The Facts About Marijuana

It probably shouldn't have surprised me that Sesh rescinded the Cole Memo, an Obama-era edict that instructed the DOJ not to interfere with states' voter-approved and regulated marijuana industries unless doing so was necessary to prevent other crimes.  However, what does surprise me is that, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, many people in the United States continue to assert that marijuana is a dangerous drug.  The facts are clear:

• There have been no known fatal overdoses from marijuana.  Meanwhile, alcohol overdoses kill tens of thousands of people in the U.S. every year.  Legal opioids likewise.  There were sensational headlines last November about a baby who died from myocarditis after consuming marijuana, but it's unclear whether the marijuana was responsible for the baby's death.  Furthermore, that baby was living in a sketchy situation in which he could have been exposed to much worse things than marijuana.  Blame the parents, not the plant.  There are already severe penalties for supplying any drug (including legal ones) to a minor, and at least in Colorado, edible forms of marijuana must be clearly marked and sold only in childproof containers.
• Corollary to the above, the "margin of exposure" (MOE), or the ratio of the lethal dose to the normal human dose, is orders of magnitude higher for marijuana than it is for either alcohol or tobacco.  A higher MOE means that it is that much harder to overdose.  In practical terms, lethal overdoses of marijuana do not occur, because the areas of the brain responsible for breathing do not contain cannabinoid receptors.
• Marijuana does not damage the liver like alcohol does, and in fact, there is research indicating that cannabidiol (CBD), the primary non-psychoactive cannabinoid compound in marijuana, can protect the liver against fatty liver disease. 
• There is research indicating that smoking marijuana does not decrease lung function in the same way that smoking tobacco does.  A study in 2006 concluded that smoking marijuana does not cause lung cancer.
• Speaking of CBD, it is known to be effective at controlling epileptic seizures and has, for some patients (particularly those suffering from more severe forms of epilepsy), proven to be the only effective remedy.  That's why CBD is now legal in 46 states, including the reddest of red states (you can even buy it over the counter in some of those red states), but it remains a Schedule I substance at the federal level.  The Colorado marijuana industry has been at the forefront of developing extremely-low-THC/high-CBD strains that can be used to control seizures without introducing any unwanted psychoactive effects.  Such research could not be conducted at the federal level, because the DEA classifies marijuana as a Schedule I drug with "no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse."  Meanwhile, cocaine, hydrocodone, meth, oxycodone, and fentanyl are all Schedule II drugs.  To reiterate, federal drug policy considers a compound with known medical benefits and no psychoactive effects, and which almost all states have approved for use, to be more dangerous than compounds that are literally killing tens of thousands of people a year.
• Regarding scheduling, when marijuana was classified as a Schedule I drug in the early 70s, this was intended to be provisional, until further research could be conducted.  Such research was conducted by the Nixon-appointed Shafer Commission, which found marijuana to be as safe as alcohol and recommended ending its prohibition.  However, Nixon saw marijuana prohibition as a convenient way to jail his political enemies, and his administration chose to double down on prohibition rather than follow their own commission's recommendations.  The architect of this policy (John Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic policy advisor), as well as the implementer of the policy (John Marshall, Nixon's attorney general) were both convicted of multiple felonies in the Watergate scandal.
• Also regarding scheduling, THC (the primary psychoactive ingredient in marijuana), is a Schedule III drug when distributed by Big Pharma in FDA-approved pill form, but it remains a Schedule I drug in its naturally-occurring plant form.  To reiterate, not only does federal drug policy consider CBD (which is non-psychoactive and has known medical benefits) to be more dangerous than most opioids, meth, and cocaine, but it also considers CBD to be more dangerous than THC, the compound in marijuana that gets you high.
• While no one should ever drive under the influence, the risk of a fatal automobile crash while under the influence of marijuana is about 7-8 times lower than the risk of a fatal automobile crash while under the influence of alcohol. 
• The risk of dependence from using marijuana is less than that of alcohol and much less than that of tobacco.  Marijuana does not produce strong physical withdrawal symptoms like alcohol and tobacco and other drugs do. 
• The legal marijuana industry has kept billions of dollars out of cartel hands each year and has led to a sharp decrease in marijuana seizures along the U.S./Mexican border.  It is noticeably reducing the power of the cartels, which will improve the security of the border over the long term.
• Buying through a heavily-regulated dispensary ensures that marijuana users know exactly what they're getting.  More specifically, the THC content of the product is precisely measured, and the product is free of toxins. 
• Teen marijuana use is either flat or has decreased in states that have legalized recreational marijuana.  With highly-regulated dispensaries, there is less of a black market from which teens can purchase. 
• There is research indicating that the availability of medical marijuana has, in the states where it is available, led to a sharp decrease in opioid-related deaths. 
• The legal marijuana industry is generating hundreds of millions of dollars (perhaps even billions now that California is coming online) in tax revenue every year.  In Colorado specifically, this is used for school construction and other education programs, and for public health programs (including substance abuse prevention.)
• The legal marijuana industry has, in Colorado, been responsible for one of the biggest economic booms (if not the biggest) that the state has ever seen.  In 2015 alone, it created 18,000 jobs, and the industry at large is estimated to employ hundreds of thousands.  By comparison, the entire coal industry employs about 75,000.  By 2020, the legal marijuana industry is expected to create more than a quarter of a million new jobs, exceeding the rate of job creation in manufacturing.
  
