I seem to have woken up in the wrong universe.
Here’s Pat Robertson on the 700 Club coming out for marijuana legalization. And making sense.
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Rand Paul and Secret Societies
October 22, 2010 By 30 Comments
Apparently this ad has really rattled Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul, and he berated his opponent for it and refused to shake hands after a debate.
I have no idea about the truth or falsity of the accusations. If they’re true, they strike me a standard secret society antics. Irreligion is usually part of the package. Although kidnapping is extreme, “aqua Buddha” is just another slang term for a bong.
This particular group is called the NoZe Brotherhood. I suspect that if we could get access to the famous “Skull and Bones Society” in which George W. Bush was a member, we’d find similar things.
With O’Donnell’s “witchcraft” and Paul’s “aqua Buddha,” this has turned into a weird election year in the States.
America's Greatest Poisoner
May 13, 2010 By 49 Comments
by VorJack
My wife picked up Deborah Blum’s The Poisoner’s Handbook recently. I started reading over her shoulder a bit – you know, just to know what my coffee was going to taste like. It’s largely the story of Charles Norris, the first real coroner and toxicologist working for New York city in the twenties, so naturally it deals with Prohibition.
We’ve talked about Prohibition before, and I’d known that people did all sorts of crazy and deadly things to get drunk. What I wasn’t fully aware of was just how crazy and deadly the US Government made it.
Stealing a Drink
Pullquote: My opinion, based on actual experience of the medical examiner’s staff and myself, is that there is actually no Prohibition. All the people who drank before Prohibition are drinking now – provided they are still alive.
Even during Prohibition, a huge amount of alcohol was being manufactured. However, most of this is classified as “industrial alcohol,” or ethanol used for commercial or industrial purposes. This is the stuff in cleaning products and beauty supplies as well as the stuff used in chemical factories. By law, this alcohol has to be “denatured,” which means some addition chemical has been added to make it taste ghastly or even make it mildly toxic.
There were two problems with this. The first was that organized crime – and even disorganized criminals – seemed to be able to steal this stuff in tremendous quantities at will. The other problem was that “denatured” alcohol could be “renatured,” particularly since criminal organizations could afford to hire top-notch chemists to do the job.
There’s a career path for you science majors that your guidance counselor never told you about: mafia chemist.
So while there were a number of different ways to denature alcohol, most were quickly defeated. It must have been like the 20s equivalent of cracking copy protection. But one very simple method remained difficult to remedy: the addition of methyl alcohol. Problem was, the stuff was deceptively poisonous.
Pick Your Poison
Pullquote: [A speakeasy patron was] “in the same category as the man who walks into a drug store, buys a bottle of carbolic acid with a label on it marked ‘poisonous,’ and drinks the contents
So the Government had a problem. Sixty million gallons of industrial alcohol was being stolen every year, and presumably most of it was being consumed. Their attempts to make it unpotable were all failing, except for one that made it toxic. So, the Government doubled down: they made the stuff even more toxic. They added other nasty chemicals, but mainly they upped the amount of methyl alcohol.
Methyl alcohol (AKA wood alcohol) is ethyl alcohol’s (AKA grain alcohol) meaner, uglier cousin. It’s much more toxic: a quarter cup of pure methyl alcohol is enough to kill most adults. They share some of the same effects when drunk, including the initial buzz and the later hang over. However, with wood alcohol the buzz is shorter and the hang over worse.
Maybe the worst aspect is the fact that methyl alcohol takes longer for the body to get rid of. Left on it’s own in the body, it naturally breaks down into two toxic chemicals: formaldehyde and formic acid. So a person could drink methyl alcohol, survive the immediate problems, yet still get very ill hours later as the resulting chemicals damaged the organs. For example, it’s the formic acid which attacks the sensitive tissues in the eyes, causing the characteristic blindness that wood alcohol is famous for.
Dying for a Drink
Pullquote: The government knows it is not stopping drinking by putting poison in alcohol. It knows what the bootleggers are doing with it and yet it continues its poisoning processes, heedless of the fact that people determined to drink are daily absorbing that poison.
And here’s the WTF moment – they did this, expecting it to stop people from drinking, even though people were already drinking methyl alcohol by itself. Mixed with water, it forms a cloudy drink that was dubbed “smoke.” A few people were dying every day in the poorer parts of New York from drinking “smoke.”
