The conversation also addresses the issue of why former dictators, despots and war criminals should be brought to justice.

“But why prosecute Talmadge now? The man’s old and coming apart at the seams. His awful seizures tear him apart and he’s got terminal larynx cancer from cigarettes. Why doesn’t somebody just let him die. The cancer’s its own punishment.”

“Punishment is not always justice,” Jasmine said. “Do you think the Nuremberg trials were only about punishment and the culpability of those being tried?”

She paused for an answer I did not have, then shook her head.

“Justice outranks punishment. It brings a cultural repudiation of criminal behavior and that act brings justice—to the individual directly wronged and to society as a whole.”

“But why Talmadge and why now?”

“What’s happening now began in 1990, a couple of weeks before Christmas when a grand jury in Jackson indicted Byron De La Beckwith for the murder of Medgar Evers.”

I was familiar with the case. Evers had been gunned down in front of his home in 1963. An ambitious young district attorney in Hinds County, Bill Waller, brought De La
Beckwith to trial and endured abuse and anonymous death threats to see justice done.

Waller also resisted intense pressure from the racists who controlled the state—the Stennis/Eastland Democrats who had made their careers standing in the schoolhouse door and who thought good race relations was providing new paint to freshen up the Colored Only signs smeared across the Mississippi landscape like ugly cultural graffiti. In this atmosphere, Waller got hung juries in two separate trials. I suppose that, given the all-white juries back then, the verdicts stood as a partial victory, and indicated that not all white people were behind Mississippi’s brutal apartheid.

Less than ten years later, Mississippi elected “nigger lover” Waller as governor thanks in large part to the FBI backed up by the guns and steel of the federal government and National Guard troops.

Many think the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent protests did the whole job. Partly true enough, Dr. King and his protesters had to be the first wave to show the nation their dedication, their suffering, and to help Americans understand the evil. Build a nationwide outrage intense enough to commit federal guns and bullets to protect the innocent.

Reality is that this is a nasty Darwinian world and you can’t love your enemies to death. The world ain’t about Kumbaya. And if that’s all you have, you and all your good intentions are gonna be eaten alive. The Civil Rights Movement would never have succeeded without the threat of federal violence even the Klan had to respect.

“Bobby DeLaughter got a conviction in the Evers case,” Jasmine continued. “And produced more than simple justice for Myrlie Evers and her children. It sent a tremendous signal that Mississippi had changed, and if we got a conviction here, it might happen everywhere. Light bulbs went off all over the South, and pretty soon we had convictions in the Birmingham church bombings and in a whole lot of other Klan killings. All the way up to Indianapolis and Pennsylvania.”

“A compelling case, counselor,” I said.

“Feed one person’s hunger for justice and you can feed a whole people. It’s a fish and loaves kind of thing.”

Today, I bought another Quran.

I already have two of them. Translated by different people. They’re heavily underlined, highlighted, annotated (defaced some may say) just like my copies of the Jewish and Christian scriptures.

I’ve studied them all in quests for understanding that have serves as the backbones of three novels — Daughter of God, Perfect Killer and an almost-completed (and so-far-untitled) work. That study has also helped me — a fairly heretical Protestant — to understand my own faith.

But why yet another Quran?

Because the same evil irrationality that has hijacked most of Islam outside of the United States has possessed Terry Jones — a Florida religious cleric — who says he wants to burn copies of the Quran.

I bought another Quran today as a preemptive strike against Jones’s sectarian bigotry. For, regardless of whether he ever sets match to a Quran, he has burned goodwill and torched the efforts of rational, earnest people who have made an effort to bridge the religious divide.

When the Quran I bought today arrives, I’ll donate it to a friend or a local church or synagogue and urge its careful reading. I will do this because a thoughtful reading of the Quran and the Jewish and Christian scriptures will reveal frighteningly similar tales of death, destruction, murder, mayhem and mutilation committed in the name of Allah, God, or Yahweh.

