My Suburban Destiny

Went to boss’s house for Thanksgiving, had a great time. Make carrot and parsnip pot pie, took two days. Went to a potluck, which originally was going to be a singles event, but only guys showed up. Oh, well, if only people followed through on their RSVPs.

I’m still sick, so I’m still taking pseudoephedrine . Maybe I need ephedrine, instead of fake-ephedrine. The pseudoephedrine continues to mess with my mind, so I’m feeling, wide awake, dazed, and sluggish. And by the end of the day, the little red pills make you mouth dry as sandpaper.

I was hoping I could work some on my two big personal projects, the movie club website or my novel. Unfortunately, no progress on either. I really need to get cracking on the movie club website, since November and December are going to be quiet months for social events and there should be a rebound in January. One would think that January would be a good time to launch a movie club.

Study shows more people abuse legal opium derived drugs than illegal opium derived drugs. If the goal is fewer abusers, than we should keep illegal drugs illegal.

Roles agreed upon in advance. Players describe character before starting game. Qualities not listed in advance can’t be added during the game. All qualities implied costume are immediately granted.

Final state. The final state is the condition under which a character wins, or the campaign is over. Players choose in advance if they want a character vs character or character vs world.

No game master. Any character can say that something happened in the world and unless another character says that didn’t happen, it happened. (This rule need to be modified for large groups)

Resolution of game actions. All character actions automatically succeeds, however, characters must challenge the character with 1 to 3 objections. Objections can be either character resistance or the player imaging resistance from the environment. Character actions can be challenged if they are out of character. If players argue, they have to switch to another resolution device. Paper-scissors-rock is the default resolution for opposed feats (that is, where one player is attempting a feat, the other character wishes or thinks that the feat to fail, it isn’t obvious what the outcome should be based on the characters qualities)

Game dialog vs in character dialog. Game dialog is for dealing with game mechanics and should follow formula, in character dialog is

Game progress. Not sure yet, although it seems that a multi session campaign would be a good element.

Game accounting. LARP should have almost no accounting.

Game Flow. Players take turns. Each turn players

A recent comment on my blog indicates people are not really reading my posts and think I am in favor of legalizing drugs.

I read a few articles on the ‘Anti-War on Drug’ meme and a common theme is that there is a lack of proportion between the damage a drug does and the legal response to it. For example, marijuana has some limited use in treating pain. It doesn’t impare driving. Regardless to that, the legal response should be great enough to get people to stop using it after society has decided to get people to stop using it. If anything, the legal response against drugs is too mild, in most cases. Look at Afganistan. The only way they got the drug problem under control over there was to cut off peoples hands. Look what the US backed government has accomplished. Opium growing and use is rampant again. The idea that a criminal pays triple damages is well established, for example in financial crimes, criminals pay triple damages. In drug law, criminals should pay 1000 times their damage to society, it is the only thing that will get their attention.

The war on drugs is a lot of issues. Each drug really should have it’s own policy, since they cause different problems and fall in different places on the spectrum of victimless to victim crimes.

Tobacco. Nonsmokers are the victims–worst of all are the quality of life issues- I can’t stand people smoking around me, second is the damage done to the housing stock, and finally the extra money I have to spend cleaning cloths that stink like cigarettes every time I go to a night club. Some smoker out there is currently ruining the carpet in my future apartment. Smoking is still widespread and generally legal. People smoke less the hard to you make it to buy and them more expensive you make it. Tobacco is still mostly in the formal economy. While it is pleasant to know that smokers are slowing killing themselves, it is not fast enough. The government should require every 1000′th cigarette to have cyanide in it.

Alcohol. Alcohol is a problem when someone drinks enough that they can’t drive.

Marijuana. Marijuana has the same problems as tobacco. If Marijuana was legalized, then not only would my cloths stink like tobacco everytime I went to a night club, they’d also stink like Marijuana. Impaling Marijuana users on a pike is not good enough.

Cocaine and other euphorics. Cocaine destroys your ability to feel happy without using euphorics, permanently. It is a defective product and should be kept off the market. If libertarians were taking defective aspirin that destroyed their ability to feel happiness, permanently, then they might be unhappy with the result. They might even regret that they had ruined their brain’s ability to enjoy anything. Euphoric abusers tend to be unreliable folk who keep quiting their jobs and relationships to seek out some happiness because they can’t get it from working or having friends. Why libertarians want an ever increasing number of these zombies on the street, I don’t know.

Hallucinogens. We’ve got limited resources, so lesser damaging drugs like LSD probably should get some other sort of policy, but I’m not sure what.

So, just because I got to get back to work, here are some policies, first for the stick and then the carrots:

1) Penalties with teeth. Like maybe letting drug dealers be ripped to pieces by dogs on national TV.

2) Declare war on Mexico and Columbia and maybe Canada. F*ck Iraq, lets send the Marines to Mexico, Belize and Columbia. While the Canadians generally have been allies in the past, transshipping drugs isn’t exactly what allies are supposed to do.

3) Increase taxes on tobacco.

4) Set a maximum amount of booze that any one person can buy.

5) Disabuse ourselves of a rosy world where people could freely choose to use marijuana, alcohol, tobacco, cocaine, heroine and meth without out any costs to those around them.

Carrots.

And we need to do more to address the social needs of drug abusers in the first place–policies to address unemployment, persistent poverty, low levels of education, etc.

I’ve had a cold most of the weekend. I saw the movie Reddick, which I think everyone should see. It is a better story and better graphics than most Star Wars films. Wikipedia recaps the whole story in elaborate detail. Never read a Wikipedia entry on a movie before watching the move–Wikipedia entries tend to be all spoliers, but good for filling in any details that might not have make sense the first time around.

