Stilgherrian » drugs

Links for 27 April 2008

del.icio.us — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 10:44:07 +0000

I’ve decided to have another go at publishing the links I find online. So, thanks to del.icio.us and some mild semi-automation, here’s today’s batch.

The Newseum: The interactive museum of news, including "today's front pages" for 500+ world newspapers.
TV Fugly Awards: An "alternative" to Australia's Logie awards for TV.
Eurovision Song Contest - Belgrade 2008: Official website of the Eurovision Song Contest.
The Bugle | Times Online: Weekly news satire audio podcast from the UK.
The Paranoid Style in American Politics: Richard Hofstadter's article from Harper's Magazine, November 1964. Paranoia Politics isn't new.
Twitter Rulez! (via Todd Langowski) | Newick: An apt sign spotted in workplace.
Plugger: Australian Business News: A customisable aggregator for Australian business news.
Secondary DNS Service: An inexpensive service which provides secondary domain name servers.
The seriously inconvenient truth on drugs | the Daily Mail: UK Daily Mail columnist Andrew Alexander puts a cogent case for the decriminalisation of recreational drugs.
A second summer of love: 20th anniversary of acid house: The Guardian's retrospective on the acid house Summer of Love of 1988.
The Australian Open Source Industry & Community Report 2008: A 20-page report on the state of the open source software world in Australia. A freely downloadable PDF and is redistributable under a Creative Commons BY-ND license.

5 Random Semi-Related Posts

Not David Hicks, but Wayne Carey

Stilgherrian — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 06:06:08 +0000

No, contrary to yesterday’s rumour Andrew Denton’s first guest for 2008 won’t be long-term GITMO resident David Hicks but instead noted feminist, temperance campaigner and pacifist footballer Wayne Carey.

5 Random Semi-Related Posts

The New 7 Deadly Sins

Stilgherrian — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 09:58:22 +0000

One of the Pope’s groupies came up with a new version of the 7 deadly sins. I haven’t bothered chasing this story ‘cos it seems like such a wank, but there’s some interesting commentary from friend and colleague Zern Liew and Murdochland blogger Tim Dunlop [waves].

5 Random Semi-Related Posts

Australia 2020: The Disillusionment

Stilgherrian — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:15:37 +0000

When Chairman Rudd announced the Australia 2020 Summit the euphoria kicked in like a clean hit of a fresh new political drug. After 11 drab years of John Winston Howard, Change! Big, bright colourful change with sparkly bits and the sound of a thousand sitars! But now the euphoria’s wearing off. We’re coming down — and the Main Event is still a month away.

Kevin still looks pretty cheerful, though, doesn’t he. Why is that?

Look back through everything I’ve written so far and you can see the moodswing. “Chairman Rudd’s got a clever strategy going,” my first post began. Another post was headlined Australia, let the Enlightenment begin!, quoting Maxine “Toadslayer” McKew and agreeing that the nation was ready to start a new conversation about its destiny. At the end of February I even nominated myself.

Given Rudd’s claim that his government would be open and transparent, and develop policies based on evidence, it all sounded pretty good.

As days go by, however, it’s become increasingly clear that the potential of the event will be stifled by the political “need” to placate the same old whinging lobby groups, the same old middle-class middle-aged white men in dark suits (just flick through the Steering Committee) and, it seems, the “need” to pre-load the agenda with specific topics to… well, let’s explore that.

There’s two brilliant critiques of the process so far. Please, read them in full before continuing — though I’ll give you a summary here if you’re in a hurry.

The ABC’s Media Watch ran a story this week, I’m having a Summit and you’re invited, which highlighted Rudd’s technique of openly inviting specific high-profile journalists and getting key media outlets to nominate “ordinary Australians” — ensuring they’d be supportive.

In the past couple of weeks, the Prime Minister’s Office has invited twenty media organisations — they’ve sent us a list — to select a reader, listener or viewer and to pay for them to go to Canberra.

