"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives." James Madison, Fourth U.S. president, known as the Father of the Constitution.
“The elections of 2018 and 2020 will be vital in testing how far the electoral system has deteriorated.”
"It is absolutely essential for not only moral but tactical reasons to internalize this point: There are people for whom our democracy has never worked, because our democracy was designed to not work for them. Any resistance movement that stands any chance whatsoever of gaining traction among America’s critical non-white and non-male demographics must take this basic fact into consideration before going any further.
The bottom line here is that we are at a time in American history where the threat of actual, full-blown fascism is too great to ignore. There are many people in our society who don’t have the luxury to give up, and the rest of us owe it to them, and ourselves, to try to find a way to come together and use all this righteous anger productively. At the very least, when history asks us “What did you do to help turn the tide of fascism?” we will be able to answer, “Something.” (Emily Pothast).
Legislation is pending before Congress, HR 331, to halt the federal government from taking civil forfeiture action against properties involved in state-sanctioned, medical marijuana-related conduct.
If approved, it would “amend the Controlled Substances Act ... to exempt real property from civil forfeiture due to medical marijuana-related conduct that is authorized by state law.
In the past, federal officials have sought to close dispensaries by threatening property owners with civil forfeiture proceedings. Under these proceedings, property may be seized if there exist evidence that it was involved in activities that violate federal law, regardless of whether those activities are licit under state law.
Presently, the Justice Department is barred from taking such actions because of the passage of the Rohrabacher-Farr amendment. However, that protection will expire on December 8, 2017 unless renewed by Congress.
Do this part now! "FDA is 👉 accepting public comments 👈 on
marijuana and the other substances currently under UN review via the
web until October 31."
"This is going to be as normal
as when you go to the Boston Common and see a movie and you can buy a
drink. But it's not happening tomorrow."
After nearly two years of anticipation, the first recreational marijuana
dispensaries in Massachusetts could be up and running within “weeks.”
However, Bay State residents will have to take their purchases home;
it’s going to be much longer before the opening of any businesses that
allow customers to smoke or consume weed.
This abuse of federal power has to be stopped right now and stopped for good.
HR 331 was referred to committee to halt the federal government from taking civil forfeiture action
against properties involved in state-sanctioned, medical
marijuana-related conduct. If approved, it would “amend the
Controlled Substances Act ... to exempt real property from civil
forfeiture due to medical marijuana-related conduct that is authorized
by state law.” In the past, federal officials have sought
to close dispensaries by threatening property owners with civil
forfeiture proceedings. Under these proceedings, property may be seized
if there exist evidence that it was involved in activities that violate
federal law, regardless of whether those activities are licit under
state law. (Source: NORML)
Gov. Jerry Brown of California signed the California Cannabis Equity
Act (SB 1294) into law on Wednesday, authorizing the expenditure of $10
million in state funds to support so-called cannabis
social equity programs. The programs assist members of communities most
severely impacted by the War on Drugs that wish to enter California’s
newly legal cannabis industry. The grants will be used to offer equity
applicants and licensees business loans or grants, waivers for licensing
fees, technical support, and other services.
Cities including Oakland, Los Angeles, Sacramento, and San Francisco
have already established social equity programs. State Senator Steven
Bradford, a Democrat from Gardena who authored SB 1294, told the Compton Herald in June that the measure will help expand municipal equity efforts.
"The newest poll out of Michigan looks good for marijuana legalization, and Manhattan’s district attorney announces he’s dismissed more than 3,000 marijuana cases, but congressional leadership has yet again failed America’s veterans" (Marijuana.com).
In America, our eteemed elder experts and pundits, very often, aren't experts at all. This makes it very difficult to let those who have accidentally or intentionally become sociocultural zombies, to know that they've become zombies, or are dangerously close to that fate. It's an all too real struggle in each of our families, and it massively scales up in complexity and consequence in those weird extended tribal families known as both major political parties.
Bear with us for a sec, we're going to do our best to use words (the worst invention in history, perhaps) to communicate some of the ways that ideas which transcend language, interact with and shape the material world. Weird. Yeah. So buckle up, Dorothy, and let's take a brief vacation from Kansas as we try to understand what's going on in an exponentially transforming world, from a much broader context than downtown Wichita.
