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In another amusing unintended consequence of the war on drugs, it turns out that the pharmaceuticals most likely to get disposed of into city water supplies are controlled substances. The restrictions on who has access to over 365 controlled substances are such that they can’t be disposed of via normal hazardous waste disposal methods such as incineration, due to the costs of maintaining the controls on contractors who handle and haul away drugs for disposal. As a result, hospitals and assisted living facilities are dumping drugs like codeine, morphine, oxycodone, diazepam (e.g., Valium) and methylphenidate (e.g., Ritalin) down the drains, behind locked doors with a witness to the disposal for record-keeping purposes. The DEA is reportedly working out some modified regulations with the assistance of the EPA.

Orcinus has an interesting article about Sarah Palin, prompted by the finding of a 1995 photograph of Palin at her Wasilla city council desk with an article from the March 1995 issue of the John Birch Society’s New American in front of her. Ben Smith at Politico has a more balanced piece on the same subject, which points out that there were lots of copies of that particular article sent out, and that Birchers themselves don’t appear to be particularly impressed with Palin. ...

A lot of my investments are in S&P 500 index funds, which, until the recent dive by financial institutions, included financial stocks as its largest sector of investment (finance is now third after energy and IT). Over the past couple years, I’ve held shares in the Prudent Bear Fund (BEARX), a mutual fund that uses a strategy of shorting various stocks, purchasing put options, and investing in gold, as well as making some short-term trades of the exchange-traded funds ProShares UltraShort S&P 500 (SDS), which goes up when the S&P 500 goes down, and ProShares UltraShort Financial (SKF), which goes up when the Dow Jones U.S. Financials Index (DJUSFI) goes down. I had been holding some shares of SKF for a couple weeks with a 30-day limit order to sell at $142, which would give me a nice profit. When it shot up Thursday, I upped my limit, and ended up selling some of my shares at over $150, and closing out my position. The market then reversed, and SKF dropped as low as $110, so I picked up a few more shares at around $117. Friday morning, SKF dropped to $87 and started to climb back up, when all of a sudden it stuck at $93 and no more trades went through. Trading was halted. The SEC announced a “temporary emergency action” to ban short selling in 799 stocks of financial companies for the next ten business days (until the end of the day on October 2), which may be extended for up to another twenty business days (until the end of the day on October 31, bringing us right up to the election). The UK instituted a similar ban. Because of this ban, trading in SKF was temporarily halted. The SEC seems to be under the illusion that short sellers are responsible for the stocks of financial companies falling, rather than the fact that these companies have been engaging in risky behavior and are now loaded down with bad debt. But a short time later today, trading in SKF resumed, after ProShares announced that they cannot accept orders to create new shares in the fund, since that would require taking new short positions in financial stocks, but those who hold existing positions are still permitted to trade them. This effectively turns SKF into a closed-end fund, making SKF shares more scarce than they otherwise would be. When I saw that SKF was again trading, I bought more shares at $90, reasoning that the financial problems are far from fixed, the proposed government action is likely to be full of holes, and with normal routes to short selling closed, more of those who wish to hedge their bets against further drops in the financial sector will turn to other alternatives such as put options (though options markets are likely to be hurt by this ban as well, since the U.S., unlike the UK, didn’t make an exception for options market makers) or shares in funds like SKF, the latter of which they will only be able to purchase from existing holders of the fund. It’s a serious mistake to think that short selling is something solely done by vultures trying to destroy companies at risk–it’s a defensive measure against catastrophe for those who are mostly holding long-term investment positions. An Associated Press story on the ban shows that the SEC is starting to recognize that it may cause some unintended problems: ...

Reuters reports that nighttime satellite photos from Sunni Arab areas of Baghdad show that the lights in those areas began to go out before the U.S. troop surge began in 2007, suggesting that population shift, rather than the surge, may have had greater responsibility for the drop in violence.

Sarah Palin has apparently been using a personal email account for State of Alaska business (perhaps following Republican precedent on how to avoid subpoenas?), and it’s been compromised. Wikileaks has the documents. UPDATE (September 19, 2008): The screenshots used by the attacker showed that he used ctunnel as his web proxy, and contained enough information to identify his source IP in ctunnel’s logs. As pointed out by commenter Schtacky, it looks like they’ve identified the culprit, who used some Google research and Yahoo’s password recovery feature to change the password on the account to break in. This shows the problem with choosing “security questions” for password recovery that have answers which are easily publicly available. I hope that this kid’s actions don’t sabotage the corruption case against Palin that may have been supported by evidence in her Yahoo email, evidence that is now tainted by the fact that it was compromised (and subsequently deleted). ...

Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars discusses those right-wing Christians who oppose Sarah Palin because God doesn’t want women to hold leadership positions or even vote. He lays out some choice quotes from Covenant News, the website promoting these extreme views, and observes that this website is the home to contributors such as Gary North and Ron Paul.

Radley Balko at The Agitator replies to Jennifer Rubin at Commentary about why the Washington Post’s coverage of Cindy McCain’s addiction to painkillers and commission of crimes to support it is newsworthy. Balko gives two reasons: John and Cindy McCain have touted her addiction an example in overcoming adversity. That presents quite the contrast to McCain’s legislative history as an ardent drug warrior. People accused of crimes similar to those Cindy McCain was accused of committing usually go to prison (even when they’re innocent). Her crimes haven’t been well-reported in the media. And they show how John McCain (who, by the way, is running for president) believes in one set of rules for the friends and family of powerful politicians, and a different set of rules for everyone else. While Cindy McCain’s addiction and theft from her children’s charity to support that addiction were lightly covered at the time, there has yet to be much coverage of it at all during this campaign. And one aspect of the case that’s been covered even less is John and Cindy McCain’s attempt to railroad Tom Gosinski, the guy who blew the whistle on Cindy McCain’s theft from her children’s charity. The Post story is one of the first to get his version of what happened. And Balko concludes: ...

A McCain-Palin ad cites factcheck.org to claim that Obama has made false attacks on Palin–but the attacks haven’t come from Obama. McCain and Palin are appealing to factcheck.org’s accurate content in order to lie about Obama, and factcheck.org calls them on their dishonesty.

Sarah Palin said in an interview with Charlie Gibson that Alaska “produces nearly 20 percent of the U.S. domestic supply of energy." Not true. Alaska produces 14% of the oil from U.S. wells (not 14% of oil consumed), produces 3.5% of domestically produced U.S. energy, about 2.4% of U.S. energy consumed. McCain repeated the same falsehood to Gibson, saying “[Palin’s] been governor of our largest state, in charge of 20 percent of America’s energy supply." (Via factcheck.org.) If they keep repeating this claim, they are liars. There’s already good evidence that they are bullshitters.

Kat and I went last night to see “Walking with Dinosaurs” at the U.S. Airways Center in Phoenix. It was a visually impressive show–they did a great job on the dinosaurs, which were quite realistic in appearance and movement, with only minor distractions. The smaller dinosaurs were operated by a person inside, whose legs were partially visible since a human’s legs don’t fit into the shape of the dinosaur’s legs. The larger dinosaurs were each mounted on some kind of flat long vehicle that was colored to match the floor, but was still visible. The music was loud and somewhat bombastic, the kind of stirring movie soundtrack music that can be sometimes irritating–but not as much so as the typical Phoenix Suns intro that regularly happens at the same location. The dinosaurs movements involved very limited interactions with each other–only occasionally so much as touching each other–which made the “battles” more of a suggestion than a depiction. No doubt this was to avoid damaging some expensive dinosaurs. The production was narrated by an actor playing “Huxley” the paleontologist, who walked around on the floor with the dinosaurs, describing the historical context with the help of video projected onto several screens. The arena itself was encircled by inflatable plant life that “grew” and “died” at the appropriate times. Some lighting and smoke effects also contributed to the atmosphere, for fires, volcanos, and the comet theory of the K-T mass extinction. Some other props included some giant rocks which were also used to represent the continents, and a big ball of dinosaur poop (one of several kid-pleasing elements that I also appreciated). It was definitely a bit more on the entertainment side of “edutainment” than the education side. Although the script tried to convey the timescales involved, it didn’t try very hard–some visual analogies on the video screen might have helped. It explained the difference between fossils of dead animals and trace fossils that show evidence of how they lived, but made no attempt to talk about the geological strata or how we know the enormous ages involved. It didn’t, to my mind, do much of anything to try to proactively counter young-earth creationist nonsense about the dinosaurs. And that was a pity, because as we left the arena, we were confronted by young-earth creationists from the Arizona Origin Science Association handing out copies of Ken Ham’s booklet, “What REALLY Happened to the Dinosaurs?” I heard one gentleman come back and ask for another copy, saying “my brother[-in-law?] is an evolutionary biologist, and I want to give him one.” I hope that man’s relative takes the time to rebut it. There are some photos and video of “Walking with Dinosaurs” at Brian Switek’s Laelaps blog, along with his description of the show. ...