The days go by so fast, spinning out of control.  The nights — nights of precious and necessary sleep seem to run by even faster.  Before I know it, another is gone.  I shower, lather up my hair and think: “Didn’t I just do this a minute ago?”

Why does the time fly?  I still remember (and remember like it was yesterday!), after an argument with my mother, yelling, “I can’t wait until next year!” And I remember being unable to wait; the days then dragged.  I swear that when I was 17, a year lasted at least twice as long as it does now.  Inflation?  Each breath costing even more seconds than the one which came before?

I have a theory about this:  When we learn a new skill, we step through it at first slowly, haltingly.  Whether it’s a new motor skill, like swinging a golf club to hit the ball just so — or to hit it at all! ( how does Tiger Woods do that?!) — or learning how to add, subtract, multiply, or divide, we struggle in the beginning.  With practice comes familiarity and we not only need to think less of how to do the thing, we begin to do it without thinking.  Without noticing.

I think time is like that.  Each second that passes, each minute, each hour, each day and before we know it, each year etches experience with time onto our brains.  As new ones are added to the total of those we’ve lived, subtracted from those we have left, the cares of adulthood multiply, dividing our attention.  This causes us to think less of how we do a thing; we begin to do most without thinking.  It’s a new kind of familiarity we’re developing, but a familiarity that tends to breed wistfulness, not contempt.

Why does the time fly? I cannot ponder this one any longer.  I wash the shampoo from my hair.  Time to take a swing at another day.

There are 235 Jon Stewarts in the United States.

But there’s only one who is the most trusted man in America.

Anyone who has been poking around here the last couple of weeks — and according to the WordPress.com Stats module that came with this blog, that seems to be probably around a few hundred people — has noticed I’ve been busily upgrading the site software. For many years, Unspun™ relied upon MovableType™.

Unfortunately, Unspun™ gets blasted by hundreds of comment spammers per day; close to a thousand some weeks. MT gave me no easy way to moderate or block these.

The Akismet plug-in for WordPress™ does. The switch to WordPress™, however, has not come without its own problems.

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You betcha!

Not that anything here at Unspun™ would ever be political. 😉

I’ve been slowly — painfully slowly, in fact — trying to deal with whether or not to resurrect Unspun™ and I’ve decided that it won’t hurt to post something now and then. In keeping with a promise I’ve made to myself two days ago, though, my posts will not necessarily be as long or as painfully researched; they’ll probably be more personal. As such, I suspect most people won’t want to read them.

This doesn’t mean there won’t be any of the old political posts of the past. I am, after all, a political being. And in fact, when I started writing this post, I was originally going to make it about the McCainations of a particularly facile lying candidate whose name you’ll probably never guess.

One reason I’ve not posted anything for awhile here is that the blog has been in need of an overhaul, ever since Amazon decided to make it more difficult to embed books for sale by making the old code break. Another reason, though, has been that this election year, I’d not fully made up my mind which candidate I was going for. I’m still uncertain about how I feel about my decision, but I think I’ve made it. After all, if you have to stoop to the level that the McCain camp is stooping to these days, there’s something dramatically wrong with you not just as a candidate, but as a human being. And I’m still in favor of trying to keep human beings in office.

One thing I did not miss about being gone was the spammers.  Although the ability to comment on Unspun™ has been turned off for perhaps a year now, they’re still trying.  Since moving from MovableType™ to WordPress™, the spam comments have been coming in by the hundreds per day.  Fortunately, WordPress™ allows me to keep readers from ever having to see the spam.  So commenting is possible again, but the comments are moderated.  As in the past, I will post anything that isn’t spam, even if it’s unkind to me.

I also didn’t miss the incredible time sink that some of my past writing could become, but I miss writing.

So (I think, anyway), I’m back.

As any of you who have been here before probably can see, Unspun™ is undergoing a transformation. I’m changing from MovableType™ to WordPress™.

Until then, of course, the usual beautiful images, links, etc., aren’t here. It may take weeks, since my law practice sometimes interferes with my ability to spend time on the blogging stuff, but I’ll get everything ported over sooner or later. The articles themselves should still be here (although no longer with the links that were known to Google. Alas, I’ll have to live with that. My readership dropped so much after what A-plus.net did to me a couple years ago anyway that it probably doesn’t matter.

Time to rebuild.

Stay tuned.

According to a recent statement reported by the Washington Post, Curt Furbrain — I’m sorry, I think that might actually be Furberg — is advocating for warning labels on ADHD drugs, stating, “I am sure there are patients who need these drugs, but it is not 10 percent of all 10-year-old boys.”

Either the Washington Post is leaving out significant chunks of its stories, or there is no basis for making this comment. Imagine someone saying, “I’m sure there are patients who need diabetes medication, but it is not 10 percent of all 65-and-older adults.” (Hint: It’s actually 22 percent.)