• Simple possession of marijuana (i.e. a non-violent, victimless crime) accounts for 88% of all marijuana arrests, which themselves account for about half of all drug arrests.  We're talking about millions of arrests, here.  At some point, you have to ask yourself whether our overburdened and underfunded law enforcement resources would be better used in the pursuit of violent criminals or dangerous drugs, like meth and K2, that are actually killing people.  Furthermore, there is a huge racial bias in marijuana arrests.  A Black person is 3.73 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than a white person, despite the fact that per-capita usage among those two demographics is approximately equal.

I've made the scientific arguments, and now I'm going to make some personal ones.  I am not a pothead, but I know probably as many regular marijuana users as I do regular beef eaters.  I also know quite a few regular alcohol and tobacco users, and a few users of harder drugs.  Drug addiction has affected my family personally.  I've lost family members, friends, and colleagues due to alcoholism, meth addiction, and opioid abuse.  I've seen other family members, friends, and colleagues succumb to cancer and other diseases brought on or exacerbated by a lifetime of tobacco use.  Meanwhile, every regular marijuana user I know is a gainfully employed, healthy, contributing member of society, and they're generally among the nicest people I've met.  I've seen people play concertos while on marijuana.  I've seen people negotiate raging rivers while on marijuana.  Yet two friends of mine, both of whom were among these gainfully employed, healthy, contributing members of society, were locked up like animals because they had a dead plant in their possession.  The War on Drugs has effected a much greater toll on people I care about than marijuana itself has.

I've seen the long-term effects of these drugs on those who have used them regularly for decades.  You'll just have to trust me that a 70-year-old who has used alcohol daily for 50 years is generally in much worse mental and physical shape than a 70-year-old who has used marijuana daily for 50 years (corollary: Willie Nelson may stumble a bit these days, but if he had drunk instead of smoked for all of those years, it's unlikely that he'd still be alive.)  I've seen daily marijuana users give it up for a month or more because they knew they had to take a drug test, and they were able to quit cold turkey with no problems.  That isn't the hallmark of a drug that has a "high potential for abuse."

Long and the short of it:  I have seen no evidence that marijuana is any more dangerous than alcohol and tobacco, and I have seen quite a bit of evidence that it is less dangerous.  And I'm sick of seeing hard-working people get locked away and tax dollars wasted trying in vain to eliminate it.  Sesh needs to wake up and smell the 21st Century, because all he's doing right now is showing kids that the federal government is full of BS when it comes to assessing drug risk.  When the DOJ chooses to focus on attacking the legal marijuana industry rather than on addressing the deadly opioid crisis, what kind of message is that sending?

2016 Election Post-Mortem: Myths and Facts

Yeah, I'm sure you're sick of hearing about this election.  T.S.  It took me 24 hours to absorb what happened here, but I'm ready to talk about it.  I hope you are too, because there are a lot of things that need to be said.

Myth #1: This Election Was About Elitists vs. Working-Class People

Trump supporters are people too, they're entitled to their opinions, and no one should hate them-- or anyone else, for that matter.  However, let's please jettison this narrative about Trump supporters being downtrodden, out-of-work folks who were screwed over by an elitist-controlled system.  His supporters make, on average, more money in a given year than most Americans.  They make, on average, a lot more than I do, and a lot more than teachers or police officers or fire fighters make.  Yes, there are some people who voted for Obama and also voted for Trump, so white nationalist fervor cannot fully explain this election.  Yes, some Trump supporters genuinely were screwed over by the corrupt system, and they saw Hillary as a product of that system.  They weren't wrong, but please don't fool yourself into thinking that that was the sole-- or even the primary-- reason behind this.  Many Clinton supporters were screwed over by the same system.  They simply didn't buy into the argument that a billionaire hotelier was any less of an elitist and an influence peddler than she was.  They trusted her more to appoint Supreme Court justices who would reverse Citizens United.  At the end of the day, we have allowed money to become so deeply entrenched in our political process that you either have to kiss the ass of filthy rich people in order to win an election, or you have to yourself be filthy rich.  So the choice was between someone who was the product of a corrupt system and someone who promised to bring his own personal brand of corruption into that system.  When given that unenviable choice, things like qualifications and temperament can tip the scale.

