It appears there’s an effort afoot to change the California Constitution. I noticed this news item yesterday a couple of different times.

“More than 300 people gathered to debate the idea Tuesday at a Constitutional Convention Summit. They agreed on one thing: The state’s system of government is broken.”

Reportedly, the Summit was organized by a business-interest group, the Bay Area Council. Another item that stood out for me was how some reportedly want reform of the initiative process, while it appears they might use the initiative process that exists to make these changes. Is ‘use what they don’t like’ a correct summary of their intent?

“Who should be chosen as delegates to a constitutional convention? What issues should be considered? Whose ox gets gored? How do you sell a complex issue to a public that’s turned off by politics?”

Anyway, this is something to keep an eye on. There are statements in the article that Californians are uninvolved in politics, but is this even true? Isn’t every school kid who attends education for at least 13 compulsory school years (without pay) involved in politics for those years? Isn’t everyone who votes involved in politics? Isn’t everyone who pays taxes involved in politics?

Well, I guess that’s my view. Why are we being told we’re not involved, when in some cases we have little choice about our involvement? Does this business group really mean something else?

It’s been widely reported yesterday, and the reporting is expanding today, that California Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (Democrat-San Francisco) has submitted A.B. 390 to legalize, regulate, and tax marijuana.

Once again the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) has a quick and easy letter you can send to California legislators if you as a citizen of California support this bill, A.B 390. You can choose among several different letters, by hitting the appropriate link at the site. The California weblog page of MPP also has some information.

[addition of 03.01.09]: What to read the current version of A.B. 390? Enter “390″ in the appropriate search field and select “bill number”, and follow the onscreen promts.[end addition]

I sent mine yesterday, and this time I wrote my own (it has typos, but at this point they can’t be edited).

Some of the thoughts expressed are based upon my prior post titled San Diego County Board of Supervisors, Medical Marijuana, and Waiting to Inhale. Here’s my letter:

February 23, 2009

[recipient address was inserted here]

Dear [recipient name was inserted here],

It’s my understanding that California Assemblyman Tom Ammiano has authored a bill, A.B. 390, that will legalize and tax marijuana. Additionally, it will regulate it similar to how alcohol and cigarettes are currently regulated.

This seems like common sense legislation to me. Recently I was appalled to find out that San Diego County has been refusing to issue Medical Marijuana IDs to patients with a prescription from their doctors for its use, which either prevents them from using this medicine, or subjects them and their caregivers to the pressure of arrest. Caregivers in our county are reportedly being stormed by swat-like police teams, their property confiscated. It’s now about 15-years since Californians legalized medical marijuana, and some counties within the state are refusing to follow our laws!

I find myself wondering why state authorities haven’t arrested our County Supervisors for failing to follow California law. When any of the rest of us decide to challenge a law in court, as they reportedly have, we still have to follow the law that’s in existence until such time as a court overturns it or the legislature agrees on new laws. I understand this is a complex issue, involving federal government prohibition, but it makes a poor example when our own local leaders refuse to follow a state law passed by ballot proposition some 15-years ago.

Therefore, I’m feeling quite strongly that legalization and taxation is the next step for the people of California to take: San Diego County has refused to issue IDs to lawfully prescribed patients, subjecting them to arrest, if not prosecution, and the state has failed to arrest the real lawbreakers: the county supervisors! Therefore, to legalize, tax, and regulate marijuana makes some sense to ratchet up the pressure on the supervisors and over time, upon the Federal government through the U.S. Senate.

California just had a record budget stalemate, along with reported tax increases and service cutbacks. Think of the tax revenues that could roll in with regulated and taxed marijuana, but also remember all the otherwise good people who’ve been hurt by the insane prohibition of a weed through stiff enforcement and jail time. How much money have Californian’s been taxed to process and jail all these citizens all these past years?

Just thinking of these folks’ tragedies over the course of decades breaks my heart.

Please support A.B. 390.

Sincerely,

Ken Klaser

The recipients were:
Assemblymember Jeffries
Senator Hollingsworth

Debian GNU/Linux “Lenny” 5.0 is released as stable! A free operating system? Highly recommended!