That’s not including News Ltd’s big kahuna, John Hartigan, who of course is chairing one of the summit sessions.

It’s not surprising that News Ltd papers have eagerly joined the search for summiteers.

Like Sydney’s Daily Telegraph…

“You can help shape our future”
— Daily Telegraph, You can help shape our future, 3rd March, 2008

Australia’s 1000 “best and brightest” is gradually diluted.

Meanwhile, the Centre for Policy Development’s article Beyond the 2020 Summit asks us to imagine what we actually do after this magic weekend.

You would think that the Government’s stated objectives for the Summit would be a good place to start. Here we scrutinise just two: harnessing the best ideas across the nation and producing options for consideration by Government.

Objective: To harness the best ideas across the nation.

This might be difficult to measure and doing so will be a very long-term exercise. For those who missed out on their opportunity to present their ideas at all, it is probably a sore point. Candidates had to write 100 words to justify their inclusion and many with wonderful ideas would not have considered themselves worthy of consideration. From amongst those bold enough to apply, can we be certain that the Steering Committee did not filter out potentially radical ideas in their participant selection process? No matter how open-minded the selectors, it is certain that the Summit was a select group rather than a genuine opportunity to generate the best ideas Australians could offer.

Objective: To produce options for consideration by the Government.

This is hardly a firm commitment to do anything in particular with the ideas. As well, there was a promise that a public response would be produced by the end of 2008. The decision-making process is hardly transparent; it is not clear who will decide which ideas are capable of being shaped into concrete policy responses. This objective, unfortunately, will most likely lead to contributors at the Summit passively awaiting the Government’s response. Moreover they will be unaware of how the output of the Summit will be processed. Of course they are the ‘lucky’ ones. Those who never made it, especially those who will potentially be affected by policy responses emanating from the Summit, will feel even more obsolete.

The authors rather wish that the Summit’s objectives had instead been modelled on some principles on best practice in community engagement that are expressed in The Brisbane Declaration 2005, endorsed by over 2000 attendees from 44 countries of the International Conference for Engaging Communities, a conference hosted by the Queensland Government and the United Nations.

The CPD proposes what some people may think a radical solution for the follow-up. Instead of bureaucrats analysing the options behind closed doors, you choose 100 random citizens for each policy area and have them evaluate the ideas.

The randomly-selected citizens are presented with ideas from the Summit and able to obtain clarification from the authors. Rather than just private submissions lodged through the Summit website, all Australians are encouraged to participate in e-panels (electronic issues-based forums) that simultaneously discuss the ideas. The randomly-selected citizens have access to all these views as well, including new ideas or concerns that emerge.

This is remarkably similar to an idea first floated by futurist Alvin Toffler in his 1970s book The Third Wave: if you truly want parliament to represent the people, you could just choose a representative sample of the people. Randomly. It’s one of many fascinating ideas he runs through.

It’s also remarkably similar to Mark Pesce’s proposal, How to listen to 21 million voices.

Hey, I think they might be onto something here. Open, transparent policy development!

Gosh.

Now I’ve already written how I don’t think “representation” should be the model for selecting participants, but this seems a great way of involving everybody.

So, Dear Chairman Rudd and well-suited Steering Committee members (and Cate Blanchett), you have a choice.

Treat the Australia 2020 Summit as a political exercise to create the perception of a new long-term vision for Australia and pat yourselves and a smiling PM on the back.
Actually harness the potential of new ideas. Use some of the best resources of our nation — our minds, our wonderful, varied multicultural and multi-experienced minds, all of them! — to process and filter and come up with something really new. You could even use the Summit to showcase the kind of open, transparent, evidence-based government you’ve been talking about.

So far, alas, it looks like you’re choosing the same old cynical, corrupt Option 1.

Binge drinking is guaranteed a spot on the agenda, apparently. Important perhaps, yes, but I’d have thought the topic panels would decide their own agenda — you know, fresh ideas from the panellists to think “outside the box”.

