Daily Office:
Monday
¶ Matins: Can’t make a difference? Do like Luis Soriano, the librarian with “4800 books on ten legs.” At least figure out how to get the man another burro and a few hundred extra books.
¶ Tierce: Best cheeky story in today’s Times: Stephanie Clifford reports on Ivanka Trump’s latest venture, a collaboration with ConAgra in which the entreprenootsie plugs prepared lunches that will last for up to a year in your desk drawer. No refrigeration required! “Office Workers, Ivanka Trump Is Thinking of You.” Yeah, sure.
¶ Sext: Another chapter of the terrible and unnecessary collateral damage of drug-prohibition: Mexican children coarsened by gangland slaughter. Marc Lacey reports.
¶ Compline: Bird & Fortune explain it all to you: Chronicle of the crash foretold:. But people were laughing then, way back in 2007.
Oremus…
§ Matins. And then look around at all the books you’ve got at home. (It’s safe to say that, if you’re reading this blog, you’ve got too many books; and if you don’t, let me know.)
While it is difficult to imagine the former model lunching on processed chicken from a plastic tub, ConAgra executives said she was an ideal promoter.
“We wanted somebody who would appeal to a younger office worker who’s technology-savvy,” said Michael Locascio, vice president at ConAgra. “We wanted someone they could identify with, someone they knew, but also not somebody that was on the front of every tabloid.”
Ms. Trump, possibly slicing baloney for her sandwich at home, was not available for comment. Asked whether Ms. Trump was the best choice to discuss budgeting, Mr. Locascio said that “we want to have her talk in a way that’s credible, which is why we’re talking about this as a business venture for her.”
“Slicing baloney…” Great show, Ms Clifford!
§ Sext. Is this a reasonable price to pay for the satisfaction of outlawing cocaine and heroin? (There can be precious little other benefit to our drug laws!):
Bodies have been hung from bridges, sliced into pieces, decapitated, burned.
Mr. González’s biggest fear is that the awful scenes playing out across much of Mexico are so common that they will eventually lose their shock value among the young, making killing an expected, even acceptable, part of life.
“They may grow up with this sort of thing being normal,” he said. “They can say, ‘I saw 12! How many did you see?’ You could never have imagined this years ago.”
Maybe if we put everyone who thinks that narcotics are an underworldly affair on a strong IV drip.
§ Compline. “Rewarding the ingenuity of the markets,” where ingenuity = spotting the men in string vests before anyone else does. (Thanks, Fossil.)
Too many books? Isn’t that like being “too nice?” That’s something people say all the time: “She’s too nice.” What they mean is something else, like: She’s a doormat, she’s insincere, she’s fake, I don’t trust her affect. Too many books means: not enough shelf space, bought them and haven’t read them, no longer interested in what I thought I was interested in.
So, yes: I have too many books 😉
Sound reasoning by many researchers has been ignored in the area of drug policy for over forty years in my experience. I can remember Jerome Jaffe, M.D. and Harris Isabel M.D. saying in 1968 that what really needed to be done was to take the money out of the equation by removing the criminal penalties. The actual dollar value of the drugs themselves is very, very low. Marijuana as a commodity in an open market would likely trade no better than tobacco and heroin not much better than acetoaminophen. Legalization would not increase drug use anymore than it increased the number of abortions. Legalization would be the first step to a more open policy that might allow a cultural change that would reduce drug abuse and dependence. It might even have some benefit in the quagmire of Afghanistan.