God Bless Bob Dylan, one of the greatest songwriters of all time! But I much prefer his Basement Tapes over his Casino Sell-Out. What kind of rock concert doesn't allow dancing? More like a geriatric ward cocktail party, with tickets over $100. Luckily one needn't pay for such a travesty, usually a ticket can be had in exchange for some bootleg CD's of his concerts of more sincere and inspired times, like his Gospel Era, which was as earnest and honest and deeply-tradition-r ooted-yet-contempo rary as anything he did in the 60's or afterwards. Those 1979 shows were HOT, as Bobby told the crowd clamoring him to play some rock & roll, he told them his heartfelt truth which was "go to a Kiss concert if you want the road the hell!" God Bless you Bobby Dylan, even if your venues **** ! Go back to those baseball field summer tours with Willie Nelson, that was much friendlier to your audiences than the usher-state you've sold out to lately, old friend! (Aug 27, 2008 | post #14)
Lieberman A Possible Running Mate For McCain
Lieberman has fought for the wrong side in some very disturbing economic trends in our country. Back in 1982, when I was a high school student, the CEO-to-worker pay gap was around 42-to-1. Two decades later, as I was teaching high school, that gap had grown by a factor of nearly seven, reaching 282-to-1 by 2002. If we measure just since 1990, average CEO pay rose 279 percent, far more than the 46 percent increase in worker pay, which itself was only 8 points above the 38 percent inflation since then. CEO pay raises since 1990 also dramatically outpaced the stock market performance of the 500 largest publicly traded firms (which rose 166 percent), as well as the 93 percent rise in corporate profits. Now, if we look at the extreme end of this trend in CEO pay inflation, we find an overlap with other disturbing trends. For example, at the 30 companies with the greatest shortfall in their employees’ pension funds, CEOs made 59 percent more than the median CEO in a Business Week survey of 365 large corporations. At the 50 companies with the most announced layoffs in 2001, CEOs received a median income 38 percent higher than the median income of those in the corporations surveyed by Business Week. Finally, the top 50 job-cutting CEOs in total received more than $570 million in compensation in 2002, a reward of more than $1,000 for each of the 465,000 jobs cut. How does Lieberman fit into it all? Much of the data above come from a report issued jointly by the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington and United for a Fair Economy in Boston. The report, “Executive Excess 2003: CEOs win, Workers and Taxpayers Lose,” focuses on stock options as the main force driving the growing CEO-worker pay gap. The report details the history of corporate and congressional intervention in regulatory efforts to check this by requiring companies to “expense” stock options. In the report, Lieberman emerges as the key figure undermining efforts to require the “expensing” of these stock options on the corporate balance sheet. Lieberman sponsored a 1994 Senate resolution condemning the Federal Accounting Standards Board’s proposal to make companies record stock options as an expense when granted to employees. Then again, in August 2002 –eight years deeper into the trends described above—Lieberman opposed a bill that would have required companies to expense stock options. He instead offered his own softer bill that still allows stock options to escape being reported as expenses on corporate balance sheets. In effect, Lieberman helped to obscure the financial workings of companies paying CEOs outrageous sums even as they bleed jobs, underfund pensions and dodge taxes. Joe Lieberman has allied himself with the masters of greed and pension-gouging and layoffs and tax-dodging. And, proving he has a subtle side as well, he works for obscurity in corporate accounting to make it all possible. (Aug 26, 2008 | post #141)
I'm glad things have turned so much for the better for you! Do we agree that the same drug that can be helpful or useful or performance-enhanc ing to some can also be dangerous and harmful to others, or even to the same person under different conditions? Parents and guardians should stop being so naive and trusting about giving their kids the many dangerous and harmful psychiatric/behavi oral drugs that are making billions of dollars in profits for pharmy co's and all their ad agency friends. The "treatments " making fortunes and careers in psychiatry today will soon be seen as having been as ridiculous as we now see the psychiatric treatments of a few decades ago. I think the "medicalizati on" and diagnoses of "disorders " for much of the normal range of human behaviors and feelings has become dangerous because 1) people let the doctors define them and tell them they are sick or have a "disorder ", and/or 2) people trust the doctors and the drugs they prescribe as if they are safe or effective or helpful. In many cases they are not. Once people realize that all drugs are dangerous they will start to see that individuals, though under a doctor's advice and counsel, must still become responsible for making the final decisions deciding which drugs are helpful or harmful to them. Its not so much that nobody should ever use any drug as it is that all people should be very thoughtful and cautious about taking any drug. Especially with kids, especially for behaviors. That is doping a kid, not "treating " him. I bet that 99.9% of the behavioral drug prescriptions would be much better addressed with a more appropriate education program and career path for the kid. And that 99.9% of "depression disorders" and other DSM diagnoses would be better treated with good friends and a satisfying vocation than with pharmy dope. (Aug 26, 2008 | post #13)
