The number one cause of car accidents is traffic.
Self-explanatory.
But what IS traffic? Traffic is stacking within the system. Instead of being dispersed through the road network, vehicles are clumped together by automated (and oftentimes inefficient) intersections. Automated traffic controls produce a dangerous driving environment.
The band-aid: improved intersections and interchanges. The solution: multi-modal innovation.
The Human Genome Project should be opened to all as costs go down in gene mapping. Regular people should get the opportunity to find out what is in their genetic “cards.” Imagine ‘genetics’ in high school with open access to the Human Genome Project. Keeping the enormous potential of the project locked away is senseless, considering that someone who is prevented from working with copy-written genes could the person to make a huge scientific breakthrough.
The patenting of human genes for profit motive should be reconsidered as ethically questionable because it blocks research. (and cures)
image & recent coverage:
Supreme Court Agrees to Consider Myriad Case Involving Human Gene Patents
“I now have absolute proof that smoking even one marijuana cigarette is equal in brain damage to being on Bikini Island during an H-bomb blast” – Ronald Reagan
I have yet to see the proof. But Ronnie might have a developed a great strain name.
The Chesapeake Bay was home to the earliest English colonies. Charter companies brought hundreds and eventually thousands of people to these new colonies. Beginning with the Jamestown settlement of 1607 and hopes for gold, poor location and disease would afflict early colonial settlers. While there was no gold to be found, the cultivation of tobacco eventually made the colony profitable.
To cultivate tobacco, planters brought in large numbers of English workers, mostly young men who came as indentured servants. The Chesapeake region offered little economic opportunity to indentured servants who had completed their term of obligation. Even with the small amount of capital needed for tobacco cultivation, former indentured servants at best became subsistence farmers, a class ripe for such calls to rebellion as those proposed by Nathaniel Bacon.
Virginia and Maryland were characterized by large plantations and little urban development. The emphasis on indentured labor meant that relatively few women settled in the Chesapeake colonies. This fact, combined with the high mortality rate from disease—malaria, dysentery, and typhoid—slowed population growth considerably. Because tobacco had become the mainstay of the Virginia and Maryland economies, plantations were established by riverbanks for the good soil and to ensure ease of transportation. Wealthy planters built their own wharves on the Chesapeake to ship their crop to England, slowing town development.
As the number of new indentured laborers declined because of limited chances for advancement and reports of harsh treatment, they were replaced by African slaves. The Chesapeake colonies enforced laws that defined slavery as a lifelong and inheritable condition based on race. This made slaves profitable because planters could rely not only on their labor but that of their children as well. The slave population, which numbered about four thousand in Virginia and Maryland in 1675, grew significantly to the end of the century.
The Virginia colony made it’s fortunes through the cultivation of tobacco, setting a pattern that was followed in Maryland and the Carolinas, but eventually, fluctuations in Chesapeake tobacco prices caused a prolonged economic depression from 1660 into the early 1700s.
A legislatively-referred constitutional amendment:
✔ a procedure available in 48 states.
✔ no petition signatures necessary.
✔ one friendly legislative sponsor per.
✔ a bill (LRCA) putting to the ballot/electorate
✔ a single, unconvoluted, unadulterable question
✔ to gauge/pursue certain legislative policy-making.
…”Should the state of XYZ…”
✔ passage through its requisite committees
✔ passage through both chambers of state legislature. ☄
✔ passage of ‘the bill’ (question) by governors sig.
✔ referral to State SOS offices or electoral authority
✔ for transmittal to General Election ballots
….”Should the state of XYZ…” (check yes)
✔ cannabis will be the most popular vote-getter.
✔ result: a recommendation to lawmakers to “do this” ☎
***this process is NOT an ‘initiative’ ‘referendum’ etc***
(☄ some states at 2/3+ majority in ‘first year attempt)
(☎ vote directive is not necessarily binding in all cases)
*certain details and restrictions apply. particulars of the procedure vary by state.
learn more:
http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/Legislatively-referred_constitutional_amendment
Originally Posted at Free the Leaf, August 20, 2012
Apartheid era menu showing the racialization of food rations.
During Apartheid, the political prisoners of South Africa’s Robben Island would frequently go on hunger strike over the quantity and quality of their rations. Dietitians in the service of the state’s racial system determined ‘racial diets’, according to the Western determined ‘tastes’, with little input from the races themselves. Taste differs from individual to individual.
When prisoners complain, wardens would often respond, “like it,” or “I eat no better at home.” The food would then be quickly traded among the prisoners, until that activity found out and suspended; it later resumes. There is no need for a racial structure of rations, except but to make detention efforts more backwards and cumbersome. Why should they go through such an effort?
