Moving on…

Sara Robinson’s apocalypse

Sara and her husband migrated to Canada to get out of the black iron prison before the bars swung shut. Of course I should note that the members of Stephen Harper’s party are quite in line with the administration here, and will follow suit and slam that door shut in short order, too, if this were to go on as she imagines,

Four years ago, when Mr. R and I started planning to our exodus from America, we had a scenario in our minds that we found so preposterously unlikely at the time that we didn’t even discuss it with close friends, because we knew they’d think we were crazy. “This is how it happened to my grandparents,” he kept telling me. “It was frogs in pots. The Czar came, and their rights were abrogated. The Cossacks came, and there were progroms. Isadore and Bessie left Kiev around that time — but for their relatives who stayed, the Nazis came, and there was Baba Yar and Auschwitz. Frogs. In. Pots. It may only feel tepid now — and I’m not going to hang around, adapting and denying, until the day comes that we’re cooked.” In the privacy of our own conversations, the potential for disaster was enough to keep us going, one foot in front of the other, until we found ourselves all the way up in the Great White North.

By the way, I must say he does look like someone closeted himself, don’t you think? Because let’s be honest, all men are gay to all other men. We don’t all prefer it, but it’s just how it is. Men who deny this are the ones who are closeted, pretending not to feel any sense of this at all as if it were not perfectly natural.

And all women are beautiful too. Even gay men know that, because they are typically more honest about their feelings. Men who claim only to love women because they know that women are beautiful do not thereby prove their heterosexual preference.

I say these things as a happily married man (with a wife, I should clarify in these modern times), because I think it is at the root of the authoritarian impulse, the desire to stamp out anything which makes the men (in this patriarchal society) question their sexuality. This military fetishism, wars for the sake of proving that your phallus is the biggest one, and everything that the obedient soldiers in their little uniforms represent.

Even torture, yes. This is a sexual fetish writ large. It is a display of repressed emotions and feelings in blood. We have to end this nonsense and open up our society to an understanding that we are all attracted to one another in some ways that we find inappropriate, whether it be to see a beautiful college student on a city bus, a married woman, or anything that would be out of bounds.

So we look, and then we do not act in ways we should not, and it is as it should be. We are faithful to one another by our free choice.

And yes, my comments were a tangent, but I put the picture up and then just ran with it. So there.

Don’t miss the musical box below

From Reuters today:

OTTAWA (Reuters) – Canadian troops fighting Taliban militants in Afghanistan have stumbled across an unexpected and potent enemy — almost impenetrable forests of 10-feet (three metre) high marijuana plants.

General Rick Hillier, chief of the Canadian defence staff, said on Thursday that Taliban fighters were using the forests as cover. In response, the crew of at least one armored car had camouflaged their vehicle with marijuana.

“The challenge is that marijuana plants absorb energy, heat very readily. It’s very difficult to penetrate with thermal devices … and as a result you really have to be careful that the Taliban don’t dodge in and out of those marijuana forests,” he said in a speech in Ottawa.

“We tried burning them with white phosphorous — it didn’t work. We tried burning them with diesel — it didn’t work. The plants are so full of water right now … that we simply couldn’t burn them,” he said.

Even successful incineration had its drawbacks.

“A couple of brown plants on the edges of some of those (forests) did catch on fire. But a section of soldiers that was downwind from that had some ill effects and decided that was probably not the right course of action,” Hillier said dryly.

One soldier told him later: “Sir, three years ago before I joined the army, I never thought I’d say ‘That damn marijuana’.”

Wherein I speak a language only some readers may understand

John Bush (for that is what I will call him now that he has turned aside from nuclear war, at least, and in deference to the Depeche Mode) had an interesting quote about Iraq yesterday,

I am, you know, amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they’re willing to — you know, that there’s a level of violence that they tolerate.

Atrios was having some trouble parsing it. I think it’s clear that John really thinks that we’re going to have a violent uprising here in America, if we value freedom. And he’s developing an increasingly bunker-mentality about it, such that his statements seem no longer to make sense. He’s not crazy, but he’s scared out of his wits, as he should be.