When faced with current reality, our poor political zombie cousins (with whom we share 99.9% DNA, even more than the 98.8% DNA with our chimpanzee cousins) and other fam often become irate, flying off in a rage of sudden anomie, a tailspin of lost identity, flailing about, blaming everyone but themselves, and rallying fellow zombies to their cause. "No zombies! We're not the zombies, you're the zombies! How dare you, you arrogant punks! Do you know how long I've been doing this job? Have you seen my impressive resume and impeccable pedigree?" All of which may be truly impressive, and yet, over time, zombosis has taken over. On the other side of the equation, the messenger, of course, gets their face eaten off for the high crime of telling the truth.
"I'm sorry grandma (or uncle, or Mr. President), the zombosis has taken over. You're a zombie. We still love you and want to help you, but if you fight this, it will only get worse for all involved." There's no winning in this situation. Zombies gonna' zombie, so we're just all in for the hell that follows. The only question for us is, how to cope? How do we maintain some semblence of compassion and serenity in the midst of the inevitable zombie apocalypse? Sorry, but you're on your own, this is not a question we'll attempt to answer definitively, here.
So, at risk of getting our face eaten by some readers, here's the news: we're all fighting the dire socio-political-cultural disease of zombosis. But how did this happen? How can we stop it? If you gave up learning 30 years ago, 20 years ago, even 10 years ago and have coasted on your esteemed credentials all that time, the zombosis is setting in. The longer you've considered yourself a completed product, a perfectly manfactured interchangeable part for the 1970's industrial capitalist machine (or worse, the 1950's edition), the deeper the disease has potentially set it. The longer we feel we've been right about our worldview, the harder it is to see that we've gradually become wrong; or at least, increasingly out of sync with exponentially changing conditions all around us, over the course of our lifetime.
Case in point: our perceptions about when the Post Automation Anthropocene "might arrive." Almost everyone under 30 knows they've grown up in this era. There's no "might." It's just called Thursday. Yet, the further one's perspective is situated on the timeline beyond age 30, the further out of touch they are likely to be with this reality, aka, current reality.
Let's talk about just one tiny sliver of this particular reality. The current state and trajectory of autonomous vehicles. We'll use an excerpt from this week's, September 13, 2018 Angellist weekly email, to ask "When will driverless vehicles take over, completely?"
Angellist Weekly Email:
In the last few months alone, Uber has deepened its dealings with Toyota, taking on $500 million more in investment to expand its self-driving tech to minivans. Waymo has partnered with Walmart to help riders get their groceries faster and more efficiently. And Tesla has said its new self-driving chip, promising to process video data 10x faster than its predecessor, is finally ready.
“Four years ago, I said there was no way I was going to see autonomous vehicles in my lifetime,” said Dennis Mooney, SVP at truckmaker Navistar International, in an interview. [Today,] “We could see autonomous vehicles on the road commercially within three years."(Emphasis added).
Poor Mr. Mooney, poster-zombie for the great elder industry non-expert. Zobmies just can't grok that that this type and pace of acceleration in technologically leveraged automation productivity has been the norm since the birth of computing. Like the acceleration due to gravity, it's not a speed, it's a derivative. A rate of change. This is what zombies just can't grok. When these zombies run everything from the local parent-teacher association to the local community college, to the local "jobs center," many people today find themselves living in a hellish world of absolutely idiotic norms and rules that haven't applied to the realities of everyday life, for decades, or even longer.
For many, it's like living in a world where everyone around you keeps reenacting Star Wars Episode IV, while everyone born after 1985 or so was given the script to Episode IX. This kind of world makes zero sense, all the characters are behaving as if Episode IV is the only episode in existence, yet here we are, standing in front of them, actively filming what may be the final installment in the franchise. No, really, this time. Regardless, there sits Obi-Wan, pontificating. Dude, you're a good Jedi, and thank you for all that you did, but um, there's absolutely nothing you can possibly teach us, anymore. We know far more about you than you know about yourself. Okay, yes, we can learn to be patient and listen to you read your famous lines, nonetheless. The one thing we can learn from you is patience and understanding that all you know is the script you were given. True. That's important.
Meanwhile, back here on Earth, in the United States, in 2018, the proportion of economic dividends from the aforementioned automation productivity gains that have accrued to labor -- whether in the form of income, decrease in hours worked, let alone anything even remotely resembling liberation from the drudgery of the 1950's world view -- has been very near zero when compared to the dividends accrued by capital. Particularly, when compared to the top one percent of the top one percent of wealth holders and income takers. Yes, takers, because all of those decades of unearned productivity-gain dividend income are not in any way attributable to individual merit, much less your own sole labor.
