If a journalist reported that some elite department store was racially segregated -- there would be a firestorm in the media for at least a week.

But Ted Koppel reported that the California state prison system is racially segregated and the media outrage was exactly zero.

This is me, scratching my head.

But it's not just head-scratching, because people were shot to death as a consequence and now there's a big ethnic cleansing case heading to a federal judge where the ethnic cleansing order came from a gang leader inside a state prison.

It's like, creepy now.

If you ever end up in a California prison, you'd better know what race you are even if you don't believe in race.

Because the first thing they ask you when you enter the prison is what race are you.

And your answer will determine the rest of your life in prison.

It will determine where you're allowed to sleep, with whom you're allowed to sit, with whom you're allowed to socialize, what time you're allowed to shower and which gang leader you're expected to obey without question.

You can call that tribalism if it pleases you.

But the bottom line is you're still going to get your teeth knocked out if you don't stick to your own "kind."

Whatever you want to call it -- why is this acceptable?

Why has this reality become so easily acceptable to people of the so-called "progressive" persuasion?

1. Racial separatism

2. Gang loyalty

They're not learning to read or do math or use the Internet or stay clean and sober.

They're learning not to talk to anyone of a different race or they get their teeth knocked out, and they're learning that they have to deal drugs for the gang in charge of their race, or they get their teeth knocked out.

This is the biggest, fastest growing prison system in the country, and this is what the prisoners are being taught.

But the way to overcome it is to start talking beyond race and start seeing beyond race. To be your brother's keeper, you must first know that you are his brother. And that connection isn't made through skin color. It's made through a shared humanity. If Americans can come out of our racial time recharged and ready to work together, we just might rediscover that.

Oh right, yeah, and we're going to win the War on Drugs if we can just cram enough druggies into prison!

Gary, you should try your hand at writing comedy.

I can't stand hearing about anyone suffering from Alzheimer's.

I now feel morally obligated to post this 2006 press release from NORML:

La Jolla, CA: THC inhibits the formation of amyloid plaque, the primary marker for Alzheimer's disease (AD), far more effectively than approved medications, according to preclinical data to be published in the journal Molecular Pharmaceutics.

Investigators at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California reported that THC inhibits the enzyme responsible for the aggregation of amyloid plaque in a manner "considerably superior" to approved Alzheimer's drugs such as donepezil and tacrine.

Don't kill the dog.

If I were the LW and the LW lived in California, I would give cannabis a try for the dog and the grandmother and the grandfather too.

You never know. Maybe it could help all of them.

You know, they've found that it can help incontinence too. Here's another NORML press release from 2006:

Plymouth, United Kingdom: Cannabinoids and cannabis extracts significantly reduce incontinence in patients with multiple sclerosis, according to clinical trial data published this month in The International Urogynecology Journal.

Now this was MS-related incontinence, but there are indications that it could work with other causes of incontinence too, because they've found that cannabinoids help control the muscle tone in the bladder..

It's a pretty amazing drug. It sounds crazy, I know, but this is all real science, I swear to God.

I can't stand to see people suffer needlessly so I feel morally compelled to speak out, even if it makes me look obsessed and libertarian.

Last week California scientists announced that they had discovered that one of the active ingredients in marijuana blocks the expression of the gene that teaches breast cancer cells how to metastasize.

So how do we measure integrity and slime with this story?

Was it slimy of Forbes and Fox News to cover this story in detail and did the New York Times and Salon show integrity by refusing to touch it?

"I've heard him now in many debates talk about bringing our troops home, and about the war in Iraq and how it's failed," McCain says. "And I want to tell you that that kind of isolationism, sir, is what caused World War II."

Is he saying that we could have beaten the Nazis if we'd attacked them while they were still allied with Stalin?

That is a nutty thing to say. The Germans were allied with the USSR until 1941.

If they'd ever set an episode of Hogan's Heroes at that Russian Front place Sergeant Shultz kept talking about, Americans might not have these dumb fantasies.

The Red Army had to wear down the Nazis quite a bit before America was capable of defeating them militarily.

And that was our military strategy -- to let the Nazis get worn down on the Eastern Front before we entered from the west.

I don't think there was anything that could have prevented that war, and you can tell that by how hard it was to win.

I think it's not only stupid but slimy to tie Iraq together with WWII. Saddam Hussein never possessed anything comparable to the military power of the Third Reich, or had any racialist fantasies of world domination of his own little Iraqi tribe.