Myth #2: Bernie Could Have Won

We.  Just.  Don't.  Know.  Yes, the DNC was in the tank for her, but they were also in the tank for her during the early days of the 2008 primary.  Obama turned the tables rather quickly, and he became the darling of the DNC overnight.  Nothing prevented Bernie from doing likewise, other than the fact that he was unable to build a "rainbow coalition" of voters.  Hillary was able to do this in part because she learned from the 2008 campaign.  At the end of the day, she walked away with 3.5 million more votes than Bernie did, and no advantage the DNC gave her could have accounted for that.  What did account for it is the fact that this wasn't her first rodeo.

Bernie supporters are latching onto a hypothetical match-up poll from early June that said that he would have beaten Trump by ten points, and another poll from the same time frame that seemed to predict exactly the horse race that we got between Clinton and Trump.  But the first thing one should notice about these polls is that the hypothetical Sanders/Trump match-up left 11% undecided, and the hypothetical Clinton/Trump match-up left a whopping 14% undecided.  Hypothetical match-up polls are not really predictive.  A hell of a lot has happened since June.  In a parallel universe, one in which Bernie took the nomination, a hell of a lot would have happened in the months between that point and this point.  Having a self-described socialist in the race could have energized the Republican base just as much as having a Clinton in the race (if you don't believe that, just look at the example of Jeremy Corbyn.)  And no, I don't really believe Bernie is a socialist or even a democratic socialist.  He's a textbook social democrat, actually.  His argument for socialism is a nuanced argument.  It's an argument that says:  no, we're not trying to turn the U.S. into a socialist nation, but a truly free country requires a balance between collectivism and corporatism.  If we embrace too much collectivism, then we create a nation whose over-reaching regulatory framework can stifle innovation and make it difficult to run a business.  However, if we embrace too much corporatism, then we create a nation in which big corporations are unfairly advantaged relative to small businesses and individuals.  Too much government control decreases competition and stifles innovation, but too much corporate control does likewise.  Those who use "socialist" as a dirty word need to understand that the opposite of socialism isn't capitalism.  The opposite of socialism is fascism.  The American Dream lies somewhere in the middle.  Bernie's argument, an argument with which I wholly agree, is that we've allowed our nation to move too far toward the corporatist end of the spectrum, and dialing it back requires injecting more socialism into the mix.  But this is a nuanced argument that did not fully resonate with primary voters, particularly people of color, and that is precisely why Bernie was unable to turn the tables on Clinton like Obama did in 2008.  The people who turned out in record numbers to elect our first President of Color supported Clinton in the primary because she represented a third Obama term.

But, but, super-delegates.  Sure, super-delegates are an elitist construct.  But the flip side of that coin is that, if the Republican Party had some super-delegates of its own, Trump wouldn't be President.  Super-delegates have existed in the DNC since the early 1970's.  They existed when Obama turned the tables on Clinton in 2008.  She (barely) won the 2008 popular vote, but Obama won the primary because of super-delegates, so any argument that the 2016 primary was "stolen" from Bernie must also conclude that the 2008 primary was "stolen" from Clinton.  However, this argument rests on a false assumption that primaries can be "stolen" at all.  Primaries are not elections.  The purpose of those contests is to gauge the relative electability of particular candidates, and the parties are not legally bound by their results.  But, again, she won by 3.5 million votes.  Did the DNC put its finger on the scale for Clinton?  Yes, but I doubt that it was a 3.5-million-vote finger.

Not everyone who voted for Trump did so because of white nationalism, but please don't fool yourself into thinking that that wasn't a major factor in this election.   White nationalism is emerging as a movement in Europe as well, despite the fact that most of those countries have comprehensive Bernie Sanders-style social welfare programs.  So don't fool yourself into thinking that Bernie's promise of free college and universal healthcare would have quieted the Trumpist movement.  There is definitely an argument to be made that Bernie could have done better than Clinton in the Rust Belt, but he could very well have lost some other states-- particularly Virginia, which went 65/35 in favor of Clinton during the primary.

