May 2011 – Page 3

A Million Medical Marijuana Patients

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We don’t know his or her name, but somewhere in one of sixteen states and the District of Columbia is America’s 1,000,000th legal medical marijuana patient. We estimate the United States reached the million-patients mark sometime between the beginning of the year to when Arizona began issuing patient registry identification cards online in April 2011.

Between one to one-and-a-half million people are legally authorized by their state to use marijuana in the United States, according to data compiled by NORML from state medical marijuana registries and patient estimates. Assuming usage of one-half to one gram of cannabis medicine per day per patient and an average retail price of $320 per ounce, these legal consumers represent a $2.3 to $6.2 billion dollar market annually.

Rallying Against The Regime

Joshua Landis calls a letter he received from an American in Syria "the best piece of writing on Syria since the uprising began." A snippet from the sprawling piece:

It’s interesting that identity runs not only along religious, ethnic, and tribal lines, but also along geographical lines, in that the people of Dera’a—not only the city, but the entire muhafiza—are viewing themselves as a unit, separate from those who comprise the leadership of Syria. “I can say that 90% of people in the entire muhafiza are against the government,” Adham says. Rather than viewing the uprising as one of sectarian character, he explains that “my brother’s family in the city of Dera’a has Christian neighbors. There are many Christians in the city of Dera’a and in other villages who have joined in the protests.”

Bruni’s Baby Bump

Not Frank's, Carla's. A reader writes:

I actually have been breathlessly waiting for you to put a side-by-side picture of Carla Bruni-Sarkozy "hiding" her pregnancy and Palin just a few weeks before delivery showing nothing. Bruni is probably on the lowest end of skinny for a woman, given how tall she is and that she is a model. And yet, just a few months in you can very very visibly see that you cannot hide that bump no matter how skinny you are, no matter how old you are (she like Palin at the time is 43/44), how active you are, how fit you are, and how many children you've had.

I am one who has been extremely skeptical of the whole she faked it thing, but after seeing Bruni trying to hide it and not being able to, I have to say, it raises tons of questions.

You can see how even someone as skinny as Bruni, while not looking very wide in the hips, looks very big from the side – no scarf can hide that. Figured you would be saying something since this is the most famous hidden pregnancy I have ever seen!

Another writes:

As Palingates pointed out, she's a former model and has, naturally, very "tight abs". Out of curiosity I went looking for more of the photos and here she is at the speaking engagement for her illiteracy foundation. If you can click on the gallery, it's most obvious in photos 1, 3 and 6.

(Photo: French First Lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, who is pregnant, greets a guest outside Le Ciro's Restaurant while waiting for the spouses of heads of state before lunch on the second day of the G8 Summit on May 27, 2011 in Deauville, France. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

The Big Lie, Ctd

Here's Palin's insinuation on Memorial Day:

She also made a slight dig at President Obama for saying Monday at Arlington National Cemetery that his “most solemn responsibility as president [is] to serve as commander in chief of one of the finest fighting forces in the world.” Answering a question about Memorial Day, Palin said, “This is the greatest fighting force in the world, the U.S. military. It’s not just one of the greatest fighting forces. And I sure hope our president recognizes that. We’re not just one of many. We are the best.”

Here's what he said:

“It is my most solemn responsibility as President, to serve as Commander-in-Chief of one of the finest fighting forces the world has ever known.”

It's all about using American exceptionalism against him. Greg Sargent explains.

Correction Of The Day

Gonne

Readers descend en masse on this post. One writes:

A small correction: Maud Gonne was not Yeats' wife. Though he was in love with her, she married Major John McBride, who was executed by the British authorities for his part in the 1916 Rising. (Funnily enough, my parents now live in McBride's old house.)

Another writes:

Yeats spent much of his life madly in love with Gonne, wrote scads of poems to and about her, and proposed to her numerous times throughout their long relationship, but she always turned him down, and eventually married someone else, a man Yeats despised – the Irish nationalist Major John MacBride, whom Yeats would write about so memorably in "Easter 1916":

A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;

Another:

Yeats also proposed to Gonne's daughter, Iseult; she refused him as well.

