Maureen Dowd’s reefer madness column is getting a lot of run recently. Mostly for this bit:

The caramel-chocolate flavored candy bar looked so innocent, like the Sky Bars I used to love as a child.

Sitting in my hotel room in Denver, I nibbled off the end and then, when nothing happened, nibbled some more. I figured if I was reporting on the social revolution rocking Colorado in January, the giddy culmination of pot Prohibition, I should try a taste of legal, edible pot from a local shop.

What could go wrong with a bite or two?

Everything, as it turned out.

Not at first. For an hour, I felt nothing. I figured I’d order dinner from room service and return to my more mundane drugs of choice, chardonnay and mediocre-movies-on-demand.

But then I felt a scary shudder go through my body and brain. I barely made it from the desk to the bed, where I lay curled up in a hallucinatory state for the next eight hours. I was thirsty but couldn’t move to get water. Or even turn off the lights. I was panting and paranoid, sure that when the room-service waiter knocked and I didn’t answer, he’d call the police and have me arrested for being unable to handle my candy.

I strained to remember where I was or even what I was wearing, touching my green corduroy jeans and staring at the exposed-brick wall. As my paranoia deepened, I became convinced that I had died and no one was telling me.

I’m a terrible cynic so my bullshit detector is flashing red while reading this. But, she is an old woman and potency is higher with food grade weed these days. We’re a long way from mixing in pot with the brownies. Perhaps this is an honest recital of her experience. In fairness, she does concede that her inexperience may have been the issue. Old age is most likely the bigger issue, but she can be forgiven for not acknowledging it.

Later in the column she sounds like the her parents circa 1968.

Colorado raked in about $12.6 million the first three months after pot was legalized for adults 21 and over. Pot party planners are dreaming up classy events: the Colorado Symphony just had its first “Classically Cannabis” fund-raiser with joints and Debussy. But the state is also coming to grips with the darker side of unleashing a drug as potent as marijuana on a horde of tourists of all ages and tolerance levels seeking a mellow buzz.

In March, a 19-year-old Wyoming college student jumped off a Denver hotel balcony after eating a pot cookie with 65 milligrams of THC. In April, a Denver man ate pot-infused Karma Kandy and began talking like it was the end of the world, scaring his wife and three kids. Then he retrieved a handgun from a safe and killed his wife while she was on the phone with an emergency dispatcher.

As Jack Healy reported in The Times on Sunday, Colorado hospital officials “are treating growing numbers of children and adults sickened by potent doses of edible marijuana” and neighboring states are seeing more stoned drivers.

I fully admit to being torn on the legalization issue. The zeal of libertarians on the issue has always turned me off. At the same time, the scolds on the right with their assertions about gateway drugs and “the children” fall flat with me. When you live in the sort of places I prefer to live, you know better.

Still, I can’t help but note the public reaction. Despite the fact Bill Buckley and National Review have been pro-legalization for fifty years, the Left has always claimed the Right is behind the war on drugs. Now, it is the old warhorses of the Left out wringing their hands over legalization. All those aging Boomers who used to love telling tales of their youthful experimentation are lecturing us about weed.

I look forward to her next column on how television rots the brain and rock and roll causes children to misbehave.

John Derbyshire calls the culture war a cold civil war. I like it, even though it is imperfect. In modern America, we have two groups of white people. One hates the other with the intensity of a thousand suns. The other can’t figure it out. This story in America’s Paper of Record is great example.

More than half the members of the City Council have fired off a letter to Walmart demanding that it stop making millions in charitable contributions to local groups here.

Twenty-six of the 51 members of the Council charged in the letter that the world’s biggest retailer’s support of local causes is a cynical ploy to enter the market here.

“We know how desperate you are to find a foothold in New York City to buy influence and support here,” says the letter, obtained by The Post and addressed to Walmart and the Walton Family Foundation.

“Stop spending your dangerous dollars in our city,” the testy letter demands. “That’s right: this is a cease-and-desist letter.”

That can only make sense when you have lost your marbles. These people hate WalMart so much they will deprive their own people of charity to make it clear how much they hate WalMart. Why do they hate WalMart? It’s southern!