Myth #3: The Left/The Media Could Have Predicted This, If Only They Had Listened

In the days since the election, a lot of people are trotting out Peter Thiel's line that the media took Trump literally but not seriously, whereas his supporters took him seriously but not literally.  I can only hope that Thiel is right, because that means that President-Elect Trump doesn't actually believe some of the awful things he said during the campaign.  But there are ways of quantifying how often a candidate lies, and Trump's propensity for telling bald-faced lies was quantifiably much higher than Clinton's (her rating was, in fact, similar to Bernie's.)

We can argue about media bias until we're blue (or red) in the face, but at the end of the day, everyone is biased.  Everyone.  That's why we, as a species, have developed methods (including the Scientific Method and traditional journalistic codes of ethics) to work around these biases.  That doesn't mean that scientists or hard journalists get it right all the time, but it does mean that someone who has spent a lot of time researching something is more likely to get it right than someone who hasn't.  It means that, if a supposition has undergone rigorous scrutiny-- particularly by people who have no vested interest in agreeing with it-- it's more likely to be true than one that hasn't.  Even if the journalists who work for a traditional media outlet have baked-in biases (see above-- everyone has baked-in biases), they're still going to have a pretty good chance of getting it right if they follow traditional journalistic codes of ethics, including focusing on research and clearly delineating objective facts from subjective opinions.  This is first-year journalism stuff, which is why I am saddened that so few modern journalists seem to practice it.  I'm equally saddened by the fact that we, as a nation, seem to have developed more trust in social media and the blogosphere than in hard journalism.  I mean, yeah, some newspapers are liberally biased, but some aren't, and some of the conservative papers were just as vocal in their opposition to Trump as the liberal ones.  I don't know the answer to this, but I do know that the answer is not to increase our reliance on media sources that are, by their very nature, unreliable.

So what was the media supposed to do?  Ostensibly the purpose of journalism is to seek the truth, but when one candidate is clearly and measurably lying a lot more often than the other, how are people on the other "side" supposed to "listen" to this?  How is it their fault for not believing the lies that Trump told to his supporters in order to get elected?  It isn't that the media is a bunch of anti-populist, elitist snobs who look down on Real America from their ivory towers in New York City.  You have to remember that many local papers didn't endorse Trump, either.  The average journalist makes less money than the average Trump supporter, actually.  The media did the best it could with the information it had to work with.  Trump's "shock jock" approach to his campaign may have been cleverly designed to get as much media attention as possible, or he may have really meant the things he said.  There was no way for anyone outside of his immediate sphere to know which it was, and it's clear that at least some of his supporters did take him both literally and seriously.  The media went with what it knew, which is that he was lying more than telling the truth, and Clinton was telling the truth more than lying.  This is what lawyers would call the "preponderance of the evidence."

Pollsters will be studying this election for years to come, with the hope of predicting similar phenomena in the future, but this year, they did the best they could with the information and methods they had available.  Pollsters were listening to Trump supporters, but not all Trump supporters were talking.  It's impossible for polls to work correctly when a significant number of respondents aren't willing to own their choices.  That being said, I do think that some members of the media and some pollsters made the same error that Bernie supporters made when they assigned too much importance to the hypothetical match-up polls:  they ignored the margins.  Even the latest Trump/Clinton poll prior to the election left nearly 6% of the vote unaccounted for.  Trump's victory came from within that 6%.  Trump has been defying pollsters throughout this election cycle for basically that same reason.  Most people outside of Trump's campaign (even Republicans and conservative media outlets) made the same error, but at least give Nate Silver some credit for having included the aforementioned polling uncertainty in his models, which were always a lot more bullish on Trump than most.  His last assessment gave Trump about a 30% chance.  Fair enough.

Myth #4: Third Parties Cost Clinton the Election

It's unclear whether Johnson culled more centrist Democrats from the herd or more centrist Republicans, but I strongly suspect the latter more than the former.  I mean, he and Weld are former Republican governors, after all.  So let's look at Stein.  Assuming that all of her voters in Wisconsin had voted for Clinton instead, Clinton would have taken that state by the slimmest of margins (~4000 votes.)  Assuming that all of her voters in Michigan had voted for Clinton instead, Clinton would have taken that state by a much larger margin (~39,000 votes.)  However, if all of Stein's voters in Pennsylvania had voted for Clinton, Trump still would have taken Pennsylvania by ~19,000 votes-- and, with it, the election.  Florida?  Nope.  Still not even close, even if you assign all of Stein's votes to Clinton.  North Carolina?  Stein wasn't even on the ballot.

