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This is possibly the most important video on marijuana legalization I have ever seen, or will ever see (outside of the notification that marijuana has been legalized – if that day comes in my lifetime).
I don’t care if you link back to my site, I don’t care if you tell people whose blog you found this on, just show people this video.
Lawrence O’Donnell, former chief of Staff for the Senate Finance Committee, on MSNBC, has something to say. I urge you to listen.

Penn Jillette Doing What He Does Best – Talk

Generally speaking I admire Penn Jillette for a couple of reasons. The one I admire him most for is his uncompromising and well-reasoned world-view (although we definitely disagree on some subjects). Here he is, making more of his thought-process and wisdom available. This time, it’s on religion, politicians, and religious behavior of elected officials.

Again with the graphs ^^

So I was bopping around the nets, and I found this nifty little graph about how economists calculate income distribution (which is another way of saying ‘how wide the gap is between rich and poor people’) in any given country. Take a look, HERE.

I happened to notice that there were quite a few comments… *sighs* and most of them were political.

How, I hear you ask, can anyone in politicise an educational graphic about math?

I’ll tell you.

The three example countries picked to show off the differences between countries with high, low, and median income distributions, were America, Namibia, and Sweden.

According to the math at the time the graphic was published, Sweden had the lowest income distribution in the world (in other words, least difference between the richest and poorest people), the U.S. had a middle-high distribution, and Namibia had the world’s highest.

Of course, any time America isn’t the absolute best at anything, things get political. *rolls eyes*

So, because I had a moment, I posted there, and I’ll post here, too, just exactly what is wrong with making a political judgement about a mathematical/scientific tool :

You know, I hate to feed trolls, but let me respond really quickly to some of the comments left here by those seeking to politicize science.

1) – You’re politicizing science. Bad. Bad boy/girl. Drop it. No biscuit. Bad.

2) – Even if I agreed with your particular political cant, I wouldn’t agree with the idea of saying that a scientific tool is ‘useful’ or ‘not useful’, ‘good’ or ‘bad’ based upon how closely the results of using the tool resemble the political doctrine espoused by your leaning. That’s just not good science.

3) This infographic isn’t good or bad in and of itself; it just explains facts that economists around the world agree on, and explains (in brief) the method those economists used to agree with each other.

4) Those economists (like any scientist) had to look past their own personal political agenda to see where the data took them. why can’t you?
Okay, I’m done.