Drug Arrests Made In Glastonbury
Do you think it would be better if prescription drugs, alcohol and tobacco were all therefore unregulated and illegal? Do you really think any of that would protect children or public health and safety better than a legally regulated market? Why do you think alcohol prohibition was repealed in the first place? Because prohibition only made the booze and the streets MORE dangerous, not because alcohol was suddenly judged to be "safe." In the real world, there are no absolute answers to fully eliminate every problem associated with drug use. But prohibition reduces NONE of the problems while creating many additional ones, from unknown (unregulated) drug purities and doseages to creating a huge black market causing crime and violence and funding organized crime and street gangs. That is why replacing prohibition with legal regulation would be a much better policy for protecting public health and safety. By creating a drug consumer license program, adult drug consumers would be educated in the hazards and safest use practices of their class of drug. The regulated dispensaries where such drugs are obtained would also have on-site counselors available and/or a friendly referral process so counseling or treatment are always available. Educating and humanizing the consumer, combined with regulating the manufacture and sale of drugs, would eliminate as much of the problems caused by drug abuse as can be done in the real world. To the extent that adults have legal access to a drug, its manufacture and sale is regulated by law. This prevents adulterated or unmeasured drugs from causing poisonings and overdoses. This regulation also eliminates the organized crime wholesalers and street gang retailers, thus eliminating not only huge amounts of crime and corruption but also many of the opportunities for youth to buy or deal in drugs. Youth demand for drugs by itself would not even begin to support an international manufacture and smuggling cartel, nor even a street retail market. It is the adult demand that pours hundreds of billions of dollars annually into the illegal drug market. So repealing prohibition and replacing the black market with a legally regulated adult market will indeed eliminate the drug cartels and street retailers. Would kids still have access to drugs? Yes, the same way they have access to all the other things that we allow adults to have but not kids: handguns, cars, sex, alcohol & tobacco, etc. But banning dangerous things for adults in the name of protecting children is not how we handle all these other things, and it is not working in the case of drugs either. All it does is create a huge pool of crime and criminal organizations, make the drugs and the streets much more dangerous than they would otherwise be, and fill our jails with people who should not have been criminalized in the first place...all the while creating unregulated street dealers where kids have unlimited access to drugs after all. Better to regulate the drug trade and allow law enforcement to concentrate on the small minority of adults who would still give drugs to kids. That would and should remain a serious criminal charge, as it is with alcohol. (Aug 7, 2008 | post #79)
Hartford Man Faces Drug Charges After Enfield Traffic Stop
No charges for any unsafe driving or moving violations, no charges for driving while intoxicated. In other words, no threat to public safety or probable cause for a search except police knowledge of past "drug violations," meaning the hypocritical fascist culture war is in full display with this search and arrest. If even a lawmaker or judge were driving with the deadly addictive drugs alcohol and tobacco loaded up in the car for transport to a party where they were planning to distribute the drugs to their guests, they'd have only a warning for no seat belt. But arbitrary prejudicial laws define some drug users and addicts as criminals and others as legitimate pursuers of the inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. In other words, if your happiness is found in ways even slightly different than the way it is found by the powerful members in society, suddenly the Constitution (and other American traditions of freedom and legal principle) is meaningless and the employees of the prosecution-prison industry are given more lives to destroy for pay. (Jul 31, 2008 | post #14)
Drug Arrests Made In Glastonbury
Yes I believe that kids' access to drugs will be reduced and their involvement in the drug trade will be virtually eliminated through replacing the organized crime wholesale cartels and the street gang and local opportunist retailers with a regulated market of licensed buyers and sellers. So now its my turn to ask for a straight answer. Do you really think that prohibition keeps kids from getting drugs? (Jul 30, 2008 | post #77)
Drug Arrests Made In Glastonbury