No, I think there were ultimately two things that cost Clinton the election:

1. The Electoral College (duh)

The EC was originally meant as a check and balance on the "tyranny of the majority."  It was originally an elitist institution meant to bridge the gap between the uneducated masses and the educated polity.  That's why it's somewhat ironic-- in the O. Henry rather than the Alanis Morissette sense of the word-- that this election, which was ostensibly about elitism vs. the plight of the working class, was decided by this arcane, elitist institution.

Originally, one elector was elected by popular vote from each congressional district, but the electors were more or less free to "vote their conscience" when choosing the President and Vice President.  The idea was that electors were educated people who had the necessary knowledge of the U.S. system of government to make informed decisions regarding who should lead it.  However, they also had strong ties to local communities and could earn the trust of the people within their districts.  The candidate with the most number of electoral votes became President, and the second-place candidate became veep.  I'll refer you to this Wikipedia article for a list of some of the problems that this caused in our early nation.  For instance, you may not have been aware of the fact that, because of the Electoral College, Thomas Jefferson didn't actually win the 1800 election.  He was appointed by the House.

Over time, the EC evolved into its modern form, whereby electors are-- for the most part-- no longer elected.  Most states have a winner-take-all system in which each party chooses a complete set of electors (sometimes during the primary, but often without any direct input from the electorate), and the set of electors from the party that wins the presidential popular vote in a given state are allowed to cast all of that state's electoral votes.  Many states have laws against "faithless electors", so there is very little that an elector can do in most cases other than cast a vote for his/her party's candidate.  That is obviously not the system that our Founding Fathers intended.

One of the arguments you most often hear in favor of the EC is that it forces candidates to pay attention to "flyover country."  As the argument goes, without the EC, a candidate could theoretically focus just on California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, and New Jersey and still win an election.  OK, but in this campaign, Trump won by focusing on about half that many states.  Speaking as someone who lives in a very populous state that is always a foregone conclusion, it would be nice to have a presidential candidate focus on us for a change.

The National Popular Vote project seeks to forge an interstate compact whereby the electoral votes from all participating states would be assigned to the winner of the nationwide popular vote.  They make a compelling argument that this would not, in reality, disenfranchise voters in low-population areas.  If true, then this would be an excellent stopgap measure, since it wouldn't require amending the Constitution, but I personally believe that ranked voting, AKA an "Australian" or "automatic runoff" ballot, is a better long-term solution.  Under this system, every voter is required to rank every candidate in order from most to least favorite.  If no candidate gets a majority of votes by counting all of the first-choice votes, then the candidate with the least number of first-choice votes is eliminated, and the second-choice votes from those voters are counted instead.  This process is repeated (hence the name "automatic runoff"), eliminating the candidate with the least number of first-choice votes each time, until only one candidate emerges with a majority.  There are numerous advantages to such a system.  For starters, it eliminates any danger of voting for a third party, because if (when) that third-party candidate is eliminated in the first round, anyone who voted for that candidate will have their second-choice votes counted instead.  It encourages more informed voting choices, because any vote that does not rank all of the candidates is discarded.  Thus, if there were four candidates on the ballot, then there would be an impetus for voters to find out what all four of those candidates stood for, in order to rank them intelligently.

Finally, the advantage of ranked voting is that it provides further assurances that candidates will not ignore "flyover country".  Under a ranked voting system, a candidate could not simply appeal only to the most populous areas of the nation, because there would be a significant political advantage to becoming the second choice for voters in less populous areas rather than the last choice.  Potentially, such a system could even eliminate primaries to some extent.  There would have to be some sort of qualifying round in order to prevent a "clown car" situation akin to the 2016 Republican primary, but this qualifying round need not necessary be intra-party.  It could simply be a preliminary round, during which anyone who chose to do the research would be allowed the opportunity to rank 25 candidates in order, and the five winners of that round would advance to the general election.  If applied retroactively to this election, that would have resulted in a final ballot with Bernie, Hillary, Trump, Cruz, and Kasich, with no third parties.  But we also have to realize that switching to a ranked voting system would fundamentally change the role of parties in the election, so it's impossible to say how the Libertarians and the Greens would change their game to accommodate the new system.  Overall, it would give those voters more choices and more chances of finding a candidate that is at least somewhat aligned with their views, even if the actual candidates from their parties were eliminated in the first round.  Whereas Hillary, Cruz, and Trump could have garnered a lot of first-choice votes on a ranked ballot, they would have also garnered a lot of last-choice votes, so it is likely that either Bernie or Kasich would have won in the balance.  Per Duverger's Law, a two-party system will naturally emerge from a plurality-rule voting system, so eliminating the EC and switching to ranked voting would create a much more fertile environment for third parties.

