The Broken Spectrum Of The World - Delivered

Story found at http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,459068,00.html

You’ve probably heard about it already, if not, you need to read the story. Friday morning, Black Friday, the day I never leave the house because I know there are far too many idiots out and about to risk going out amongst them, something tragic happened. At a Walmart in New York, early in the morning around 5 am, a crowd of over 2000 people waited outside the store as it prepared to open for the day.

The deals and sales inside were so great that it was worth killing a man over. I say that with a heavy tone of sarcasm and disbelief. As an employee at the store was preparing to open the doors, the crowd became nothing more then a group of savages, as they ripped the doors off their metal frames and crushed them on top of the employee. The metal was crumpled like an accordian. These “people” trampled the man to death, no one stopped to help him, they continuously ran over him and other employees that tried to help the man. When the walmart employees tried to get all of the people to leave after they dicsovered that the man was seriously injured, people were upset that they couldn’t go shopping and some ignored the store’s employees and continued to shop, nevermind that they had just killed someone in their rush to go shopping.

I haven’t seen the video yet, thats the downside of having dial-up internet, I can’t watch any videos. However people I have talked to that have seen the video have said that a large man was the first through the door and seemed to intentionally knock the man to the ground and trample him. While I can’t say much about it since I have yet to see the video, I am already 100% positive that any person that was involved in the death of this man should be charged with murder.

We live in a civilized society and this sort of thing should NEVER happen and I’m sure I’m not the only person that is disgusted by the actions of these people. People are selfish and indifferent, and that leads to incidents like this one. I hope the majority of us have enough sense and morals to never act in such a manner. I would have stopped to help the man and I would have been outraged with the crowd of people, would you?

I’m down to 1 exam before I’m done with this semester. So far I’ve netted high A’s in every class, couldn’t have done much better then that. I’m pretty happy about it, I just hope the momentum carries into next semester.

After tomorrow I am officially on vacation until January 13th. Which gives me a lot more time to dedicate towards writing more articles and buffing up on my guitar skills on the new guitar I recently got for my birthday. I’m looking forward to it all.

Here over the past 2 months, readers have really picked up and I’m happy to see that, I’ve even seen a little discussion. So I wanted to get some input from everyone. What topics would you like to see discussed more? I’m always happy to write, and its all the better when I have people wanting to hear certain topics.

Also I have started to add more links to the menu. I will be slowly adding links to news sites to make it easier to get your news each day.

Originally reported from http://media.www.dailynebraskan.com/media/storage/paper857/news/2008/10/28/Features/Legalizing.Weed.May.Benefit.Society.Economy-3509454.shtml?refsource=collegeheadlines

Marijuana is a mind altering drug, and not unlike its wet counterpart alcohol, it has the ability to unite or divide those discussing its place in American society.

According to federal surveys, more than 70 million Americans over the age of 18 have smoked marijuana. Its effects are described as an altered perception that causes feelings of well-being, relaxation and reduced stress. It has also been attributed to an increased appreciation of humor, food and music.

Its low toxicity is responsible for the well-known fact that marijuana has never directly caused a death. It was even reported by the Washington Post in 2006 that marijuana smoking, even in extreme cases, does not lead to lung cancer, while cigarettes cause 440,000 deaths a year.

So why is marijuana illegal in the first place? In a 2002 Zogby International poll, American’s ranked marijuana as far less dangerous than alcohol and cigarettes, yet those things can be bought by a legal patron at most gas stations.

Marijuana’s illegality is a matter of business history. In 1937, the marijuana tax was passed with help from anti-hemp newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst. The ferocious and corrupt Hearst had significant financial interest in the timber industry, and when it was found that hemp - cannabis grown for non-drug use - could be made into a stronger paper, he fought for a ban on cannabis plants completely by printing frivolous newspaper stories warning of marijuana’s dangers. The bill passed, due in large part to his financial support and, as they say, the rest is history.

In 2003, when the National Office of Drug Control Policy reported the government was spending $29 billion annually to prosecute and incarcerate marijuana users, the negative public response to the report sparked the largest interest in the pro-weed cause ever. In 2006, a Time/CNN poll stated 72 percent of Americans supported marijuana decriminalization, which reduces marijuana-use penalties to fines alone. Decriminalization has been implemented in 13 states, including Nebraska, and could reach 20 by 2010.

Could this increased interest in decriminalization ultimately lead to legal weed? It’s hard to say, but as the decriminalization movement gains steam, so does the legalization movement. With a modern legalization policy, the government could monitor who was buying this drug and at what age, just as they have done with alcohol and tobacco for years. Not only would it keep drug dealers from selling weed to kids, it would send a dagger into the stomach of the black market drug industry.

In 2006, marijuana was named America’s most valuable cash crop, with an estimated production value exceeding $35 billion annually, which exceeds corn and wheat production combined. By making marijuana a legal commodity, the government could keep drug dealers from banking off the drug’s mass appeal.

So what would happen if marijuana was legal? During the prohibition of the 1920s, people who wanted to drink continued to do so. The same can be said of marijuana prohibition. If weed were legalized, stoners would still get high, and non-users would still have the right to choose if marijuana was right for them or not.

In 2005, Harvard professor and economist Jeffrey Alan Miron issued a report that stated that marijuana should be legal and the crop should face taxes much like those seen with tobacco or alcohol. If realized, he predicted the United States would earn an estimated $6.2 billion annually. This extra tax revenue could be a real economic boom.

