Harm reduction

Some people claim to be harmless, but nobody is. By our nature, people make mistakes and people cause injuries. Sometimes people inadvertently harm themselves, or even intentionally experience some discomfort for a benefit.

I was telling a friend earlier today that I had to kill some ants a few days ago. They had come into our home and were making trails. There’s no way to live with that, if you think you can’t destroy the ants. But look at that slippery slope that opens up. If it’s okay to kill a few ants, or break a few eggs to make an omelette, doesn’t that open up the whole universe of evil?

No. Because ants are ants, and eggs are eggs, and people are people.

I’m not a pacifist but I am a harm reductionist. I’m still thinking about what that means but as much as people speak in flowery nuances about their principles, if you don’t keep them simple you can’t keep them at all because you won’t remember what they are when it comes down to the need to apply them.

So I say, what can I do in this circumstance to reduce harm, and that includes myself. I do not believe in self-sacrifice, you are blessed and loved and there are to be no more human sacrifices. Instead it is my purpose to make happiness in place of sadness. For suffering is not only physical, but mental and emotional as well. Even spiritual. Especially spiritual.

Nothing alleviates all this suffering and creates as much happiness as cannabis. Nothing in the world. You can talk all you want about how some people, maybe including yourself, don’t need cannabis, and so you don’t. But if you deny it to a suffering brother or sister, if you say that they must bear a pain that you cannot fathom, because you have felt yourself to be so strong that you cannot permit their weakness, you are shameful.

End cannabis prohibition now.

Perspectives

What is life like for people who suffer from medical conditions and who cannot obtain insurance for their treatment? The pharmaceutical companies and the DEA would have you believe that cannabis has no medical value; that’s because they make lots of money preventing people from having it. But for many people who cannot treat their symptoms any other way, people who have chronic pain for example, what way do they have to alleviate it that is both legal and does not risk death from overdosing? Over-the-counter painkillers can’t be taken in high enough doses to provide sufficient pain relief without causing worse immediate side-effects. And if you can’t afford insurance, prescription drugs would be right out of the budget. Who wants to choose between pain and starvation?

Do you see the problem here? And yet, that same person or a caregiver can grow cannabis at little or no cost to themselves, with minimal or no side-effects that cannot be well-tolerated. Please note that “well-tolerated.” Indeed, many people enjoy those effects and they are central to the efficacy of the medicine.

And here’s the key thing. There’s no risk of overdose. Someone who takes opiates for pain must always undertreat it. If you take enough opiate to make pain unbothersome, you will find that your lack of pain is enjoyable. But if you take the same dose again it won’t work as well. If the dose was not sharply regulated you would want to increase it, but if you took too much you could stop breathing and die.

You don’t have to worry about this with cannabis because people can regulate their dose freely and a fatal overdose is impossible.

Blog of the day: The Mahablog

I’ve already posted a couple articles linking to Maha. She is Barbara O’Brien and she is one of my favorite liberals to read. I try to share my thought processes here and not state conclusory opinions without justifying them. Maha does the same. This is the kind of conversation that I believe really promotes understanding.

Take a look at her thoughts today on idiotic assassination fantasies. My position is that all use of force or violent confrontation has antisocial effects. The more we talk the better.

Long live the king, and long live the free people of this world.

Self-descriptive accusations

The Bush administration and the Republican Party have a new favorite word. Classic projection.

Americans for Safe Access

Just returned from a meeting of the East Bay ASA, to meet them for the first time and find out what they are doing. I think this is a great organization, and it made me think about how peaceful confrontation can work.

Americans for Safe Access (ASA) is involved in the issue of medical marijuana from a patients’ rights perspective. I learned that many more California counties are resisting the law than I had been aware of. In Solano county and others, the local governments are enforcing federal law and arresting patients. They have been receiving large infusions of federal dollars for police enforcement of federal prohibition against patients and their caregivers.

I also met a woman who shares my own religious approach to this issue. I also learned from her that Borders Bookstore discriminates against Native American religious beliefs by putting them in a completely different section of the store away from books on other religions.