So what, if anything, this would accomplish isn’t clear to me. What it did do was kill lots of people. Blum reports that over 700 people in NYC died from poison booze the year after the new formulas were introduced.
Many politician fought against the poisoning, but more fought to continue it. It was, after all, the drinker’s choice to buy the illegal alcohol. And so it continued, until the end of prohibition. Deborah Blum calls the US Government the biggest mass-poisoner in the 1920s.
I Needed A Job, And Xenu Was Hiring
June 22, 2009 By 47 Comments
by Shéa Bennett
I recently had a job interview for an IT position with the Church of Scientology.
Let me explain. I wasn’t aware of my potential employer going in. The company in the advertisement was Narconon, who bill themselves as “the world’s most successful drug rehab,” and apparently have been in the business of narcotic rehabilitation since 1966.
I know, I know – some of you are screaming, “What!? How could you not have known that Narconon was a Scientology front?” Well, I didn’t. I have no real excuse – I simply did not know. You probably don’t know, for example, that there are four different models of the IG-88 assassin droid in the Star Wars universe.
Oh, you did? Ah.
I should have done more research. I did some research, but I didn’t look up Narconon on Wikipedia. My mistake — it won’t happen again.
The Interview
I live in East Sussex, which is on the South East coast of England, and my interview with Narconon was on Wednesday morning at one of their main drug rehabilitation centres. The building, a Tudor mansion that is well over one hundred years old, is quite simply magnificent.
I’d arrived a little early and took a moment to sit on a bench outside, soaking up the majesty of the surroundings. Very impressive indeed; must have cost a fortune.
Moments later, somebody came out to see me, and introduced himself. It was Bob, the chap I’d spoken to on the telephone when arranging my interview. We entered the building via the reception – the inside was as pretty as the out – and Bob handed me an application form.
I was taken to another room, and there I met Adam, who was also applying for the position. Bob explained that even though Adam had arrived first we would be interviewing together. The importance of this unity – that Adam and I needed to stay together – was reinforced upon me on several occasions thereafter, to the point where, looking back, I have to wonder if Adam was actually a genuine applicant, or somebody they had used to watch over me. But that’s crazy, paranoid thinking. Right?
I finished the application form and returned it to Bob. Adam followed. Now back in the reception area, I was admiring the beautiful fireplace when I noticed a large, fairly old-fashioned looking book on the mantle. The author’s name grabbed my immediate attention.
L. Ron Hubbard
The book was still shrink-wrapped – it was available for purchase. It’s not unusual to find an association between religion and rehab programs, but this still caught me a off-guard. My mind drifted back to the application, and a section therein that asked if I represented a newspaper or had the intention of writing a story about the facility. I had assumed this was a legal procedure to protect the guests, and I’d ticked the box marked “no.” Hindsight is, of course, 20-20.
Bob then led Adam and myself into a private room, and said we needed to watch a video that explained the history of Narconon. Fine; this was not the first time I’d had to sit through introductory materials for a new job. What Bob neglected to mention, however, was that the video was essentially an introduction to Scientology. Sure, it was mostly about Narconon, but L. Ron Hubbard and/or Scientology were typically given a very specific (and often congratulatory) mention at the beginning of every new scene.
Introductions
The video traced the history of Narconon through founder William “Willy” Benitez, a former inmate at Arizona State Prison who, in 1988, started a program for recovering addicts after reading Hubbard’s 1966 work, The Fundamentals of Thought. Hubbard would then go on to sponsor the incorporation of Narconon as an organization, and it wasn’t long before new programs were opening all around the world.
Numerous “celebrities” made appearances on the tape at various points, but it wasn’t until Kirstie Alley showed up that I was finally presented with a name I actually recognized. Indeed, the producers of the show obviously realized this, too, as she then appeared again. And again. And again. Before we had a moment with Kelly Preston. And then more Kirstie Alley.
Alley, it turns out, is a national spokesperson for Narconon, and thanks to her Scientology training has now achieved the level of “OT VII,” or “Operating Thetan Level 7.” Impressive stuff. Incidentally, Alley is the only cast member of Cheers never to appear on Frasier, allegedly because of that show’s positive portrayal of psychiatry, the practice of which Scientology is decidedly opposed.
As for the program itself, the gist of it involves the use of vitamins and minerals alongside exercise and lots of time in the sauna, to cleanse the body of toxins. Patients are then rehabilitated using the principles of Scientology.
