Art Machine
Just another former infatuation junkie

The geek code’s a little bit out of date, but I figured it was about time for me to do it, anyway.

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Everybody tells us that necessity is the mother of invention. Now, Reuters tells us that restaurant owners in New York City are being very inventive in their quest to answer the need for gimmicks to keep smokers coming.

“Bravo Bloomberg,” [Vittorio Assaf of Serafina Sandro] said. “It took Mayor Bloomberg to make us finally cook with tobacco in the kitchen. It’s the invention of a new spice into the cuisine.”

Well, at least the diners won’t get lung cancer. Mouth, throat, and stomach cancer, maybe. But not inhaling the smoke of burning carcinogens will do wonders for your lungs.

Honestly, I have to admit that I’m surprised. As much as the tobacco industry has pushed to get its meathooks into every segment of the market, it’s shocking to realize that we didn’t start cooking with dried tobacco flakes years ago.

Although I still don’t get why anybody would want to drink a “cigarette-flavored” Manhattan. Does this mean that kissing a businessman in New York City is like kissing an ashtray? And who, exactly, goes around kissing ashtrays for comparison purposes? That’s always bothered me. Some poor soul out there has probably actually kissed an ashtray or two (or two thousand) for the sole purpose of verifying that it is, indeed, just like kissing a smoker. And the worst part of it is that the person kissing the ashtrays had to be a non-smoker, because a smoker’s taste buds would be deadened to the point that the experiment would be moot.

I know what you’re thinking. “Moot” would be a great name for a rock band. Or an MC. “MC Moot.” Somebody should pass those on to Dave Barry.

Which brings me (in a round-about way) back to the original subject. I just want to know – who taste-tested these things? I know that the article says that Chief Chef Sandro Fioriti tested it on “friends and staff”, but were they smokers? Frankly, their tastebuds might be dead enough that anything but tobacco tastes like cardboard to them. These are people who treasure cigars that mix raspberry flavor with “a delicate taste of old shoe leather.” And The Delicate Taste of Old Shoe Leather sounds like a perfect title for an anthology of foot fetish erotica – but I digress.

TalkLeft points us to this story from the San Francisco Examiner. While it seems to offer some hope for Ed Rosenthal, I think it also provides some insight into the Conservative viewpoint of true “local power.”

This is a double review coming up, so hold onto your hats. Or your seats, if you forgot your hat. And if you don’t have much of a seat to hold onto, you might just want to hold on.

First, let’s cover a review of the Rosenthal case. Ed Rosenthal is a well-known supporter of medical marijuana initiatives. Two years after California passed Prop. 215 (the “Compassionate Use Act”) in 1996, Rosenthal was deputized by the city of Oakland to act as a grower and distributor of medical marijuana.

In February of 2002, Rosenthal was raided by federal agents. They took him into custody for cultivating marijuana plants, conspiracy to cultivate, and maintaining a warehouse for storage. The warehouse in question stored several thousand “starter plants” that Rosenthal intended to distribute to patients who wanted to grow their own medical marijuana.

Now, let’s cover a review of Republican images of political divisions. On this side, we have the Conservatives. On the other side, we have the Progressives. The typical Republican/Conservative view of the divide is particularly clear on issues of government control. According the the Republicans/Conservatives, we who consider ourselves on the Progressive side are “tax-and-spend, big government liberals.” We want to regulate everything into the ground and give the federal government the power to break down doors on a day-to-day basis. We want to take power away from the states and give it all to the President.

The Conservatives/Republicans then paint themselves as the protectors of the people. They want to keep the government out of the business of the everyday, ordinary man. They want to minimize regulation to allow us more freedom. And they want to take power away from the central government and give it all to state and local governments.

All caught up? Good. Now, let’s see how one relates to the other.

Word has come out recently that a juror in the Rosenthal case blatantly broke the rules of conduct, despite frequent warnings from the judge. This should result in the declaration of a mistrial, and the setting of a new court date.

The alternative would be for John Ashcroft to decide not to re-prosecute, and allow Rosenthal to continue with his life as a deputized official of the city of Oakland in the legal distribution of medical marijuana under Proposition 215.

Right. And monkeys.

Ashcroft is on the warpath, as evidenced by his recent bust of “head shops”, or Operation Pipe Dreams, as he prefers to call it (hold your laughter until the end, please). With his big, bad armada of Conservatives/Republicans bringing up the rear, he’s ready to prove that the War on Drugs^TM is just as vital today as it was in the good ol’ days of Reaganomics, Iran/Contra, and psychics in the White House. Given this current drive and the fact that it was Ashcroft’s DOJ that pushed for Rosenthal’s arrest in the first place, the chances of his letting Rosenthal get back to the job he was given by the people of Oakland are about as good as the chances of NBC giving Saddam Hussein a regular late-night talk show.

