mrclay.rg

No Imagination Means No Change

“I don’t mind adopting a policy that seems strange to you if the result of it is going to make society improved…” – William F. Buckley Jr. re: drug legalization When drug policy reformers say “legalization”, it strikes fear into persons who have only experienced and imagined society under the effects of modern drug prohibitions.

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‘Phlox’ Menace Could Abet Future Enemies

The latest example of law enforcement solutions to reducing drug use. Police raided the home of a couple in the hunt for a drug factory because a [moss phlox] plant in their garden smelled like cannabis. … the couple, both in their late 70s, returned home to find that the drugs squad had battered down

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Take his word, our drug policies are working.

Today’s Wall Street Journal features two opinion pieces, one by our commander of the War on Drugs, John Walters, and the other by one of the war’s most respected critics, Ethan Nadelmann, founder of the Drug Policy Alliance.

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Commodity cars a challenge worth pursuing

Mr. Obama and members of Congress, Rather than supplying any current auto manufacturers with a bailout, which I think will only delay the inevitable, please consider investing (and encouraging private investment) in efforts to standardize the components of a new generation of automobiles. With free and open standards, such as those used to build the

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The Auto Bubble and the Apple car

In the U.S., dealership lots and ad papers swell with recent model used cars in great condition. Sometimes near-working vehicles are abandoned. People around us choose to buy new cars they can’t really afford every day, or at least they were.

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Mankind is still capable of monstrocity

If you’ve fooled yourself that this is not true, you need only to check yesterday’s New York Times to sober up. In cultures where women still have little value, for at least a dozen years some men have thrown acid on the faces of women, and are rarely punished. In a recent case, girls with

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Change I’d invest in

In the pursuit of drug law reform an acquaintance told me, “Having logic on your side is nice, but money and grassroots organization is better.”

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More Drug War Victims Pile Up

Our War on Drugs has turned Mexico into a real war zone. Five more dead in Tijuana; 685 in one city in the last year; young men in rival cartels are gunned down, tortured, mutilated, beheaded, found in mass graves. Those who can afford to have left town, while the rest of the city lives

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Inaction is not action

Many people have well thought out reasons for not voting in presidential elections (some still vote only in local elections or for/against ballot initiatives). This blog post compiles several given by libertarians. Here are my responses to the general themes I see: Voting, even for a hopeless candidate that aligns most closely with my beliefs,

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When your campaign needs a plumber

They’ve got to be pretty desperate to put these people out there. Joe Wurzelbacher twice agreed with a questioner who said that “a vote for Obama is a vote for the death to Israel.” Afterwards McCain’s campaign backed him up: “Joe has offered some penetrating and clear analysis that cuts to the core of many

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Bring on Skate 2

Before EA skate was on the horizon I started a post about how the THPS series was no longer cutting it, but I never got around to posting it. While they’ve obviously done something right, THPS has never been about realism and I think there are plenty of players (probably mostly skaters) who’re looking for

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Satchel’s Pizza before and after

A real Gainesville treasure just a few blocks from our house. Last weekend we were there with Kathleen’s mom and my parents. March 2003 2008

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Learning from the Free Market

When government regulation is completely removed from the picture, business thrives, and one industry has a particularly impressive success story. Its products are produced where costs are low and sold elsewhere with monumental margins. In fact these extraordinary profits help this industry overcome enormous hurdles of distribution; not even incredibly powerful organizations with endless supplies

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Where’s the code?

Google’s free open source project hosting has been awesome for Minify, so when I was looking around for Subversion hosting for my personal code, I figured why not host it there? So here’s a bunch of my PHP and Javascript code. Hopefully some of it will be useful to people. A few PHP highlights: HashUtils

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A faulty argument for policing morality

Recently the Gainesville PD conducted a prostitution sting that busted a particularly vile couple who solicited sex in front of the woman’s six year old son. In addition to the prostitution charge, the woman was rightfully charged with child abuse. I heard about this on the radio, and the report included a quote, I’m guessing

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Right thinking on Healthcare

I see this as the bravest statement made in the 2nd Obama-McCain debate: I think [healthcare] should be a right for every American. In a country as wealthy as ours, for us to have people who are going bankrupt because they can’t pay their medical bills—for my mother to die of cancer at the age

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Getting phpQuery running under XAMPP for Windows

While trying to run the initial test scripts included with phpQuery 0.9.4 RC1, I got the following warning: Warning: domdocument::domdocument() expects at least 1 parameter, 0 given in C:\xampp\htdocs\phpQuery-0.9.4-rc1\phpQuery\phpQuery.php on line 280 This is strange because DOMDocument’s constructor has only optional arguments. As it turns out, XAMPP for Windows ships PHP with the old PHP4

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Joining in on the commentary

I think we’re very lucky that both presidential candidates have the potential to bring more intelligence to the position, and that the excitement seems to be getting more of us paying attention to what our elected officials are doing for (and against) us. I’ve certainly never been more interested in a presidential race, and access

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RecordSet to CSV in VBScript

While I’m in a temporary hell maintaining some VBScript, I thought I’d should share this. RecordSet’s GetString method is inadequate for properly quoting CSV, so I had to write this.

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Minify 2.1 on mrclay.org

A new release of Minify is finally out, and among several new features is the “min” application that makes 2.1 a snap to integrate into most sites. This post walks through the installation of Minify 2.1 on this site.

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