The video lasted for 30 minutes. I was quiet throughout, but Adam kept saying odd things, like, “Wow, they’re really doing well for themselves,” and, “They’ve mentioned everywhere but here!” when the show had failed to say anything about the St Leonards building in which we were seated. He seemed quite interested in the information, and this odd behaviour on his part prevented me from making any obnoxious jokes. Quite clearly he either didn’t know who or what Scientology represented, or he didn’t care. Or both.
His attitude fascinated me. The situation was becoming increasingly surreal; with my mounting paranoia, I’d begun to check the room for hidden cameras. I was torn between my curiosity to see where this was going, and the blossoming worry that any time now somebody was going to start injecting me with chemicals until I declared allegiance to The Leader. Whatever happened, assuming I got out alive, and with my mental faculties otherwise intact, I was sure of one thing: I would have a half-decent story to tell.
As soon as the video finished, Adam was out of his chair, off to tell Bob. He returned to the room a few moments later, alone, and proceeded to switch off the DVD player and the television, a decision on his part I thought more than a little presumptuous.
Bob arrived, and asked us what we thought of the presentation. “Hmmm,” I said, nodding. “Hmmm?” asked Bob. “Hmmm,” I replied. He didn’t press the matter any further.
Personality Testing
Pullquote: By now I’d accepted that Adam was going to kill me.
We were then informed that we needed to take a personality test. Two hundred questions, all of which needed to be answered in one of the familiar three ways: definitely yes; unsure; and definitely no. The instructions made it clear that, where possible, we should always strive for a yes or no answer.
What made me laugh is how so many of these “personality” questions were deliberately leading. They’d be like, “Do you sometimes wish you could advocate all responsibility to a greater power?” or “Do you often feel the world is a dreamy place?”
Several times the test asked if my muscles twitched during certain events, like when I’m in a situation that might turn hostile – I mean, they do, but I put “no” to be safe, in case it led to injections – and of course like all personality tests there were lots of the same question delivered repeatedly in different ways, and I made sure I answered each of these in the opposite manner to which I had before.
This took about half an hour. I finished before Adam, and took my answers out to Bob. He had a quick look-over, seemed pleased, and then announced that we now had to take an IQ test. This was timed over 30 minutes, and meant another 80 questions. The paper proudly stated it was an “Oxford IQ Test” on the front sheet, but many of the questions were, once again, more than a little leading. Between the standard fare about which shape comes next and the usual mathematical queries were some strange word pairing problems, and one question – and I swear this is true – actually asked you a brainteaser about the letters that make up the word “lobotomized.”
Still, eighty questions is eighty questions, and part of me likes to do well in these things, no matter who I’m representing – if the Devil himself gave me a quiz I’d want to get an A – and I finished with literally seconds to spare. Adam didn’t finish, and Bob had to come and make him stop. Neither seemed enormously bothered by this fact. By now I’d accepted that Adam was going to kill me.
The Truth Laid Bare
Back at reception, we were told we’d need to speak with Dawn, the boss, before we left. She duly arrived, happened to pick up my file first, and led me into another room. This was the first time I’d been separated from Adam or Bob. It’s worth noting that nobody apart from the narrator on the video had mentioned Scientology up to this point, but Dawn didn’t hold back, immediately launching into her pitch. The teachings of L. Ron Hubbard, I was told, were pivotal to both the Narconon foundation, and the occupants of the building.
She then asked me what I knew about Scientology. Unlike Adam, I knew a fair bit, but I’m inclined to be polite to those who are polite to me, and responded to her questions with courtesy. I told her I was essentially an atheist at heart, to which she nodded approvingly, which confused me a little. Did she believe that one already with religion is a harder convert than one without? Perhaps this is true.
When she asked me what I could do for the program, I told her that I had some ideas regarding using social media to build a “loyal following.” These perhaps weren’t the best choice of words, but I didn’t offer them with humour or malice – I was being sincere. I’d checked out Narconon USA’s Twitter account and found it decidedly lacking. Of course, I’d done all this on the assumption that Narconon was just a drug rehabilitation centre.
Oddly, Dawn told me she had never heard of Twitter, but that the organization stayed away from social media because, quote, “there is so much bullshit out there.” All of this explained how such an obviously popular search query as “drug rehab” yielded so little traffic for Narconon; evidently, most of the visitors did a little more research than I did, and never went back again. And probably warned their friends.
