Biden White House Sandbags Staffers, Sidelines Dozens for Pot Use

Dozens of young White House staffers have been suspended, asked to resign, or placed in a remote work program due to past marijuana use, frustrating staffers who were pleased by initial indications from the Biden administration that recreational use of cannabis would not be immediately disqualifying for would-be personnel, according to three people familiar with the situation.

The policy has even affected staffers whose marijuana use was exclusive to one of the 14 states—and the District of Columbia—where cannabis is legal. …

In some cases, staffers were informally told by transition higher-ups ahead of formally joining the administration that they would likely overlook some past marijuana use, only to be asked later to resign.

Huh. I have some difficulty in understanding just what the Biden administration thinks they’re going to achieve here. It seems unlikely that they’re going to turn the staffers who just got stabbed in the back into even more devoted servants of the cause. A hatred of pot smoking seems unlikely to be widespread among modern Democratic Socialists and shanking a bunch of low-level staffers isn’t going to buy the Administration any brownie points with the weak and ineffectual Republicans. So… WTF.

Whiteness Is a Pandemic

Whiteness is a public health crisis. It shortens life expectancies, it pollutes air, it constricts equilibrium, it devastates forests, it melts ice caps, it sparks (and funds) wars, it flattens dialects, it infests consciousnesses, and it kills people…

White supremacy is a virus that, like other viruses, will not die until there are no bodies left for it to infect. Which means the only way to stop it is to locate it, isolate it, extract it, and kill it.

Man wanted by police arrested near residence of Vice President Kamala Harris, gun and ammo found in car

A guy wanted in Texas was arrested near the Vice Presidents residence in D.C. The police said he had “AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, 113 rounds of unregistered ammunition, and five 30 round magazines.” Now, beyond the head-scratcher that is “unregistered ammunition,” there’s this small detail: the gun and ammo were in his car… “parked in a garage several miles away near the Washington Convention Center.”

Ummm… he was going to assassinate someone using a gun *miles* away?

But hey. Conveniently just in time for those all-important gun control bills, amiright?

“System Error” is an amusing little short movie about an AI coming to awareness. Definitely worth a few minutes.

The very lean backstory is that aliens showed up on Earth and either shared or imposed advanced AI technology. 54 years later, everyone seems to wear the same Metropolis-like work clothes, wear fully exposed ID badges that serve as debit cards and consume standardized food products, sold by robotic tellers. But at one point a hint is dropped that the robot here was created in 1985, indicating that the aliens actually landed in about 1931. Thus this isn’t a future dystopia, but an alternate history. Perhaps one where the aliens land at the height of the Great Depression and due to politics and bad timing impose a Soviet-style regime of blandness on mankind (though obviously money is still a thing).

Ghana will no longer export cocoa to Switzerland

Ghana wants to stop exporting raw cocoa, and instead export finished chocolate. According to THIS, Ghana is responsible for 57% of Switzerlands cocoa, so this would pose a serious issue for the Swiss chocolate industry (and probably a lot of other countries chocolate industries as well, since Ghana produces 45% of the worlds cocoa…though Wiki says they’re responsible for only 18%). Ghana is of course taking a risk: if their home grown chocolate sucks, then they will have spent a lot building infrastructure, will have lost raw cocoa sales, and won’t sell much processed chocolate. Even if it doesn’t suck, it won’t be Swiss chocolate, and that matters to a lot of people for whom this sort of thing matters.

One is left to wonder what the Swiss will do. They import north of 44,000 tons of cocoa, and would have to start looking for alternative sources. Ecuador and Mexico and the like would probably want to step up, unless they, too, decide that processing it locally makes sense.

Growing the cocoa there in Switzerland seems unlikely due to the cocoa tree being a distinctly tropical plant. Still: it might make sense to try for local production. It might make sense for Switzerland to not only try growing cocoa trees in hothouses (possibly in warrens of tunnels carved through the hills and mountains), but also via hydroponics, though genetic manipulation (get coca beans growing on vines or something, or from mutant peanut or taters, I dunno) or even purely synthetically. If Switzerland can pull this off, they’ll be not only independent of reliance upon volatile third world imports and politics, they’ll have new agricultural technologies and techniques to sell. The developed world could, say, turn skyscrapers into high-tech farms for the production of spices and such that are currently produced only in equatorial regions. At last the modern world could divorce itself from dependency upon the third world, not only ending the need to send them our money, but also ending the heartache of the poverty stricken folks of the undeveloped countries knowing that evil westerners are appropriating their cultures. Imagine the joy that would spread through the cocoa farmers of Ghana as they saw their exports of cocoa dry up utterly, their farms returning to a state of nature, as they know that they are no longer participating in the evil Europeans appropriation of Aztec culture.

A notion: an early product of asteroid mining could be Island Three habitats given over entirely to the production of “luxury” raw agricultural materials. There would have to be a thriving trade in water and carbon and such going *to* the habs to counter the raw materials going down, but this would only serve to make space flight all that much cheaper. A secondary – and probably necessary – product of the asteroid mining would be the silica processed out of the asteroids. This could be dropped from low orbit in the form of “cannonballs” a meter or two in diameter as a gentle incentive for the refugee boats full of starving Ghanaian cocoa farmers to turn back.

The Swiss chocolate industry is already in trouble enough thanks to the Pinko Pox, with revenues down more than 10%. That works out to a loss of more than $400 million… and that’s based just on a decrease in tourism. Imagine what it’ll be when their supply of cocoa starts getting rather thin. Billions of dollars could fund some interesting new technologies, all of which would be useful not only for chocolatiers but for modern mankind as a whole. The daily Lindt-SpaceX shuttle to the ChocoHab in geosynchronous orbit could make for an inspiring sight.