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Canadian Liquor Stores Want You to Be Able to Buy Weed with Your Six Pack

Liquor stores in British Columbia and Ontario want to start selling weed once it becomes legal in Canada.

The two unions representing BC's public and private liquor stores announced a partnership this week—the Responsible Marijuana Retail Alliance of BC—through which they're advocating to sell recreational pot at retail locations by next Christmas.

Their logic seems to be that liquor stores already sell a controlled substance that gets people fucked up, so adding weed to their mix just makes sense.

"Just as with alcohol, there are legitimate concerns about access to marijuana by youths. Our stores are an over-19, age-controlled environment and our industry has demonstrated the strongest compliance with identification checks," said Stephanie Smith, president of the BC Government and Service Employees' Union, which represents the province's 200 public liquor stores.

It would also be cost effective. Because liquor stores already have a warehousing and retail system in place "there is no need to reinvent the wheel," she said.

Last month, Warren "Smokey" Thomas, head of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, which represents LCBO employees, said LCBO outlets would be ideal weed retailers because they already have "social responsibility" covered.

"They do age checks, they do refusals if somebody's intoxicated."

[...]

https://www.rt.com/news/324486-rt10-obama-snowden-promo/

I'm sleeping too much. If I sleep too much I get depressed, if I get depressed I sleep too much. It can be a vicious spiral.

Today I got up at 3:30 in the afternoon. I wasn't up particularly late last night.

It's not just the sleep by I find myself uninterested in the things that usually interest me. I haven't been singing because the weather has been bad. I haven't been practicing guitar because I just don't have the gumption. Really there is no excuse.

If it continues I'll go to my p-doc and ask for some Happy Pills.

It took a few decades, but they came around to accepting a tenuous reinterpretation of the Second Amendment.

Rising up to the bait, I asked why and was pointed to three legal essays (labeled by authors Burton Newman, Anthony M. Sierzega (PDF of a project for undergraduate honors), and Saul Cornell). This rant is going to discuss the basic problems I noticed right away.

All these essays argue that the Second Amendment grants a collective right rather than an individual right, and that the "individual right" was a relatively new spin peddled in recent decades by the NRA and the libertarian movement.

The first thing I noticed was that two of the three essays ignored the actual writing of the Second Amendment.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

It seems kind of a huge oversight to ignore that the Amendment grants a right to "the people" (which has always been interpreted to mean anyone living in the US, not just US citizens) and then turn around and say that the right is clearly "collective". Is the previous amendment on free speech "collective" as well? For example, Newman writes:

In 1939 the Supreme Court issued the Miller decision. The justices ruled that "the Second Amendment must be interpreted and applied with the view of its purpose of rendering effective Militia." That was the state of Second Amendment law until the 2008 Heller decision. Prior to Heller, the Supreme Court never recognized that individuals had an individual right to keep and bear arms. It was the NRA propaganda, not the law of the land, that led the cry for unlimited gun ownership and protection of gun owner rights. The NRA myths allowed the cycle of expanded gun sales and NRA power to purchase political influence. Democrats and Republican alike announced their allegiance to the Second Amendment and the public grew to believe that the NRA view of the Second Amendment was consistent with constitutional law. The NRA controlled too many elected officials to allow for protection of our citizens from gun violence, gun deaths and unspeakable gun horrors in schools and public places.

Meanwhile Cornell writes:

The Second Amendment reads: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." What do these words mean? Well, the answer to this question depends on who you ask. Supporters of the so-called collective rights interpretation believe that the Second Amendment only protects the right to bear arms within the context of well regulated militias. Supporters of the so-called "individual right" interpretation view the right to bear arms as a right vested in individuals, much like the 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech.

The fact that there are two such divergent interpretations is the result of significant changes in how Americans view the 2nd Amendment that occurred during the latter part of the twentieth century. For most of the last century, the meaning of the Second Amendment was not particularly controversial: the courts, legal scholars, politicians, and historians endorsed some version of the collective rights interpretation. As late as 1991, Chief Justice Warren Burger described the individual rights view as an intellectual fraud. Yet, the growth of a revisionist individual rights theory of the Second Amendment in the years since Burger made his comment has been nothing short of astonishing.

This view was originally propagated by gun rights activists such as Stephen Halbrook, Don Kates, and David Kopel whose research was funded by libertarian think tanks and the National Rifle Association (NRA).

