"Patriotism is the delusion that one of these gangs of bandits is better than all the others." - Robert Anton Wilson
"This is what happens when you legalize drugs. You wind up with (a) super fun innovations like "magic" grilled cheese sandwich trucks, but far more important (b) safer, saner, regularized products. I'd much rather have the CEO of a legit company make the call on how much THC should be in my PB&J than leave it up to some gal with a little bit of culinary inspiration who bought her weed from some guy in a bar. And now—in Colorado and Washington, at least—you can."
"Many of the advocates can't imagine anyone functioning in 21st-century America without valid proof of identity. So they are skeptical that requiring it could possibly be an obstacle to voting. They also tend to believe that anyone who lacks something so basic deserves no accommodation. These attitudes reflect a failure to understand the lives of many Americans...
One of them was Ruthelle Frank, a former member of the village board of Brokaw. She has never had a driver's license or state ID, and her 1927 birth certificate has a misspelling. To get it fixed, she would have to undertake a legal process that could cost $200. Another was Mariannis Ginorio, a young Milwaukee woman. She had no driver's license, and Wisconsin doesn't accept birth certificates from her native Puerto Rico issued before 2010. Sam Bulmer, a homeless Air Force veteran, could offer only a federal Veterans Identification Card—which is not on the list of IDs recognized by the state. Statewide, the court concluded, 300,000 eligible voters don't have the documents needed for voting.
In the normal course of life, people like this don't need them. Fifteen percent of white adults in Wisconsin, and half of blacks and Hispanics, don't drive. Passport holders are a minority of the population. A lot of people don't need a photo ID to board a plane because they don't fly."
"According to our friends at Lacrosse Playground, the Duke women’s lacrosse team was recently stuck in Chicago’s Midway Airport for a brutal 8 hour layover. They killed the time in the most badass way possible, though, doing a fantastic lip-synch of ‘Fancy’ by Iggy Azalea. Nice work, ladies."
"Could your town's mayor spark a police investigation into your activities that ends with town cops rifling through your mobile phone, your laptop, and the full contents of your Gmail account—all over an alleged misdemeanor based on something you wrote on social media? Not in America, you say? But you'd be wrong. Here, based on e-mail records provided by the city of Peoria to Ars Technica, is what that sort of investigation looks like...
The entire farcical situation concluded without charges; Peoria County State's Attorney Jerry Brady declined to prosecute anyone over the Twitter account, saying that "false personation" applied only to personal interactions, not to Internet speech...
The case serves as a reminder of the true power of the state... The warrant sought not just connection details, but all content in the account, including "any image file, document files, text files, and other stored files." Police had broad latitude to search through anything they found. Between an e-mail account, a mobile phone, and a laptop computer, police can gain an almost complete window into someone's life. Do we want them to have this much power simply to crack down on misdemeanors?
The state doesn't always exercise this tremendous power under rigorous oversight, either. Though the apparatus of oversight was in place, the judges who signed off on the warrants never pushed back on them, even though the warrants misstated the day on which Ardis learned about @peoriamayor and even though one of them said that the offense in question was a "violation of child pornography laws" rather than the actual claim of "false personation.""
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