2. Turnout (or Lack Thereof)

You can argue that the lack of enthusiasm for Clinton kept Democratic voters at home, but there's more to it than that.  It is clear that many states, particularly in the South, made it more difficult to vote in this election by restricting early voting, closing polling places, etc.  The North Carolina GOP even bragged about how turnout among African Americans was decreasing relative to 2012.  I don't know that they were necessarily bragging about voter suppression efforts, but decreased turnout always favors Republicans, and of course the partisans at the state level know this.  The Voting Rights Act ensured that, in prior elections, these actions on the part of states could not unfairly disadvantage areas of the state in which people of color live.  That is, if Black people had to stand in long lines, then (at least in theory) white people had to as well.  Shelby County v. Holder changed that in 2013, and there are certainly a lot of cases being made that that decision was a factor in Florida and North Carolina.

But let's put that aside for a moment and ask ourselves-- why do we allow partisans to control our elections at all?  We talk about congressional term limits, but why do we allow partisan state legislatures to redraw congressional districts in such a way that many of our elected U.S. representatives run unopposed or without any credible opposition?  That is, as much as anything, why congressional representatives stay in office for as long as they do.  Term limits would be one solution, but an end to partisan gerrymandering would be another.  Furthermore, why do we not recognize that letting partisans control electoral rules at the state level creates a fundamental conflict of interest?  Of course these partisans are going to try to unfairly advantage their party in any way that the law allows.

The EC unfortunately exacerbates this.  Without it, there would be much less impetus for state-appointed partisans to try to advantage the election in their party's favor, because no one state could swing the whole election.  It is no coincidence that most of the dirty dealings you hear about vis-a-vis secretaries of state for elections occur in places like Florida or Ohio or North Carolina.

Myth #5:  Misogyny, Xenophobia, and Racism Won This Election

No, actually more people than not voted to elect a female President.  Misogyny, xenophobia, and racism only won on a technicality.

So What Now?

To me at least, the narrative of Trump as a "change candidate" is hollow.  He cannot credibly be the bringer of change when he fought tooth-and-nail against change while a Black President was attempting to bring it (see "birtherism.")  Congressional Republicans cannot credibly be the bringers of national unity when they tried their best not to give Obama a single legislative victory, even on policies with which they agreed.  So forgive me if I'm not ready to make nice with any of these people just yet.  If Trump turns out to be much more of an Arnold Schwarzenegger-style Republican, if he is truly concerned about doing what most Americans want instead of just what his party wants, then there is hope.  But if, however, he caters only to the people who elected him, then I fear for our nation, because a sizeable chunk of those people seem to just want to burn it all down.  I'm not saying that they don't have legitimate beefs with government.  They do, and so do I, but I also don't think that chaos is going to improve anyone's financial situation.

What we have to come to terms with is the fact that this election was a referendum not just on government elitism but also on America's readiness to embrace an equal-opportunity society.  It is the result of an entire class of people (working-class whites) who feel that they've been cut out of the political process.  My first reaction to that would be:  yeah, and now they know a little bit about how it feels to be Black, or Latino, or a woman ... except that they don't, because they ultimately won, and a rich white man ultimately ended up in the White House, per usual.  We dismissed these voters at our peril, because democracy says that everyone has a voice, even if the loudest voices are coming from angry white men who want to blame "others" for their problems.  However, we also have to ask ourselves whether this election represents exactly the "tyranny of the majority" that Mr. Hamilton warned us about.

Good Artists Copy. Great Artists Steal. Unlucky Artists Get Sued.