Last week, Walmart announced that it distributed $3 million last year to charities here, including $1 million to the New York Women’s Foundation, which offers job training, and $30,000 to Bailey House, which distributes groceries to low-income residents.

Walmart, which has been thwarted by union-backed opposition for more than a decade, said the handouts “can make a difference on big issues like hunger relief and career development.”

The retail giant said its business agenda “aligns with supporting the local organizations that are important to our customers and associates.”

But Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito called the donations “toxic money,” and accused Walmart of waging a “cynical public-relations campaign that disguises Walmart’s backwards anti-job agenda.”

There’s a level of crazy that lies beyond the ability to comprehend. This lunatic is just spitting out all the scare words she can conjure. There was a time when this sort of behavior disqualified you from public office – even in New York City.

I love the British press. So much so I get most of my news about the world from them, rather than American sources. What does it for me is the irreverence. Reading the NYTimes or WaPo I get the feeling the writer filed his report while dismantling a bomb. There’s not much in the way of humor in our reporting. The Brits, on the other hand, will gladly mix tabloid nonsense with serious news on the same page.

This weird little story in the Independent is a great example of the devil may care habits of the British press.

In the latest episode of ‘Gwyneth Paltrow states the absolute ridiculous’, the actress has claimed that saying negative things to water can hurt its feelings.

The ‘consciously uncoupled’ star revealed that she follows the work of Japanese scientist Masaru Emoto, whose experiments attempt to investigate whether human consciousness has a direct effect on the molecular structure of water.

His theories go as far as to claim that shouting at rice – as one so frequently does – could turn it bad.

This is comedy gold, but it would never appear in an American paper. Our press cozies up to the powerful and famous. The Brits lampoon the rich and famous.

“I am fascinated by the growing science behind the energy of consciousness and its effects on matter,” Paltrow wrote in a blog post for her much derided clean living website GOOP.

“I have long had Dr Emoto’s coffee table book on how negativity changes the structure of water, how the molecules behave differently depending on the words or music being expressed around it.”

Handing over the keyboard to friend Dr Habib Sadeghi to explain what on earth she was talking about, he wrote: “Japanese scientist Masaru Emoto performed some of the most fascinating experiments on the effect that words have on energy in the 1990s.

GOOP?  Sure enough, it is a real site. I thought maybe it was an acronym for some British slang. She apparently runs or is the owner of an on-line boutique.

I know Gwyneth Paltrow is a famous person, but I’m not sure for what without looking it up. I’m terrible with remembering anything about celebrities. Her wiki page says she is “an American actress, singer, and food writer. She made her acting debut on stage in 1990 and started appearing in films in 1991.” I thought she was an actress, but I have no recollection of seeing her. Maybe that makes her a great actress or I just don’t pay enough attention.

Regardless, why in the world is she running an on-line store?

It gets even more weird when you look at her bio.

Paltrow was born in Los Angeles, California, and is the daughter of actress Blythe Danner and the late film producer/director Bruce Paltrow. Her father was Jewish and her mother is from a Christian background, and Paltrow was raised with “both Jewish and Christian holidays”. Her father’s Ashkenazi family immigrated from Belarusand Poland, while her mother’s ancestry is Pennsylvania Dutch (German) and white Barbadian (English). Paltrow’s paternal great-great-grandfather, whose surname was “Paltrowicz,” was a rabbi in Nowogród, Poland. Paltrow has a younger brother, Jake Paltrow, and is a half-cousin of actress Katherine Moennig, and a second cousin of former U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (AZ-08). Her uncle is opera singer and actor Harry Danner.

I’m going to assume that a woman who thinks you can  hurt the feeling of water is very far to the left in her politics. I don’t know enough about her to say for sure, but that would be my guess. Yet, her very carefully constructed wiki page is heavy on the race stuff. There’s some heavy duty signaling going on there.

Anyway, the rest of the story is pretty funny.

“In his experiments, Emoto poured pure water into vials labelled with negative phrases like ‘I hate you’ or ‘Fear’. After 24 hours, the water was frozen, and no longer crystallised under the microscope: It yielded grey, misshapen clumps instead of beautiful lace-like crystals.

“In contrast, Emoto placed labels that said things like ‘I love you’ or ‘Peace’ on vials of polluted water, and after 24 hours, they produced gleaming, perfectly hexagonal crystals.”

