There is much debate about the idea of legalizing marijuana, but in the end, the justifications as to why it is illegal are simply wrong. One of the most common arguments as to why marijuana should be illegal is that it is a gateway drug. There are two reason why this is wrong.

1) Causation Fallacy

Any politician, individual, or even medical association making this claim are wrong. Simple logic shows that labeling marijuana as a ‘gateway drug’ is misguided.

While it is true that many people that do cocaine have also done marijuana, it does not mean that smoking marijuana causes one to do cocaine. This is a causation fallacy.

There is also a correlation between runners and people that eat healthy. But that does not mean one causes the other. The correlation is a result of the fact that healthy people tend to do both. Similar to drugs, it is the person’s personality or lifestyle that will lead them to do both marijuana and cocaine.

2) The Law Creates the Gateway Affect

Much like there exists a positive correlation between marijuana and cocaine use, there is also a correlation between people that use protein powder (or other supplements) to build muscle and people that take illegal steroids. However, the correlation between protein and steroids is much lower than the marijuana-cocaine correlation even though steroids are much more effective. Why would the correlation be so much less when looking at these two examples?

It is simple: There is a clearly defined separation between using protein powder and steroids - the law. If a law was passed making protein powder was illegal, it would take away this legal separation between protein powder and steroids. So if someone wanted to do something as minor as take protein powder, they would have less of a disincentive to do steroids, since both options are illegal. It narrows the ap between the two options making it more likely a person choosing to do one option would also do the other.

It is not the fact that marijuana is a gateway to cocaine use, it is the act of making it illegal that creates a gateway.

Marijuana Laws

Society is not against marijuana. It has been proven not to be associated with increased cancer risk and is likely less harmful than fast food. Plus, it is readily accepted, especially when you consider 94 million Americans have tried it. It causes much more harm to society by making it illegal.

By making marijuana illegal, politicians create many more problems:

• The act of making marijuana illegal leads to an increase in crime and violence (did we learn nothing from alcohol prohibition?)
• It decreases our resources for enforcement of other laws (including cracking down on harder drugs)
• It increases society’s burden to deal with people convicted of using marijuana (10 million Americans)
• It results in a massive decrease in potential revenue from taxes and farm income ($23 billion annually for the US economy).

This post is not to meant inspire individuals to stand up and fight for marijuana legalization - you likely already had a stance on the topic. Rather, it is meant to educate you so you can call out politicians that try to feed the public pure BS with no regard for the good of the public and only care about their perception in public.

I challenge any politician to make a logical argument as to why marijuana should be illegal. You will lose.

Let me get this straight. George Brett had a home run recalled because he had some extra pine tar on his bat, but Bonds is allowed to hold the home run record while on steroids?

Fan favorite Barry Bonds has now tied Hank Aaron atop the list of one of the highest regarded records in all of sports. We would like to take a minute to congratulate Bonds on his steroid induced record. Just because he was pumped with enough steroids to fuel the East Germany Women’s Swim team for over ten years, doesn’t mean these accomplishments shouldn’t be celebrated.

We want to nominate prima donnas from all sports. MLB is going to celebrate Bonds cheating his way to this record. So we want to nominate other athletes who have used some less than conventional techniques to success, so that they too may be celebrated in their achievements.

1) Roise Ruiz should reclaim her Boston Marathon victory. She merely improvised and took a shortcut, the subway, on her way to ‘winning’ the 1980 Boston Marathon. But apparently it doesn’t matter how you get the results, as long as you achieve them.

2) Danny Almonte shouldn’t have to give up his perfect game in the Little League World Series. He was really only a couple of years older than the kids he was pitching to. I mean, when he is 36, they will be 34, and then the age difference doesn’t seem so bad. Besides, it’s not that you are all at the same age, but that you are all at the same skill level that is important.

3) There is no need for the University of Oklahoma football team to forfeit their wins from 2005. Sure, your star quarterback, Rhett Bomar and others were being paid thousands of dollars for work they never did at a car dealership. Who cares? He was just ‘exploring options’ outside of football. And apparently he had quite the ROI on it as well. Just because he wasn’t the one doing the work doesn’t mean it didn’t get done, and that’s really the point.

4) The University of Minnesota Men’s basketball team should have their awards and titles from 1993-1999 reinstated. Just because your office manager wrote over 400 papers for at least 20 Gophers shouldn’t be cause for such harsh punishment. It’s too cold up there to be forced to write your own papers anyway.

5) Ben Johnson should still have his records and gold medals. Bonds has proven there is no reason steroids shouldn’t prevent you from holding records. Maybe we can reach an agreement by just putting an asterisk on the gold medal?

6) Tonya Harding will have her 1994 US Championship title back. There is nothing wrong with thuggery in sports. If Bonds has taught us anything, it is that if someone is better than you, beating them by playing by the rules is for suckers. It is much smarter to take a crow bar to their knee, for example.

7) George O’Leary is to be reinstated as Notre Dame head coach. Just because he claimed on his resume that he received a Masters from a school where he never graduated, and received a letter in football at a school where he never played game, there is no reason to punish him. Actually doing these things himself would have just been to stressful and time consuming.