Here's why the "Blurred Lines" verdict bothers me:  it bothers me because it plays into an ever-more-pervasive myth in this country that success is solely the product of original ideas and hard work.  Let me start by disabusing everyone of the notion that there is such a thing as an original idea.  Every artist, every musician, every chef, every inventor, every writer, every "maker" steals from someone-- usually multiple someones.  Marvin Gaye stole his ideas from someone.  Led Zeppelin stole their ideas from someone.  Elvis and The Beatles stole their ideas from someone, and the people they stole from stole their ideas from someone too.  The difference is that, back in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, musicians and music fans did not have instant access to practically every song ever recorded.  If a guitar player was into some old, obscure blues recordings, he or she could rip off those cats without any mainstream music fans being the wiser.  To be clear, however, it's not as if a derivative work just springs fully-formed from the head of Zeus.  What makes an artist an artist is the unique ability to amalgamate a variety of often disparate ideas, to churn them around in their mind, and to spit out a new thing ... a new thing that is based upon a bunch of old things but which is also greater than the sum of its parts.  Blatant copying of ideas does occur, to be sure.  For instance, when the producers of "Ghostbusters" couldn't get Huey Lewis to record the theme song, they hired an unknown L.A. studio musician (Ray Parker, Jr.) to duplicate Huey Lewis' sound.  Parker hit too close to the mark, and "Ghostbusters" ended up with the same bass line, note-for-note, as "I Want a New Drug."  Parker was sued successfully, and I understand why, but as a musician, I've listened carefully to "Blurred Lines" and "Got to Give It Up." I can't find any blatant note-for-note or chord-for-chord copying, and of course the lyrics are totally different.  I mean, listen to "Showdown" by ELO and then listen to "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" and then tell me that Jeff Lynne wasn't ripping off Marvin Gaye in much the same way.  The most you can say is that Pharrell and TI and Robin Thicke copied the "feel" of the song.  So what?  What songwriter hasn't copied the feel of another artist's song?  That's how it works, pretty much.  You don't just sit down in a room and say, "I want to write a song that sounds like Joe Schmoe."  You'll usually have a song that's in the form of a basic chord structure and lyrics, and when you sit down with a band, because of the product of the members' varied influences, you'll often spit out something that resembles the groove of some other song.  It's usually inadvertent.  Sometimes, even blatant plagiarism is inadvertent.  Billy Joel tells a story about how, when he first presented "Moving Out (Anthony's Song)" to his band, his band laughed at him, because he had inadvertently lifted the melody from Sedaka's "Laughter in the Rain."  Joel of course changed the melody of the song into its current form, but pay attention to the rhythmic structure of the lyrics.  It's still "Laughter in the Rain."  Some of you may also remember back in the 80s when John Fogerty was sued for plagiarizing himself.  His former record company still owned the rights to all of the CCR catalog, and they felt that "Old Man Down the Road" was too similar to "Run Through the Jungle" (which Fogerty also wrote but did not own the rights to.)

You see, competition is what makes any market-- including the music market-- healthy, but the ugly truth is that, in order for there to be healthy competition, you have to allow a bit of stealing to take place.  Our Founding Fathers understood that, which is why some of them were initially against having patents and copyrights at all.  They ultimately compromised and gave authors exclusive rights to their work for 14 years, renewable for another 14 years if the author was still alive.  This is a far cry, however, from the current copyright term of 120 years for corporations or the life of the author + 70 years for individuals.  Our Founding Fathers understood that, in order for ideas to flow freely, there needs to be a limit to how much you can milk them.  This is true not just for art but for business as well.  The more you prop up the old, big players, the more you prevent new, small players from entering the game.  Now, Pharrell and Robin Thicke are hardly small players, but the problem is that this decision sets precedent that is likely to hurt small players in the future.  It's already hard enough to write songs without inadvertently stepping on someone else's melody or chord structure (just note how many pop songs stole from Pachelbel.)  Now songwriters have to be careful to avoid stepping on someone else's "feel" as well?  The problem is:  every time we make copyright law more stringent, we are not empowering the small indie artists, because those artists aren't the ones who have the time and money to sue people.  We are empowering the big players.  We are helping the rich and famous stay rich and famous while making it harder for up-and-coming "makers" to achieve the same success.  We are allowing the previous generation to prevent the current generation from doing the same things they did.  Like I said-- every artist steals.  For an artist to say "you can't use that groove-- I invented it" is about as hypocritical as a business owner, who made millions on the backs of teachers and construction workers and police and firemen, to then turn around and say that we need to cut funding for those jobs.

In this case, it wasn't that the artist said anything-- he's dead.  His estate was already worth millions.  In this case, it was the family of the artist who sued.  In and of itself, that doesn't bother me as much as the thought that, given the history of recording industry shenanigans, the game is not likely to remain confined to those narrow parameters.  The major labels are hurting, and I could easily see one of them building upon this precedent to sue an indie artist such as Taylor Swift for stealing, for instance, the groove from Toni Basil's "Mickey" or some other old song to which the label owns the rights.  It's really easy for people to sit back and point fingers at the songwriters for their lack of originality, but anyone who says that has never tried to write a song.  Even before The Internet, it was pretty hard to string a handful of chords together in some form that someone else hadn't thought of before.  These days, however, even if you aren't intentionally borrowing a riff or a chord structure or a groove from another artist, then ten thousand people on the Internet will find some obscure artist that you sound like-- usually one you've never heard of.  Don't get me wrong-- I'm complimented when people do that, but only as long as no one sues me!

