in·som·ni·a (ĭn-sŏm’nē-ə) – n. – The bane of my existence.

1 sheep, 2 sheeps...

As I sit here more awake than throughout the entire day, I wonder what it takes to become tired, and why when I want to be tired, I can’t, and why when I want to be awake, I feel like I am in a zombie state. Then I wonder why I even wonder these things. Maybe I can’t fall asleep because I wonder too much. Maybe it’s because my wonder-er wonders about why it wonders, creating a never ending vicious cycle of non-sleep, or sleeplessness, or even sleep that doesn’t really do much for me. Do I really have insomnia? Or do I just have really shitty sleeping/eating/exercising habits that create sleep problems? As I mull this over night after night, hour after hour while counting the protrusions from the ceiling, trying to find constellations in them, and feeling much like a 17^th century philosopher trying to figure out what consciousness is, or how you could even find out such a thing, I realize that all I am really doing is thinking to damned much. Is there a way to get ALL thoughts out so that you could have a clear mind throughout the day? Sure there is, or at least many would argue so. Some I think would tell me that I need to write more. That it’s writers block. Too many thoughts and no way to get them out. So you toss and you turn and you stay awake at 3am to write a blog about it. Eventually you come to the conclusion, or a conclusion so it seems, that every time you get a thought out of your head, 3 more are created out of nothingness. Can I really get to the point where all my thoughts are out on the table to stare at, and think about some more? Or is it just going to be another vicious cycle, one thought exited, three created in it’s place. And it also seems that it takes a hell of a lot of words just to get one thought out. I mean let’s get serious. What exactly do we have that is 100% explained, to which it could have no more explaining, or to which you couldn’t narrow it down just that much further for the next guy who doesn’t get it. I don’t know. I don’t even want to know. I just want to sleep. Or rather, I would like my brain to rest. Because you see even after I do fall asleep, and yes I do fall asleep eventually, I never really ever feel rested, like my energy has been completely recharged. I always feel the same amount of tiredness, the same amount of energy, no matter how many hours I slept. When I wake up in the morning after sleeping “the needed 6-8 hours a day”, I feel like crap, like I got an hour and half of sleep on a plane. I’ve tried more sleep, less sleep, no sleep (that option really sucks), drug-induced sleep, natural drug-induced sleep, all with the same or similar crappy effects, 0 energy and alertness.

Although, as I sit here writing this, my eyes begin to get heavy, and I start feeling like if I walked into my bedroom and layed down on the bed, I would fall into a deep trance-like super sleep state. I feel as if I had a long night at the bar with two Ambien before conking out on the bathroom floor. But alas, as soon as I crawl into that warm cozy bed, snuggled up with my wife, feeling the most comfortable I have ever been, I wake up. I wake up like it’s X-mas morning an I’m a 5 year old boy who just knows there’s some really cool shit sitting under the tree just waiting for me to go play with. And what are these mystical, magical, wonderful new things I have received? Nothing. There isn’t anything there. Just the need to change the world, to teach people how to use less water every day, how to stop using oil-based plastics and shit like that. And yeah ok sure these are all good things to think about every once in a while, maybe even all the time. But why when I want to sleep? It almost seems as if my brain thinks there is just too much to do in the world, in life, and says, “Hey! You got too much to do man, wake the hell up.”, so I wake up.

To me this just shouldn’t be the case. I should not have to fix everything, everywhere, right when I want to sleep. Or even all the time. Where’s some goddamn me time. Or some time for friends and family. I feel estranged from them as I’m sure they do from me because my mind has other things on itself. And would anyone believe that I have no real visible or tangible control over it? Not really. To outsiders it must seem like I ignore them completely and utterly out of disrespect for their wants and needs, that fixing clean water shortages are more important than spending a little time every day to keep in touch with someone far from me, or keeping in touch with my wife who is usually pretty damned close. But those things, in the very bitter end, are not more important than friends and family. Now if I could just get my brain to understand this I would be just a touch better off, and this blog would not have been written now would it have……Hmmm.

Does the illegality of drugs threaten our economy?

It is being talked about all over the world… Some countries, like the Netherlands, have even become keen to it, and have seen amazing, and maybe even unexpected changes in violence, and overall crime. I for one believe that making certain  “soft-drugs” tolerable, not legal, would help our economy, and the economies we destroy by keeping drugs illegal.

“I couldn’t have gotten so stinking rich without George Bush, George Bush Jr., Ronald Reagan, even El Presidente Obama, none of them have the cajones to stand up to all the big money that wants to keep this stuff illegal. From the bottom of my heart, I want to say, Gracias amigos, I owe my whole empire to you.” – Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman of the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico                                  Source – http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-henry-sterry/mexican-drug-lord-officia_b_179596.html

This makes me sick. That a drug lord actually thanks us for keeping our drugs illegal. And would anything like this make it to a network station? Would it make the headline news? Of course not.