Her insightful post comes just a week after she compared dealing with internet trolls to being a survivor of war.

Speaking ahead of her appearance at the Code technology conference in California last Tuesday (27 May), she said: “You come across [comments] about yourself and about your friends, and it’s a very dehumanising thing. It’s almost like how, in war, you go through this bloody, dehumanising thing, and then something is defined out of it.”

“My hope is, as we get out of it, we’ll reach the next level of conscience,” she concluded.

Steve Sailer makes a strong case that IQ correlates with success. That may be true but the exceptions and outliers can be quite outlandish. Assuming Gwyneth Paltrow believes these things she is reported to have said, the women is as dumb as a post.

Earlier I commented upon the weirdness of Obama. Ralph Peters has a piece on NRO today that has a slightly different, but similar take.

Congratulations, Mr. President! And identical congrats to your sorcerer’s apprentice, National Security Adviser Susan Rice. By trying to sell him as an American hero, you’ve turned a deserter already despised by soldiers in the know into quite possibly the most-hated individual soldier in the history of our military.

I have never witnessed such outrage from our troops.

I don’t think this is too much of an exaggeration. Vets are apoplectic over this.

Exhibit A: Ms. Rice. In one of the most tone-deaf statements in White House history (we’re making a lot of history here), the national-security advisor, on a Sunday talk show, described Bergdahl as having served “with honor and distinction.” Those serving in uniform and those of us who served previously were already stirred up, but that jaw-dropper drove us into jihad mode.

But pity Ms. Rice. Like the president she serves, she’s a victim of her class. Nobody in the inner circle of Team Obama has served in uniform. It shows. That bit about serving with “honor and distinction” is the sort of perfunctory catch-phrase politicians briefly don as electoral armor.

The near total lack of military service is one problem. The greater problem is the lack of earthling experience. Look at the bio of Susan Rice. It is impressive and so far out of the norm that she may as well be from another country.

This is a fundamental culture clash. Team Obama and its base cannot comprehend the values still cherished by those young Americans “so dumb” they joined the Army instead of going to prep school and then to Harvard. Values such as duty, honor, country, physical courage, and loyalty to your brothers and sisters in arms have no place in Obama World. (Military people don’t necessarily all like each other, but they know they can depend on each other in battle — the sacred trust Bergdahl violated.)

This understates the differences. Lots of people skipped the military and went off to college. They live and work with people who made different choices. They have family members who made different choices. Few Americans have lived as a pampered, royal elite totally divorced from daily life in America. Susan Rice, like her boss, would end up under a bridge if not for the government. She is the ruling class and the ruling class is her.

President Obama did this to himself (and to Bergdahl). This beautifully educated man, who never tires of letting us know how much smarter he is than the rest of us, never stopped to consider that our troops and their families might have been offended by their commander-in-chief staging a love-fest at the White House to celebrate trading five top terrorists for one deserter and featuring not the families of those soldiers (at least six of them) who died in the efforts to find and free Bergdahl, but, instead, giving a starring role on the international stage to Pa Taliban, parent of a deserter and a creature of dubious sympathies (that beard on pops ain’t a tribute to ZZ Top). How do you say “outrageous insult to our vets” in Pashto?

This is the result of foreign rule. America has been colonized by these weird pod people who look like us, make noises that sound familiar, but otherwise they are nothing like us. America is ruled by foreigners.

Way back when Obama started to run for president, I was skeptical about his chances for a few reasons. The main reason was that he was a weirdo. The number of people you will meet, who are the son of an African immigrant, is small. The number of mixed race people in the country is tiny. The number of mixed race people raised in Indonesia and Hawaii is the set of one.

Then there are the odd things he says, like calling Hawaii Asia or not knowing the number of states. During the 2008 primary campaign, he repeatedly displayed an unfamiliarity with America that was striking. I’m not getting into the birther stuff. I just mean that the guy seemed to be a stranger. Pols always put on an act to seem like a regular fella. Obama works hard to act like a human familiar with our customs.

But, here are.

That’s what I think is at the heart of the Bergdahl fiasco. At first I thought it was a tempest in a teacup, but the furor is quite intense. Americans respect veterans so when they get pissed, they have our attention.