Another:

Gonne wasn't at all known for her occultism; she was far more engaged in politics than anything else, and Yeats' attempts to involve her in his mysticism pretty much fell flat. Georgie Hyde-Lees, Yeats' actual wife, shared more deeply in his occult beliefs. Her specialty was automatic writing, though the evidence suggests that this was an ability she affected as a way of impressing Yeats and maintaining his interest.

Another:

The occult was an Irish avant-garde fashion in the 1880s and '90s in Dublin for those intellectuals trying to free themselves from what they saw as an oppressive Catholicism.

Another:

Maude Gonne was his self-proclaimed muse and many of his most famous works were written to her. Here's "Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven":

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread upon my dreams.

Another:

Apparently, Maud Gonne was once asked in an interview why she did not return Yeats's love and responded, "Just think of all the wonderful poetry that the world would have lost."

Seniors And Republicans

They’re the ones most responsible for Obama’s latest uptick in the polls, according to a new survey from CNN:

“Obama’s overall approval rating among independents and Democrats is virtually unchanged since late April, but among Republicans it is up 12 points, to 27 percent,” Holland says. “That 27 percent sounds pretty anemic, but it’s Obama’s highest approval rating among Republicans in over two years.”

The same pattern holds among age groups. “Bin Laden’s death has not made much difference in Obama’s approval rating among people under the age of 65, but among senior citizens, positive views of his track record are up nine points, to 51 percent,” Holland adds.

The Evil In Damascus

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I simply do not know how the brutal torture of children can be surpassed as an example of pure evil. What is happening in Syria has become morally intolerable even under the standards of the Middle East. You can view the profoundly disturbing video of the corpse of a 13 year-old boy delivered back to his parents by the Syrian security forces here. I warn you. The Dish publishes many graphic images, but the sheer effect of sadism on this child's body is too much for public display.

The boy, Hamza al-Khateeb, was arrested on April 29 and returned to his family around a month later. This is a regime that actually wants to broadcast its atrocities to intimidate its people:

The child had spent nearly a month in the custody of Syrian security, and when they finally returned his corpse it bore the scars of brutal torture: Lacerations, bruises and burns to his feet, elbows, face and knees, consistent with the use of electric shock devices and of being whipped with cable, both techniques of torture documented by Human Rights Watch as being used in Syrian prisons during the bloody three-month crackdown on protestors.

Hamza's eyes were swollen and black and there were identical bullet wounds where he had apparently been shot through both arms, the bullets tearing a hole in his sides and lodging in his belly. On Hamza's chest was a deep, dark burn mark. His neck was broken and his penis cut off.

His father fainted when he saw his mutilated corpse. The boy, apparently, was a sweet kid, swept up in what can only be called a terrorizing campaign by the Assad regime:

Torture in Syrian prisons, long known as some of the worst in the world, is now "rampant" according to a report by Human Rights Watch. "When you have mass execution and torture it rises to the level of a crime against humanity. In Syria, it appears clear that this has become widespread and systematic," said Ricken Patel, director of Avaaz, which has been documenting human rights abuses in the country. "This is a campaign of mass terrorism and intimidation: Horribly tortured people sent back to communities by a regime not trying to cover up its crimes, but to advertise them."

The Assad regime is worse, it seems to me, than even Qaddafi's. I do not know what the West can do militarily or economically, and suspect it's not much. But there is something you can do. His Facebook page is here, with 62,000 followers. Let his family and friends know you have noticed. Let history record this act of barbarism. Let Assad know the world is watching and remembering. And let this cry ring wider and further than in Syria alone.

"We are all Hamza al-Khateeb".

The View From Your Window Contest: Winner #52

A reader writes:

This is another tough one, and I don’t know where it is. My first thought was Europe, and the balconies, awnings, and tiled roofs on the apartment buildings suggested Southern Europe, as did the poplar trees. But the cars don’t look right – I wouldn’t expect to see those minivans in Europe. Maybe it’s South America? Like Buenos Aires or Santiago? So, I don’t know – it might help if I could make out the sidewalk café’s name, or the brand of beer on the sign outside … I’m stumped, but I’ll guess Buenos Aires, Argentina!