How many other topics have already been loaded this way?

Well, we don’t know, because there’s been no news from the summit secretariat in a fortnight! You think there’d be something to say, even if it was just to confirm officially how many nominations you’d received, how far you are through the selection process, when we’ll know who’s selected, whether you’ve chosen the tenderer to run the event yet, when the timetable for the summit will be announced — that sort of thing.

We can accept that this is all being made up as we go along. After all the world is made up as we go along. In the 21st Century, though, some of us are used to seeing that “background chatter” as things get done. It helps reassure us that things actually are getting done — and done honestly — even though it might not be fully polished and glistening in the sun yet.

Wow, there’s transparency for you.

5 Random Semi-Related Posts

Quote of the Day, 6 February 2008

Stilgherrian — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 19:15:47 +0000

Headline of the Decade, perhaps? “Police: Crack Found in Man’s Buttocks”. Who’d have thought. “Hagerstown, Md. (AP) — Police searching a downtown home found a man hiding 15 plastic bags of crack cocaine in his buttocks.” Hat-tip to Angus Wheaton.

5 Random Semi-Related Posts

Quote of the Day, 29 January 2008

Stilgherrian — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 08:51:24 +0000

Overheard in a pub on King Street, Newtown earlier today: “I’m not afraid of mental institutions any more. It’s a free holiday. Free food, free cigarettes — free DRUGS!”

5 Random Semi-Related Posts

Heath Ledger dead: jokes here please

Stilgherrian — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 22:58:55 +0000

Yes, Australian actor Heath Ledger is dead, possibly from a drug overdose. So now it’s time to collect all the jokes, ‘cos he can’t sue you for libel. Please add them in the comments.

Tasteless? Yes. Exploitative? Probably. Too soon for this? Yeah probably that too.

So why do it?

It’s an experiment…

More than a year after the event, a collection of jokes about Steve Irwin’s death is still one of the most heavily-visited pages on this website. More than half of the searches bringing people here are for Corey Worthington Delaney.

Tasteless is what you want, so tasteless is what you’ll get.

We’ll even throw in the phrases “heath ledger porn” and “heath ledger naked” to help things along. Index that, Google!

The comments will be moderated, but not heavily. They may take a while to show up because — oddly enough! — there are other things to do.

[Update: Scroll down to find the comments thingy. Try to spell properly. And if you're going to whinge that "It's too soon to make jokes," then at least suggest how long someone has to be dead before they're not sacred any more. And try to spell properly.]

[Update 27 January 2008: The two rules about relevance are now being enforced. Comments will not be published if (1) they repeat jokes which have already been posted, unless they're substantial improvements, or (2) they're just some anti-gay comment that doesn't have any relevance.]

5 Random Semi-Related Posts

Post 801: Kill the Hallucinating Goldfish

Stilgherrian — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 05:16:34 +0000

This is blog post number 801. It’s time for something special. Time for an extended essay encapsulating several trains of thought which I’ve been following for some time.

We are the 801,
We are the central shaft
And thus throughout two years
We’ve crossed the ocean in our little craft (Row! Row! Row!)
Now we’re on the telephone,
Making final arrangements (Ding! Ding!)
We are the 801, we are the central shaft

So sang Brian Eno in the song The True Wheel from his 1974 album Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy).

Eno says he wrote the lyrics while visiting New York:

I went to stay with this girl called Randi and fell asleep after taking some mescaline and had this dream where this group of girls were singing to this group of sailors who had just come into port. And they were singing ‘We are The 801 / We are the Central Shaft’ — and I woke up absolutely jubilant because this was the first bit of lyric I’d written in this new style.

Yes, apparently in the 1970s a musician wrote a song while under the influence of hallucinogens. Who’d have thought.

