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Bill Moyers treats us to LBJ’s telephone recordings, highlighting some of the similarities between today and the days before our escalation in Vietnam. I wish we could hear the conversations of all our presidents like this. Moyer’s concludes with this:
Now in a different world, at a different time, and with a different president, we face [...]

Greenwald makes a pretty convincing case that Bush/Obama’s “justice system” for accused terrorists is merely for display purposes only.
If you’re accused of being a Terrorist, there’s not one set procedure used to determine your guilt; instead, the Government has a roving bazaar of various processes which it, in its sole discretion, picks for you based [...]

Update Nov. 15: My letter to the editor in Monday’s Alligator.
Recently I wrote about the potential e-cigarettes hold for harm reduction, so when the University of Florida proposed a regulation that would expand its tobacco use ban to explicitly include e-cigarettes, I decided to speak up. Today I sent the following e-mail to Paula Fussell, [...]

During Jon Stewart’s interview with Al Gore, Stewart half-jokingly proposes one solution to the problem of oil interests slowing the move towards cleaner energies:
Stewart: Partner up with Exxon and say, “You own the oil and gas now; you can own the new thing.”
I have to admit, granting the oil companies monopolies on the replacement technologies [...]

Today almost no credible evidence suggests that cannabis belongs on Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, alongside drugs like heroin. This position has stifled medical research of the drug and its component chemicals for 39 years, making research extremely expensive and arbitrarily difficult to secure compared to that of much more harmful drugs.
A few [...]

I first learned about e-cigarettes from Reason’s coverage of the FDA’s rush to ban them, and of the rightful criticism of that intent from the American Association of Public Health Physicians. Without smoke (e-cigs are miniature vaporizers), nicotine use is likely to be many magnitudes less harmful to the body.
The hope is that e-cig use [...]

Due to web images being optimized for on-screen display (let’s say 96 DPI), images on printed pages are usually blurry, but they don’t have to be:

Start with a high-resolution image. E.g. 2000 x 1000.
Save a version with dimensions that fit well in your printed layout when placed in an IMG element. E.g. 300 x 150.
In [...]