Another writes:

Obviously European. Red and yellow signage at lower right pegs it in Spain, as does the little red Seat-brand looking car. Big city, so probably one or the other of the great Spanish urban rivals Barcelona or Madrid. Barcelona, where my family is from, has relatively few streets that run in both directions in areas with that kind of architectecture. Plus, buildings in Barcelona’s Eixample neighborhood, where this would most likely be taken, are only six stories tall – these are more or less eight. So I’m going with Madrid, and, being Catalan, I therefore do not care to spend any more time on this week’s contest. (If I’m wrong, please don’t let it be Barcelona!)

Not Barcelona – or Madrid. Another:

I’m guessing Antakya, Turkey because it’s the only time an answer has jumped into my head so immediately upon viewing a picture. (I’ve also correctly guessed several times in the past when I did not bother to send an answer in – Damascus, Paris, St. Andrews – and ended up kicking myself over it.) The vegetation and light quality seem right – definitely Mediterranean – but I also don’t think it’s Spain. It’s too clean to be North Africa. Probably that store front is readable by someone more tech-savvy than me, who will reveal this to be a picture of Chile or something, but I’m gonna go with my gut.

Another:

This is a view over Charles Square (Karlovo nám?stí) in the Czech capital, Prague. I just don’t have the energy (or interest) to spend hours researching the exact building, time of day, window, etc. of the photograph. I mean, the contest is “The View From Your Window”; the goal is to determine the view rather than the window. If not, maybe the contest should be renamed something like “The Window Of Your View” or something else that stresses the building and window rather than the view. Prague is a lovely city – what more does a person need to know?

That it’s not Prague! Another:

Tough one. Maybe someone will recognize the signs on the businesses, but I couldn’t find anything concrete to go on. The satellite angles and general feel of the photo suggest northern Europe. Since my mom’s side of the family is Danish, I’m going to go with Copenhagen.

Another:

You sneaky bastards.

At first glance this looks like a fairly easy VFYW. Then you start to study it closely and realize there’s almost nothing with which to anchor yourself – no legible license plates or street signs (that blue/white “PD” looking sign on the bottom right is a googlers dead-end), and fairly nondescript buildings that could be suburbs in any European or even southern cone South American city (Buenos Aires, Santiago).

The most striking things in the picture are the lime green tables and chairs outside that cafe. I mean, seriously … lime green chairs. And so it is that I find myself on a Saturday afternoon google-imaging “cafe lime green chairs outside.” The only plausible hit comes from some woman’s lovely blog about her year-long sabbatical in France. Walking through Lyon, she stumbled upon these tables and found them striking enough to photograph. In her picture, the restaurant seems to be “Le Panier a Salade” which is located in the heart of Place Neuve Saint Jean, which is my final answer.

One of the joys of VFYW is discovering blogs during the hunt. Almost makes up for the compulsion to comb through hundreds of lime green table google image pics on a beautiful Saturday afternoon.

Another:

I have a great idea for a movie. A demented criminal mastermind hides a nuclear bomb somewhere in a major city in the United States. In order to taunt the police, he sends them a clue – an extreme close-up photo of a brick at the base of the building where the bomb is hidden. The police are stumped, until one intrepid rookie decides to send the photo to a certain beagle-loving blogger. The blogger posts the photo online for his readers to see. Ninety minutes later, the bomb is found, along with a story about how somebody proposed to their girlfriend right in front of that brick. It would make a fortune, don’t you think?

P.S. I have no idea where that picture was taken.

Another:

It’s definitely Switzerland. In the bottom-right corner, next to the cafe, is a Swiss parking meter, yellow cycle lanes, overheard strung lights, and a sign for Cardinal beer. The beer is brewed in Fribourg but also found in the capital Bern and Zurich. The architecture reminds me more of Zurich just north of the city. I was looking at Google Street View without success. Since I won #33, my wife only let’s me search VFYW for half an hour. So I’ll stick with Fribourg.

