Winter is over.  Spring is here, and summer is just around the corner.  This is the perfect soundtrack for the season.  Stupid happy music FTW!

I just stumbled across this method to infuse vodka with skittles.  It looks relatively easy, if a little time consuming (there’s some filtering involved).  The results look delicious, and may be the next replacement for jello shots at parties.

I have to make it public. It’s suppose to be secret, however most people in Austin, Tx knows about it. The police department has machine that can read your mind. It can also change the way you feel. Sexual impulses, anger, and causing you to feel fear paranoia, basically anyway they would like to feel. This means it can cause a girl or boy to feel sexual. So sexual that they will have sex with strangers. This is just like rape. This is just one crime they commit with this machine. A machine that can read someone’s mind will be used to violate everyones civil rights. Ideas and secrets about company will be stolen by their competition with ease. People will be spied on in there homes, without a warrant. (this means someone will be able to watch you during intimacy without your knowledge.) There are a lot of people all over the United States knowing about this machine and the police department being able to use it. Start thinking about how the government has given the police department a weapon to commit not only one of the biggest civil rights violations of all time, but to commit war crimes such as rape and interrogation without the knowledge of the victim. I know it is hard to believe however if you happen to know someone in the police department, just ask if they have this machine. After that, I would also like people to think about how we are able to get the government to stop letting the police department violate civil rights and commit war crimes against there own citizens.

It’s hard to choose which of the many great songs to choose from to showcase the Fantastischen Vier, Germany’s first successful hiphop group.  Der Picknicker is also great, as are many of their older things.  Troy came out a few years ago and was an instant classic, and it has a great beat to match the MC’s.  There is some great and tricky wordplay in the song, but non-German listeners will still be able to appreciate the song for what it is.  Good stuff!

Ridiculing conservatives’ obsession with gauging the Obama presidency based upon the performance of the DOW Jones index, Nate Silver notes that the market is now above where it was when Obama took office.

Well, two can play that game, of course. So here’s another one for you. How much money would you have today if you’d placed $1000.00 in the DOW when Obama recommended buying stocks, on March 3 of this year?

The answer: $1112.99

Following Obama’s advice you’d have made a 11% return on your investment in just over two weeks. Not bad. I think we’ve found Jim Cramer’s replacement should the Mad Money guru decide to call it a day.

Nowadays the UN Office on Drugs and Crime no longer talks about a drug-free world. Its boast is that the drug market has “stabilised”, meaning that more than 200m people, or almost 5% of the world’s adult population, still take illegal drugs—roughly the same proportion as a decade ago. (Like most purported drug facts, this one is just an educated guess: evidential rigour is another casualty of illegality.) The production of cocaine and opium is probably about the same as it was a decade ago; that of cannabis is higher. Consumption of cocaine has declined gradually in the United States from its peak in the early 1980s, but the path is uneven (it remains higher than in the mid-1990s), and it is rising in many places, including Europe.

This is not for want of effort. The United States alone spends some $40 billion each year on trying to eliminate the supply of drugs. It arrests 1.5m of its citizens each year for drug offences, locking up half a million of them; tougher drug laws are the main reason why one in five black American men spend some time behind bars. In the developing world blood is being shed at an astonishing rate. In Mexico more than 800 policemen and soldiers have been killed since December 2006 (and the annual overall death toll is running at over 6,000). This week yet another leader of a troubled drug-ridden country—Guinea Bissau—was assassinated.

Yet prohibition itself vitiates the efforts of the drug warriors. The price of an illegal substance is determined more by the cost of distribution than of production. Take cocaine: the mark-up between coca field and consumer is more than a hundredfold. Even if dumping weedkiller on the crops of peasant farmers quadruples the local price of coca leaves, this tends to have little impact on the street price, which is set mainly by the risk of getting cocaine into Europe or the United States.

Nowadays the drug warriors claim to seize close to half of all the cocaine that is produced. The street price in the United States does seem to have risen, and the purity seems to have fallen, over the past year. But it is not clear that drug demand drops when prices rise. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that the drug business quickly adapts to market disruption. At best, effective repression merely forces it to shift production sites. Thus opium has moved from Turkey and Thailand to Myanmar and southern Afghanistan, where it undermines the West’s efforts to defeat the Taliban.