While today we hear most about the Quran’s admonitions to “slay the infidels wherever you will find them,” Islam has nothing close to a monopoly on scripturally sanctioned violence against people of differing faiths:  The Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition and Israelite extermination of Canaanites and others come to mind.

Read the rest.

To say that this wine label is pornographic is ridiculous. It’s a classic piece of art from the late 1800s and originals are sold for as much as $50,000.”

The whole turgid tale is told by Bill Leigon, President of Hahn Family Wines which produces Cycles Gladiator Wines. Leigon said that the wines, ” available to consumers in Alabama for three years, have been banned from restaurants and retail establishments this week by the Alabama Beverage Control Board which has deemed the wine brand label as “pornographic.” Cycles Gladiator Wines has complied and wine distributors across Alabama have been forced to remove the wine from accounts.

Leigon notes that the Cycles Gladiator label “bears a replica of an antique French poster created in 1895 to advertise bicycles. It features an artistic rendition of a nude woman flying alongside a bicycle across a star-filled night sky.”

More

With a little Googling, this turned out to be a “Speak Out” item in the Daily Journal in in Kankakee, Ill. The newspaper’s links are a little wonky so, to find the original clueless post, go to the newspaper’s home page and enter “to all you hunters” in the search box.

You’ll find a reply that is interesting in its own right.

“Drinking just a glass of wine a day increases women’s risk of breast cancer, as well as several other types of the disease, a new study concludes.”

Take a drink. Get cancer. Any questions?

But what it neglected to say is that the links are equivocal, not-conclusive and that scores of peer-reviewed studies, published over the past 20 years agree unanimously that people who consume alcohol in moderation live longer than either abstainers or heavy drinkers.

This longer life span, according to the research, comes from a 30 to 50 percent drop in deaths from cardiovascular disease — the number one killer in the developed world.

Read more about it. It will drive you to drink.

The gun pictured above is a semi-automatic handgun. One shot each time you pull the trigger. Eight to maybe 12 shots in the magazine depending on the caliber and manufacturer. The pistol is lethal but in a whole different class from the Uzi submachine gun. Just pull the Uzi’s trigger and hold on as this full-automatic weapon fires 1,700 rounds per minute.

Google News has presented photos of armored personnel carriers labeled as “tanks,” hunting shotguns labeled “automatic weapon” and more. Does it matter? Do facts matter?

This sort of incompetence bodes badly for a company who wants you to trust them with all your applications and data.

This boy’s death should be prosecuted. There is such a thing as criminal negligence and this is it. So, too, the idiots at Fresh News and the equally stupid Google news bots responsible for repeating the error.

You’d think the public schools have dumbed America down enough without Google’s help.

UPDATE: My thanks to reader Dusan Maletic for his corrections. I now have the photo of the correct Uzi and its firing rate. I made my own dumb mistake by just reading the story posted by the Googlebot and not tracking the story back to the original article. My bad, and double bad on Google and Fresh News. Thanks Dusan.

“They’re saying (the killing) didn’t arise out of her employment, except that in this case she wouldn’t have been killed if she hadn’t been at work,” said Frazier’s attorney, Moira Stagliano. “This person didn’t know her, just walked into the store and picked her out.”

The killer, Tommy Joe Thompson, 45, of West Sacramento — had previously served a prison sentence for beating his young son in 1994 — walked in and stabbed Talley.

[A] defense psychiatrist, Herb McGrew, testified that Thompson had told him he stabbed Talley because she was black. Thompson is white.

“You know that he got up that morning, and he said, ‘I’m going to kill a black person,’ ” said Deputy District Attorney Dane Neilson, according to a transcript of the hearing. “She was, unfortunately, the first person he saw, correct?”

“Correct,” McGrew replied.

An insurance company lawyer later cited that exchange in a letter to Stagliano defending the denial of benefits to Talley’s son.