It seems to me that a diet of hunger and frustration only serves to radicalize.
Originally posted HERE, November 22, 2011
“It’s time for us as a people to start makin’ some changes. Let’s change the way we eat, let’s change the way we live and let’s change the way we treat each other. You see, the old way wasn’t working so it’s on us to do what we gotta do to survive.”
In introducing shorter work weeks to their audience, John de Graff and Kevin Batker, both advocates on the ails of consumer culture mindset, describe a 1965 United States Senate subcommittee prediction which suggested that because of advancements in technology,
“Americans would be working only about 20 hours a week by the year 2000, while taking seven weeks or more of vacation a year.”
Work hours had been on the decline since their peak at the height of the industrial age, the labor need decreasing due to automation and computing. They state that “until World War II, bread (higher wages) and roses (as in, shorter hours—time to smell the roses!) were the twin demands of the labor movement.” (de Graaf & Batker, 2011) However, the work hour rate leveled off and Americans adopted an attitude of working more hours than they needed to, in order to raise their standard of living. De Graff and Bakter offer convincing evidence that a shorter work week could provide range of benefits and solutions to contemporary labor issues. In fact, they blame the policy of the 40 hour week for a number of social problems, from unemployment to stress from overwork, and add “surely any economy based on the “greatest good” would take seriously the need for leisure.” (de Graaf & Batker, 2011)
I believe that the forty-hour work week is essentially arbitrary and ‘non-natural’. I’m glad Google found the logic paying employees “to be effective, not to work 9 to 5.” My article covered similar territory around reduced weekly work hours, showing productivity gains, amidst a range of other economic, environmental, and social benefits.
“The average Dutch worker puts in fewer than 1,400 hours a year, compared with almost 1,800 for Americans. And yet, the Dutch economy has been very productive. Unemployment has been much lower than in the U.S., while the Netherlands has a positive trade balance and robust personal savings. Gallup Inc. ranks the Netherlands fifth in the world in life satisfaction (2010), behind only the Nordic countries (except Iceland) and well ahead of the U.S. Dutch emphasis on free time dates to at least 1982, when employers and unions signed the Wassenaar Agreement, in which unions accepted restrained wage growth in return for reductions in working hours and the expansion of part-time employment. The pact ended inflationary pressures and led to an economic turnaround that came to be called “the Dutch miracle.”
de Graaf, J. &. D. K. B. (2011, November 3). Americans work too much for their own good. Bloomberg. Retrieved from http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-03/americans-work-too-much-for-their-own-good-de-graaf-and-batker.html
IMAGE: HERE
RECENT COVERAGE:
Reduce the Workweek to 30 Hours
New York Times Opinion | Anna Coote | March 9, 2014
The Truth About The 40-Hour Workweek: It’s Actually 47 Hours Long
Think Progress | Bryce Covert | September 2, 2014
Cannabis was decriminalized in 2011 in Connecticut on a bill which I sought sponsorship for. SB1014 passed the Assembly, and was approved by the Lieutenant Governor in a Senate tie-breaking vote. This was the first Decrim-by-Legislature since Alaska, in the 1970s. It was a historic, albeit shitty bill.
In regards to the cannabis decriminalization bills before the Judiciary Committee.
Free the Leaf – Global Cannabis Movement SUPPORTS this legislative action and urges you to consider these points in your decision making:
Bills of this nature have passed through committee before.
This bill, as part of the Governor’s budget, is not doomed to veto.
This bill has immediate cost savings to the state.
This bill (narrowly) realizes that cannabis users are NOT criminals.
You have been given the testimony of the concurrent Medicinal Cannabis bills, and must recognize that what was recently approved, benefits very few. Much of the self-disclosure of use for particular treatments given in testimony has not been addressed. These individuals need–and will continue to use–this therapeutic plant for any number of ailments (as an alternative to medications laden with unwanted side effects).
Twice, by bad luck, in the State of Connecticut, these individuals are felons.
That goes, as well, for the recreational user:
Who for choosing a substance that is SAFE (*not “safer”)–as opposed to alcohol and other dangerous legal substances–is subject to the humility, probation, and/or jail time deserved of ACTUAL CRIMINALS.
Negative considerations around this issue suggest a cognitive bias founded on hearsay, inaccurate media portrayal, and outright lies. The truth is that this plant is BENIGN, but the criminal penalty associated with it is not.
It’s the LAW that has ruined lives.
Albert Einstein once said “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
We suggest that has been the case…
Thank you for your time and patience,
Courteously:
the Free the Leaf Community, and founder, Daniel Malo
