Billion Dollar Shave

A note on wet shaving... with a brush and double-edge blade … from an expert:

The primary question from men considering the traditional shave with brush, shaving soap, and safety razor is, “Why bother?” Or, as a friend put it, why put aside all the modern technology of pressurized cans of formulated shaving foams and gels and the modern multi-blade razor cartridge that allows you to shave while still half asleep?

The answer varies by person, but for me it is the sheer pleasure that the morning shave now affords. Shaving has moved from a routine at best, a chore more often, to a wonderful ritual from which I emerge feeling truly pampered. I now look forward to shaving each day, and that feeling more than repays the little bit of equipment required. The daily shave: a daily pleasure. How many guys can say that?

The reason many men are choosing to shave with a safety razor, however, is much more down-to-earth: the multiblade cartridge uses a tug-and-cut approach that, for many, causes ingrown whiskers, razor bumps, and skin irritation. These men turn to the double-edged blade and safety razor for the comfort they achieve once they learn how to use the instruments, which might take a week.

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The Marijuana Gateway

This article originally appeared at OtherWords.org

Like nearly all Americans of a certain age, I was told in school that tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana are gateway drugs — and that is why marijuana should remain illegal. 

First of all, even if you accept that these three substances are “gateways” to something worse, why is it that adults can use alcohol and tobacco legally, but not marijuana?  

This is particularly outrageous given that, unlike alcohol and cigarettes, marijuana has a wide range of medical applications. 

Other than prescription opioids, marijuana is the only drug that relieves my chronic migraines. I like that it doesn’t come with the addiction or overdose risks that opioids do, and I want to use it legally and under a doctor’s supervision.

Unfortunately, I live in Wisconsin, where even medical uses are illegal.

For me, marijuana is a gateway to relief from headaches, not a gateway to harder drugs. Legal medical marijuana allows me to decrease my use of opioids.

Senator Kamala Harris recently reframed the gateway idea in another way. The war on drugs approach of criminalizing marijuana, she said, “is the gateway to America’s problem with mass incarceration.” As a former prosecutor and drug warrior who now supports decriminalization, she would know.

While I was sitting through D.A.R.E. classes in school, others were being criminalized and locked up for nonviolent drug offenses.

These harsh drug laws and strict sentencing guidelines were not enforced equally, either. Although blacks and whites use and sell drugs at similar rates (white people actually use drugs a bit more), black people are 6.5 times more likely to be incarcerated for drug offenses.

In part this is because law enforcement spends more time looking for drugs in communities of color than in white communities. They could have found plenty of drugs and underage drinking among the rich kids in the dorms and frat houses of the mostly white, elite private school where I went to college, but they weren’t looking.

After the arrest, racial disparities continue, disadvantaging low income people and people of color at every stage of the judicial process. The racial disparities continue even after someone has paid their debt to society. A black person with a felony record faces more employment discrimination than an equally qualified white person with a felony record.

It seems like the war on drugs is on its way out, although not quickly enough. The tide is turning toward medical usage of marijuana and even some psychedelics, legalized recreational marijuana in some states, and handling addiction with treatment instead of prison.

Yet marijuana is still fully criminalized at the federal level and in many states (I’m looking at you, Wisconsin).

Many jurisdictions that have legalized marijuana have also expunged the criminal records of anyone convicted of nonviolent, low-level marijuana offenses. But there’s no way to give them back the years of their lives they spent locked up for pot.

Why are we still paying taxpayer dollars to incarcerate cannabis users, taking them away from their jobs and their families? Our current path is a gateway to misery. Let’s choose another.

OtherWords columnist Jill Richardson is pursuing a PhD in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Distributed by OtherWords.org.

A liar, a con artist, and a snitch..

Yeah, it's the same guy. More from ProPublica:

When Detective John Halliday paid a visit to the Pinellas County Jail on Dec. 4, 1986, his highest-profile murder case was in trouble. Halliday, who was 35 and investigated homicides for the local sheriff’s office, had spent more than a decade policing Pinellas County, a peninsula edged by white-sugar-sand beaches on Florida’s Gulf Coast, west of Tampa. It is a place that outpaces virtually all other counties in the nation

in the number of defendants it has sentenced to death. Prosecutors who pursued the biggest cases there in the 1980s relied on Halliday, who embodied the county’s law-and-order ethos. Powerfully built and 6-foot-4, with a mane of dirty blond hair and a tan mustache, he was skilled at marshaling the facts that prosecutors needed to win convictions.

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Making the Case for Paid Family Leave

This article originally appeared at OtherWords.org

Ten years ago, my husband and I opened a specialty oil and vinegar shop. Early on, we learned that our store would be only as good as the people who work in it. To invest in our employees is to invest in our business.

Now we employ five people. One of our most valued long-term employees, Linda, worked at the phone company for 27 years before coming to us. She left the phone company as a retiree but didn’t have enough money from her pension to retire.

When Linda fell and broke both of her arms last year, my husband and I told her to take the time she needed to recover. When payroll came around, I went to her apartment with her paycheck. She was sitting with the TV tray in front of her, deciding how to figure out rent with her leasing agent, what food to cut, and whether to sell her car.

I gave her a full check, including pay for the time she’d been out recovering. She was incredibly relieved, and my husband and I were honored to be able to cover her time, which we continued to do through her recovery.

But this took a toll on our family, our finances, and our business. I have three children and scrambled to pay for child care to cover my employee’s shifts. My husband and I missed a mortgage payment on our house, and we were late on a commercial rent payment.

Our business is thriving, but when it comes to paid family and medical leave, we just can’t do it alone. Many small business owners like me desperately want to offer leave but simply can’t afford it.

In February, I traveled to Washington, D.C. to share my experience with members of Congress at a special briefing on paid family and medical leave hosted by Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut.

I told them the same thing I’ve told lawmakers in my home state of Minnesota: To give small business a fighting chance, we need to level the playing field and adopt a strong paid family and medical leave program.

Whether we’re business owners or employees, we all should be able to take time away from work when a loved one is sick, or we have health problems of our own. In our current economic climate, that’s a real financial struggle for all of us, and it shouldn’t be.

Paid family and medical leave laws create a system where everyone pays in a little, spreading the costs so everyone can benefit. This is the kind of solution that small businesses are clamoring for.

A recent survey of 1,500 small businesses by Main Street Alliance found overwhelming support for national and state paid leave policies. Sixty-four percent of small business owners — including 76 percent of women and people of color — support paid leave.

Linda is now recuperating from hip replacement surgery now, and will also need knee replacement. We have another employee who will likely need time off to assist his mother, who has early onset dementia.

Meanwhile, we’re trying to open another store, which would provide needed jobs in a small town. Yet the dollars we need for the store are being diverted to paid leave.

Nearly every other country in the world has figured out that a low-cost, pooled insurance program is a sound investment in economic and family health.

I’m encouraged that our national lawmakers are willing to listen, but we don’t have time to waste. While Congress discusses paid leave, state lawmakers around the country, including my state of Minnesota, should lead on this issue. Let’s send a clear message to Washington that the time for paid family and medical leave is now.

Sarah Piepenburg, is the owner of Vinaigrette with locations in Excelsior and Minneapolis, Minnesota, and a member of Main Street Alliance, a national network of small businesses. Distributed by OtherWords.org.