If those few facts happen to hit our dear reader like a Mack truck, consider this:
U.S. trucks carry more than 10 billion tons of freight each year, according to the American Trucking Association, and 43% of the expenses they incur track back to drivers. It's also an industry currently understaffed by about 50,000.
That, my friends, is the end of truck drivers. It's called demand pull, demand pressure, and it is just the lastest evidence of the vacuum that has been sucking civilization through a tiny wormhole the size of a straw, into dimensions that most of us chimps just can't wrap our minds around. Also, "analysts don't expect broad adoption of self-driving cars to hit until the 2030s (or for them to become "common" among passengers until the 2050s)." That's another why "it's easy to see why freight vehicles" will take off long before that. At the same time, remember our thesis here: the most impressive expertise demonstrated by many of these "analysts" is the capacity for underestimating the rate of change by orders of magnitude. Nevertheless, our 99% chimp DNA still likes to drive sports cars, so there's room for behavioral inertia with the adoption of autonomous cars; but the monotony of long-haul trucking, the risks, the accidents? Not so much excitement to keep that going. This is one reason why the karma of self-driving trucks is about to flatten the dogma of millions of industrial leaders and labor theorists when it comes to the immediacy of the economic impacts we're all facing, right now. Exhibit A:
TuSimple, an autonomous-tech startup, has been touting a breakthrough in the vision of its semi trucks this year — they're now able to "see" up to 1,000 meters ahead on the highway. No other autonomous system is known to have such long-sighted vision, and TuSimple is getting rewarded greatly for the algorithms that enable it. The company has raised more than $80 million from investors including Nvidia. Competitors like Waymo are testing autonomous semis, but so far don't seem to have the depth of vision TuSimple's team says it's unlocked.
Embark is a 2-year-old self-driving truck company whose founders think they can get to market first. After raising $30 million from Sequoia in July, bringing capital raised to nearly $50 million, its founders are focused on expanding their fleet of trucks from five to 100. Their trucks completed a coast-to-coast drive earlier this year.
Kodiak Robotics has its sights set on long-haul trucking. Led, in part, by ex-Uber, ex-Google Self-Driving Car Don Burnette, the company has raised $40 million to test AI-enabled trucks and hire engineers.
And potential contenders keep popping up, like Kache.ai, which has kept a low profile so far this year. The company has connections to ex-Google engineer Anthony Levandowski, who was previously in the middle of the Uber v. Waymo lawsuit. Check out 30+ startups working on autonomous tech.
So there you have it, today's dose of zombosis treatment. There's no cure for zombosis except constant learning, so if this is the first dose you've received in awhile, the effects could include many of those mentioned at the top of this little prose pill. However, if you can find a way to not eat the faces off of absolutely everyone around you, there may be a way to recover from some of the worst symptoms. Depending on how deeply the zombosis has you, there could even be a complete healing. But not if you stop here. Only if you keep moving forward into the chaos and uncertainty that lies ahead, because the only safe and stable place for those with the worst cases of zombosis is to remain a zombie. Sadly, for many, a world of absolutely certainty and stability mean so much, that they are more than willing to accept that fate, rather than the fate of change.
"I was at a bar the other night to watch a comedy show and everyone was pretty hammered. I started seeing everyone act differently,” he said.
Talmo also said that he noticed how childish people would act depending on how much they’d had to drink and he realized, “Wow, this is a lifestyle that I can’t do anymore.”
Talmo was a comic who never got on stage without a drink. Now he’s doing it with nothing in his hand except for water. Transitioning to a “dry” comic wasn’t easy — especially with cancer — because his anxiety became more amplified than ever before.
“In the beginning I was freaked out because it was anxiety on top of anxiety,” he said. But now he says his comedy is free flowing and fearless. “Really, what do you have to lose? If you’re fighting for your life, what do you have to lose on stage?”
Talmo said he now sees weed as a healthful alternative to drinking, particularly as he realized that with weed, he wasn’t going to end up with terrible hangovers and alcohol’s negative long-term effects. He also found that with marijuana, he’d wake up with his brain feeling more refreshed.
Talmo admits that he’s not the type of person who finds creativity while stoned. It really just helps him to feel relaxed. Through a lot of trial and error, such as eating an entire weed Rice Krispies treat followed by two weed-infused espresso beans, Talmo figured out that he does best stopping at 10 mg of THC."