People on the liberal side of the blogosphere, or blogtopia, have given little consideration or respect for the statements that John has made about his conversations with God. Doesn’t matter if you believe it, he does. Doesn’t matter if you think that doesn’t make sense. It does to him. You can’t enter into a dialogue with someone unless you are willing to undertake an acceptance of certain premises for the sake of discussion.

John wanted to be God, and now he has to settle for being the janitor. Some day he’ll be a good man.

Hat-tip to Christy Hardin Smith.

Come, the new Jerusalem

Update: replacement video:

This is another criminal investigation

Matt Stone and Trey Parker are playing the right like a violin, and it is fun to watch sometimes. Last night, on South Park they did a whole show poking fun at the “9/11 Truth” movement, even having a character representing an outrageous caricature of the people who question the official conspiracy theory.

At the same time, the proponent of the alternative view was clothed throughout the episode with a shirt that showed a web address 911truth.org, so that viewers could go and find out an actual perspective that was not quite so ridiculous.

We’re all doing our bit to gather information, whether it be over torture or complicity in other crimes. Let’s all make up our own minds upon reviewing all the evidence, and shut down no investigation that is proceeding to gather the same.

Mental health

I had a broken hip and an upper sinus infection. I couldn’t walk and I couldn’t sleep. It hurt to stand still, or to lie down. I was very badly broken and I could not function any more. I began talking to God, and learning how to survive. This was interpreted as crazy.

Older people are not crazy. They are sick, in many ways they cannot do things and they cannot even do nothing without suffering. They need some help, and they are asking for it by saying things and doing things that seem strange, nonsensical. So they are given drugs, phenothiazines, which pacify them. They don’t help anyone. They stop the patient from acting out because they make the patient unable to think at all. An IQ that might have been supergenius could be reduced to a qualified moron, incapable of performing basic skills like reading and writing.

I’m not speculating, this was done to me. I’ve recovered.

Cannabis is what fixed me, finally. It heals the pain. It heals the reason you cannot function, and then you are acting properly again, and speaking sensibly. Of course if you have been talking to God, you are going to be religious now. And a lot of older people are going to be expressing their understandings in terms that are like this, now that they are going to be helped.

Cannabis allows the brain to recover from Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.

Cannabis is the cure for “psychosis.” These are side-effects of pain you cannot diagnose, but the body can. The body needs neural help, the protection of cannabis or tobacco.

Yes, tobacco in this case becase tobacco is a neural sedative for pain. When those neurons are screaming, tobacco makes them go numb for awhile. But if you must use tobacco it should be only for a short time and with a high quality leaf, like you might obtain from American Spirit and preferably their organic. Cannabis can then allow them to heal, and the tobacco should then be withdrawn. This is herbal medicine, and it works.

Other than that, tobacco is really not good for you and has a lot of downsides that recommend against using it for any reason if you can obtain cannabis. When I did not live in California, I could not have cannabis in very much quantity nor as high of a quality as I can now. Tobacco was a crutch that is perhaps unnecessary for others.

It should not be illegal to smoke what works.

In today’s New York Times, Benedict Carey writes, based upon a large study published today in the New England Journal of Medicine,

The drugs most commonly used to soothe agitation and aggression in people with Alzheimer’s disease are no more effective than placebos for most patients, and put them at risk of serious side effects, including confusion, sleepiness and Parkinson’s disease-like symptoms, researchers are reporting today.

Right.

And what are these drugs? Phenothiazines?

Phenothiazine (a phenol derivative of thiazine) is a pesticide and industrial chemical used in pharmaceutical manufacturing. It is sometimes used as an antihelminthic. It was introduced by DuPont as an insecticide in 1935. It is now most commonly used as an intermediate chemical in the manufacture of various psychiatric drugs.

Pesticide.

Good morning Kate Bush

I’m right here, honey.

Good morning John Bush

Good morning