I still didn’t know an awful lot about my duties or anything about the package that came with the position, so I asked Dawn about the remuneration involved. I was shocked to hear that Narconon were expecting a 48-hour week, over six days, and were paying exactly the national minimum wage of £5.73 per hour. Nothing more. No perks; no extras. That was it. “We all work for minimum wage,” she told me, which was almost certainly not true. Still, somebody was picking up the tab for the building, and every penny counts. Tom Cruise’s money has to go somewhere – why waste money on the staff?
Still, this irked me, and even though I attempted to maintain a civil tone, clearly I’d let something slip as she started to wrap up the interview, adding that she’d keep my details “on file” if I was interested. I said that I was – in the back of my mind, Bob was waiting outside the door with his needles, and from here on there were only wrong answers. Of course, even if they are crazy enough to offer the job to me, there is no way I’m going to accept.
The Other Side of Narconon
Narconon now has a presence virtually everywhere in the world. Its program and methods have caused considerable controversy, and despite Narconon’s claims of a success rate of over 70%, one Swedish study found that the organization’s numbers were closer to 6.6%. Each independent Narconon centre pays 10% of its gross to Narconon International, an institution that is part of the Association for Better Living and Education (ABLE), a promoter of Scientology. Narconon International has been accused of everything from website plagiarism to lawsuits involving wrongful death, and their targeting of children through the UK school system has particularly come under fire.
The Church of Scientology has a lot of money. Patients at a Narconon centre in the USA stay for 3-4 months at a cost of up to $30,000, typically paid for by quickly-disillusioned parents. You think they’d know better. You think they’d have a little more savvy when it comes to making believers out of ordinary folk.
So, 48 hours each and every week to help in the publication of propaganda for a religious cult? No thanks. I mean, for fifty, maybe sixty thousand a year, I’ll “believe” whatever you want me to, up to a point. I may not ever openly acknowledge the existence of Xenu – you know, like most Scientologists – but I could maybe look the other way when he’s doing his rounds. Somebody has to do the website – might as well be me. For a hundred grand, I might even do a little door-to-door. You know, on the QT.
But, I’m sorry – I have some scruples, and it takes a lot more than minimum wage, a lovely old building and, yes, some happy shiny people, to make me a convert.
While the events in this article are reported accurately, the names have been changed to protect the guilty.
12 Bad Effects of Prohibition You Should Know
March 11, 2009 By 148 Comments
Should drinking alcohol be illegal? Even asking that question today seems absurd, but only 75 years ago it was illegal to drink alcohol in the United States.
I’m talking about Prohibition, of course, which lasted from 1920 to 1933. It was a massive social experiment that failed and is a lesson for us as we think about other victimless crimes like drugs, gambling, and prostitution.
According to Peter McWilliams in his excellent Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do, there were twelve bad effects of Prohibition:
1. Prohibition created disrespect for the law.
Pullquote: Prohibition goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation and makes crimes out of things that are not crimes.
If everyone breaks the law, it is disrespected. Practically everyone broke the law of Prohibition — making everyone criminals. If the law prohibited moderate consumption of something as pleasurable and harmless as alcohol, what else did it prohibit that was good?
Prohibition encouraged people to see the law as whimsical and unimportant, instead of something good and protecting. It did nothing to encourage the respect and obedience the law deserves.
2. Prohibition eroded respect for religion.
Evangelicals were the main force behind Prohibition. They saw alcohol as the “devil’s drink,” hating it so much they explained away their holy book’s favorable references to it (and still do today).
They preached God demanded total abstinence from alcohol. Much like today with homosexuality, conservatives thought drinking was responsible for many of society’s ills. If it could be made illegal, then God would bless America.
But instead of ushering in paradise, Prohibition increased alcohol consumption and immorality, created organized crime and caused massive political corruption. As they so often are, evangelicals were wrong. They made false promises and did far more harm than good. This jaded many people towards religion.
Of course, to many of us, eroding respect for religion was one of the few positive effects of Prohibition…
3. Prohibition created organized crime.
“Prohibition made the gangster not just well paid, but well liked,” McWilliams said. It took significant organization to bootleg the quantities of alcohol people desired. The result was organized crime, which didn’t differentiate between petty crimes like transporting liquor and real crimes like violence, murder, and theft.
Similarly, organized crime continues today because of the prohibition on gambling, prostitution, and drugs. Where there is demand, there will be supply.