So congratulations Mr. Bonds, you have found yourself in good company. And in a matter of days you will hold the home run record for at least a few years, until Alex Rodriguez breaks it, legally.

If you ever wished you could be a professional sports league commissioner you may want to change your mind, unless of course that league would be the NHL whose only problem is lack of any kind of support. With the recent problems involving Michael Vick, Barry Bonds breaking the home run record, and Tim Donaghy helping to cover the over/under on NBA games for the past two seasons I wouldn’t want to take their place for anything.

Michael Vick came out early on in the investigation of a dog fighting ring that was found on his property in Virginia. Two days ago he was told by Commissioner Roger Goodell not to report to training camp. How long this quasi suspension will be is yet to be determined but the case could take as long as a year? The plaintiff in the case rarely loses cases just to keep that in mind.

Where is Bud Selig? Well for one thing he is not in San Francisco where Barry Bonds is a mere two homeruns shy of tying Hank Aaron and three away from a new mark. With the absence of the Commissioner of baseball missing in action you have to wonder if MLB will even celebrate the feat. When Hank Aaron broke the record the game was stopped and he spoke to the crowd right in the middle of the game. I think the baseball world can’t wait until this over and neither can Selig. My only wish is that he breaks it on the road.

This brings us to commissioner number three. David Stern spoke yesterday morning about Tim Donaghy being an “isolated case”. How many NBA fans have ever watched a game and thought a ref had it out for your team. The hardest thing facing the Commish in this situation is bringing integrity and validity back to a profession which is already be raided with doubts. Good luck with that one, David.

All the NHL fans must be laughing inside about the legal issues surrounding their professional counterparts. But then again, it’s hard to have coverage of your legal issues when you are stuck behind soccer, high school sports, and local amateur events in your local newspapers. It could be worse Gary, trust me.

Like you, I like strippers.

However, I generally find myself leaving the strip club with an empty wallet. Any business that can get you to spend all of your money is a good one to be in.

But while walking out of a club one evening, I realized that a big reason they have such a good business is because strippers are such great salespeople. It is not simply due to the fact that they are selling to stupid, horny men like myself, but because they use a lot of highly effective sales and marketing techniques.

You too can achieve great success by applying sales and marketing techniques of strippers. Here are the 10 sales and marketing techniques I have learned from strippers:

Sales Technique #1 - Give them something for nothing
One of the first things a stripper will do is come up to you and flirt with you. She will likely sit on your lap or do something to raise your excitement level. For this, you have to do nothing. But you do get a sample of the service and if it is a good one, your chances of buying the service increases. This also applies to the dances they do on the stage.

Sales Technique #2 - Understand your customers
Strippers get to know their customers by asking questions. This allows them to develop a rapport and tailor the sales pitch…

Sales Technique #3 - Tailor the Sales Pitch
Strippers will try different sales pitches to different people based on what she thinks they like. “I like to get dirty” or “Have you seen my great ass?” or “My tits are real”. Each pitch may be the one thing that converts the potential customer into a buyer. (Pointing out a tight ass works well for me). And she revises her pitch based on experience.

Sales Technique #4 - Make sure you are selling a great product/service
She knows she has to have a great product. If she put on 30 pounds or hadn’t showered for the past 4 days, she would likely not get as many customers. Regardless of how great of a salesperson you are, you can’t do much with a crappy product/service.

Sales Technique #5 - Provide Good Customer Service
She will make sure you are happy on your first dance or she won’t get repeat business or won’t be able to do what she ultimately set out to do…Upsell.

Sales Technique #6 - Upsell
She sells the customer on a relatively cheap service, a lapdance, but then markets her other services to them. She tries to get them to the “champagne room” and sell an upgraded service, which is where the money is at. However, without the first sale, she would never get the larger sale. Customer acquisition is tough. Once she does it, she needs to get as much business as she can.

Sales Technique #7 - Closing Techniques
She will use a variety of closing techniques to get you to buy her services. There are a variety of closing techniques, but two popular ones used by strippers are the compliment close (usually flirting with you) and companion close (getting your buddies to push you into closing the deal).

Sales Technique #8 - Target your audience
Strippers market to individuals that are interested in her service. First, she works in a strip club where guys go specifically for her service, that is obvious. But she also knows which guys to go after within a group or which groups will likely spend the most money. Spending time with cheap-asses only wanting to pay a dollar for a dance will not be a wise use of he precious time.

Sales Technique #9 - Persistence
Even though the audience is qualified, she knows she will get rejections. Even so, she will go up to every guy and ask if they need a lap dance. She also knows that the more guys she asks, the more yes’s she will get.

Sales Technique #10 - Branding
I don’t know any strippers that are named Ethel, Mildred or Agnus. Instead, you will get the pleasure to do business with Cookie, Destiny, Candy, or Raven.

Has a co-worker screwed you?
Did your ex-girlfriend cheat on you?
Need to get a little revenge on someone?

Get revenge by controlling what information people find out about a person when a search is done on that person’s name. Here are the 5 easy steps to accomplish this:

If you need additional instructions see below:

Creating the blogs:

Creating one blog should be sufficient, but if you want to do it right, create several. Use a blogging software that allows you to host your blog on their site. WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, and ClearBlogs are all examples, but there are additional ones out there.