Society generally frowns upon people who make important decisions while under the influence. (By an odd coincidence, Hugh MacLeod posted some vaguely-related thoughts only yesterday, in dying young is overrated, revisited.) However the more I look, the more I worry that we’re governed as if our societies were hallucinating. And even worse, it’s as if they’ve forgotten how to remember the lessons of the past.

I’m worried that we’re governed by Hallucinating Goldfish.

I reckon our societies aren’t just hallucinating. They’re suffering paranoid schizophrenia.

Instead of acting upon real data collected from the real world, we construct paranoid fantasies and then respond to those.

Our tabloid media report every threat, adding every scary adjective they can find, to convince us the world is a threatening place. Our politicians often like this, because frightened people will suspend rational thought and Demand That Something Be Done. Apparently politicians have even been known to help this process along by creating new threats for us to be afraid of.

The Howard government’s NetAlert campaign over-emphasised the potential risk to children online.

The claim in the NetAlert advertising campaign that over half of 11–15 year olds who chat online are contacted by strangers does not appear in the government commissioned research.

In fact, only 14% of the research participants said their mix of chat partners included people they hadn’t met. Even before NetAlert, three-quarters of parents had already discussed online dangers with their kids.
Massive energies are spent in the War on Terror (an abstract noun!) even though, as I’ve pointed out before, you’re far more likely to drown in your own bathtub.
Headlines constantly scream about Wild teen crime waves, even though children are safer than ever before.
Dr Mohamed Haneef.
Adam Curtis’ powerful documentary The Power of Nightmares explains how a vision of a secret, organized evil that threatens the world has been used by American Neo-Conservatives and Islamic Radical movements alike. The entire film is freely downloadable from the Internet Archive.

Our continual state of hallucinatory paranoia is made worse by a lack of long-term memory. Societies try things, and sometimes they don’t work — but that doesn’t seem to stop us trying them again.

Investors pour millions into Web 2.0 businesses they don’t really understand, even though the lessons of the first dot-com bubble were obvious.
The War on (Some) Drugs continues operating in a prohibition mentality, even though that’s been shown to fail so many times before. I can thoroughly recommend Richard Davenport-Hines’ book The Pursuit of Oblivion: a social history of drugs for gaining an understanding, and this BBC interview might be worth a listen.
When we designed mainframe computers, we learned that security was something that needed to be part of the original design, not grafted on as a “feature” afterwards. Then we connected PCs to the Internet, with fundamentally insecure operating systems like Windows and the original MacOS, and were surprised when they got hacked. We’ve started connecting “smart phones” to the grid, with fundamentally insecure operating systems, and we’re surprised when mobile phone viruses appear. And now we’re about to connect TVs to the Internet too.

Yes, I’m worried that we’re governed by Hallucinating Goldfish.

So what can we do about it?

Well, I’m a big fan of Science. All that Age of Enlightenment stuff. Reason. Logic. Joined-up thinking. We should demand it of our leaders (political, cultural, religious), employers, employees and ourselves.

It’s heartening to see that Chairman Rudd is all for evidence-based policy development.

I’m a Labor moderniser. Always have been, always will be and what that’s on about is good evidence-based policy in terms of producing the best outcomes for this nation, carving out its future in a pretty uncertain century where things fundamentally are changing.

It’ll be interesting to see how PM Rudd handles situations where the evidence runs counter to Labor’s political imperative — particularly when compromise is needed to get legislation through the still-hostile Senate.

There’s a lot we can do as individuals to help kill the Hallucinating Goldfish.

Learn how to see though the tricks. I J Good’s paper A Classification of Fallacious Arguments and Interpretations provides a formal list of dodgy tricks, but Wikipedia’s articles on fallacy and propaganda techniques provide a great start. The classic book How To Lie with Statistics and the newer How to Lie with Maps are also great reads.
Turn off the crap. Rid your life of the tabloid media, including shock-horror newspapers and TV programs.
Demand to see the evidence. If someone claims some fact or statistic, don’t take it at face value. Use The Power of the Internet to check it out.
Spread the word. If you spot misinformation or faulty reasoning, tell your friends, family and colleagues. Make your coffee-break conversation more useful than whinging about the boss or prattling on about lame TV programs.

