Russia is on the move, and it's moving towards fascism. And not in the hyperbolic, Godwin's Law sense either. No, the honest-to-goodness state control of industry coupled with racist undertones, youth movements, and revisionist history.
It might be the brink of a new Cold War.
MSN has a flash-based map showing the growth of obesity (defined by the CDC as a body max index in excess of 30) over the past few decades. There are a few holes until the early 1990s, as not all states were collecting data, but if you'll notice, the states have had the worst obesity problems for the longest are also those states that have the lowest incomes.
The three states with the highest percentage of obese persons in 2005 were Louisiana, Mississippi, and West Virginia, which come in at near the bottom of per capita income lists. The states that did the best in 2005 are all quite wealthy except for Vermont, which happens to have one of the most highly-educated populations, even though they aren't particularly wealthy.
Obesity is downwardly mobile.
Okay, so I, *ahem* "acquired" a few movies in the past few weeks, and in more than one of them, the uploaders had hidden video messages in the files. The first was an anti-Bush, anti-war peace. The second was spoilers for the last Harry Potter (which I'd already read). Both were placed on television screens in scenes near the middle of their respective films.
Bizarre. I suppose that's the kind of thing you have to put up with if you use underground distribution networks.
Whenever an inmate is representing himself, you just know he's got nothing. But when you see a list of defendants as bizarre as this one...
Okay, we've got the Roman Empire, the Quran, the "Vienna Convention" (which one is not specified), Napoleon, "computer hackers and telephone phreakers", Jimmy Dean Sausage Co., the "House of Rothschild", Hamid Karzai (current president of Afghanistan), ICANN, Fort Knox, eBay, Wendy's, "gangs in Hong Kong", Scott Peterson, Jimmy Hoffa, the King James Bible, Skittles candy, and, inter alia and my personal favorite, Magna Carta.
Because suing 800-year-old documents of questionable authority is gonna get you what you want.
I think this guy should be fined for wasting the court's time.
UPDATE: It's not the first time, either. He's got a list of completely frivolous claims out there. The one against Michael Vick is of note, as he seeks, and I quote, $63,000,000,000 billion backed in silver or gold". I wonder if it's possible to hold someone in contempt for filing too many frivolous cases?
A US District judge has struck down the anti-illegal alien statutes passed by Hazelton, Pa. The opinion isn't up on Westlaw as of today--it's a 206-page opinion and was only handed down yesterday--so I can't say much about the legal reasoning used, but I'm betting that the judge found that immigration is an issue preserved entirely for the federal government, regarding which state and local governments may not legislate.
Still, given the length of the opinion, it's likely that he's touching on a number of issues. I'll go into a deeper discussion when the opinion is available.
Regardless, I believe this is the correct ruling. I do believe that the penalties for illegal immigration should be much harsher--though I believe being a legal immigrant should be much easier--but state and local government should not be able to touch this or any other issues related to international law.
So there's this cat, see, and he lives in a hospice care center, and every time he curls up next to a patient, the patient dies within hours. He's not causing the deaths--you don't go to this facility unless you're already dying--but he does seem to be able to predict them somehow. It's not known if he's reacting to some identifiable stimulus--smells etc. from the patient, or perhaps the actions of the house staff--or whether something more significant is happening. Either way, it's spooky.
UPDATE: ...and, this being the internet, after all...
A Colorado county judge collapsed in his courtroom yesterday, and either died on the scene or on the way to the hospital.
So what would be the official court procedure for that one? Not that they'd apply anyways, but I'm pretty sure that there aren't any federal rules of procedure to account for a judge expiring in the courtroom.
Some genius has released a study that shows that obese girls are less likely to go to college than non-obese ones.
This seems to be anecdotally true. Having now attended three institutions of higher learning, and there were very few obese people there. Most looked pretty healthy.
The reasons for this should be blindingly obvious. Obesity is linked to socio-economic status, specifically that it's downwardly mobile. College is linked to socio-economic status, specifically that it's upwardly mobile. Ergo, the worse your BMI on the heavy end, the less likely you are to go to college.
There was one finding that didn't fall directly into the above observation. Obese girls who attended secondary schools in which obesity was uncommon were much less likely to attend college, buy boys showed no difference from their peers in similar school settings. But without seeing the data it's impossible to know just how significant it is. Either way, I think the conclusions drawn by the researchers are a bit premature.