Like so many other things in this country, I feel that this decision will enable the old guard to further stack the deck against the new guard.  It's yet another example of why competition and a free market are not necessarily compatible ideas.  If you leave a market alone, it will eventually distill into a few big players (or even sometimes just one!), and the first thing that a big player will do is seek to eliminate competition, which means eliminating or absorbing the small players and merging with other big players.  Consumers love competition, but businesses hate it.  That's why there needs to always be a balance between pro-consumer and pro-business policies in order to keep markets healthy.  There needs to always be a balance between over-regulation and deregulation.  The unfortunate truth of the music business is that making copyright laws more stringent (over-regulation) is not helping the artists down in the trenches.  It's helping the Disneys and the Sonys of the world.  I believe that an artist absolutely deserves copyright protection for his/her work, but not beyond the artist's lifetime, and probably not even beyond 56 years (I personally am in favor of a 28-year term with a 28-year extension if the artist is still living.  That's the way the law was written up until 1976.)  We need public domain music and art and literature.  It's what creates a continuous thread of common culture, a "national canon" if you will.  It's what allowed Aaron Copland to create "Hoedown", for instance, or Disney to create just about every fairy tale movie they've ever created.  One could hardly say that Disney's "Cinderella" or Aaron Copland's "Hoedown" was "stolen", but each one of those works bore a lot more resemblance to its parent work than "Blurred Lines" bears to "Got to Give it Up."  And yet it is Disney who has lobbied for their copyrights to be extended to 120 years, in order to prevent others from doing exactly what they did.  It is big companies like that who have done their best to eliminate Fair Use, so even quoting and parody are not safe anymore.

Marvin Gaye died in 1984.  His work should be part of our national canon, right up there with Steven Foster.  New artists building upon his work to create new works is the greatest tribute we could ever give to the man, but who will dare to do that now?  Ironically, in an attempt to secure Marvin Gaye's lasting legacy, his family may have just ensured that he has none.  People aren't going to continue to listen to 70s recordings forever.  At some point, new generations will want new music to call their own, and if the older generations aren't willing to let the new generation co-opt some of their ideas, then those ideas will likely die.

Top Ten New Slogans for the Live Music Capital of the World

From the home office in Wahoo, Nebraska, the top ten new slogans for the Live Music Capital of the World:

10.  Austin Music:  All of the Competition of L.A. Without All That Pesky Money
9.  Austin Music:  A Lucrative Career Awaits You, As Soon As They Call You Back
8.  Austin Music:  Where $10,000/Year = Success
7.  Austin Music:  Couch Not Included
6.  Austin Music:  Hundreds of Places to Play.  No Places to Park.
5.  Austin Music:  Texas Music Has Moved to Hays County.  Sorry for the Inconvenience.
4.  Austin Music:  Not Just for Musicians Anymore
3.  Austin Music:  We're Full.  Try Denton.
2.  Austin Music:  Where the Music of Stevie Ray Vaughan Lives On ... Sort of Like Freddy Krueger

and the #1 new slogan for the Live Music Capital of the World:
1.  Austin Music:  Here's a Copy of My New Album.  Would You Like Fries With That?

Almost Famous

If you see an essay being forwarded around the Internet, something wise or witty or that tugs at the heart strings or otherwise speaks to some deep inner truth about the human condition, chances are that the famous person whose name appears at the bottom of the essay is not the person who actually wrote it.  Chances are that the person who actually wrote it is a struggling writer who really could use the exposure from people forwarding their work all over the world, but unfortunately someone along the way decided that a lie sells better than the truth.  Even more unfortunately, they were right, because at the end of the day, the people who forward these misattributed works are less interested in the flowery prose and more interested in the idea that someone they've heard of came up with it.

Signed,
Morgan Freeman

Keep Your Rants to Yourself

Dear rich or famous or semi-famous Americans,

I would just like to inform you that, in general, I don't give a crap what you believe about politics, religion, the state of the world, or anything else that does not pertain to the area of expertise for which you became rich or famous or semi-famous.  If you're a musician, then please confine your rants to the topic of music. If you make duck calls, then please confine your rants to the outdoors.  If you're in the food services industry, then please confine your rants to the topic of food and/or services.  If you're an actor, then please confine your rants to the topic of entertainment.  If you lack the ability to do that, then please don't expect me to be sympathetic if your off-topicness suddenly causes you to no longer be rich or famous or semi-famous.

Dear non-rich, non-famous, and non-semi-famous Americans,

I would just like to inform you that, in general, you give way too much of a crap about what rich, famous, and semi-famous Americans believe about politics, religion, the state of the world, or anything else that does not pertain to the area of expertise for which they became rich or famous or semi-famous.  Don't do that.  It only encourages them.

Forward Unto Dawn

"It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to forward a hoax on Facebook and remove all doubt." -- Mark Twain