“The doctors testify that Mr. Thompson’s motivation in stabbing Taneka Talley was purely race motivated,” attorney Kelly Hamilton wrote. “As such, it is our belief that our denial in this matter is proper.”

“Taneka Talley was at work, doing her job, when she was killed,” the lawyer said. “If she had not been in that store, she would not have been available to (the killer), and she would still be alive.

“It’s shocking that Dollar Tree and its insurance carrier are using the alleged racist motivation of a killer as an excuse to get out of paying benefits,” Stagliano said.

Killed on the Job? Tough luck. We’re SRS and Dollar Tree. We’ll save a buck by screwing you out of your money. Talk about a hate crime! Find a Dollar Tree near you and let them know what you think.

One of the latest victims is retired technology publishing exec Michael “Mac” McCarthy, the fellow who invented the “Dummies” books among many things (Editor of Linux World, Sun World etc.)

The other day I got a robomessage (an automated email) from my ISP, Comcast.net, saying that my computer was being used for spam, and thus they were blocking me — I would be unable to send email.

Not a big problem, I thought, I’ll just use Gmail as my Reply ISP, which I did – for two weeks, and then that stopped working too.

According to the Comcastic tech support person, the bot decided Mac was a “zombie.” But Comcast didn’t have a human being who could reverse the bot’s judgment. The rest of McCarthy’s tale is here.

At least Mac got an email. In many other cases, Comcast just changes the mail delivery ports without informing people with the result that mail simply doesn’t get delivered. But the sender gets no notice their mail has been lost. Just like the U.S. Postal Service.

I wrote about the widespread problems in August. Comcast still can’t deliver the mail.

Turnout made the difference. Historically, black Californians have voted in about the same proportion as their population, in the 6 percent to 7 percent range, while Latinos, although more than a third of the state’s population, have been about 13 percent of voters.

Last week, however, 10 percent of voters were African American while 18 percent were Latino, and applying exit poll data to that extra turnout reveals that the pro-Obama surge among those two groups gave Proposition 8 an extra 500,000-plus votes, slightly more than the measure’s margin of victory.

To put it another way, had Obama not been so popular and had voter turnout been more traditional – meaning the proportion of white voters had been higher – chances are fairly strong that Proposition 8 would have failed.

The outcome should not have been so surprising since Obama made it clear during the campaign that while he supported civil unions, he did not favor gay marriage.

The rest of the story is here.

“There is no doubt; tequila has the exact proportion of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms necessary to form diamonds.”

For now, the scientists are continuing to taste test different tequilas´ abilities to produce diamonds. They´re also working on creating doped diamonds, which contain impurities, to serve as semiconductors.

Doped diamonds? Would that be, like, with cocaine or something?

Finally! Something that finally makes sense of the election.

See the entire commentary here.

[B]ecause civil law describes a contract as an offer, consideration and acceptance, in politics we have:

1. (Offer) – The candidate promises/offers to do/not do something specific.
2. (Consideration) – The candidate promises to do/not do this in exchange for a vote.
3. (Acceptance) – The voter casts his/her vote on the basis of the candidate’s positions/promises.

And this might mean exactly what?

Failure of the person or proposition soliciting my vote to uphold their end of the contract is breach of contract. In such a breach, their campaign advertisements could be considered false and misleading (fraud) and those who engaged in the fraud are guilty of conspiracy and, perhaps racketeering.

That’ might be change we need, but ain’t gonna happen until everybody in the U.S. Senate stops wearing togas. The rest is here.

While browsing the wonderful stats at Netcraft, I stumbled over their list of Phishiest countries and the bad boys who host the most phishers.

We keep thinking about Russia, China and Estonia being the epicenters, so the list was surprising. Of course, it’s ranked by the percentage of servers that are phishing, rather than totals.

Click here or on the graphic, above, to get the full list.

Given Comcast’s disdain for consumers, it’s no surprise that they are #3 globally in the percentage of phishers hosted. That’s Comcastic!