I hereby posit Davidson's Rule of Sociological Assumption: Don't assume you've discovered a problem with society when the problem is largely explicable by money or the lack thereof.
Ever heard of the One Laptop Per Child project? OLPC? An MIT-led effort to produce an extremely stripped-down laptop computer for about $100? They're selling them to third-world governments who, ideally, pass them on to kids to give them access to a computer and, most importantly, the internet.
So far, so good. What do you think the kids in question are using the laptops for? If you guessed "surfing for porn" you're right, but you don't win any prizes. Too obvious.
Two interesting legal claims out of the White House this week, one probably correct, one probably incorrect. The first is that the administration has declared that the Department of Justice will never initiate proceedings towards prosecuting executive officers for contempt charges initiated by Congress after the President has invoked executive privilege.
Well this just kinda makes sense, if you ask me. If Congress could hold the President or his officers in contempt, there really wouldn't be any separation of powers. Only the Court has an inherent power to find people in contempt. Congress has no such power as such power is not part of legislative power. Additionally, this is basically making the executive branch investigate itself for not playing nice with Congress. This isn't something Congress would want the President to be doing anyways. But in any case, the Constitution and the Court are quite clear that Congress has no non-political means of enforcing its will. If it wants documents or testimony from the President, it must use its political arsenal--especially the spending power--to get what it wants. It has no other recourse. If the Congressional leadership doesn't have the guts to play hardball, they can take their ball and go home.
But the second is the President's Executive Order of July 17, which amounts to a suspension of the Fifth Amendment in certain cases. Property in the US which is owned by any person found by the executive to have either aided or be likely to aid in impeding the reconstruction of Iraq may be "blocked" (read "frozen") by the Secretary of the Treasury without prior notice. Whatever happened to "No person shall be... deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law"? Did that somehow escape their notice?
This is different than warrantless wiretapping. The Courts have always recognized that an exception to the warrant requirement exists for international communications in situations where national security is at stake, and the President has historically been granted broad powers in that area. But property is property, and I'm not aware of any jurisprudence describing an exception to the Fifth Amendment.
That being said, the Order is unlikely to be challenged in court, for the only people likely to have standing, i.e. suffer an injury from the order by having their property seized, aren't the kinds of people who are likely to file a complaint in federal court. But if the administration screws up badly enough--odds, anyone?--they'll nail someone completely unrelated and get the Court will overturn the Order just as soon as the complaint is filed.
These are awesome. Some have been around the net for a while, but others I haven't seen before, and they're hilarious. Some are pretty awful, but the Yahoo/404 combination is just great.
In a somewhat unusual occurrence, I completely agree with a statement released by a Southern Baptist leader in response to another statement issued by the Vatican. The latter essentially says that Protestant churches, because they reject the doctrine of apostolic succession and sacramental priesthood, are not true churches. The former essentially says that the Roman church, because it does not preach the gospel and insists upon the primacy of the pope, is not a true church.
Yeah, that's about right. Turnabout is, indeed, fair play. I'm willing to recognize Rome as an "ecclesial community", but until the Roman church rejects certain aspects of Lateran IV, Lateran V, the entirety of Trent, most of Vatican I, and all claims of supremacy, and rehabilitates men such as Hus, Wycliff, Tyndale, Luther, and Calvin, it will remain in irreconcilable conflict with true churches everywhere.
A group of inmates came up with a rather ingenuous plot to spring themselves from federal prison. They declared their own names to be copyrighted and then demanded payment to the tune of several million dollars from the warden for using their names without permission. Payment not being forthcoming, they filed liens against the warden's property, including seizure of vehicles and changing the locks on his house. After they'd initiated the forfeiture process, they sent letters demanding to be released before they would return the warden's property.
Unfortunately for this quartet, the agent they hired to effect their asset forfeiture happened to be an FBI agent. Needless to say, the warden is still driving his car.
The inmates and an accomplice have been indicted for conspiracy to impede the duties of federal prison officials and sending threatening letters with intent to extort. I'd throw on misuse of copyright just for good measure, but I gather that IP precedent really isn't something that's on the top of BoP's list.
Various parties are upset about FBI data mining. While this is not surprising, the problem is that data mining is probably entirely legal.
Why?
Because once your information is a matter of public record you have no reasonable expectation of privacy.
- Your vehicle and drivers license registration? All available.
- The complaints you make to government consumer protection agencies? Already in government hands.
