The Off Topic Topic

[Liep]

26 ministers? Merkel's last cabinet had 15. What do you do with the excess ministers?

They relax for 2 years on full minister-pay and then seek jobs in the private sector, or retire. Why we have an inflation in the number of ministries I don't know, though I suspect that this time it was to appease the coalition partners request for posts.

[Grey Fox]

26 ministers? Merkel's last cabinet had 15. What do you do with the excess ministers?

Just 26? Just 15?!

Canada's Federal Government has 39, and some of them have more than 1 ministry.
Quebec's Government has 26, also with some of them handling more than 1 ticket.

[Malthus]

26 ministers? Merkel's last cabinet had 15. What do you do with the excess ministers?

I have some suggestions ... 

[PDH]

26 ministers? Merkel's last cabinet had 15. What do you do with the excess ministers?

I have some suggestions ... 

It's always about feeding them to the giant bugs for you, isn't it?

[Malthus]

Well, why didn't they make it illegal?

Serious answer? It was a pre-existing use of the White dudes who wrote the laws in the first place.

There are really two recreational drugs that White folks seriously identified as part of their culture at the turn of the 20th century, when drug legislation first came into being: booze and tobacco. Of the two, booze was seen as by far the worse, tobacco as basically harmless - as drunks cause a lot more obvious trouble than smokers.

Other drugs, like pot and opium, were associated with peddlers of patent medicines (basically, fraudsters), black folks and mexicans (pot) or scary orientals (opium). All undesireable characters who ought to be crushed.

There never was any attempt to objectively measure the harms of various drugs, their addictive potential, etc. If there was, tobacco would certainly have been banned - but that was simply not politically possible where so large a percentage of the population were smokers.

[CountDeMoney]

Other drugs, like pot and opium, were associated with peddlers of patent medicines (basically, fraudsters), black folks and mexicans (pot) or scary orientals (opium). All undesireable characters who ought to be crushed.

OK, I'll bite:  what were the other drugs at the turn of the 20th century that weren't pot and opium?

[Grey Fox]

Coke, Heroin.

[CountDeMoney]

Coke, Heroin.

Was cocaine and its variants really even considered a drug at the time?  I thought it was more like a "miracle ingredient" that made you all chatty and twist the end of your hair with your finger.

[Razgovory]

Coke, Heroin.

Was cocaine and its variants really even considered a drug at the time?  I thought it was more like a "miracle ingredient" that made you all chatty and twist the end of your hair with your finger.

They still use it for eye medication I believe.

[Malthus]

Other drugs, like pot and opium, were associated with peddlers of patent medicines (basically, fraudsters), black folks and mexicans (pot) or scary orientals (opium). All undesireable characters who ought to be crushed.

OK, I'll bite:  what were the other drugs at the turn of the 20th century that weren't pot and opium?

Cocaine and morphine. Heroin - that was originally marketed by Bayer at the turn of the century as a cure for morphine addiction (!) and as a cough medicine (!!). 

Cocaine got a bad rep for the same reason as opiates initially - that it was peddled as a cure-all in various patent medicines, and eventually, taken up recreationally. Unlike opium or pot, it wasn't associated particularly with the whole racial issue. 

Thing is though, if one lined the drugs up and measured them objectively, tobacco would rate as deserving of being in a similar category as the very worst drugs, legally. In some respects - tobacco is notoriously mentally addictive, it's about as bad in that respect as heroin (though obviously heroin is far worse in terms of physical addiction). Also, if you are a smoker, chances are very good you will die because of it, eventually (if you are an illegal user of heroin, your chances are of course far greater of dying of an overdose or of complications from injections).

[Liep]

So Kim Jong-un had his uncle executed, and in the article I read about it this was little tidbid: "Earlier this year he had his ex girlfriend executed, but people speculate that it was ordered by his now girlfriend. Both women have been members of the same band."

Wtf is going on in that country?

[derspiess]

Was just reading about that.  Kim Jong Un just seems like a dude you don't want to ever have been very close to.

[Liep]

Our just appointed Foreign Minister has been called to a hearing for telling his predecessor "...so if you can't visit, then you can dream yourself away to a Cuban paradise" while giving him a Bueno Vista Social Club cd as a going away present.

The hearing is about how he can call Cuba a paradise. Yay, politics!

[Capetan Mihali]

[fhdz]

My god, that's brilliant.