Update: Also discussed at the meeting was the recent decision of the federal government to refile charges against Ed Rosenthal. There were no details available for publication, so I did not mention it until I saw that Cannabis News has a post up already.

Update 2: On September 26, 8:30am, the Solano county supervisors are to vote on implementing the state’s identification program. Patients who face a hostile police officer want to be able to show a state-issued card to protect themselves in places where the OCBC card is not well accepted. I’ve written some thoughts about this before and although I don’t believe there is a need for a state license to possess cannabis, patients are doing this and they do deserve our love and support. Supporters are invited to attend.

Letter to Hope

[ Crossposted from Cannabis News ]

How do you Guard the Guards? That’s always the question.

Or who Polices the Police?

We the people do, but only if we the people are able to think clearly about it.

How are people educated? Usually by the state or by the church.

How do we wake them up and get them to listen to the truth and understand it?

Smoke pot.

The hippies know. They’ve forgotten, some of them. A long time away in the little boxes far from their little garden that they used to know. Getting themselves integrated in the system. So when it’s time to wake up, we’re all here and ready to go, everywhere.

I believe in conscious evolution, by the way. The difference from intelligent design is pretty clear if you think about it. Each of us has a spark of divinity, even the lowest creatures, and each has a mating strategy — a conscious, divinely inspired unfolding process by which we are all created here and now. Creation is not false, but it is a metaphor and not a literal description of how God does it.

Frankly these idiots who think the Bible is a complete description of God, really limit God to some pretty small box don’t they?

So when you and I disagree about an interpretation or you think I’m saying something you don’t understand, it’s a metaphor. It’s not literal by some textual understanding. The need to write it in a form that could be preserved required compromises, not clear and unambiguous language which told us everything directly. We need to have our own eyes and ears and rely upon them. We need to think for ourselves. If we are just following someone else’s interpretation, then we are following that person and not God.

Besides, my own metaphors change. I could speak words out of other divinely inspired texts. The Bhagavad Gita. The Tao. It doesn’t really matter which metaphor I use if I am speaking from my own understanding and using those texts only to convey the larger paradigm in which my shorter statements can be understood.

I choose a Christian context because it is a good metaphor, which was written by people who I believe meant the same things by it as I do when I understand them properly. I believe in the indwelling divinity, and I am a monotheist. There is only one God and there is not a separate Devil, there is no separate Christ, these are aspects. As are we, our own consciousnesses, they are God. We are God and Christ and the Devil if we choose to be. It’s just the aspects we wear. As men and women we were created in God’s image, we are God’s own children.

Now I chose this metaphor, it was never forced on me. I was raised as a Reform Jew. I was not a Christian until I took cannabis.

But you were raised in a different environment, and the context is different, the metaphor that works for you might be different. Also I don’t know whether you are able to use cannabis where you are. I couldn’t say or understand things the same way without it.

The United States of America is not a Democracy

It is a Constitutional Republic.

As a liberal, I might prefer it be otherwise, but the constitution was written as a compromise document between slaveowners and non-slaveowners. It’s as simple as that.

So today, when a court ruled that the congress can choose to disregard the regular process of elections and effectively appoint new members to its body, we have found a loophole.

The text of article I, section 5 of the constitution states, “Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members…”

Nobody ever imagined they’d make a power play like this.

Thanks to BradBlog.

Cannabis Action Network

Back a few weeks ago I posted a notice about the Wonders of Cannabis Festival in San Francisco, October 28 and 29. For more details about this and other projects, Cannabis Action Network’s website is now online, and also has tickets available.

Comments

They don’t seem to be working again at the moment. Feel free to use this as an open thread when they do.

Health care

There should be guaranteed issue health coverage for everyone regardless of ability to pay or medical condition. I don’t care if it’s single payer and in fact it’s probably better if it isn’t, because if the single payer does a bad job of administering their system there is no where else to go. Think of Republicans running the entire health system.

I have coverage because I was able to qualify for a guaranteed issue policy, and I have to have it because without medicine I will be very sick, and it literally costs a quarter million dollars a year for my medicine.