It's only Sierzega's essay that observes (via discussion of a legal opinion written by current Justice Antonin Scalia) that "the people" elsewhere in the Constitution (including amendments) referred to individual rights.

Next, Scalia turns to the language of the Second Amendment, once again arguing along the same lines as the libertarian individualists. He begins his analysis by dividing the amendment into two clauses: the prefatory clause (“A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State”), and the operative clause (“the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”). Scalia believes the prefatory clause simply announces the purpose of the Amendment and does not limit the operative clause (District of Columbia v. Heller 2008, 3). He writes that while “this structure…is unique in our Constitution, other legal documents of the founding era, particularly individual-rights provisions of state constitutions, commonly included a prefatory statement of purpose” (District of Columbia v. Heller 2008, 3). For Scalia, the prefatory clause may offer clarification regarding the operative clause, but it in no way restricts its meaning. After defining several key phrases found in both clauses, Scalia offers a conclusion regarding the meaning of the structure of the amendment.

Scalia begins his analysis of the operative clause with an examination of the phrase “the right of the people.” The Bill of Rights uses the phrase three times: in the First Amendment’s Assembly-and-Petition Clause, in the Fourth Amendment’s Search-and-Seizure Clause, and in an analogous phrase in the Ninth Amendment (District of Columbia v. Heller 2008, 5). According to Scalia, each of these examples refers to the protection of an individual right, not a collective right. The use of the words “the people” by themselves is found three additional times in the Constitution, each regarding the reservation of power, not rights (District of Columbia v. Heller 2008, 6). The phrase “right of the people,” when used in its entirety, always refers to an individual right. “The people” used in these six examples has been read to describe the entire political community. Therefore, according to Scalia, the amendment does not just protect a subset of people, in this case the militia consisting of adult white males. Instead, it protects the rights of all Americans.

Seems strange to me that legal opinions would ignore an obvious interpretation of the amendment and instead go to great effort to portray the "individual right" interpretation as something novel.

There is also a remarkable glossing over of history. Once again, Sierzega is the only one to observe that the NRA's lobbying efforts started in 1934 not 1977 (when every one of the essays claims the NRA was taken over by "libertarians"). Further, he's the only one to observe that federal level gun control started in 1934 with the National Firearms Act as well with regulations presented by then President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) to restrict firearms which were commonly used by criminals of the day (such as bans on sawed off shotguns and silencers, and restrictions on machine guns). This law and similar ones of the day were, according to Sierzega, contributed to and supported by the NRA, whose leadership expressed support for the "collective right" model for the Second Amendment.

Even more surprisingly, the early NRA supported, and often helped write, many of the nation’s first federal gun control laws, including the 1934 National Firearms Act and the 1938 Gun Control Act (Rosenfield 2013). Testifying before Congress in 1938, NRA President Karl T. Frederick supported the National Firearms Act, stating that “I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons. I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses” (Rosenfield 2013).

But on the other hand, it is quite clear that the NRA supported individual ownership of firearms and use of firearms for numerous purposes, particularly, hunting, self defense, and sporting/target practice. In other words, despite their public statements, they clearly have supported individual rights such as ownership and use of firearms since their very beginning in 1871 and immediately started to lobby to protect those rights from the moment that they were threatened at the federal level.

This leads to an issue of timing which was wholly ignored by these essays and Mr. AC, namely, that the distinction between individual and collective right was completely irrelevant to federal level gun control until 1934. So the alleged "revisionism" covers a bit over four decades before 1977 rather than almost two hundred years. It's been almost as long since 1977, the year that the NRA started explicitly supporting individual rights. The fact that US Congress didn't even see fit to regulate firearms till 1934 also indicates to me substantial implicit support for individual firearm rights.

The Supreme Court ruling which decreed a "individual right" was District of Columbia v. Heller. In 1976, Washington, DC in response to one of the worst crime rates in the US, passed a gun control law that severely impaired peoples' ability to protect themselves with firearms. Aside from firearms grandfathered in from before 1976, handguns were banned and all firearms had to be stored in a way that made them much harder to prepare for self defense on sudden notice. Newman's essay glosses over this harm and I doubt, for example, that the Supreme Court of the 19th century would backed such a law no matter how they choose to interpret it. The interpretation of an individual right is natural here because the situations of self defense are naturally individual. There is no collective right to self defense. And it was quite clear that the ability to not only bear firearms, but to be able to use those firearms instantly was crucial to a variety of self defense scenarios (such as a resident reacting to a nearby burglar).