For all the yellow ribbons strewn across his hometown in Idaho and the gratitude expressed by his parents in an emotional visit to the White House on Saturday, it’s looking increasingly unlikely that Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl will receive a hero’s welcome when he returns to the United States after nearly five years in Taliban captivity.

From military forums across the country, a groundswell of anger is rising over the Obama administration’s silence on perhaps the most controversial question surrounding the deal that freed Bergdahl in exchange for five senior Taliban members: Was he a deserter?

I know a few vets of Afghanistan and they are livid. Apparently, this story has been percolating in veteran circles for years. Vets have the advantage of knowing how the military works, but also knowing how the politicians make the military work. They get it from both ends. It appears a lot of vets suspected a deal was coming. Now that the deal is official, the anger has spilled over into the general public.

Given the embarrassing behavior of the American media these days, it is truly shocking to see reports like this from the NYTimes. Here’s another critical report from The Hill. Then you have this negative portrayal of the creepy parents in the Washington Post. If Obama has managed to shock his most loyal followers, this deal has gone beyond unconventional.

The puzzle is why in the world would Obama sign off on this?

That’s what brings me back to the weirdo factor. To an American, a soldier who walked away from his post is hard to defend. One that joins the enemy is intolerable. We all know that. Some of us may have sympathy for the guy or blame his defects on larger issues, but even the most liberal American draws the line at helping the enemy. It is why Jane Fonda remains an object of revulsion for most people.

For Obama, none of this registers. Obama has put a lot of time and effort into showing the Muslim world he relates to them and respects them. This has been assumed to be in reaction to the cowboy tactics of Bush. Today it seems like Obama really does relate to the Muslim world more than he relates to America. He seems to have more respect for the Taliban, which he never fails to pronounce with a foreign accent, than he does the US military.

Presidents are usually strange ducks. Reagan had no friends and lived an unconventional life. He was thoroughly American. Clinton was a very strange man, but he was a familiar picaresque figure in southern politics. Even Poppy Bush was a familiar character on the American scene. Obama is a cross between vacuous French intellectual and African despot. He’s nothing like anyone you have ever known.

We have a deeply weird man in the White House and the results have followed.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/06/02/229148/anger-explodes-over-treatment.html#storylink=cpy

I saw this just now in my twitter feed.

While the tech industry has long aspired to be inclusive, the numbers are dismal. Hardly a week passes by without media outlets highlighting concerns about sexism, ageism or “founder profiling” in our industry.

The truth is that TechCrunch will not be able to solve the SF housing crisis or increase STEM education in inner-city schools. We can’t offer entrepreneurship classes in rural America or require VCs to screen founders without considering their gender.

But there are great organizations who can. And we aim to support them.

Today we’re excited to announce TechCrunch Include, which is a program designed to help social enterprises (nonprofit and for profit) working to make tech a more inclusive place. The program offers a year’s worth of access to TechCrunch resources — financial as well as media and events. Our mission is to help these enterprises increase their effectiveness on a variety of fronts, including fundraising, volunteers, partnerships and media attention.

Participants will receive a number of benefits, including free exhibition space and tickets to Disrupt and Hackathon events, free attendance at all other events, and assistance with media/press strategy. In addition, TechCrunch will commit a total of $50,000 a year (starting in 2015) in direct financial support to select participants. TechCrunch already awarded $50,000 this year to Girls Who Code.

Consider this our minimum viable product. As we learn more about how TechCrunch can leverage its strengths, we may add to or modify this list. Of course, we’re open to feedback and suggestions.

So who should apply? We’re open to all types of organizations, as long as the mission is related to increasing diversity in tech. You do not need to be based in San Francisco or even the U.S. to apply. In keeping with TC’s love for startups, we’re especially eager to find compelling groups with early traction that will really benefit from Include.

Though not said, all of the dog whistles are there. This is for non-white males. Why does Tech Crunch hate white guys?

Oh, right, never mind.

The application is interesting. In the diversity rackets, you have to know all of the buzzwords and code phrases if you going to be a playa. That’s what the free form comment boxes are for. If they flat out ask if you’re black or have a vagina, it spoils the fun. They don’t really want diversity after all. What they want is people who think and act just like SWPL, but with vaginas or brown skin.

