Intoxication is an excuse, not a cause

Look what we have here:

• Drinking Alcohol and Bad Behaviours (potsdam.edu)

In particular:

Intoxicated people have much greater control over their behavior than generally recognized. For example, in those societies in which people don’t believe that alcohol causes disinhibition, intoxication never leads to unacceptable behavior.

[...]

The researchers conclude that people who have been drinking can control their behavior if they want to.

This isn’t to suggest that getting drunk doesn’t impair one’s reflexes, or even one’s thinking: but it does rather strongly support the notion that alcohol, in and of itself, doesn’t make one lose control.  Chalk one up for personal responsibility.

What precisely did you expect?

From the comments on CBC.ca’s story on Canada’s no-fly list:

I feel betrayed, not just by the governing party but also by the systems which should have prevented this kind of abuse of power.

I am astounded by the people who think that they can simultaneously maintain a government with enough power to give them anything they want and somehow prevent said government from abusing said power.  That, folks, is like getting room-spinningly drunk and expecting to awake without a hangover.

The best pro-pot ad ever

Aliens, it seems, don’t do drugs (and no, this has nothing to do with immigration):

• The best anti-pot ad ever. (Slate.com)

I should note that Seth Stevenson, the author of the above, doesn’t take a particularly editorial stance on the matter — he tries to evaluate each ad on its merits as an advertisement.

Nonetheless, if this is the true face of the evil weed, we might as well legalize it post-fucking-haste:

A cartoon guy and gal are hanging out in a crudely drawn landscape. The guy puffs on a joint and exhales a jet of smoke. “Not again,” says the disappointed girl. Suddenly, a UFO descends from the sky. A small alien emerges and walks over to the couple. The guy politely offers the alien a toke, but the creature declines—and at this, the girl swoons. We see the alien and the girl fly off together in the spaceship, leaving the jilted stoner alone with his thoughts.

That’s right, folks: if you smoke up too much, you might become — gasp! — boring. (Also, if you’re a space alien and you don’t smoke pot, you might get the girl!) You might also disappoint your dog (that’s further down in the article). As the kids say on the internet these days: oh noes!

Look, folks, we all know damn well by now that pot is, in and of itself, about as dangerous as superhero comic books.  Sure, if you drive whilst high, you risk yourself and others — but by those standards we also need a war on insomnia.  (Oh, shit, don’t tell the government I said that!  We don’t want to give them ideas.)

The only “pot-related violence” I’ve noticed involves growers and dealers.  Now, gentle reader, why is it that grow-ops tend to attract violence while homebrewers do not?  After all, both of them are privately producing intoxicants of similar strength — what might account for this discrepancy?  That’s right, folks: pot is illegal, and beer is not.  Homebrewers can’t hope commercially to compete with Budweiser.  Grow-ops have no such problems — they compete only against each other.  Further, they compete on illegal terms, and the price of entry into this market is the risk of heavy-handed legal retribution — so why not throw in a little assault, some firearms charges, maybe a bit of murder while you’re at it?  Brewers and distillers haven’t had such problems since… hmm, not since Prohibition.  What a peculiar coincidence.

This is not a national crisis: it’s a fucking joke. We’re sending people to prison for this? No government has any business regulating something so harmless that the scariest thing fifty years of propaganda have been able to come up with is an alien stealing your girlfriend if you smoke teh p0t!

Beers of Milwaukee, vol. 13

Before I go any further, I am pleased to report that Stella Artois have corrected their punctuation: as of late their advertisements have (correctly) read “Perfection has its price” (emphasis mine).  This news delights me.

My latest discovery is Bell’s Brewery’s Expedition Stout, perhaps the most robust beer I have ever tasted.  It is spectacularly thick and bittersweet — this beer rather makes Guinness seem like Coors Light by comparison.  Expedition Stout is, in fact, so strong (alcoholically — 10.5% by volume — as well as in taste and character) that it is rather difficult to drink.  However, if one has put oneself in the proper state of mind (ensconced with a good and weighty book, perhaps, in a dark and quiet place), it is vastly rewarding.

Were it a bit more accessible, this stout might be my favourite beer of all time.  It is, however, a bit too specialized for that title.  Nonetheless, you cannot afford to ignore it if you like dark beer.

Still more airport security theatre

I’m in Milwaukee now, after attending a family reunion just north of San Diego. Naturally, I’ve been subjected to a great deal of air travel. As is common these days, the fine public servants at the security checkpoints undressed us (“please remove your shoes and belt”), demanded our papers (“please present your boarding pass and one piece of government-issued photo ID”), and scrutinized our belongings (“please place all metallic items in a tray on the conveyor belt”).

The man in front of me at Orange County’s John Wayne Airport (yes, it’s really called that) neglected to place all of his unusual items in his checked baggage. When asked just what the hell he had in his carry-on bag, he stammered out an unintelligible response that had something to do with picnics and wheels. (One can hardly blame him for losing his nerve.) The great defender of Homeland Security behind the X-ray machine called over his supervisor, who eventually shrugged and let the man past. (No worries — so far as I know, he didn’t hijack an airplane with his still-unidentified picnic-wheel device. I feel so much safer now. Don’t you?)

