Hard work and drugs in America

Ryan Grim has just published This is Your Country on Drugs, and he has presented some of his main ideas at Huffpo.

[O]ur nation diverges sharply from the rest of the world in a few crucial ways. Americans work hard: 135 hours a year more than the average Briton, 240 hours more than the typical French worker, and 370 hours--that's nine weeks--more than the average German. We also play hard. A global survey released in 2008 found that Americans are more than twice as likely to smoke pot as Europeans. Forty-two percent of Americans had puffed at one point; percentages for citizens of various European nations were all under 20. We're also four times as likely to have done coke as Spaniards and roughly ten times more likely than the rest of Europe.

What is driving law enforcement regarding drug use. Grim's answer focuses on our ambivalence toward pleasure:

When pleasure is suspected, American drug use gets tricky, particularly when that high might do some real good, as in the case of medical marijuana.

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Employing your butt to save trees

Americans talk a good game when it comes to the environment, but most of us aren't willing to do much of anything at all. Are you willing to ride the bus, carpool, cut down on your consumption of meat, eat produce only in-season? No thanks," say most Americans. That's my personal experience, based on talking with numerous "concerned" citizens. Most people that I talk with tell me that they will make changes only when the "market" makes it worth their while. It's crazy, but that's the way it is. How about this option: Would you be willing to use one roll of recycled toilet paper per year if it would save 425,000 trees? Resoundingly, America has said "no thanks," according to Time Magazine:

[A] mainstream brand, Scott, started offering toilet paper made with 40% recycled fiber. Switching to such material could make a big difference: the NRDC estimates that if every household in the U.S. replaced just one 500-sheet roll of virgin-fiber TP a year with a roll made from 100% recycled paper, nearly 425,000 trees would be saved annually. . . Hence Greenpeace's four-year-long campaign to pressure paper companies . . . to stop cutting down virgin forests. . .

It's possible — but few Americans are doing it. Toilet paper containing 100% recycled fiber makes up less than 2% of the U.S. market, while sales of three-ply luxury brands like Cottonelle Ultra and Charmin Ultra Soft shot up 40% in 2008.

Considering that the average family uses about 20 rolls of toilet paper per month, NRDC's suggestion is not a laughing matter. Based on my conversations with lots of people, though, being responsible to the environment is truly a laughing matter for most Americans. They just don't get it, unless it affects their pocketbooks.

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Our incredibly fickle media turns all of its spotlights on Michael Jackson

Check out the home page of MSNBC tonight (click on the thumbnail below). Do you see ANYTHING about the crisis in Iran? Instead we are presented with endless drivel about Michael Jackson, who was an extremely talented entertainer many years ago. But I suppose that there is nothing interesting going on in Iran. And nothing much else going on anywhere else either, apparently. For all you can tell by looking at the MSNBC homepage, the problems in Iran have been entirely resolved. Or maybe the problem is that MSNBC doesn't have anybody on the ground in Iran, and when a tree falls in the forest where there aren't any mainstream media reporters, the tree didn't really fall at all. Even though sustained coverage of Iran is potentially a lifeline for the brave Iranian men and women who are standing up to their government, which apparently stole their national election. And BTW, had we elected John McCain and had he gotten his way to bomb Iran, would our media have tried to present an accurate viewpoint of these young heroes? Or would we have merely seen a reply of the Iraq invasion, lots of videos of bombs being dropped and missiles being launched? msnbc-no-iran MSNBC is merely doing what the rest of the commercial news sites are doing. ALL of the commercial news sites have decided that Michael Jackson is far more important than . . . well . . . everything else combined. See the thumbnails below to see the home pages of CNN and ABC. What do these news priorities say about our commercial news businesses, and what do they say about us as commercial news consumers? I'd suggest that this fickle coverage suggests that the commercial media doesn't take its job seriously. Not at all. cnn-not-much-iran abc-barely-mentions-iran Absolute insanity.

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Census issues

Here's a topic I haven't followed well enough, as became obvious to me when I saw this little gem of a video on Huffpo. I had NO IDEA that one of the reasons Those-Who-Hate-Government-But-Want-Government-to-Manage-Religion-and-Reproduction are threatening not to fill out their census forms is the fear of being placed in Internment Camps. Yep, that maven of legislative insight, Michele Bachmann, warns Glenn Beck of the dire consequences we may well repeat from the WWII era. She also laments the missing "are you here illegally?" question (because of course all undocumented workers would 'fess right up to that on an official government form).

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How and why to repeal Don’t ask, Don’t tell.

How and why should we repeal Don't ask, Don't tell? Everything you need to know is here, in this presentation by Lawrence J. Korb, Sean Duggan, and Laura Conley of the Center for American Progress. Here's the pdf. Here are some of the facts worth considering:

More than 32,500 gay and lesbian service men and women have been discharged from military service since 1980.

This policy may have cost the U.S. government up to $1.3 billion since 1980.

“No reputable or peer-reviewed study has ever shown that allowing service by openly gay personnel will compromise military effectiveness.”17

Twenty-four countries allow gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the military. None of these have reported “any determent to cohesion, readiness, recruiting, morale, retention or any other measure of effectiveness or quality,” according to the Palm Center, and “in the more than three decades since an overseas force first allowed gay men and lesbians to serve openly, no study has ever documented any detriment to cohesion, readiness, recruiting, morale, retention or any other measure of effectiveness or quality in foreign armed services.”

Even the British, whose military structure and deployment patterns are most similar to ours—and who fiercely resisted allowing gays to serve in the military—were forced to do so by the European Court

What is step ONE for ending the deplorable status quo? "Issue an Executive Order banning further dismissals on the basis of DADT and send a legislative proposal on DADT repeal to Congress." We're waiting, Mr. Obama.

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