http://www.paulhag er.org/libertarian /drugwar.html EXCERPT: History amply demonstrates that, although alcohol really is a dangerous drug, alcohol prohibition did much more harm than good. There is general agreement among scholars who have studied the effects of alcohol prohibition that it was directly responsible for the rise of organized crime in the U.S.(The subsequent activities of organized crime have been used to justify greater and greater federal involvement in law enforcement.) Homicide rates soared during alcohol prohibition as criminal gangs fought over territory. More and more young people became involved in illegal activities because it was advantageous for bootleggers to use young people as "mules" (that is, people who carry or otherwise deliver contraband). This resulted in young people being killed in shoot-outs. It was the corruption of youth and the kids being killed in gang wars that finally turned the public against alcohol prohibition, which ended in 1933. Shortly after the end of alcohol prohibition, homicide rates plummeted -- within a few years they had dropped 40%. If there was a benefit observed with alcohol prohibition it was that fewer people used the drug. This benefit was illusory, however. The amount of alcohol consumed actually increased because the economics of prohibition decreed that booze should be more potent. Thus, adverse health effects associated with alcohol use actually went up during prohibition. While it is true that opiates, cocaine, marijuana, and hallucinogens are different from alcohol in terms of their psychopharmacology , all of the evidence is that their continued prohibition is having exactly the same effect on society today as alcohol prohibition had 70-odd years ago. For example, economist Milton Friedman, looking at the effect the criminal black market in drugs is having on the homicide rate estimates that it is responsible for at least 10,000 homicides each year. Criminologist Alfred Blumstein, past president of the American Society of Criminology (1991-1992), notes that the criminal black market in crack cocaine is a major component of the increase in homicides committed by youths ages 15-24 that occurred in the last half of the 1980s. The fact that many of the victims were also young underscores the tragedy of drug prohibition. Today's drug prohibition, like alcohol prohibition before it, is a major driver of violent crime and homicide. Because black market activities are concentrated in big cities and because young African-American males have the most to gain economically from the illicit drug trade, they are most often the casualties in the war: the leading cause of death among African-American males ages 15-24 is homicide. END EXCERPT Prohibition is an abdication of the government's duty to regulate the market. Instead the lawmakers have pushed the non-medical drug market (with the huge exception of alcohol and tobacco) into the hands of organized crime at the top and any opportunistic kid at the bottom, channeling $hundreds of billions$ annually to organized crime and corruption of govt and finance, meanwhile the distributors have zero incentive to check the age or drug license of their customers or retailers. Create a legally regulated non-medical drug market for licensed adults and the kid dealers and customers will virtually disappear as licensed adult consumers will be getting their drugs from licensed retailers with strong incentive to not sell to kids. But then all the hypocrisy of the alcohol-and-tobacc o-exempted drug war and its politicians would have to end, and new scapegoats found for the poverty and alienation in our cities. Not to mention the dive in alcohol and Xanax sales that the Busch and pharmy lobbyists guard against.... (Jul 30, 2008 | post #75)
Drug Arrests Made In Glastonbury
Teenagers in the illegal drug business is a natural and inevitable consequence of drug prohibition laws. The same phenomena was common during alcohol prohibition: kids were employed in various aspects of the production and distribution of contraband liquor, as well as drinking more than before prohibition. These links tell a little more about the counter-productive results of prohibition on youth involvement in the contraband trade: http://www.druglib rary.org/schaffer/ Library/s... EXCERPT: Drinking at an earlier age was also noted, particularly during the first few years of Prohibition. The superintendents of eight state mental hospitals reported a larger percentage of young patients during Prohibition (1919-1926) than formerly. One of the hospitals noted: "During the past year (1926), an unusually large group of patients who are of high school age were admitted for alcoholic psychosis" (Brown, 1932:176). In determining the age at which an alcoholic forms his drinking habit, it was noted: "The 1920-1923 group were younger than the other groups when the drink habit was formed" (Pollock, 1942: 113). END EXCERPT http://www2.potsda m.edu/hansondj/Con troversies/1091124 904_6.html EXCERPT: Often, the entire family would be involved in theproduction of home brews for illegal sale, as suggested by the following: Mother's in the kitchen Washing out the jugs; Sister's in the pantry Bottling the suds; Father's in the cellar Mixing up the hops; Johnny's on the front porch Watching for the cops.(Mendelson and Mello, 1985, p. 86) And: Mother makes brandy from cherries; Pop distills whisky and gin; Sister sells wine from the grapes on our vine- Good grief, how the money rolls in! (Sinclair, 1962, p. 209) END EXCERPT (Jul 30, 2008 | post #74)