I filled it out and in the comment boxes and put “I hate white people!” over and over along with a few “I hate heterosexuals!” and “I hate men” thrown in for variety. Fingers crossed!

The obvious defect of democracy is it gives the stupid a veto over the sensible. Organizing and manipulating the stupid is much easier than doing the same to the sensible. By definition the sensible have an understanding of how the world works, how their lives are effected by public policy and so forth.

The sensible tend to distrust politicians so it is always a challenge to fool most of these people even some of the time. The stupid, on the other hand, can be fooled most of the time without too much difficulty. Giving them the franchise is just asking for trouble.

A great deal of time and energy is expended by the sensible to keep the stupid from pulling the whole thing down on our heads. Here’s an example.

This progressive and expensive city struck a blow against rising income inequality Monday when the City Council voted unanimously to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, the highest municipal minimum of any metropolis in the country and the rallying cry of fast-food workers and union organizers nationwide.

With the council chambers standing room only and supporters waving signs declaring “Seattle needs a raise” and “$15 good work Seattle,” council members approved the new ordinance, which will go into effect on April 1, 2015, and be phased in over the next three to seven years depending on the size of the business.

In a controversial late addition to the original regulation, employers will be allowed to pay a lower training wage to teenagers.

I love the breathless coverage by the reporter. Yeah, raising the price of Starbucks coffee is really going to show the man who’s boss.

“Having a first city go to $15 is a big step,” said Ken Jacobs, chairman of the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education. “It breaks open that discussion elsewhere. I think we’re likely to see other cities follow suit…. We’re seeing a breakthrough to minimum wages at a level that weren’t considered possible just a couple of years ago.”

San Francisco is discussing raising its minimum to $15, Jacobs said, and Los Angeles is looking at $15 for hotel workers. San Diego is mulling a $13-an-hour wage and Oakland is considering $12.25. Seattle’s current minimum is the state-mandated $9.32, the highest of any state. (The federal minimum is $7.25.)

The push for a $15 minimum transformed the November elections here and brought Seattle its first socialist elected official in nearly a century, City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant. During her grass-roots campaign, Sawant pushed for the purest form of the new wage — $15 an hour, implemented immediately and granted evenly to everyone.

This is the argument against immigration. Kshama Sawant, according to her bio, immigrated from India and is now a professional pest. Were were short of pests at the time she came here? I doubt it. She should be back in India looking under her desk for cobras. Instead, she is another barnacle on the hull of the nation.

On Monday, she introduced several amendments to change the ordinance, seeking to force big businesses to pay the higher wage sooner and to strip out the training wage. As each amendment failed, the angry audience shouted: “Shame! Shame! Shame!”

“Seattle is setting the stage for future movements,” Sawant said. “Seattle will be the place with the highest minimum wage in the country. But how will we expect workers in other cities to fight big business if we don’t set the right tone?

I get home the other night and in the mail box was the latest Time magazine. I’m not a subscriber. The name on the front is unfamiliar and the address is not even close to mine. I did not think about it until throwing some crap away last night. Almost all of my mail is junk these days. My bills come via the miracle of the Internet. No one sends letters anymore. That leaves a few magazines and mountains of junk mail. I pile it up and when the spirit moves I sort through it.

The Time website is unnavigable so I can’t link the cover or even find it. This article from the LATimes has a pic of the cover. I would not have bothered to look at it if not the obvious fact the person on the cover is a tranny and the word “transgender” on the front. I no longer watch television so I’m going to guess that they are starting to fill up the roles with trannies, much like they filled up shows with flaming homosexual men a few years ago. One night of TV and you see more homosexual males than you meet in lifetime.

I’ve seen exactly three trannies in my life. One was a very tall and muscular black guy that frequented a coffee shop near my office. He was at least 6’5″ in heels and built like a linebacker. Everyone would freak out seeing this giant black dude in drag so that was always good for a few laughs. The other two were in Key West. I was walking around and passed by a tranny club of some sort. Two of them dressed as Marilyn Monroe were manning the door, so to speak. I’ve been on earth a long time and seen a lot of things. If I’ve met three trannies, I’m thinking the numbers are microscopic in terms of population.