The Netherlands has marijuana decriminalized in most parts of the country. Obviously near schools and such places as this are not tolerated by any means of having drugs within the vicinity. But they have a list of “soft-drugs” that are tolerated for personal use, not sale and/or distribution. Now you may be thinking, man they must have people getting in trouble all over the place with so many drugs all over. The fact is, since they do not criminalize the people that use drugs, they have actually had to close prisons…..8 of them. It even says later that with some of the empty space Belgium will be paying them to keep prisoners. Just think of the applications.

Remember that thing called prohibition? I remember learning that the violence was a huge part of prohibition, and more people broke the laws, because there were more laws to break. The way I see it is, the drugs exist, and always will exists. So why waste so much money putting these people in jail, and even more money keeping them there.

I wont even touch on the medical properties of the drug in this post, because that’s just a whole new slew of information, and deserves its own spot. But I will talk about how much money could be saved/earned through taxing and decriminalization.

If marijuana alone became decriminalized, the first thing that could happen would be money saved on law enforcement. Meaning that less people would be buying their pot from the streets and turning to the legal stores to buy it. Just like in the Netherlands. What this does in turn is gets rid of marijuana trafficking across our borders, as we will no longer have the need for marijuana from other countries, because it would almost all be paid for legally. Do people smuggle huge amounts of alcohol across the border? No. Why not? Because you can just go to the liquor store and buy it. Easy as that. One problem could be is that a trafficking route would open up to get drugs out of our country and into others. But of course as we have Canada to the north, which has its own pot so nothing to worry about there, and Mexico to the south, which only has such a bad marijuana problem because of us anyway.

The other money comes from taxing. Do a simple Google search and you will find even the American government has done research on the amount of money that could be made every year just by taxing marijuana could reach 6-8 Billion dollars. A number which in my personal opinion, is very underestimated. This money could then be re-put back into the system to keep drugs away from schools, and make people 100% educated on the healthy, and unhealthy aspects of the drug. I think if people are completely educated about something, the good and the bad, they will make the best decision possible for their lives. However if you just tell people it’s bad, they just become afraid of it.

I personally refuse information about healthiness of products and drugs from a government who allows the sale of alcohol and tobacco.

Alcohol

“In 2001, an estimated 75,766 AADs and 2.3 million YPLLs were attributable to the harmful effects of excessive alcohol use” – Source – http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5337a2.htm

Tobacco

“During 1997–2001, on average, smoking accounted for an estimated 3.3 million YPLL for men and 2.2 million YPLL for women annually, excluding burn deaths and adult deaths from secondhand smoke. Estimates for average annual smoking-attributable productivity losses were approximately $61.9 billion for men and $30.5 billion for women during this period” – Source – http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5425a1.htm

YPLL – Years of potential life lost (YPLL) or potential years of life lost (PYLL), is an estimate of the average years a person would have lived if he or she had not died prematurely.^[1] It is, therefore, a measure of premature mortality. As a method, it is an alternative to death rates that gives more weight to deaths that occur among younger people. Another alternative is to consider the effects of both disability and premature death using disability adjusted life years. – Source – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Years_of_potential_life_lost

Smoking-attributable productivity losses for both men and women are $92.4 billion???!! And we are worried about a drug that has 0 attributable deaths per year. 0. As in they don’t have a number. Tell you what. Go here. If you want proof. On the Center for Disease Control (CDC)’s website, they have a huge paragraph about the harmful side effects of alcohol abuse in children and adults, underage drinking problems, etc. etc. They have a couple of sentences for marijuana, none of them showing a figure or number of yearly attributable deaths. There are 100’s of thousands of deaths linked to alcohol and tobacco, and they go advertised day and night, free drinks at club such and such, buy one pack get 2 free, go ahead smoke up Johnny! And yet a drug that is/has been used for centuries by musicians and politicians alike, and has been linked to zero deaths per year, and could very well have medicinal properties attached to it, and whose much less potent sister HEMP, can be made into food, clothes, paper, wood, plastic, and gasoline, are banned from the country. We have problems here people. And we need to wake up and smell the roses.

Further reading from a more respectable reporter…

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/25/stopping-border-violence-by-legalizing-drugs/

The Dutch justice ministry has announced it will close eight prisons and cut 1,200 jobs in the prison system. A decline in crime has left many cells empty.

Quality music….can’t be free?