Coincidentally, this law barely predates the alleged libertarian takeover of the NRA. It'll be interesting to see how much influence it had on the NRA power shift.

The last point I want to make here is that a collective right is rather dubious legal structure on moral and practical grounds. For example, the most common use of the expressly collective right was to give some classes of people advantages over other classes of people (eg, apartheid in South Africa). And it is dubious to claim you have a collective right without a corresponding individual right. For example, how could we have a collective right to free speech, if no individual also had that right? Eg, the US public could say whatever it wanted by say, a poll, but no one individually could? That would go wrong immediately.

Similarly, what is the point of a collective right to bear arms? As a counter to US military might, it's a joke. All of the states' National Guards forces are no match for the US military assuming they were even independent enough to fight the US military (say because the US military declines to provide them with weaponry and supplies). Nor does existence of the National Guard help the average citizen becoming a better soldier in an "effective Militia" (as described by the Supreme Court in the Miller decision above). OTOH, the individual right to own and use firearms does just that. It creates a huge group of people familiar with the care and use of firearms which would be necessary to any "effective militia" and it supports the above mentioned individual right to self defense.

And of course, all the essays had to mention former Chief Justice Warren Burger's opinion (here from Newman):

In a PBS News Hour interview in 1991, former Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger referred to the NRA Second Amendment myth as "one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American people by any special interest group that I have ever seen in my lifetime."

In sum, I find these peculiar essays (which may not reflect mainstream gun control advocacy) to have contained considerable hypocrisy with a bunch of revisionists complaining about other alleged revisionists and claiming "fraud" over an obvious interpretation of the Second Amendment and obvious historical support for it. Further, actual history shows no significant gun control regulation for 140 years after the US ratified the Bill of Rights with crudely two bouts of federal level gun regulation, the first in the 1930s and the second starting in the 1970s. Currently, we have what appears to me to be a near reversal of gun control regulation to the level prior to the 1970s with what appears to be a great deal of public support both for the reversal and for the individual rights interpretation of the Second Amendment.

Nearly 20 years ago many a weekend was spent playing Duke Nukem 3D, a friend and I had a couple of computers and a null modem cable, it was great.

Spotting it on steam I couldn't resist, haven't played it since 2000.

Was it always as scary as it is? turn round a corner and there's some thing shooting you, or crawling across the floor, hatching from some egg, arghh!!!

So, Amazon ordered 9 episodes of Man in the High Castle on 2015-02-18 ... those episodes were released on 2015-11-20. That's 275 days for a season of this show to be produced, apparently, consisting of 9 episodes. 30 5/9 days per episode. That comes to 306 days for another 10 episodes. So if they announced a season 2 today, we might see another season on October 3 of next year.

Rats.

Ever wonder who the top trolls are around these parts? Yeah, me too. So I wrote up a quick script to find out. Now keep in mind our moderatorlog table only goes back so far; it gets the tail end trimmed off every so often by one of our slashd jobs. Without further ado, here are our top ten finalists, excluding Anonymous Coward and counting only Troll moderations:

1. Ethanol-fueled: 430
2. Runaway1956: 187
3. The Mighty Buzzard: 157
4. Hairyfeet: 129
5. jmorris: 114
6. frojack: 105
7. aristarchus: 98
8. zugedneb: 60
9. MichaelDavidCrawford: 59
10. VLM: 55

If you didn't make it this time, keep trying! If you want to have a gander at the whole list to see how close you got, here it is.

Union Gospel Mission served Sushi for lunch the other day. I Am Absolutely Serious. See, someone who distributes trays of sushi to grocery stores had too much of it, it would otherwise have exceeded its shelf life so they gave it to the homeless.

Two nights ago I stopped by Right 2 Dream Too, more commonly known as The Tent Camp, at 4th Avenue and Burnside in Oldtown Portland. They often have food set out for passersby to take with them. All they had was bread but what bread! What I took with me was a loaf of rye with caraway seed. There are vast quantities of bread made available to the homeless here even so much of it goes to waste.