That said, the tranny has become the dividing line between two groups of people. One the one hand we have liberal white people who engage in all sorts of magical thinking about the world, including things like biology and physics. They think someone can change their sex if they choose to do it. They think evolution stopped 50,000 years ago and that all humans are exactly the same. They think putting a dumb person in school long enough will make them smart. These things not only contradict accepted science, they contradict objective reality. They disbelieve and curse their lying eyes.

On the other side of the line is another group of believers. These folks believe in conventional religions, nationalism, fraternity and so forth. In the case of religion, they accept it may contradict science, but not in important ways that alter the functioning of society. In the case of nationalism, they know there’s no good reason to feel the way they do when the national anthem is played, but they accept it and relish it. In other words, these folks believe in things because they appear to make life more pleasant, their societies more successful and the future more palatable.

That would be the end of it if the first group of people did not hold the second group in such contempt that they wanted to kill them. The magical thinking crowd has not committed to the actual killing of the latter group, but they do want to kill all the stuff they believe. They want to stamp out Christianity, love of country and all of the things normal people think are important.

The great battle between these two camps of believers is what shapes our times. The fact that the fault line is the waist line will one day be great fodder for a wise cracking historian. The first group’s sudden embrace of deranged men in drag is based solely on the belief that the second group find this disgusting. If Evangelicals were to embrace homosexual marriage and drag queens, the first group of whites would make unholy war on gays and trannies.

The trouble for the “normals”, as I call the second group, is they keep hoping the fanatics, as I call the first group, will relent. They will never relent. The fanatics will continue to attack the normals until the normals are all dead. Then the fanatics will attack other groups of fanatics they deem insufficiently fanatical. This will repeat itself until the whole thing collapses on itself.

Maybe at some point normals will come to recognize this and join the fight. I don’t know. In my lifetime it has not happened or shown many signs of happening. In the 1980′s it looked like the nation finally snapped out of it and was ready to shrug off Cultural Marxism, but it was not the case. The fanatics were back in force by the 1990′s and every white guy was being marched off to diversity camp for re-education.

The smart bet in the Tranny Wars is on bearded weirdos demanding and winning the right to take your sons into the woods unsupervised as camp counselors.

This story in the NYTimes is becoming common.

Five months after Colorado became the first state to allow recreational marijuana sales, the battle over legalization is still raging. Law enforcement officers in Colorado and neighboring states, emergency room doctors and legalization opponents increasingly are highlighting a series of recent problems as cautionary lessons for other states flirting with loosening marijuana laws.

Everyone who had been making big money from the war on weed is screaming bloody murder about legalization. There are legitimate arguments against some of this, but the general tone suggests the prohibitionists are unlikely to make them.

There is the Denver man who, hours after buying a package of marijuana-infused Karma Kandy from one of Colorado’s new recreational marijuana shops, began raving about the end of the world and then pulled a handgun from the family safe and killed his wife, the authorities say. Some hospital officials say they are treating growing numbers of children and adults sickened by potent doses of edible marijuana. Sheriffs in neighboring states complain about stoned drivers streaming out of Colorado and through their towns.

“I think, by any measure, the experience of Colorado has not been a good one unless you’re in the marijuana business,” said Kevin A. Sabet, executive director of Smart Approaches to Marijuana, which opposes legalization. “We’ve seen lives damaged. We’ve seen deaths directly attributed to marijuana legalization. We’ve seen marijuana slipping through Colorado’s borders. We’ve seen marijuana getting into the hands of kids.”

One of the features of the modern social welfare state is official lying. By that I mean people telling obvious lies, but everyone pretending they are just alternative opinions. Calling your organization “Smart Approaches to Marijuana”, when you’re clearly not smart or interested in anything other than prohibition, is an obvious lie. What Kevin Sabet goes onto to say is clearly made up nonsense that no adult would ever believe.

Yet, here we are with the NYTimes treating this crook like a legitimate source of knowledge.

Despite such anecdotes, there is scant hard data. Because of the lag in reporting many health statistics, it may take years to know legal marijuana’s effect — if any — on teenage drug use, school expulsions or the number of fatal car crashes.