It is definitely Switzerland. Another:

The buildings, the old ones in the background and the newer ones (’70s, ’80s) in the foreground look truly Swiss. But why I’m sure it’s Switzerland is because of the bar sign in the yellow house. This looks like the Cardinal brand, a Swiss beer brand which is brewed in Fribourg. So my guess would be that this is from a Swiss city in the French speaking part of the country – let’s say Lausanne, cause the place isn’t flat …

Closer. Another:

The yellow markings for the bike lane and (especially) the pedestrian crosswalk suggest that the photo was taken in a city in Switzerland; apparently, very few European countries have yellow pedestrian crosswalk markings. I couldn’t pin down an exact location, but my hunch is that the photo was taken in Geneva.

Good hunch! About a dozen readers correctly guessed Geneva. One writes:

Easy. I imagine loads of people will get this. The Coop supermarket in the photo was my local for three years. The photo is taken from the building on the corner of Rue Voltaire and Rue Vuache. Probably from the fourth floor or fifth floor for Americans. Here‘s the view of the building the photo was taken from. Here‘s the view from street level:

Another:

I already won this competition last year by getting Lausanne, but thought I’d email in anyway because, well, OMG that’s my town! My office is about three blocks from here, and I very nearly got an apartment in older building on the far corner of the T-junction in the picture (rue Benjamin, where the white car is leaving the frame on the right). There’s a railway bridge immediately behind the photographer; behind that is the stop, Isaac Mercier, where I catch the #13 or #14 tram home every evening.

The Salvation Army shelter is round the corner, so this is not the most salubrious area in the city, though it’s hardly dangerous. However, if any intrepid Dishers want to go have a look, they should walk down the hill behind the frame to the railway line, turn left and walk two blocks North alongside the tracks (on rue de Malatrex) to Trattoria da Tonino, on the corner with rue Servette, who does a very tasty Penne alla Siciliana.

The address where the photographer was standing is either rue de Voltaire 10, 1201 Geneve, or rue du Vuache 1, 1201 Geneve – not sure on the configuration of the staircase in the building, so I’m afraid I can’t tell you which. The photographer is facing West looking along rue Voltaire towards the (rather under-rated in my view) neighbourhood of St.-Jean. As a little variation on a theme, I patriotically put together the ubiquitous aerial photograph on our very own web-map service, www.search.ch, rather than on Google: http://map.search.ch/d/zllztk4nz.

You should give this week’s prize to someone who doesn’t live here though, because most people who do will immediately recognize the distinctive Geneva architecture and yellow Swiss road paint.

A good point. A quick detour:

The fact that I’ve been living in Geneva for the last two years and still can’t find this view, even though I’m absolutely positive that it’s here somewhere, makes me realize just how hard this contest is. So I’m just gonna go with the Jonction neighborhood of town. Here is a view of it, behind the beautiful Rhone, from my window:

Another:

So the location is looking out from a building down onto the Coop at 18 Rue Voltaire. I recognized it instantly – the slope of the road, small cars, architecture of the buildings – I thought, hey, that’s Geneva. Looked a little closer and I saw the Coop sign; I’ve stocked up on Suchard (swiss hot cocoa), vervene tea and chocolate bars there a number of times. Then, of course, the yellow SwissPost truck left no doubt it was Switzerland. A quick poke around Google maps led me right to Rue Voltaire and you can’t miss those pink buildings.

I’ve already been lucky enough to win one book (Brookline), after also guessing Lausanne correctly, so no need to consider me for this one. Plus this spares me sending screenshots and guessing exact windows. But it was fun to reminisce about the really fun karaoke bar that used to be across the street from the building where the photo was taken. Good times.

Another:

Wow, I’ve always wanted to go to Italy, and now I feel like I have! The place looks Italian, and I looked at many Italian cities in Google Maps but noticed they all had white crosswalks. I looked in some other nearby countries and saw Switzerland had yellow ones. There seem to be only a few places in Switzerland where there are 7+ story buildings like these ones. I looked along bus routes in Geneva and Zurich and was about to give up when I saw a pink/yellow building in the satellite view. I held my breath and went to street view and saw it was right! I highlighted the window in the attached picture:

Should be in the corner building above La Bella Gallipoli restaurant on Rue Voltaire, though it looks like the building’s entrance is on Rue du Vauche. I think it’s the 2nd window in (away from Rue Voltaire) because of angles. I think it’s sixth floor because it seems to line up with the 5th floor in the pink building, and the slope should be going down. Also the iron work at the bottom of the picture looks to be directly in the window frame, and lower floors look like they have it a little outside. Google maps doesn’t show a hotel and there isn’t any sign, so I’m guessing an apartment.

