i really need to stop reading the washington post in the morning. every time i do, it seems i find reason to blog.

take this report being released today by the ondcp, finding that “teenagers who smoke marijuana put themselves at risk for future mental illness and higher rates of depression.” sounds scary! but the report also states that “too often teens do not seek treatment for their depression, choosing instead to seek relief by smoking marijuana. they do not realize that pot can make their problems worse and can set them up for serious health consequences.”

that’s right. the white house report says that depressed teenagers who don’t get treated have a higher likelihood of growing up to be depressed adults. i call that one for the file marked “duh.”

or take this gem:

The report also found that teenagers who smoke marijuana at least once a month are three times more likely to have suicidal thoughts than non-users. It said that even though the percentage of teens who are depressed is equal to the percentage of adults who say they are depressed, teenagers are more likely to seek solace in marijuana or other illicit drugs.

add that to the previous information and what you have is the following: teens who aren’t treated for depression are likely to have suicidal thoughts. the causality of marijuana just isn’t borne out in the analysis presented in the washington post article. by their logic, i can safely assert that home schooling leads to smoking pot from corpses’ heads. (and thanks, james, for that link. i was eating lunch.)

*sigh*

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in other news, also reported by the wapo, it seems the u.s. commission of fine arts has its nose out of joint because the working model of the new mlk jr. memorial features “a stiffly frontal image, static in pose, confrontational in character.”

heaven forbid a man who led marches, who packed the mall, and who – yes – confronted the racism in america be depicted in full frontal suitedness, arms crossed.

but what the commission is really bent about, apparently, is the artistic style of the proposed piece: the commission sec’y, thomas leubke, wrote that “the colossal scale and Social Realist style of the proposed statue recalls a genre of political sculpture that has recently been pulled down in other countries.”

call me crazy, but i don’t think the sculptures to which he’s referring (saddam, anyone?) were removed out of aesthetic concerns. and in demanding that the dr. king sculpture be altered to evoke the “works of sculptors such as michelangelo and rodin,” leubke is completely missing the appropriateness of depicting dr. king in the social realist style: art that “belongs to the people and to the land and not to the exclusionary cliques of art world elites.” it almost seems that despite being sec’y of the fine arts commission, leubke is unfamiliar with the wpa.

ed dwight, a denver sculptor, has said the sculpture doesn’t look like dr. king. now that seems to be a more valid criticism.

dc is so bent on prohibiting its residents from owning handguns¹ it took the issue all the way to the supreme court.

now the city is going to arm its patrol officers with assault rifles.

while it’s arguably safer to have handguns in the hands of police officers than criminals, i don’t think that necessarily extends to the average law-abiding citizen. i’m left with the thought that this move must be in reaction to a concern (i’d say likelihood, but i haven’t read the transcript of the oral arguments or paid much attention to legal commentators’ opinions on the subject) that the lower court ruling on the dc gun control ordinance will be upheld by the supreme court or remanded to the lower court for a narrower review. “hey! let’s throw MORE high-powered guns at the problem!”

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¹ D.C. CODE §§ 7-2502.02(a)(4), 22-4504(a), AND 7-2507.02

on april 17, william morrison, an attorney whose clients have included members of numerous polygamous sects, pointed out on the diane rehm show that according to court documents, “sarah barlow” claimed to have been beaten so badly by her husband that she was hospitalized with broken ribs. “we’ve got a search warrant based on an anonymous telephone call, that can be independently verified, and we haven’t seen the verification yet. … we don’t know that any of this has happened, because the person has not been proven to be a reliable informant.”

now, according to this cnn article, a pre-paid cell phone that was used by “sarah barlow” in one of the calls that precipitated the raid on the FLDS ranch has been linked to a woman recently arrested for making false reports of sexual abuse to the police.

coincidence?

the NYT online has the following headline on one of its stories:

“US Economy Unexpectedly Sheds 17,000 Jobs”

now, is it just me, or are other people also wondering who’s going to clean up all that mess? i know if my dog unexpectedly shed 17,000 anything, there’d be a blitz of brushing and sweeping. and how odd – it sounds as though all of a sudden, poof! seventeen thousand jobs, just gone. all at once.

and wait, if i’m remembering my colbert report coverage, didn’t mister prez just tell us that it was only the rate of increase of new jobs that was slowing, not that the economy was actually losing jobs?

one wonders, was the labor department instructed to withhold that report until after the state of the union address? mmmmm? (i’m making skeski-like noises now) nooooo, it couldn’t be. of course, as one mister harris was quoted as saying, “it could just be a statistical quirk.”

yeah. and as wayne would say, “sha! and monkeys might fly out of my butt.“¹

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¹ how incredibly juvenile of me. yes, yes, i know it might just be a statistical blip. an oddity of reporting. and it’s certainly not a trend.

but still…

the queen decides to honor salman rushdie with a knighthood, and iran’s response – it’s a clear show of hostility toward islam!

ugh. i’m reading hitchens’ god is not great right now. a good read to begin with, and this latest religious whine is just cake. religion poisons everything.

update: hey, look at that. the vatican’s jumping on the stupid train as well (albeit a different wagon in the train). stop funding amnesty international, pope rat has decreed – how dare they support a woman’s right to choose whether to carry a pregnancy to term?

*sigh* and i’m trying to figure out how to work in the tidbit that Although the late twentieth century STD epidemic has been curtailed in all prosperous democracies, rates of adolescent gonorrhea infection remain six to three hundred times higher in the U.S. than in less theistic, pro-evolution secular developed democracies. yay religion.

bush stays in bed for several hours at the g8 summit, dan bartlett doesn’t know if it is viral or food poisoning.

now, let me be clear: i am not advocating anything, particularly not anything sinister. that would be illegal. besides, presidential succession via assassination is a disruptive thing in any country. but it does pose a fascinating hypo: the president of the united states falls victim to an assassination attempt while attending an overseas summit. what result domestically?

as the political season ramps up for the ‘08 elections, rhetoric is flying high and even the republican candidates can’t distance themselves from the bush administration quickly enough. cheney ascends to the presidency (officially); he could become an ‘08 contender, especially if the media eats up what’s sure to be his “i told you so” darkside pap. (although kucinich’s attempt to impeach cheney would instantly become more relevant.)

any thoughts?

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in other news, the beeb has the most awesome headline of the day:
patient sheds green blood like mr. spock of the starship enterprise.

scooter gets 30 months. (it bothers me that the link on cnn’s main page reads, “libby to find out soon if he’ll go to jail.”)

bush leaves office in 19 months.

according to reuters and cnn, female cheetahs “sleep around,” practice “serial infidelity,” and engage in “duplicitous behavior.”

bwah?

i just converted the six-digit decimal representation of my birthdate to binary. by hand. then i checked my work here. and then briefly considered writing the formula to automate the conversion.

holy crap, i need to get a job.

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it looks like bob zoellick has a new one (job, that is). this should come as a surprise to, oh, nobody.

to hear my dad tell it, back in the day (say, 25 years ago), a country would get a good family planning program going, only to have it derailed by a visit from pope jp2.

ffwd to today: on the heels of pope rat’s visit to brasil, lula launches a program to provide heavily subsidized birth control pills through ten thousand pharmacies nationwide.

sounds like they’ve stopped buying what the vatican’s selling.

in other news, an ottawa appeals court decided that a five-year-old boy has three legal parents: the lesbian couple who made the decision to have a child, and the friend who agreed to father the child. it was the legal status of the biological mother’s partner that was in question.