One fellow saw me foraging for the bread and gave me two packaged sandwiches and a can of Dr. Pepper. One of the sandwiches was from Dave's Killer Bread. Dave was a felon who did fifteen years in prison until his brother took him into the family bakery business. Now 1/3 of Dave's Killer Bread's staff consists of people with criminal record; there are always fresh loaves on every table at the Portland Rescue Mission.

The problem here in Portland is not food but shelter many people sleep out in the cold, often in the driving rain. I myself have a tent and a warm sleeping bag, these because of the kindness of an old friend, also a propane campstove. Rod buys more propane when I run out.

When I had a short contract about a year ago - making good money but not for long - I bought a real wool sweater, wool thermal underwear and wool socks. I have a good coat that was given to me by my employer when I was an industrial control systems engineer.

A side effect of the startup boom, primarily mobile applications here in Portland, is that engineers are moving in from out of state, rents are skyrocketing and people are being forced out on the street. Making the problem worse is that Oregon has no-fault eviction - that is your landlord can evict you any time they please, for no reason at all. This is why I'm planning to buy a van to live in, were I to rent an apartment I would just be contributing to the problem while enriching a Portland landlord.

I have about 60-90 days left before my SSI starts. This is SSI just to start with, I expect to qualify for SSDI but there is a problem with my tax records from 2003 that I need to straighten out with the IRS. I have all the records I just haven't dealt with it yet. But with the SSI, possibly not when I first get it but if I can somehow save that money for a month or two I'll have the cash for a van.

A fellow I met on the train argued that I should buy a sailboat; he lives in one and it works well for him. A boat would cost more than a van but he argues that it is cheaper to live in. "Isn't the maintenance expensive?" "Not if you live in it, and stay on top of the maintenance," he told me.

When I get my SSDI I might buy two or three acres of unimproved land then build a house on it, also plant a vegetable garden and keep chickens. Maybe I'll keep goats as well I'm heavily into drinking milk. The SSDI is retroactive to the earlier of when one became disabled, to a maximum of twelve months. In rural oregon or washington one can buy two acres of land for $5,000.

I'm writing some code that I expect will make good money. When it does I'm not just going to blow it all on hats as I did when I was able to work regular coding jobs. I would put it into that house that I'm building, donate quite a lot to the portland rescue mission, R2D2, the Union Gospel Mission, the Salvation Army and the Blanchet House of Hospitality.

Just because something is a nonprofit that doesn't imply it's a charity - but all those are real charities.

A year or so ago, an executive from an electronics company (Apple, if I remember correctly) spoke of the lack of innovation in television sets since the 1950s, and my reaction was “He’s either stupid or thinks I am.”
        In the 1950s televisions had knobs on the set for changing channels. Remote controls were brand new, expensive, limited in capability, and used ultrasound rather than infra-red.
        The screens were vacuum tubes, and most were monochrome. Color television was brand new, and it was nearly 1960 before any stations started broadcasting in color. Rather than being rectangular, color sets were almost round; even black and white sets weren’t true rectangles.
        They had no transistors, let alone integrated circuits; the IC had yet to be invented, and transistors were only used by the military. They were a brand-new invention. TVs didn’t have the “no user-servicable parts” warning on the back. When the TV wouldn’t come on, as happened every year or three, the problem was almost always a burned out vacuum tube. One would open the back of the set and turn it on. Any tubes that weren’t lit were pulled, taken to the drug store or dime store for replacement. If that didn’t fix the problem you called an expert TV repairman.
        The signal was analog, and often or usually suffered from static in the sound, and ghosts and snow in the picture.
        There was no cable, and of course no satellite television since nothing built by humans had ever gone into space.
        However, there is one thing about television that hasn’t changed a single iota: daytime TV programming.
        In the 1950s most folks were well paid, and a single paycheck could easily pay for a family’s expenses. Most women, especially mothers, stayed home. As a result, daytime TV was filled with female-centric programming like soap operas, game shows, and the like. Usually there were cartoons in the late afternoon for the kids.
        Today the rich have managed to get wages down so low that everyone has to have a job. The demographics of daytime television have radically changed as a result. Now, rather than housewives (of which few are left, and we now have house husbands), who can watch daytime TV? Folks home from work sick, both men and women, folks in the hospital, the unemployed, and retired people.
        Yet daytime TV is still as female centered as it was when I was five. Soap operas, talk shows with female hosts and female guests discussing topics that would only appeal to women, and game shows.
        What’s wrong with the idiots running our corporations these days?