Federal Government stands down in the war against medical marijuana

By Pablo Fanque
All This Is That National Affairs Editor


In a surprise ruling today, the Justice Department said that citizens who distribute and use marijuana for medical purposes should not face federal prosecution. The directive has far-reaching political and legal ramifications.

A high government official reportedly urged the Department of Justice to draft and release these new guidelines.


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Want to get your wallet back when you lose it? Keep a baby picture in it...

A fascinating article appeared in Boing Boing in July on social research by an Edinburgh psychologist:

"Researcher Richard Wiseman and team left a load of wallets lying around with various contents, trying to see if there was a correlation between, say, baby pictures or cards indicating charitable giving and the rate at which wallets are returned. It turns out that people in Edinburgh (and maybe everyone) have a high likelihood of returning wallets with baby pictures, but are much less likely to return the wallets of charitable givers."

Read the article here.
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Democratic carbon offsets stiff at the box office

By Pablo Fanque
All This Is That National Affairs Editor

The Aspen Canary Initiative to sell carbon offset credits to Democratic National Convention can only be described as pathetically moribund and doomed from the start. The program, set up by the Dem's Host Committee raised a total of $18.34 worth of Canary Tags, offsetting .9 tons of carbon emissions, or, approximately, not enough to offset a fraction of one state's airfare to the convention let alone thousands of delegates and guests.

The offsets were aimed at DNC-goers other than the official delegates, who had a separate carbon offset program through Vermont-based Native Energy. That program, set up in January through the Democratic National Convention Committee, was utilized by 65 percent of the DNC’s 4,440 delegates, and may have actually made a difference.
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