A previous winner sends another one of her multi-part diagrams:

Another guesses a different window:

I hope this note finds you after a restful long weekend. Despite hoping to spend little time near my computer this weekend, my heart leapt when I spotted the yellow cross walk in the VFYW contest. Those had to be from my native Switzerland! The satellite antennas made me think this had to be in the French-speaking part of Switzerland (the German speaking Swiss are too neat for Satellite dishes). The sign on the corner of the pink building looked like “Coop”, one of Switzerland’s largest retail chains. A search of Coops in Geneva soon revealed the one pictured here, seen from the apartment building on the corner of Rue du Vuache and Rue Voltaire. The railings and wire probably make this one easier for skilled contestants, but it’s still just a guess for me … maybe it’s the leftmost window on the fifth floor?

Thank you for giving me ‘home’ court advantage; now I have two successful VFYWs under my belt!

Yet another close tie this week, and we have yet to hear back from the submitter of the photo as to which window is the precise vantage point. We will update as soon as we hear back.

Update: Our submitter points to the window in the second row from the top, second window from the left:

Wow, that is indeed exactly correct, my kitchen window! Suddenly I find myself ever-so-slightly frightened :)

Only one other reader (who hasn’t won a contest already) correctly guessed that window:

Yesterday, a friend posted to Facebook that they were leaving Switzerland, so I e-mailed and asked if the contest photo reminded them of anything. “Perhaps Lausanne, it reminds me of a train trip from Zurich to Geneva”. So I spent some fruitless hours cruising around Lausanne, before visiting Geneva. I looked for places with at least a few trees on the south side of the street, and none on the north side. The link to the street view is here. Looking back at the building, and finding place on the road where the tip of the tree, a spot on the road, and the window all line up makes me think the window is the one circled in orange.

This is one of those rare moments when we can’t determine a tie-breaker based on the given rules, so we’ll just have to send books to two readers this week.

(Archive)

The Forever War

Conor Friedersdorf asks us to see the flip-side of legitimate fear of terrorism:

Our thought process is as follows: terrorism is a threat, and it justifies waging war anywhere on earth where there are terrorists. As we all know, however, it's impossible to kill every last terrorist. Thus the war on terrorism rolls on. Even if we leave Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, it'll continue.

Give the hawks their due: terrorism is an ongoing threat to the United States. In fact, it's likely to pose a bigger threat with every year that passes, insofar as technological advances are permitting people with meager resources to obtain ever deadlier weapons. Heaven forbid they get a nuke or a killer virus. What the hawks fail to recognize, however, is that perpetual war poses a bigger threat to the citizenry of a superpower than does terrorism. Already it is helping to bankrupt us financially, undermining our civil liberties, corroding our values, triggering abusive prosecutions, empowering the executive branch in ways that are anathema to the system of checks and balances implemented by the Founders, and causing us to degrade one another.

Greenwald echoes the meme by watching Mark Shields on PBS:

Now that we killed bin Laden, we need civil-liberties-eroding measures like the Patriot Act more than ever. The notion that the death of bin Laden would trigger a winding down in the War on Terror — as though bin Laden was the cause of those policies rather than pretext for them — will prove to be one of the more absurd notions advanced on such matters.

The problem is that we do not have the same information the executive branch does and therefore have no concrete idea of the threat level. We have to trust them, and yet they seem not to trust us, by positing a risk-free security environment as the sine qua non of what Americans are prepared to live with. I'd be content to trade off some security for regaining some of the liberty we have lost since 9/11. But I do not even know if there is a trade-off.

This is the blind leading the afraid. There must be a better way.

Quote For The Day III

“It’s not a publicity seeking tour,” – Sarah Palin "in a nationally televised Fox News interview from her campaign-style, 'One Nation' tour bus."