As for the cold, I’ve been using Pseudoephedrine. It works. Interestingly not everyone takes pseudoephedrine and feels like they drank a cup of coffee. I must be special.

Buying Pseudoephedrine is a bit harder than it used to be. It requires showing my drivers license, seeing a real pharmacist, not just a clerk and signing my name to it. It would be hard to casually shoplift it and it would be really hard to buy industrial quantities without the pharmacist calling the cops on you. The manufacture of meth, will move out of Mom and Pop shops to Mexican drug manufacturers, which is fine with me. Each constraint you put on the production of a product makes it more expensive and the quantity that the market consumes. You can’t tell me that drugs is a special case where making it operate outside the formal economy increases the quantity produced. By the same logic, forcing car companies, software companies, and pickle makers to work outside of the formal economy would lead to everyone having twice as many cars, operating systems with fewer bugs and extra jars of pickles on every shelf. Making illegal drugs illegal, that is forcing them into the informal economy reduced the quantity and quality of labor and capital avaiable to that industry and must create shortages of the illegal good. Shortages mean high prices, lower demand and lower total consumption.

The prohibition failed because it was a large established industry with near universal consumption. The prohibition failed to create the institutional changes to make people think that alcohol was really all that illegal. It would be like trying to make bread illegal, in the sense that no one would take the law very seriously.

On the otherhand, as of today, most people believe that the long list of euphorics, stimulants and depresants that are illegal, should be illegal and would not tollerate drug dealing or usage in the employee break room or in an apartement they rented, just because they thought the law on drugs was a farce. Hence, the war on drugs is effective in a way that the prohibition is not. Now the details of law enforment operations is another issue. I would not be surprised if there is petty corruption, waste and inefficiency in the prosecution and detection of drug crimes.

Anyhow, time to take a break from my pseudoephedrine powered blogging and go try to get some sleep, if these little red pills will let me.

First they came for the Meth makers, and I did not speak out–
because I was not a Meth makers;
Then they came for the pedophiles, and I did not speak out–
because I was not a pedophile;
Then they came for the rapists, (oh, I mean forced sex enthusiasts) and I did not speak out–
because I was not a rapist;
Then they came for the alcoholics, and I did not speak out–
because I was not a alcoholic;
Then they came for the smokers, and I did not speak out–
because I was not a smoker;
They still haven’t come for me–
and if you ask, me I don’t mind if the meth makers, pedophiles, rapists, alcoholics and people who smoke in night clubs are taken away. In fact, we should deliver these people to the door steps of people who want the above types to be free to indulge such excesses in the name of libertarianism and let the libertarians enjoy these people enjoying their freedom, just so long as it is in a libertarians planet and not mine.

I don’t feel that the Democrats were defeated. This republican shill of a journalist Adam Nagourney seems to have been trying very hard to snach defeat from the jaws of victory for the Democrats. If anything, this shows media’s conservative bias.

This election, I do not regret that the Democrats results–we lost no seats, we gained the House and we are still in spiting distance of controling the Senate. I only regret I didn’t have more hours to volunteer for grassroots activism.

The Republicans have spent all of their political capital, they have none left. It is a good thing that they have lost. And it is time for Adam Nagourney to write a new, more honest article, “For Republicans, Even a Crushing Defeat is not Enough to Make them See Sense”

Tonight, I tried to go to a new book club. This one was promoted on Craigslist, organized by a Yahoo groups mailing list and generally seems to be a tough club to participate in. Last month one new attendee ended up going to the wrong Subway (bad address). This month, I tried to go to a movie/book discussion hosted at a private house and couldn’t get past security. The host didn’t provide a phone number, locked the door, didn’t answer it when I knocked, didn’t provide a door bell and didn’t even so much as have the windows open so they could see if a guest had arrived but lacked the brute force to pound on the door loud enough to be heard over the movie. Another potential attendee on the mailing list hours before the event started still seemed to think the event was at Subway and decided not to go because they couldn’t tell if anyone was going to attend at all.

Given that joining a book club means giving about 6 hours a week every month in addition to 2 hours a month attending and discussing the book in addtion to 1/2 to 2 hours a month finding the book and potential some money paying for the book and probably 1-2 hours a month preparing a potluck and 24 hours preparing for your turn to host–you’d think that organizers would try to make things a bit easier rather than harder to participate.

So far, this week I’ve:

Gone to the Washington NaNoWriMo kick off, talked with some random people. I’m looking forward to the write ins, although the forums are about the worst way to organize in person meetups possible.

I went to a meetup.com Book club held at Barnes and Nobles. The format was interesting. For example, the book club was held at a book store, after discussing the book, everyone left the table and tracked down copies of potential books, everyone passed them around and then voted on next months book. There was rule that no hardcover books would be considered. On the down side, the group had 12+ people, but as I sat and watched the discussion, only about 5 spoke much, and about 4 never said a word. This ratio seems like an important metric for measuring the success of a group.

This weekend, I’ve got an Arlingtonians for a Clean Environment stream clean up event I want to go to. If I’m reading my mailing lists correctly, a UU group will also be participating.

About every year or so, stuff happens and think it is time to reconsider everything. Usually, after all is said and done I don’t actually do much different, but sometimes it leads to some minor changes in how I putter around.

I’ve tried socializing at singles events, I’ve given up on that and tried just socializing at regular events (making especial effort not to try to find a girlfriend–its important to sometimes go to an event without having to focus trying to find someone special). And I’ve been having mixed success.

Going to all events, all the time–is a good idea. Just getting out of the house can help prevent depression, even if it is a trip to a spectator event, or a social event where I don’t actually connect with anyone.