- The records of your real estate transactions? All registered with local and probably state governments.
- Information gathered by the National Insurance Crime Bureau? Though not a government agency, they get most of their information from public sources.
- Airline flight information. Not currently coming from public sources, but as the FAA regulates all air travel, getting these records is trivial.
Things which would be illegal but are not on the list:
- Most financial transactions and bank statements. The government can't look at your check book, but obviously knows when you sell a bond or move large amounts of currency into or out of the country.
- Domestic telephone conversations.
- Snail mail. This probably includes things like UPS and FedEx, but I'm sure there's interesting case law about that.
You generally eed a subpoena to get any of these, and there are probably legal penalties if they're surrendered to any third-party, governmental or no, without your consent or a court order. There is no allegation that the data mining program does any of these things. Which is kind of the point of data mining: making sense of information that's already available, not going after information which wasn't previously available.
Things which are in a grey area:
- Email communications. As they're stored on a third-party server in ways that physical mail is not, it's an open question as to whether the government can access those. Obviously civil liberties types don't like this, but I don't think the case law has fully dealt with the issue. It isn't looking terribly good though.
- International communications, including mail. Currently the subject of the NSA wiretapping program. Presidents have periodically asserted the right to monitor and filter communications going into and out of the country for national security reasons, and though Congress doesn't particularly like this, the Court has never held that the Executive lacks this authority. FDR created an Office of Censorship in late 1941 by executive order.
In general, things which you transmit directly to a domestic intended recipient without exposing the content to anyone else cannot be reached without a subpoena. But anything you do as a matter of public record--and that's an increasing number of actions these days--is automatically accessible to law enforcement, and the degree to which your action is witnessed or available to third parties is the degree to which the government can get at that without your consent.
This, of course, is my off-the-cuff analysis. I'll probably learn more about this next year. The class Freedom of Speech is looking increasingly appealing.
So you've got a government official accused of taking bribes to approve medicines. Some of these are unsafe and have been linked to consumer deaths. The government's response? Perhaps they'll fire him, prohibit him from holding public office? Maybe send him to jail for a while?
Maybe. China just executed their one of their now late food and drug regulators. Fixed that problem.
Some baby-hating think-tank in Britain is urging parents not to have more than two kids. Why? Because it's bad for the environment. A child born in Britain will use more resources than a child born in Ethiopia or Bangladesh, ergo British people shouldn't have kids.
Clearly there's a priority problem here. First, this essentially says that the environment is more important than humanity. Second, the current fertility rate in Britain is only 1.87 births per mother, well below the 2.12 necessary for population stability. At that rate the only reason Britain's population is increasing is because of immigration.
Just more evidence that current European culture--and by extension Western culture--is necrotic.
So the infamous "DC Madam" has published her phone records dating back to 1995. Political types in Washington have been absolutely adamant that this not happen, for they don't want their peccadilloes exposed.
Well, I downloaded a year's worth of records. They're not very interesting. The list includes the locality in which the number was based and the number itself, but no names. So unless you already know someone's number, it's just a list of numbers, mostly in the DC metro area, but some a little farther out and with regular calls to Escondido. In fact, without a court subpoena directed at telephone companies, ordering them to reveal the names attached to the numbers, they're hardly worth reading, as most of the numbers are probably cell phones which don't show up in any directory.
To make it even less useful, it's a "Microsoft Office Document Imaging File". I have no idea what that is, but I assume it's some scanner output default. The file is just a raw image, no search capabilities. This is what paralegals and 1st year associates are for: "Here, we've got ten years of telephone records in image format. Parse that into an Excel spreadsheet for me."
Eventually, someone is going to be able to get useful information about this, and I predict a handful of careers and probably a few dozen marriages are going to be ruined.
INSTANT UPDATE: Apparently "eventually" should be read as "immediately" in this case. It's already come out that the number of Louisiana Senator David Vitter is on thte list. He's made a public apology.
Kinda morbid, but watching these heads roll could be entertaining. Watch the news throughout the day.
In the nineteenth century, a huckster made an "automaton" known as "The Turk", supposedly a chess-playing machine capable of beating most human opponents. Turns out there was a guy hiding underneath, and it wasn't automatic at all.