The claim is that ADHD drugs can cause heart attacks. If true, maybe we do need some kind of warning on ADHD drugs. I don’t know. But what I do know is that 1) there is no basis for the statement Furbrain made and 2) given the choice of suffering from ADHD all your life, or possibly having a heart attack if you are treated with medications, a large number of people I know with ADHD would probably risk the heart attack. I know I would.

Even more interesting, though, is that the Washington Post article says nothing — yep, that’s right, nothing — about either the percentage, or the actual number, of people who will have heart attacks because of drugs like Ritalin. In fact, there’s no indication whatsoever in this article that anyone, particularly not any 10-year-old boys, has suffered a heart attack after taking ADHD drugs.

And while I don’t necessarily think pharmaceutical companies are bastions of honesty and openness, the makers of Ritalin are quoted in the article as stating that they “saw no more evidence of a higher rate of heart problems in people taking its drug.” Almost nine million prescriptions for another ADHD drug, Adderalll, were written last year; yet, again, there is no mention of the number of heart attacks, if any.

Instead, the article merely notes that the number of prescriptions for adults is on the rise.

Sometime after the mid-1930s, the number of people taking Prontosil — essentially the first “sulfa drug” to combat bacterial infections — began to rise dramatically. (I won’t say “number of prescriptions for adults began to rise,” because my recollection is that Prontosil didn’t require a prescription when it first came out, but I could be wrong.) Nevertheless, the number of people who survived bacterials infections after the invention of Prontosil was rather dramatic. Although there were possibly people who died from allergic reactions to the drug, or other side effects, the number of people who survived wound infections (or just armpit boils) was astronomical after the discovery of antibacterial drugs. (Okay, the armpit boil is cheating, because that was 1871, and a carbolic substance, rather than sulfa, was used. — it was still antibacterial and a new discovery which resulted in less people dying from “simple” things like armpit boils.)

Like I said, it may very well be that there is some scientific basis for requiring warning labels on ADHD drugs. My complaint here isn’t about that question per se.

What I’m complaining about is the state of reasoning today. Why in the world do we accept statements like “the number of prescriptions for X is on the rise” as proof that warning labels should be required for X?

The real problem is this: The number of government agencies recommending more control over the lives and choices of citizens is on the rise — I think we all political appointees should come with a warning: “May be hazardous to the exercise of rational thought.”

Or something.

I really don’t know how many times I’m going to beat my head against a wall before I just give up and realize that the United States Constitution is dead. And that no one cares.

These days, anything the police wish to do is not only justified, but considered a-ok, no problemo, what-the-hell-are-you-complaining-for?-we’re-just-trying-to-keep-everyone-safe. Anderson Cooper goes so far as to complain about stupid people (kids, in this case) who “waste time” by protesting the abuse of their civil rights.

In my job as a defense attorney, I’m having to file motions to obtain the most basic of my clients’ rights. People who have been arrested, apparently, no longer have them. Just because they were arrested. Forget preliminary examinations; forget trials; forget due process of law. Our nation no longer follows the rule of law. Instead, we have the rule of law enforcement. And anything goes.

Sheriff wants to put intercom systems into all interview rooms where attorneys meet with clients, so they can listen in at the flip of a switch? So what. It’s for “safety” purposes. Police want to invade parties because they see kids drinking from red cups? So what. “Safety” is the issue. Our President wants to invade countries that have not attacked the United States? So? Again, it’s safety.

Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad if safety actually mattered. But it doesn’t. “Safety” is the pretense that allows the State to do whatever it wants. The State may violate any law — it matters not that the laws may have been enacted hundreds of years ago to constrain the State.

No one, no law, no Constitution must stand in the way of “safety.”

Yes, it’s true. Although he didn’t use that exact phrase. Instead, when a reporter mentioned to Cheney that two-thirds of Americans thought the war in Iraq was not worth it, he responded, “So?”

Hey, he and his minions got their war and, with it, millions of dollars for themselves and their cronies. Who gives a damn what the American people think?

I really thought abut titling this post, “Why America Is In Decline” and then talking about our abysmal lack of ability to do simple things like count. Or perhaps we could talk about how the news media fails to report the news in a way that makes sense — and we forget to call them on it.

Or it could just be one more stupid cop.

“There was somewhere between six (million) and 16 million of them running around out there,” Officer Steve Merchant of the California Highway Patrol told CNN. — CNN.com, ” Now, that stings! Escapee bees swarm a.m. commute” (last visited March 17, 2008).

Anyone who reads the story will soon realize that either the cop is wrong, or there were more bees present on Highway 99 near Sacramento than exist in the entire United States.

In the United States, the honeybee, the world’s premier pollinator, experienced a dramatic 40 percent decline, from nearly six million to less than two and a half million, in the last two decades. — CNN.com, ” Now, that stings! Escapee bees swarm a.m. commute” (last visited March 17, 2008).

The story, however, reported the cop’s statement as if it were true, without pointing out this discrepancy.

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