What this means to the American people, however, is that the Rosenthal case has become a test of the Republican/Conservative doctrine of “less government” and the teachings that Progressives want to “kick down your door”.

Explain this to me. If I’m a big-government, jack-booted-thug-loving, tax-and-spend liberal, why is Ashcroft the one spending millions in tax money to sieze state government-sanctioned medical marijuana and prosecute a deputized official of the city of Oakland for doing his job?

Freeing the people from “Big Government” apparently only extends to the captains of industry and the campaign financiers. As far as I can tell, the last time that rallying cry was used to the benefit of the people was in the days when our government wore powdered wigs and lived an ocean away from us. Since then, it’s been used to de-regulate big business, consolidate big business, and give big business the power to walk over the people.

But when a truly progressive program to give the states the power to alleviate the pain of the common people goes too far and allows the people a way around costly, ineffective treatment, the government is right there to come down with a right hand like God’s.

Meanwhile, it’s the Progressive state that passed the law in question while under a Progressive administration.

The priorities of the Republican/Conservative wave are not to free the people, nor are they to improve the power of state government. They’re to commercialize the nation to the point that your oxygen will be brought to you by 3M, and your trees will be courtesy of Halliburton. Progressive regulation is not regulation of the home life or the bedroom, it’s the regulation of corporations and the limiting of their power over the American people.

And, with Rosenthal and California’s Prop. 215, Ashcroft has supplied us with the perfect illustration of this.

The face of war is not pretty.

On CNN you can see the maps get put up on the screen with digital graphics laying out troop placements and combat points. You can see the lights in the sky over Baghdad and Kuwait City. And we all have memories of Gulf War I – watching small dots hit larger dots on our screens, producing large puffs of dust.

The war comes in clips and phrases. “Let’s Roll.” “Fuck Saddam.” Small words given big meanings, refusing a place to such minor players as reason, wit, or wisdom.

We have people everywhere telling us about how beautiful our war is – how precise. How incredible it is that our missiles and bombs go directly to their targets and civilians don’t die.

People die in war. Soldiers and civilians alike.

I don’t like shock pictures. I don’t use them very often, myself. I don’t like Greenpeace using pictures of gutted whales. I don’t like animal rights organizations using pictures of animal experiments. Not because I feel the picture are in any way wrong, nor because of any allegations that the pictures are either out of date or exaggerated. But because I feel the pictures are a cheap shot. They get a gut reaction – an immediate, sick-to-the-stomach response that is without intellectual value. It’s a scream in the ear – “How could you let this happen?” But it’s not a convincing scream. It makes the hearer wince and shrug, maybe turn away. But it accomplishes nothing.

So I present these links to pictures – some of them graphic – to be followed or not, as you see fit. I have made it clear many times before: I support our troops, but I do not support this war. I present these links, however, neither to make a case for nor a case against this action. I present these links as a grim reminder that war has a human cost. That human lives are more than just numbers reported on the cable networks.

These are file photos of the dead among our coalition troops.

These are file photos of coalition POW’s and MIA’s.

This is the family of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

And these are graphic pictures of civilians – there are no file photos for them. The pictures come from the international press, although many of them come from Arab networks. Whether you say these are casualties of American action or casualties of Iraqi action intended to frame American troops, the fact remains that these are casualties.

People die in war.

That’s just a fact.

“I want President Bush to get a good look at this, really good look here. This is the only son I had, only son.”
– Michael Waters-Bey, responding to the news that his son, Kendall Damon Waters-Bey, had died in a helicopter crash.

You know who’s gonna be big? These girls. Yeah. I said these girls.

They’re just like TATU, only without the whole underage thing. And without the lesbian lover thing. And they’re twins.

I tell you, it takes talent to make it in this world. And these girls have got major talent. Major talent. The kind of talent that can only be clad in metallic hot pants and shaken to trashy Europop.

As soon as they hit the states, they’re gonna be stars.

Gary Hart has taken time out of his busy schedule as a possible candidate to write about American foreign policy – where it is, and where it should be.

Where does it all end? Will the Bush ideologues, presently driving American foreign policy, turn America into the world’s avenging angel? Instead of just demonstrating against this war (the first of many?), now is the time to propose a better, more American, course. We must lead and strengthen existing international institutions, including the UN, and design new ones, including, for example, an international peace-making force.

What a peacenik. I wonder if he even remember 9/11?