Well today a security company has announced that it seems that spammers have finally overcome the captchas intended to prevent automatic generation of Yahoo! and Hotmail email accounts, as about 15,000 of them have been created in fairly short notice. The company, BitDefender, points to a trojan dubbed Trojan.Spammer.HotLan.A, an says it's creating about 500 accounts an hour.
That isn't very many. Which suggests one of two things. Either 1) the machine's software is essentially a calculated brute-force approach that happens to be a bit better than an un-calculated one, or 2) we've got a mechanical Turk on our hands. It occurs to me that if it's possible to make money using Chinese goldfarmers, you can probably make money using those same guys to churn out crappy email addresses.
When labor is expensive, automation is the way to go. But when labor is cheap, do everything by hand. Why spend a lot of time and money coming up with an algorithm that can solve a problem computers are notoriously bad at when you can pay 100 Chinese geeks 15 cents an hour for better results? I'm guessing that $15.00 can probably get you 6,000 accounts, easy. Match that with a trojan spam device and for an extra $10.00 you've probably just sent 6 million emails. If 1% of people respond and 1% of those give you money, you're just parted 600 fools from their money.
Governor Rendell has just ordered a partial shutdown of Pennsylvania state government. All non-essential services have been suspended, including licensing, highway maintenance/repair, state museums and parks, and even the lights illuminating the capital dome. Slot machines, however, remain open pending a court hearing. As they're a source of revenue this makes sense, though it does look a little funny.
The governor has been unable to reach a consensus about the state budget for the next fiscal year. The governor refuses to sign any budget that does not include subsidies for alternative energy. The legislature refuses to sign any budget that does.
Frankly, this is all fine by me. While I wouldn't have gone to the mattresses over this particular issue, I'm all in favor of government shutdowns. At least they aren't wasting any more of my money.
Problem: Islamic extremists are employed by and joining British security forces. British agencies are aware of the problem, but will not fire anyone because that would look like ethnic profiling, and that's Just Not Done.
William I had a solution for problems like this: make sure that everyone in your government speaks your language and kill and/or replace people that don't like you. Not particularly pleasant, but excruciatingly effective.
I really don't think there is a way of preserving a society with even a semblance of freedom as long as nonsense like this is allowed to continue. Yes, ethnic profiling involves contradictions, but so does letting people blow up night clubs because saying something about their background would be insensitive.
Here's a link to a bunch of side-by-side Disney animation cels showing how they've reused animations in various films.
I view this as kind of a fun Easter egg hunt, not a problem with the work. Back then the stuff was all drawn by hand, so any way of reducing the number of frames you had to draw from scratch would have saved dozens of hours per scene. It's kind of like Asimov: it's okay if you're stealing if you're stealing from yourself.
That is, provided what you're stealing from is worth stealing from. There's a reason people probably don't reuse frames from these all that often.
Some jackass who failed the Massachusetts bar exam is suing the Bar Association and several of its officers in federal court (link goes to complaint). Why? Because he says that the only reason he failed is because he refused to answer a question relating to homosexuality on the exam. The actual question is not provided, probably because bringing the questions out of the exam is almost certainly not allowed. The plaintiff essentially argues that a successful answer to the question would have required an affirmative statement of support for homosexual conduct, marriage, and parenting, a statement which plaintiff refused to make. He then contends that his refusal to answer this question is the sole ground for his failure, and alleges various kinds of discrimination and demands about $10 million plus a declaratory judgment that asking about homosexuality is unconstitutional.
On first glance, this seems pretty ludicrous. Dude: you failed the bar exam. It happens. Try again. Almost everybody passes, though there are plenty of people who don't pass their first time. No one cares. But literally making a federal case out of it is a Bad Idea, because that becomes a matter of public record and gets your name in the papers as a whiny bitch. So don't do that.
The complaint, like all pro se complaints, is not particularly well written. The statement of facts is far too brief, and doesn't include important things like, say, the actual question on the exam. The statement of jurisdiction is about ten times too long (this should take about one page, not eleven pages), and he cites pretty much everything he could find. Yes, legal authority is good, but learn to tell what your two or three best points are and just make those. If those don't work, your weaker ones aren't going to either.
The crux of the actual argument goes as follows: the "homosexual agenda" is part of the "irreligion" known as "Secular Humanism" [caps in original] and requiring anyone to support this violates their constitutional rights. Yep. That's what he says.
