Jared Moffat is campaign coordinator for the Marijuana Policy Project.

I mentioned that Ferguson, Missouri gains an extrordinary amount of its revenue from motoring fines.

Black people make up 27 percent of the population, but represent 71 percent of drivers pulled over by police officers. Last year, the town issued 29,072 traffic citations, according to statistics from the Missouri attorney general’s office.

*****

A couple

of weeks back an international group of scientists announced that they had

detected a black hole swallowing a neutron star.

I say a couple of weeks back, but the

detection made last month was actually of something that happened 900 million

years ago, long before the dinosaurs walked the earth. It was detected last month

because that’s how long it took the gravitational waves to arrive at earth from

where this event happened, 900 million light years away.

I’m reminded of the observation that the

length of time between the first powered flight, the Wright brothers, in 1903

and the moon landing in 1969 was just 66 years. It’s likely that a child who

observed the first flight in Kitty Hawk would have watched the moon landing on

TV. That’s an incredible advance in technology in the span of one lifetime,

without even counting the invention of television.

Black holes were

proposed by Einstein in 1915, barely a century ago, but he didn’t say that

they existed, he thought that they may not; he just calculated that the physics

of relativity made them theoretically possible. Those calculations, by the way,

were made with pencil and paper, or sometimes chalk and a blackboard. There was

no high-powered computers to work these things out on.

In barely a century, we have gone from