My Sick Mind

"You turn on the television and see this enormous disaster, you say to yourself, 'Why would we want to take on that kind of risk?'" California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger at a news conference near Sacramento. No, the "enormous disaster" he was talking about wasn't his administration, it's the big oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. But it wasn't a risk in 2008 when the governor signed a $100 million deal between some environmental groups and Plains Exploration & Production Co., known as PXP, that was estimated to bring the state some $100 million a year. Interesting. A hundred million made it a good idea - then. Imagine how he'd feel if he had never turned on the TV. But like a lot of things, risky endeavors were good ideas when the state needed money. Now that there has been an accident - and it's been on the TV - drilling for oil under the water is suddenly a bad idea, which it probably was all along. Now that we have seen (on TV)...

I really should take notes. Things pop into my head during the day and I think, 'i need to write about that' only to find that my head hasn't the data capacity that I would like, and out it goes as easily as it came in. I was thinking about all the pomp surrounding the Tiger Woods scandal and how his sponsors dropped him to the point that he decided to take an 'extended leave of absence' from golf. I was thinking, how many of the executives in the companies that dropped him as a sponsor were out doing the same types of things that got Tiger dropped? Plenty, I'm guessing, and if their wives found out they'd be dropped as quickly as Tiger. But, it's a one-way street and since Tiger is their meal ticket, he's out on his ass. I was reading an article on the Internet that some states are considering putting referendums (referendii?) on the ballot to legalize marijuana, and I remembered that I once wrote that when states run out of ways to generate ...

A friend sent me an article today that said a record number of the U.S. population is incarcerated - one out of every hundred, roughly. One would think that it's hardened criminals and repeat offenders, but as it turns out, it's mostly drug offenders and people who are not a threat to society. A report released Thursday by the Pew Center on the States, a self-described non-partisan group, found that 2.3 million Americans — or roughly 1 in 100 adults — are living behind bars, and that the consistent increase in the country's prison population over the past 20 years has been driven by policy choices, not by spikes in crime or the nation's population. On average, states spend 6.8 percent of their general fund dollars on corrections. Of course, when I say society, I'm talking about the country at large. The country at large has this idea that drugs are bad and that people who use them are a menace and should be ... incarcerated. Hence the issue. Drugs aren't nece...