Actually, he might have a point. Trying to describe the "homosexual agenda" as part of a particular ideology identifiable as "Secular Humanism" isn't likely to work (I'm guessing Gene Robinson would have a thing or two to say there, though I'd probably have a thing or two to say to Gene Robinson when it comes right down to it). But the suggestion that requiring adherence to a particular socio-political viewpoint to pass the bar is unconstitutional is not without merit. Badly put--and the court isn't going to show the same kind of leniency to legally-trained pro se litigants as it does to prisoners--but not without merit. Religious tests are prohibited in the Constitution, and the Court is very likely to find that religious tests for any non-religious position are unconstitutional. One's religious beliefs might well prevent one from signing on to the legalization of homosexual marriage.
The downside of this is that Massachusetts has pretty liberal laws regarding homosexual unions, so without reading the actual question, it's impossible to know if they're really just asking about the state of the law in Massachusetts. It would not at all surprise me if our plaintiff had simply overreacted to a question which required him to give an answer in terms of existing state law. If the question had been "Do you like gay sex?", he probably has a case. But I've a sneaking suspicion that it's something a bit more subtle.
Anyways, it's a long, rambling complaint and not really worth the read. He's got eleven different causes of action listed, most of which aren't worth talking about, including interference with interstate commerce. I kind of thought that kind of "commerce" was illegal, but we are talking about Massachusetts, after all. The case isn't going to go anywhere, which is kind of a shame, because I'd actually be interested in seeing someone worth a damn take a crack at this issue.
You want effective DRM, you have to do this. The only reason this hasn't been implemented yet is because it isn't technically feasible, though I'm pretty sure various parties would love to try.
If the RIAA or MPAA ever tried something like this I would personally travel to DC and burn down their buildings.
In a serendipitous occurrence given my current discussion with Ben, I went back to the British Museum today and found myself in an exhibit on money. What follows is a brief history of the idea and my thoughts on it.
Originally, people bartered for everything. I'll give you these three sheep for that bronze axe, that kind of thing. This runs into immediate problems if you don't have anything that the guy with the axe actually wants. You might have to do business with everyone in town before getting the ceramic pot he wants.
Solution: metal. Pretty useful to a wide number of people, and even if you're doing business with the bread guy instead of the axe guy, he'll probably take your bronze bar anyways. Gold and silver were used in ornamentation--people have been making things pretty forever, and have always been willing to pay for it--and thus had value there. So instead of going all around town executing a complex eight-way trade, you can now just give the guy some metal. Fair enough.
But other problems, the biggest of which has to do with measure. How do I know that lump of stuff you've got there is really gold? Especially all the way through. So you had to weigh and test things to make sure what you were being offered was what your trading partner said it was. Note that we're still essentially bartering. See here. Metal was useful, so people were willing to trade it for other things.
Solution to the measure problem: coinage. A trustworthy source would arise and make coins of fixed and known qualities and weights and stamp them with an official seal. Governments were generally the only institutions with enough clout and public respect to engender sufficient trust for this to be practical. Essentially, the emperor's stamp meant "This coin has in it the amount of gold that the stamp says it does, and it's of at least a certain quality, so you don't have to measure or weigh it before you accept it as payment." This saves a huge amount of time, and greatly facilitates trade between otherwise naturally suspicious merchants. The extent to which a government's currency was used outside its borders was variable, and frequently cause for arbitrage. For a while there, the Phoenians made about 17% on every coin they traded with Egypt, because Egypt had just gone through a weight change. Sneaky bastards.
This also made forgery attractive (see here) because people are trusting that the coin is what it says it is. Governments weren't concerned about forgery because it would devalue their currency. The currency carried its value wherever it went. They were worried that if unscrupulous types stamped metal with the king's mark, they could capitalize on the trust placed by the public in the king and his administration for nefarious ends by using lower-quality metal or less of it in coinage.
But another problem: coins are heavy. Really heavy. One cubic centimeter of gold weighs almost 20g. Iron isn't quite that heavy, but it's still a bitch to lug around. This is a huge pain in the ass, especially if you're trying to buy something expensive.
Solution: paper money. Once people were used to the idea that the coin was essentially a repository for public trust, and that you could rely on it to be what it said it was, it was a small step for people starting to carry cheques and notes which could be used to produce gold on demand. This is much easier than schlepping boxes of coins around, and a sophisticated banking and deposit system existed as early as the 10th century in the Islamic empire. Similar devices existed in Europe as well.