It was only in January, for example, that the Colorado State Patrol began tracking the number of people pulled over for driving while stoned. Since then, marijuana-impaired drivers have made up about 1.5 percent of all citations for driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

Proponents of legalization argue that the critics are cherry-picking anecdotes to tarnish a young industry that has been flourishing under intense scrutiny.

The vast majority of the state’s medical and recreational marijuana stores are living up to stringent state rules, they say. The stores have sold marijuana to hundreds of thousands of customers without incident. The industry has generated $12.6 million in taxes and fees so far, though the revenues have not matched some early projections.

Marijuana supporters note that violent crimes in Denver — where the bulk of Colorado’s pot retailers are — are down so far this year. The number of robberies from January through April fell by 4.8 percent from the same time in 2013, and assaults were down by 3.7 percent. Over all, crime in Denver is down by about 10 percent, though it is impossible to say whether changes to marijuana laws played any role in that decline.

That’s not a lot to go on, but at least it is honest. Maybe the NYTimes highlighted the hysterical nonsense as a way to support the legalization case. It is hard to know. Propaganda sheets like the Times are expert at this sort of subtle campaigning.

If I were to guess, I’d say the potheads are winning right now. They are handing the pols money in the form of new taxes. They have avoided any trouble, which keeps the suburban moms off their back. Most important, their critics sound foolish. Being blessed by the right enemies is always the key to winning public debate.

I’m not enthusiastic about legalization, but I was never enthusiastic about prohibition. I’d prefer a world where people did not smoke pot. It makes you stupid and it causes you to think idleness is a good thing. That said, it is not going to bring down civilization if some people smoke pot. There are other ways to discourage bad behavior that don’t require the state shooting citizens and locking them in cages. Just look at cigarettes.

Still, there are trade-offs to everything. We don’t know what else comes with legalizing weed, but we do know something does come with it.

Being a nerd has become the cool kid thing to be. A few years back I heard a Washington parasite call one of the big press events a “nerd ball” because it attracted all of the “policy wonks” in DC. The fact that few of these people can do basic mathematics does not matter.

They wear the right costumes and strike the right pose so they can pretend to be bookish nerds. All of my liberal friends pretend to be science geeks, even though none of them have any background in science.

But, fads are what they are and no group is more faddish than the Left. The trouble with this one is that incredibly stupid ideas get passed around like settled science, to use a common refrain. Here’s a good example from Tech Crunch, a site that caters to the fake nerd crowd.

Here’s an idea crazy enough that it just might work: Pave the streets with solar-powered panels that have their own built-in heat and LED lights. That’s what Scott and Julie Brusaw hope to accomplish with their ongoing Solar Roadways project, which they just funded through a hugely popular crowdfunding campaign.

The husband-and-wife team has spent the better part of the last decade developing solar-powered modular panels that could be installed in roadways and parking lots, and would be able to collect power from the sun. Those panels could also keep streets clear of snow and ice, while illuminating them with LEDs.

Rather than paving streets and driveways with asphalt, the Solar Roadways panels would theoretically be able to decrease our nation’s dependence on fossil fuels by generating massive amounts of clean energy. Panels are made from ruggedized glass and connect to one another through a mesh network, so that even if one panel fails the system will notify repair crews that it needs to be replaced.

Actually, the theory is nonsense. Asphalt is black and that means it absorbs sunlight readily. The light is converted into heat, which is why the road is smoking hot in the middle of summer. It is also why the snow melts away even when it is below freezing, once the road is exposed. The road is converting close to 100% of the sunlight into heat.

Solar panels, on the other hand, convert about 15% of sunlight into electricity. For that reason alone you have a huge loss of energy using solar panels instead of asphalt.

Then you have the issue of storage. If you want to use solar to light the roads, then you have to store the energy because lighting them in the daytime is stupid. That means batteries. They have a loss of energy, but they also cost a boatload of money and have to be replaced regularly.

We’re not even at the hard parts. Building a road from solar panels would require new materials capable of handling the massive abuse that comes from being driven over by trucks and cars. Those materials could not be smooth as the cars would fly off the roads in the rain.

Anyone with a mastery of basic science would spot this as nonsense, but the fake nerd trend means these people get to con a bunch of fake nerds into “crowdfunding” their alchemy.