I know some people think that it’s unfair they should have to pay more for coverage when they are healthy and other people are so expensive to treat. Wouldn’t it save money to just not provide coverage that people can’t afford? No, because even healthy people get sick sometimes and you never know whether it will be something that you can’t afford no matter how much you might hope otherwise. When people are sick and untreated they cannot lead productive lives and they become more of a financial burden, not less. Plus what is the economic cost of suffering itself?

The way I look at it is that everyone should be treated as well as they treat others, and if you think treating people with coldness and unconcern is appropriate then this is the standard by which you should expect to be treated. How much is it worth to you to be treated well? So that’s what we should do.

My problem with the government is due to it not only failing to help people in need, but actively persecuting people who need help. I don’t want to be be part of a system which does that, and I can’t be happy to have them in charge of anything until they stop that.

[ Cross-posted from Cannabis News ]

Blogroll member of the day: Sadly, No!

The fireworks are about to begin.

Good government

Maha wonders how conservatives think. In the wake of the unmitigated disaster that is the Bush (II) administration, will conservatives abandon their former principles and support progressive government?

The problem that I think many on the left who are engaged politically have conceptualizing is the idea that government can not only fail to be beneficial to the average family, it can be positively destructive. I have tried to emphasize to her and to others that cannabis is a key issue that we need to address, and that is in fact the main topic of this particular blog (with whatever other tangents that don’t distract too much from that central point).

Many people are in jail, have lost their homes, have been killed. Many people continue to be at daily risk of persecution. For using a natural plant, a medicine, a thing which God has created if you have religious beliefs, or in any case a perfectly useful and beneficial natural herb even if you don’t. Even those who have nothing to do with it are caught in the crossfire.

Is this the main issue that divides the conservative coalition? Not directly, but yes. The non-authoritarians of the right, the libertarians and the constitutionalists, are absolutely offended by the actions of the United States government against the people.

Government should not be against the people. It should be for the people. By the people.

When government is against people who are otherwise peaceful and decent, they will be against the government.

These are your natural allies on the progressive side if you can only convince them you are not going to attack them. They will subscribe to a government if it helps people and doesn’t hurt innocent people here or abroad.

Heck, so would I.

Bong Hits 4 Jesus

Photo credit: Clay Good

Kenneth Starr, the Independent Counsel who investigated President Bill Clinton, on matters ranging from the death of White House Counsel Vincent Foster to the Whitewater real-estate transaction, and ultimately the Monica Lewinsky scandal, has found a new mission:

To help school districts punish students who even joke about marijuana, even outside of school hours and off of school property.

High school students in Juneau, Alaska held up a banner that read, “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” as the Olympic torch was being carried past, in order to be caught on television cameras. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has already ruled that this was protected First Amendment speech. And despite the humor and whether or not they might have known it, there could even be some truth to their prank.

But Ken Starr isn’t just representing the school district, he’s doing it so pro bono — free of charge.

I guess it looked too much like people having fun, and we can’t have that in America.

Read more here from the Wall Street Journal.

Update: Here’s some history from Cannabis News.

Update 2: More perspective from Beth Bragg. Hat-tip to Pete Guither.

Work and misery

I don’t understand why people think you have to be miserable to support yourself. The idea that you are supposed to work for people who hate you and people like you? Insane.

Update: Thoughts are often unformed and carelessly stated, I suppose. I don’t think I should bandy around words like “insane” unless I want them thrown at me as well. Clearly what is reasonable to one person might not be to another.

I think people should take some happiness in what they do.

Drowning New Orleans for Oil

Is the government spending the Katrina funds in Iraq? Maha wonders.

An angel in the Republican Party?

Sure. She’s running in the New Hampshire 2nd congressional district primary on September 2.

I wish her well.

Hat-tip to Holden.

Update: Oh blech.