This is, of course, not an exclusively American phenomenon. German airport-security thugs “mistook” my supervisor’s laptop charger for a bomb when we returned from a conference in Vienna through Frankfurt; British airport-security thugs took a rather dubious interest in the rivets in my trousers the last time I flew out through Heathrow (to avoid miscommunication, I diligently trained myself to refer to them as trousers rather than pants — which no doubt saved me a great deal more humiliation); and even Vancouver’s notoriously reasonable airport-security thugs have pulled me aside to grill me on the construction and use of my LED pocket flashlight. (It turns out that, should the airport suddenly lose power, one is expected to completely lose one’s fucking mind rather than look for a way out.)

Now Canada’s taking things one step further: we’re introducing a no-fly list (because that works so well in the United States):

• Critics raise alarms over Canada’s no-fly list (CBC)
• Ottawa going ‘overboard’ with no-fly list, expert warns (also CBC)

Of course, we all know full well (when we can bring ourselves to think about it, rather than feel about it) that this strategy can’t possibly work.  According to Barry Prentice of the University of Manitoba (I’m quoting from the second article):

“What terrorist is going to travel with their own name and passport? It’s like a bank robber using his own card to have a heist.

“These people are going to steal or create a forged passport and identification if they’re going to do anything anyway.”

Bruce Schneier cuts to the heart of the matter:

Imagine a list of suspected terrorists so dangerous that we can’t ever let them fly, yet so innocent that we can’t arrest them – even under the draconian provisions of the Patriot Act.

This is the federal government’s “no-fly” list.

(He is, of course, referring to the American version.)

Don’t worry, though: no-fly lists work — though of course the powers that be can’t offer any evidence that they work, because then they might not work:

“They do work,” [Allan Kagedan, chief of aviation security policy for Transport Canada] said. ”The problem with giving examples is that they defeat security and also, ironically, defeat the privacy rights to those individuals.”

Well, isn’t it charming that the Leviathan is so concerned with individual rights all of a sudden.  I call bullshit: Ottawa leaks personal information like a shotgunned sieve.   Besides, we already know the name of one “example” of how well no-fly lists work: Maher Arar.

The final indignity, of course, is that the feds are using our tax dollars to curtail our freedoms.  Why do I feel like I’m tipping the hangman?

A matter of priorities

Violent Acres on what is (and isn’t) legal to do to oneself:

Heart disease is the number one killer in America. Yet, I’ve been spoon fed the ideology that I should love my body unconditionally while I’ve been simultaneously handed a helmet should I even look twice at a fucking bicycle. The odds are in favor of obesity killing me before an inopportune collision with a tree. However, there are no laws against eating myself into a sugar induced coma.

With priorities like that, it’s hard to believe the state has my best interests at heart.

Indeed.

“An open-air prison”

Chris Atkins deplores the relentless revocation of civil liberties in Britain:

• Tony Blair has turned Britain into a land where we are all prisoners (Daily Mail)

Atkins makes all the usual points, which I will not belabour. He also points out that governments rarely give up powers:

Although New Labour says its mania for data-gathering is all part of its plan to protect us, there’s no guarantee that future governments (who will be inheriting a nationwide surveillance machine and the National Identity Register) won’t use it to more malign ends.

Totalitarian regimes have, after all, always collected information on their citizens. Hitler pioneered the use of ID cards as a means of repression. The Belgians left Rwanda with a bloody legacy by implementing an ID card system which divided the population into Hutu and Tutsi.

When the 1994 genocide began, these cards proved a device for horrific ethnic cleansing, with one million people dying in 100 days. The Stasi secret police in Soviet East Germany kept millions of files in order to keep track of everyone in the country.

Of course these examples are the extremes – but basic liberties such as privacy and free speech have been hard-won over centuries and history shows that we should not allow them to be brushed aside.

Most people miss this point: even if the present government is using its powers only for good, there’s nothing preventing the next one from abusing them. Look at Presidential politics in the United States these days, for example: each party’s faithful are convinced that the other guy’s election would be an unmitigated disaster; that the fate of the nation rests upon the edge of a knife every four years. (So far, they’ve been pretty much right.) I’m going to go out on a limb and claim that we wouldn’t have this problem if the federal government didn’t have such far-reaching powers to fuck people up.

Beers of Milwaukee, vol. 12

Earlier, I wrote of Three Floyds’s Black Sun Stout. I have now been introduced to their “Dreadnaught” India Pale Ale, and am quite impressed.

At 9.5%, I’d say that this beer lives up to her namesake.  She is also quite a hoppy beer, and like most strong beers rather a sweet one.  Dreadnaught is rather thicker than most IPAs I’ve tasted, and this limits her value as an easy-drinking summer refreshment — though at ten bucks a bottle (a 650mL bottle, sure, but nonetheless) one wouldn’t want to go through this stuff too terribly quickly.

All things considered, Dreadnaught is quite good, though perhaps not so revolutionary as the warship.