The ultimate gains the United States could see from legalized weed are far-reaching, but it’s a hard case to sell to those opposed to it. Many people have the stigma that weed ruins lives, when it can be said alcohol has ruined millions of more lives, yet it’s still legal. It also can be said that more than 3 million violent crimes are committed by drunken people every year and alcohol causes a rise in domestic and sexual abuse in American families.

Can the same be said of weed? If somebody’s husband or father smoked a joint before returning home for the night, would he want to beat his wife, high as a kite? The effects of marijuana have been said to block anger - especially physical anger.

Maybe if marijuana were legal, our murder and domestic abuse rates would drop, or our economy wouldn’t be in trouble. Maybe our jails wouldn’t be full of people whose lives are ruined because they got caught with weed and more people would take time to sit back and realize that the good things in our world outweigh the bad.

Maybe everything would be different.

matthavelka@dailynebraskan.com

Sin Taxes ought to be illegal, and more then likely they probably are. I can’t argue one way or the other there though because I’m not sure about the that particular issue, but that isn’t really the point of this article.

Here over the past couple of years, many states have raised the sin tax on alcoholic and tobacco products reasoning that they would be doing everyone a favor by reducing sales of these products and bring more money into local and state coffers. They have succeeded in doing both, they have slightly decreased the sale of these products and have greatly expanded their tax revenues. I just have to question the fact that these two things made us all better off.

Seems to me that taxes are always on the rise and rarely decreasing, so this hasn’t done anything to help us there except allow government to spend more and more. Sales have decreased, but not by much, and I can’t really see how this has made us a better society. I know the original intent to raise the sin tax on tobacco products was to get people to quit using them, however is that really the job of the government, to police our private lives? They couldn’t make tobacco illegal because it wouldn’t be popular and they wouldn’t get all those juicy taxes they are accustomed to, so their solution was to just raise the taxes on something they deemed to be evil.

I’ll keep it short. Times are tough these days, yet all the government seems to care about is getting more and more of our money, which for the most part, is wasted. Seems to me more like taxation without representation.

Where has it gone? When did it go exactly? If you know the answer to these two questions, please, feel free to share, because I don’t know. Now don’t get me wrong, there are still some objective reporters out there, just very few of them. I won’t got off on a tangent throwing names around, but every major news outlet is guilty of taking sides instead of looking at issues in an objective manner.

Personally, I watch Fox News, and for those nay sayers that never have anything good to say about Fox News, don’t speak too quickly unless you plan to throw CNN, MSNBC, and all the others in there too, as they’re all guilty as well. Fox News runs some bias through sometimes, however the others do it on an even more consistent basis. I’ve been turned off to a lot of it all as a result. I find I’m watching less news these days for the fact that everyone is either regurgitating the same thing, or spouting off their opinion about something instead of actually reporting the pros and cons of each issue.

However I will step up and take one swing at the big leagues, and while I know he’ll probably never read this or anything else I have to say, it doesn’t change the truth of the matter in the least bit and I’m sure I’ll have some people that are in agreement with me on this one.

I was watching the O’Reilly Factor last night, I had set the channel to change when House came on, but for some reason it never changed, so I ended up watching part of his show while I was playing the new guitar I got the other day. Generally, Bill says a lot of stuff that makes a lot of sense, and he’s right on some issues, however there is generally always some segment of his show that I don’t agree with, whether it be the issue itself, or the way he presents the issue.

A segment of his show last night was what would the rest of the country be like if we had San Francisco’s morals and values. First of all, why is this even a segment? I’m sure there are a lot more important things going on in the world that he could cover besides what San Francisco may be like. I have to say, he has never had much love for California, mostly because he believes that they have poor morals and also because it is a largely Democrat state. It’s no secret he doesn’t like most Democrats.

The entire segment features a reporter interviewing different people on the streets, however it only covers a handful of things. Most of the segment was about people being able to openly smoke marijuana and then trying to directly relate that to homeless people “hippies” traveling in groups and staying in parks and pretty much being a problem, though that problem is never actually stated. The segment also seems to try and link smoking marijuana with crime problems in the city and the fact that certain places aren’t safe to go at night and how New York is a much safer city. There was also a comment about the reporting watching a drug deal go down outside of city hall, but most of me says BS on that. It seems to me though, that if there were police actually patrolling these problem areas, they would be a lot safer, and that it has very little to do with marijuana, which he seems to try and demonize the entire time. He also goes on to show pictures of cross dressers, hookers, and pornography shops. There was also footage of bad parts of town as well.

After watching the segment, not factoring anything in, yeah the city seems pretty horrible and you would be led to be in agreement with him. However if you are so weak minded that you readily accept what he tries to spoonfeed people on a regular basis, you easily miss that most big cities are not very different from San Francisco and that we only saw the bad parts of the city and none of the good parts. Instead of attacking the problems and providing solutions, the entire segment seemed like a smear campaign against the city and marijuana, and to a lesser extent, gay people. It seems like several people on Fox News have a problem with gay marriage as well and it seems to me that they have been very partial to the new law that was recently voted on and passed and have been against the gay rights protesters.

There will come a point when big media gets so sloppy that they start clearing the path for smaller contenders to come in and do the job better unless they start to shape up.

Two of my previously written articles that relate to this thread that may be of interest are Gay Marriage and Taking A Controversial Stance