Drug Arrests Made In Glastonbury
You actually think kids had less access to booze under prohibition? You actually think think prohibition didn't bring kids into the bootlegging business? It did. (Jul 30, 2008 | post #73)
Drug Arrests Made In Glastonbury
I have not "railed" against booze nor have I promoted other drugs. But I criticize hypocrisy and counterproductive drug prohibition laws that undermine public health and safetyMinors consuming and dealing non-medical drugs is just one more inevitable consequence of drug prohibition. If you REALLY want to take kids out of the drug business and eliminate the adult dealers who sell to them, take the drug market away from organized crime and the black market and put it under legal regulation where manufacture, distribution and purchase are all by license. (Jul 28, 2008 | post #71)
Drug Arrests Made In Glastonbury
Do you think the law should require dealers of alcohol and tobacco to be jailed and labeled as criminals? What criteria would you use to make laws decreeing which consumers and traders of deadly addictive drugs should be jailed and which should be allowed to sit on the Supreme Court? A second question: since you do seem to prefer the deadly addictive alcohol and tobacco be wholesaled by the likes of DiChello Distributors, I’m curious why you think the trade in other deadly addictive drugs (as well as some drugs quite less harmful or dangerous than alcohol or tobacco, such as cannabis) should be denied legal regulation and abandoned to organized crime and local retailing gangs? Surely you realize that maximizing the dangers of drugs and vastly increasing crime are the inevitable results of arbitrarily prohibiting certain drugs that millions of people will continue to use as part of their inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness? I can’t understand why anyone would support such a counterproductive policy. Are you getting something out of itI’m really glad you’re here to defend the drug war because you are the perfect example to show it is a racist culture war. That goes a long way in showing why some people continue to support a drug policy that actually undermines public health and safety. In some ways we already covered this ground in the discussion above of the book “Drug Warriors and Their Prey” which shows how parallel the American drug war is to the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. But your racism and prejudice against the “urban minorities” shows the drug war has an American Touch to ground it in our own historical experience. For an intro to what I mean, see: http://www.thenati on.com/doc/2006071 0/glasser In sum, your comments here are much appreciated, showing how the American drug war is homegrown and yet very much like other police states that have targeted minority cultures (defined racially, ethnically, politically-ethica lly, etc). Please stick around these topix forums and continue to defend the drug war. You reveal its full absurdity and malice in a way a critic can’t. (Jun 27, 2008 | post #65)
Former East Windsor Officer Gets Four Years For Trying To Entic...
I find it strange you would favorably compare a pedophile attempting to seduce an 11-year-old to a "drug dealer." Do you really hold such Orwellian concepts of govt as to think they should defy and distort the Constitution to dictate which drugs adults can consume (allowing themselves their favored deadly addictive drugs of alcohol and tobacco)? You seem to be saying people should be put in jail for drugs and yet not for attempting to sexually assault a child? I don't have an answer for how to deal with sexual predators --though generally I believe dangerous criminals should be locked out of society for the protection of those of us able to live without violating other people. Frankly I would invert your criminal-justice scheme: stop criminalizing the users of less-than-mainstre am-deadly-addictiv e-drugs (legally regulate the market by licensing manufacturers, traders and consumers) and start keeping the REAL criminals (those who violate the person or property of others) in jail so they don't victimize more people. (Jun 27, 2008 | post #36)
Drug Arrests Made In Glastonbury
You are the one who is clueless. I support arresting people who supply drugs to minors. And prohibition laws are a big part of how drugs are so available to minors. Prohibition puts the commerce in the hnds of unlicensed dealers who have zero incentive to check customers for a drug consumer license or even proof of age. (Jun 21, 2008 | post #57)
Can We Really Be Sure What Obama Isn't?
Hey Vasser, I admire your great fiddle playing on so many records and shows! I especially like that stuff he did with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and with Old & In The WayGee whiz, should that affect my vote? There are so many issues at stake, I'm glad you brought these to our attention. Its good to know voters like you have the fututre of the nation and world in mind, so obvious by the subjects you consider to bear on the election. (Jun 13, 2008 | post #514)
Can We Really Be Sure What Obama Isn't?
Is McCain a Muslim? I don't know, but look at the Muslim principle of 'taqiyya' [google] and you will see that he would be permitted to lie about his religion if he was Muslim. (Jun 13, 2008 | post #510)
Like what you see?
Create your own Topix Profile