Can local school districts and kids or their parents save money? “OpenSource, Linux, belongs in schools. Ring their ears and wake them up!”

Thanks all you great programmers!

A long time ago I posted one of my bread recipes, honey wheat berry bread, a clone of a bread I sometimes like. That was a time of increased interest and study regarding bread dough, and I posted much of what I learned in the comment section of that post. The Internet really opened up the information available to average folks! Much gratitude to the computer and Internet architects, and to all the folks who’ve added their knowledge!

Unfortunately, study and reading can take one only so far, sometimes you have to actually do it to learn more. So, after getting a scale to weigh ingredients, a vast improvement in the consistency of batch-to-batch results occurred, but then more questions arose.

I decided to increase the moisture of the white bread recipe that I use for toast and sandwich slices from 51% to 53%, where the water weight is expressed as percentage of flour weight, and further, this percentage doesn’t include all the water, as vinegar presumably is mostly water. Some may prefer to conceive of this 51–53% change as a 53.35–55.35%, or imprecisely by rounding to zero decimals, 53–55% change. The recipe is given below for further analysis. For a number of years I have put some amount of vinegar in my breads because I’ve noted the bread takes longer to stale when it has this ingredient added, or restating, gives it a longer shelf life, and I’ve never been able to taste it, so I see no downside to doing so.

As it happens, I ended up rising and baking this batch on a rainy and somewhat colder day, the rise took longer (around 5 hours) than it typically does on a warmer day (3.5-4 hours). I’m not sure how much of this change is related to the dough’s moisture change. (We get so little rain in Southern California, I decided to take an umbrella for a walk while I waited the extra time. Thank you Gaia, I love your rain!)

I prefer the french-bread taste of sandwich-style white bread made from dough that has aged in the refrigerator overnight, this isn’t done so much for the yeast to have a slower rise (though that is an effect), it is said to break down some of the carbohydrates differently, and the results are both tasted in an altered flavor, and seen as a slightly different color of crust in the baked product.

I rise the refrigerator-temperature dough in the pans it will be baked in, in the same room temperature oven in which it will later be baked. Because the oven is not humidified without the addition of heat, the weighed and pre-shaped dough pieces, before they’re put in the pans, are smeared with oil, and so too are the pans. This prevents a skin from forming during the rise in the absence of a humidified and temperature-controlled rising chamber, as well as providing a release agent for easing the removal of the baked loaves from their pans.

It seems one trick is to be patient with the rise, however, with this 53% moisture dough, I was quite surprised with how much it rose during the initial portion of baking, sometimes referred to as oven spring.

For each loaf, the dough weighed approximately 1300-1400 grams (which is 1.3-1.4 kilograms), this provides a nicely-sized sandwich slice that really is larger than a typical soda cracker! It takes 1 hour, 35 minutes of baking to reach 199F internal temperature, in a thermostat-reported 300F degree oven, and this includes our oven’s warm-up time. Higher baking temperatures seem to result in a crust that is too dark and thick for my sandwich-slice preferences, at least when baking these rather large loaves. (more…)

On Sunday, February 8, 2009, I attended a medical-marijuana presentation at San Diego’s Central Library. The Marijuana Policy Project showed us a documentary movie called Waiting to Inhale, and with local activists taking part, had a short talk afterwards.

San Diego County has apparently decided to not issue Medical Marijuana ID cards to patients, and it’s now been about 12 years since the California ballot proposition legalizing medical marijuana passed. F. Aaron Smith, California Policy Director of the Marijuana Policy Project, said during the Central Library presentation, that when medical-marijuana patients have an ID card, and they’re discovered with marijuana in California, they will not be arrested; while if they only have a letter from their doctors, it means they won’t be prosecuted. That’s kind of an important distinction, it seems to me. San Diego County’s decision means that patients and caregivers can still be arrested, and all the hassle that entails, even though at the end of this forceful, demeaning, and fearful process, often reportedly involving unfriendly strangers wearing black and frequently carrying assault rifles, the police victims won’t get a day in court, and presumably, no apologies either, they simply won’t be prosecuted.