Creating other pages:

Squidoo seems to work really well for this. Yahoo! 360, MySpace and other social networking sites can also help. If the person has a fairly common name, you may need to get several blogs and pages on social networking sites in order to get enough strength to rank near the top. If the person’s name is unique, then 1-2 accounts should do the trick.

Adding content:

Make sure the title has the person’s name in it. Also, include the person’s name at least 2-3 times within the content of each of the pages you create. Since these pages will be the ones ranking when someone searches for your target’s name, this is also where you want to include the dirt you have on this person.

Adding links:

Within the content, be sure to link to these other pages you have created. Don’t overdue it and link to EVERY page you create. But link to 2-3 of the other pages that you have created. And in at least one of the links on each page, use the person’s name as the anchor text. To get a page to rank well, you need to have links coming to the page and a link (or two) pointing to the page with that person’s name as the anchor text will also help a great deal. It is a good idea to focus on one of the pages you created and work on getting it to rank the highest. So on all of the pages you have created, you may want to link to this main page.

Sweet, sweet revenge:

Within 2-3 weeks you should see some results.
Final tip: Don’t be a total jackass, this should be all done in good fun.

Investigations, accusations, and Congressional hearings aside, here’s a look at some telling pictures of current and former Major League Baseball (MLB) players who have been linked to steroids. Look at the Before (right side) and the After (left side) . . . and you be the judge:

Barry Bonds

Mark McGwire

Raffy Palmeiro

Miguel Tejada

Jason Giambi

Gary Sheffield

Jose Canseco

Brady Anderson

Sammy Sosa

Guillermo Mota

Ivan Rodriguez

Jason Grimsley

Matt Lawton

Who’s to say everyone’s not playing by the rules?

[A true story]
A known drug user was talking to a girl one day and told he her about a recent dream. As minor as it may seem, this casual encounter snowballed until it ended up with an innocent Eagle Scout getting being put in jail for 40 years. All with absolutely no physical proof.

Ryan Ferguson will be spending 40 years of his life in jail as a result of a former friend’s dream, an overly eager prosecuting attorney with political motives, a local police department desperate to solve the biggest unsolved crime in history of their department, and a group of 12 of your peers that wanted to do their part to “solve the unsolved mystery.”

Here are the actual facts taken from the trial:

• The Police collected DNA from blood found at the scene. However, the DNA was not Ryan’s (the Eagle Scout that was convicted for 40 years). It was not even Chuck’s (the kid who had the dreams that “confessed”). This ruled them out as possible suspects.
• The Police collected several fingerprints found at the scene. The fingerprints did not match Ryan or Chuck, and ruled them out as suspects.
• Hairs were found in the clenched hand of the victim. Once again, the hairs did not match Chuck or Ryan, and was another thing that completely ruled them out as suspects.
• During Chuck’s “confession” he said they drove in Ryan’s car after the murder. The forensic team tested the car and said that if the Chuck’s hallucinations were true, a luminol test would have found traces of blood. Since the crime was so violent and bloody, luminol would have found blood even after years. They concluded that the person that committed the crime never got in Ryan’s car.

Every piece of physical evidence found completely ruled out both kids. However, there were two witnesses of the scene. They gave police a description of person they saw at the scene.

• The witness gave a composite artist descriptions of the suspect, and said that he had blond hair, was about 6 feet, weighed 200 pound and was in his twenties. Then in court, the witness pointed out Ryan, who at the time of the crime, had black hair, was 5 feet 5 inches, 145 pounds and was 17.

Not only did all of the physical evidence prove their innocence, but the only testimony that linked the kids to the crime was from the hallucinating kid, Chuck, who said he was not sure if it actually happened or if it was just a dream. During the interrogation of Chuck Erickson, he told police how the murder was committed. He was wrong. The police interrogator then tried to feed him the correct response. When Chuck was told how it was actually done, Chuck told them that was not how it happened, realized there was no way he was part of any crime that happened like that and said “maybe I don’t even know what I’m talking about.”

• Even after he admitted he wasn’t sure of the facts and saying his hallucinations may have been just a dream, his initial taped “confession” was the only thing that led to the conviction of Ryan Ferguson.

Reading this may not seem believable to you. Please, scour the internet to find out as many facts as you can and you too will be unsettled as to how an injustice like this can occur in our country.

Ryan and his family are currently going through the appeals process.

What can you do?

1. Research the story so you know the facts.
2. Make yourself heard in the forum at the local newspaper.
3. Contact the Prosecuting Attorney Kevin Crane and let him know you that feel this is an injustice (he does not make his email freely available) and would like to see more evidence.
4. Support all aspects of the legal system to ensure justice. Support forensics, prosecutors and public defenders.
5. Don’t stand for mass manipulation of the judicial system from people with personal motives.

For a slightly more detailed description of these events, you can read it here, you can also find more info at these sites.

All statements in the story are believed to be true by the writer. If you are involved in this case and see information that is not accurate, please contact the owner of this site.