Still, there are problems with gold. It doesn't have inherent value. People like to think that it does and sometimes treat it as if it did, but it doesn't. The price of gold fluctuates widely with supply and demand. The Islamic empire actually had major problems in the 16th century--as if Mongols weren't problem enough--when Spain started to flood the Old World with Aztec, Mayan, and Incan gold. The value of their deposits started falling.
Why? Because unless you're going to make something out of the gold--and the vast majority of people don't want to do this--while gold is a fine and useful metal, it's something you buy, it isn't something you buy things with. It doesn't hold value sufficiently well for a modern economy to work, as both supply and demand for gold can and do fluctuate widely.
Second, there isn't really enough gold to go around. All of the gold that's ever been mined could easily fit into a cube 20m on a side. That's a hell of a lot of gold, but only represents about $76 trillion at $500 an ounce. The world GDP last year was probably $65 trillion. That's just revenue, not assets. As a medium of exchange, this just doesn't work.
So around World War I, governments took the next logical step and went to straight fiat money. They recognized that money has never really been a "good" in the traditional sense. Ever since people stopped melting down iron bars to make tools out of them, money has been a medium of exchange, not a natural good. It's utility is as a representation of value, not value per se, and only a government has the ability to garner sufficient public trust to make that kind of fiat money worth anything. As governments weaken and fail, their scrip becomes worthless, e.g. the Confederate States of America.
This fiat money is accomplished through legal tender laws. The concept is frequently misunderstood, but very important. Essentially, "legal tender" means that a debt originally denominated in a government's currency can always be satisfied by offering that amount of the government's currency. "Tender" means to deliver the thing owed or contracted for, so "legal tender" would mean something along the lines of "having fulfilled the legal requirements to which I am subject." So by making US currency legal tender, the federal government creates a medium of exchange, even without any underlying deposit of material goods.
This isn't as strange an idea as it sounds. Even the gold standard isn't really a "standard", as it only works as long as there is a demand for gold, and exactly how much a gold-based dollar will get you will depend on how much the person with whom you're treating wants gold. Currency has always been defined in relation to other things, there being no base quanta of inherent value upon which to found it. But the inherent value of money has never been the point. It's always existed as a means for people to convert what they have into what they want. Nowadays this usually means converting labor into goods without having to make them yourself or work for the person who does, neither of which is practicable in a market economy.
If nothing else, a government may define its currency against its tax requirements. If the government only accepts payment in currency that it offers, since everyone owes the government taxes, that currency becomes valuable.
But even though the US Code doesn't specify valuation in this way, it works, and it works tolerably well. As this was the whole point, fiat money is successful by any definition.
Several of the terrorists responsible for the attempted bombings last week have been arrested. Several of them are physicians. The London Times has an editorial saying that this undermines the Leftist thesis that Islamic terror is motivated by Western injustice. These people--not all of them men--are living in the UK, well-educated, and in several cases actually practicing medicine and making a good living. They're doing just fine. Yet they still want to blow up nightclubs.
Frankly, I don't think he did anything wrong, but that doesn't mean that a presidential commution is the way to go.
Seriously now. Did anyone in the administration think about the PR repercussions for more than three seconds?
For the perhaps two people who read this who aren't on Facebook or haven't friended me there, I'm uploading pictures of my London trip as I go. They'll all be available here.
In related news, if you're in the market for a digital camera and don't want to spend $750, get yourself a Canon. I'm using the PowerShot A570IS and just love the thing. It occasionally complains that it's out of battery when I know it isn't, but turning it off and on again fixes this every time. I've taken just about every one of the pictures I've uploaded so far with no flash.
It's about time someone did this (hat tip to Fark). In anti-drug campaigns that I've come across, it's excruciatingly obvious that the campaign has been designed by middle-aged adults trying to produce material they think will appear "cool" to people the age of their children. It's almost always an excruciating failure.
But the above link goes to the Montana Meth Project. Montana, like many Midwestern and Southern states, has a methamphetamine problem. So they produced a series of ads (I don't know who the production company is), many of which have the same graphical quality as a slasher film trailer, visually depicting the realities of meth addiction while clashing with the voiceover. The ad "Boyfriend" (the site doesn't support direct linking; the videos are available in QT here) is particularly effective. In their print ads, they've actually managed to make a distinction between male and female motives for using meth (see "Hook-Up" and Lipstick [both ads visually gruesome, but otherwise SFW).