So, to get their property back, they must presumably sue in civil court, and potentially wait years to see justice (if they’re dying, how likely is that?) from the greater police machine.

So much for Pursuit of Happiness.

[begin edits 2.11.09] During the open-to-the public meeting of Feb 9, 2009, one of San Diego County’s Supervisors claimed the county has won lots of awards over they years. This certainly seems to be a true statement.

I can also say I’ve known a lot of great people over the years that I’ve lived here, quite nice, generous people. [end edits 2.11.09]

Recently I watched a good friend and neighbor in home-hospice care slowly die of cancer. While he said it was legal for him to use marijuana (I don’t know all the details), he was concerned about using marijuana. From what I could tell, he never did try it, though I do remember telling him it was probably worthwhile to see if it helped. He was probably part of the Reefer Madness generation, and likely his mind had been conditioned against its use by our many generations of Authoritarian overlords. His wife, who’s still alive, said they got some Marinol pills, synthetic THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, and she said each pill was billed $30 by the pharmacy! (hmm, seems some folks are getting rich selling those, that’s a ridiculous amount of money for one pill!) On a recent visit of mine to see her, a hospice nurse was also visiting at the same time, we got to talking for a few moments, and this nurse claimed that many patients didn’t react well to the synthetic pill form of tetrahydrocannibinol.

The movie, Waiting to Inhale, claimed that with marijuana, patients are able to modulate their own dose much better than a single pill of a fixed dosage, and further, impurities in the plant may contribute to its better outcomes, and therefore general acceptance, among patients using it. The movie had a short scene that asserted patients actually feel a difference between Indica and Sativa varieties of Cannabis, clearly this is not something a single pill based upon a single-synthetic chemical could provide patients, regardless of its alleged highway-robbery retail-price.

While it’s just a guess and logical aside, I’d bet a $20 bag of marijuana would probably last most patients several days, if not longer.

During the meeting, two caregivers, who claimed to be medical marijuana dispensary operators or possibly growers (their precise function was unclear to me from the brief presentation), said that local police had been targeting caregivers, claiming that they themselves had recently been arrested. One claimed the police had taken all their property in the process, and the other that the local news media simply wasn’t covering these stories, or their frequency of occurrence. Both of them were clearly angry: so much for their pursuit of happiness and human desire for harmony.

A local activist, Rudy Reyes, said that San Diego County residents could show up at weekly meetings of the County Board of Supervisors in support of the patients and caregivers who are following the laws implemented since the passage of Proposition 215, in order to pressure the County to begin its issuing of ID cards, and to stop the harassing of dying and sick folks, and their caregivers.

From the Board of Supervisor’s meeting calendar:

A regular meeting of the Board is held at 9:00 a.m. on Tuesday and 9:00 a.m. on Wednesday of each week in the North Chambers (Room 310) or Conference Rooms (Rooms 303 or 335-A), located at the San Diego County Administration Center, 1600 Pacific Highway, San Diego, California.

Perhaps showing up at the local television media stations would also get some attention paid to the police raids. Perhaps the FCC should be required to rule that local TV stations are themselves required to cover all police actions in their own jurisdictions (not one locality covering another’s) as a condition of their licensing, the police should separately be required to video tape all arrest and confiscation actions and further be required to routinely forward all police audio-video to the local TV stations, to insure the local populace is fully informed of the truth of their own local Authoritarians. Perhaps local TV News stations need citizen review boards to filter through all this police video and to further have the authority to tell the stations what particular pieces they’re required to air. That could insulate the reporters and talking heads from the ire of advertisers.

It seems The Supervisors are on the wrong side of the law. Can you imagine a few ten thousand or even hundred thousand local folks (why not dream big!) showing up there on one of those days when The San Diego County Board of Supervisors are conspiring against the ill and their caregivers? Maybe then they’d listen to the people they’re supposed to represent, instead of promoting an ideologically-driven political-agenda that seems to represent a minority view.