We are hearing alot these days about the legality issue reguarding the downloading of music files by torrent. The Pirate Bay, who were prosecuted for assistance to copyright infringement. In the UK ISP’s (Internet Service Providers) are being given the rights to strip away internet connections from entire housholds if found to be downloading excessvie amounts of torrents, after a warning E-Mail of course.  And while reading these stories and many more like them, I find that alot of people are complaining that free illegal downloads will decrease the overall quality of the artists and the music they make. This is complete bullshit. These are the same people that said socialized health care means bad health care, as if the only reason anyone becomes a Doctor is to make money. I would venture to guess a large number of Doctors wanted to be doctors before they knew anything about the meaning of a dollar. Well in my opinion it works exactly the opposite. The best bands, at least in my opinion, are the bands that don’t play for fame or fortune. Sure, after they get big they might roll in the money a bit, buy some big houses and fast cars. But they play the music from the soul. It’s the only reason any music is ever good. Look at Tony Gwynn. Right fielder for the San Diego Padres, not exactly the richest team in the league, by the way. One of the most consistant if not the most consistant baseball players that ever lived. Never hitting under .309 his entire 20 year pro career. Did he play for the money? I think not. If he wanted money he would have gotten his ass traded a long time ago. And don’t get me wrong here, there are a shitload of professional sports players that play for the money, and happen to be really good, but thats besides the fact. The point of all this is I don’t want to hear a single word more about “free music makes music suck” ever again. It’s bullshit. Money does not make this world go round, it doesn’t make ice cream taste better, it doesn’t make friends (at least not good ones) and it doesn’t make people play good music. Good music makes people play good music. Inspiration. Just think if everything was free….everything. I think the quality of life would increase triple fold. And especially the quality of music…

The MUSIC Genome Project..

The radio service, as show on Pandora.com

, not to be confused with the Human Genome Project or HGP, is a now 9 year plus, constantly evolving project. Pandora is the Music Genome Project’s online internet radio.  All you are required to do is sign up for a free account with your e-mail address (nothing new here), and presto, you can start making customized radio stations. It is not a play on demand set up however, as many online radio stations offer, but a system of taste matching through the Music Genome Project’s database.

This is an excerpt from Pandora’s website…

“Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or “genes” into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song – everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It’s not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records – it’s about what each individual song sounds like.”

Basically there are 400 ‘Genes’ or attributes (those of which can be seen categorized by type here on Wikipedia.) to choose from for each and every song in the database. They say that there are at least 150 types attached to each song, making the selection process very, very, accurate.

You start the process by searching for a song or an artist to create a station from. The program then proceeds to play a song either by that exact artist, or something as close as is possible to your choice. Then is when it gets fun. You can add other songs or artists to any single station at any time, and at any amount, to refine the way algorithms pick new songs. If you don’t like a song, just press the thumbs down button. The program will stop playing that song, and songs extremely similar. It does not mean it won’t play songs from that artist, or album in the future, depending on whether or not that artist has diversity among its tracks. On top of this, if you like a song, but find that Pandora plays it way too often, just click ‘don’t play this song for a month’, and for one month the song will not be repeated. Other features include, the name and bio of the artist whos song is currently playing, the name and description/history of the album, the song name and a list of similar songs, giving you inspiration of new songs and artists to add to your stations seed list. Adding an artist to your seed list tells Pandora to take their entire collection and map out the DNA of each and every song, ultimately creating a list of songs that are similar to play ad infinitum. On the other hand adding a specific song will create a more narrowed down list of tracks and artists similar to only that one song. You can also use and customize a ‘quick mix’ station, which lets you place or take away check marks from your list of stations, cycling through and creating somewhat of a mixed radio station, something that is not available with conventional ways of listening to the radio, as to hear different music you have to constantly change stations. Not to mention the radio station isn’t 100% controlled by your tastes.

Pandora is 100% free.

However, if you wish, for $36 per year, you can download a desktop version of Pandora taking it out of the browser, and directly from a program. The upgrades features include the highest quality streaming, no ads (as if there were tons to begin with), and an extended interaction timeout. (if you don’t use the thumbs up or down buttons for a period of time the music pauses and Pandora asks you if you are still around and listening, attributing it to the fact of not wanting to play to an empty room (big applause for saving bandwith and ultimately being more green). All in all the concept is amazing, and if you have a few bucks laying around every year, ($36 a year isn’t all that bad), it’s a great way to listen to and discover new music, without having to search around 17 different websites each with thier own small bit of information. Although the cost-free ad-driven version is perfectly usable. The banner ads are limited to one or two at a time, don’t make noise, and are half for Pandora One, the paid version. Every so often there is a short 30 second or so audio advertisement in between songs, but when I say every so often, I mean the ads actually remind you its not an ad free service. “Oh wow, an ad, holy crap…..Did you guys here that??? It played an ad!!!”

If you are using a different internet radio service, I would suggest popping over to Pandora and at least trying it out. It’s totally worth it.