4. Prohibition permanently corrupted law enforcement, the court system, and politics.
Organized crime was huge, and it had a lot of money and influence. Policeman and politicians were bribed and blackmailed:
If mobsters couldn’t buy or successfully threaten someone in a powerful position, they either “wiped them out” or, following more democratic principles, ran a candidate against the incumbent in the next election. They put money behind their candidate, stuffed the ballot box, or leaked some scandal about the incumbent just before the election (or all three). The important thing was winning, and more often than not, someone beholden to organized crime rose to the position of power.
It created a new class of candidates that were open to the highest bidder. Many court cases required payoffs to get a “fair” hearing. In other words, corruption abounded and the people began distrusting the government.
5. Prohibition overburdened police, courts, and the penal system.
You can’t throw everyone in jail — yet with Prohibition, even a small percentage of offenders couldn’t be locked away without overburdening the system. In 1923, for instance, the US District Attorneys spent 44% of their time on Prohibition cases. This takes time away from the real purpose of police and courts: to protect people and their possessions, not enforce a religious sect’s morality.
6. Prohibition harmed people financially, emotionally, and morally.
Hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs because of Prohibition. People in the alcohol business had two options: to find lower-paying work or become criminals (that is, staying in their profession). Because of the rhetoric evangelicals were spouting, it was also hard to find a decent job coming from the “devil’s work.” This encouraged people to break the law just to support their families.
7. Prohibition caused physical harm.
Pullquote: Marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.
Because alcohol was illegal, its purity was not regulated. While fruit, vegetable, and grain alcohol is usually safe, alcohol made from wood is not — but it is difficult to tell the difference until too late. Over 10,000 people died during Prohibition from drinking wood alcohol. Others who were not killed went permanently blind or had severe organ damage.
The same happens today with illegal drugs — most overdoses are accidental, a result from not knowing the purity or strength of the drug.
And who knows how many people died because of organized crime, or due to corrupt or overburdened police. When the police spend much of their time arresting and investigating crimes that cause no harm to others, the crimes that do cause harm increase and real criminals are more likely to go free.
8. Prohibition changed the drinking habits of our country — for the worse.
Pullquote: Prohibition is better than no liquor at all.
Instead of going out to drink, people began drinking mostly at home. When they did go out to drink, it was often to get drunk — you couldn’t been seen with a bottle, so it was best to finish it. Hard liquor became popular because it was more concentrated and thus cheaper to smuggle. To make hard liquor more palatable, cocktails were created.
Ironically, Prohibition also increased the amount people drank. Drinking has never again returned to pre-Prohibition levels.
9. Prohibition made cigarette smoking a national habit.
Cigarettes were also prohibited in many states, which seemed to make them irresistible. By 1930, cigarettes were legal everywhere and consumption nearly tripled. Smoking became fashionable and a sign of rebellion. It was also far more harmful and addictive than alcohol.
10. Prohibition prevented the treatment of drinking problems.
It’s a lot harder to say you have a problem when it could land you in jail. Legally, you were either sober or a criminal — both occasional drinkers and drunks were lumped into the same category. You couldn’t go to your pastor or counselor for help — you might end up in jail.
11. Prohibition caused “immorality.”
Evangelicals were expecting a New Jerusalem of Sobriety, but what they got was an explosion of immorality. Men and women began drinking together — they were partners in crime, and they became partners in bed. Unmarried sexual activity increased and the decade became known as the “roaring 20′s.”
12. Prohibition was phenomenally expensive.
Some estimate the total cost was about a billion dollars in a time when a Ford factory worker made $5 a day. The government also lost a significant amount of tax revenue because alcohol sales went underground. This made the price of alcohol artificially inflated, and people spent a lot for a little liquor.
* * *
Prohibition was a massively failed attempt at legislating morality. The government’s role is to protect citizens and their property — not legislate what people are allowed to do for recreation, who they can love, or what kind of sex they can have.
We spend billions of dollars a year on “the war on drugs” and have only defeat to show for it. Meanwhile, the police and courts are tied up with people whose only crime was enjoying or selling a recreational drug. They were hurting no one, except possibly themselves. And what business of the government’s is that?
[digg=http://digg.com/political_opinion/12_Bad_Effects_of_Prohibition_You_Should_Know]“It is time we realized,” said Sam Harris, that “crimes without victims are like debts without creditors.” As we think about the role of government in victimless “crimes” like gambling, prostitution, drugs, pre-martial sex, and homosexual marriage, let us remember the failure of Prohibition.
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