This all reads like a manifesto, I know, and perhaps it is. Reason and logic are supposedly what makes us humans so special. And yet when it comes to managing our greatest creations, our own societies, we discard those skills and give in to the Hallucinating Goldfish.

It’s time to Kill the Hallucinating Goldfish.

5 Random Semi-Related Posts

Don’t poke me, take up drugs instead

Stilgherrian — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 19:56:32 +0000

Spotted on Facebook: “Eric TF Bat reckons all these people with their biting and requests and poking have too much time on their hands and should take up drugs or something.” Agreed.

5 Random Semi-Related Posts

Toy of the Year’s “Magic Beads” are… magic beads!

Stilgherrian — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 08:35:07 +0000

The Hong Kong-manufactured craft toy Bindeez, named as Australia’s Toy of the Year, is being withdrawn because its “magic beads” turn into the drug GHB (”fantasy”) when you ingest them.

Sydney-based poisons specialist Dr Naren Gunja said the list of Bindeez’s ingredients supplied by the manufacturer said it should contain the non-toxic chemical known as 1,5-pentanediol.

“What we’ve found in the beads from testing done … by our hospital scientists is that it contains 1,4-butanediol,” Dr Gunja said, adding that this chemical was metabolised by the body into GHB.

“Magic beads” indeed. Get ‘em while they last.

5 Random Semi-Related Posts

Dom Knight on Joey’s E bust

Stilgherrian — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 00:04:20 +0000

Dom Knight of The Chaser has written an interesting column about retired rugby player Andrew Johns’ arrest for ecstasy possession. Nice to see someone using some rationality.

5 Random Semi-Related Posts

“Billionaire denies building secret sex lair”

Stilgherrian — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 23:12:14 +0000

Yep, that’s got to be the headline of the day, and I don’t understand why the Snarky Platypus didn’t find it first.

America’s 160th richest person, a billionaire who made his money from the 1990s hi-tech boom, has been accused of planning to build a “secret and convenient lair” underneath his California mansion dedicated to drug-taking and sex with prostitutes…

Kenji Kato worked for Mr [Henry] Nicholas as an assistant for seven years and alleges the tycoon ordered him to provide balloons filled with the laughing gas nitrous oxide for guests at parties held by the businessman. Guests’ drinks would be spiked with powdered ecstasy pills, he alleges.

Well, there goes my plan to write a couple of serious essays today… Thanks to Marc Andreessen for the tip.

5 Random Semi-Related Posts

Incarcerex for rapid relief

Stilgherrian — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 06:43:29 +0000

I just stumbled across this cute little video satirizing the War on (Some) Drugs. This Incarcerex stuff seems like just the ticket. I particularly like the fast-talking side effects warning towards the end.

Thanks to information aesthetics for the pointer.

5 Random Semi-Related Posts

Stabbed, kept masturbating

Stilgherrian — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 09:06:57 +0000

A stab victim kept on masturbating, even though knifed twice in the shoulder. The Brisbane man, Daniel Peter Blair, took amphetamines and… well… read the story for yourself! (Hat tip to the Snarky Platypus.)

5 Random Semi-Related Posts

Surprise! Prohibition leads to crime!

Stilgherrian — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 08:13:46 +0000

Gosh, who’d have thought? Ban tobacco in a jail, where almost everyone smokes the stuff, and suddenly black market cigarettes are US$125 a pack. Jailhouse cooks make more from smuggling than cooking.

Chuck Alexander, executive vice president of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, says: “It didn’t do anything but make (tobacco) a lucrative business.”

Thanks to the clever lads at Freakonomics for the pointer — and some fascinating follow-up comments from their readers.