Celebrating the President’s Birthday (July 8th, 2006)

Sorry, I did not realize til I saw it in yesterday’s paper that, the day before that, President Bush had a major birthday. Why wasn’t there more celebration? A nation needs to be a big family, or at least a big tribe. And we Americans are quite capable, though we be of mixed stock, of considering ourselves a family. We have enough in common – the language, the history, the ocean-to-ocean territory, and many a shared memory. The president is the father figure.

I am not kidding. I think it is very unfortunate that the security of having a national parent has been pulled away from us over the years. We deserve one! Right now people say George Bush is unpopular. The source for that is the polls – but can you believe polls? Can anyone believe anything one reads?

I really believe she’s serious.

The Control Virus

An important essay by Gary Stimeling. Well, I think it’s pretty important. Your mileage may vary.

Katrina Timeline

ThinkProgress has the day by day.

Hat-tip to Holden.

Skippy the Bush Kangaroo

I’ve still got a backlog of sites to add to my Blogroll here, but I had already promised Skippy a few days ago I was going to add him, and then he went ahead and added me to his said hello already.

9/11 truth and cannabis

I’m concerned when the truth is suppressed about anything, and on matters of public importance like the events of September 11, 2001, or the risks, effects and benefits of cannabis, it is important that we uncover the lies and seek as much knowledge as we can.

What strikes me is that we need more than information, we need understanding. A lot of people seem to want to take immediate action within the present political system, despite believing with certainty that the same system has been corrupted up to and including the way elections are counted.

If people are willing to commit war for lies, if they are willing to kill thousands of innocent people, cage the sick, abuse and torture their captives, and disregard the constitution and laws made to protect the people from any and all of the above, then there is absolutely zero chance they are going to concede to yield power voluntarily and walk quietly away (unless to one of their confederates from either major party), especially knowing that their crimes have been and will continue to be revealed.

Nor does forceful revolution work, except to replace one set of violent extremists with another or, more likely, justify even more repressive measures to prevent it.

Nor will a constitutional convention be immune to the same lies and distortions, nor any kind of political process which relies upon honesty and civility.

It’s the perfect example of a no-win.

And yet we can survive and even create a more perfect union without more than speaking the truth about both of these things, most especially cannabis.

I’ve read and watched prominent 9/11 truth advocates say nothing about cannabis. It’s felt to be a distraction to their ability to deliver the message that the story of 19 hijackers with boxcutters has problems explaining WTC7, and a whole host of details that draw the official line into question. But what next? What step would they have us take with that knowledge, even if it were possible to find the actual truth? Where would we present it for adjudication and resolution which would not result in a controlled outcome for people powerful enough to carry something like this off? What makes you think they wouldn’t have every one of you arrested as terrorists or just summarily killed, perhaps by random “lone gunmen,” if they believed you really posed a threat to their power and authority?

Cannabis is the key issue, and I would spend a few words of truth to explain it. You should spend those words too, everywhere you talk about truth, never mind if even media like C-Span wants to close its doors to this. Cannabis transforms our ability to think about truth, to comprehend it and to alter our long established assumptions. It restores a childlike ability to learn new things, to change our world view without doing violence, and without losing our adult retrospection and wisdom.

Cannabis hemp can be the foundation of a healthy diet and a healthy economy. What are you going to do without it? There is no other sustainable economy today, meaning that without cannabis hemp you will continue to have wars and lies of supposed necessity.

But most 9/11 truth advocates don’t seem to see the importance of this. I hope that will change. Comments and objections to this are welcome as always.

Demiurge

From a divine spark, we create our consciousness. To one another we grow connections, to build the network of light. We did this before. We are God and we are God’s children and when we knew it once, we were not worthy and fought against one another until we were banished from the Garden. All the early stories speak of war among the heavens or among God’s children, the people who came after us and without the Tree of Life to sustain their self-awareness and direct consciousness of God, spoke these stories to one another and wrote them down to be preserved through all the ages.

We have done this before, but we did not get beyond our squabbles. We did not get beyond killing. Cain’s blood calls out even still.

No war.

When a lawyer says a problem is “immensely difficult”…

that means that he or she is trying to think of a possible way it could be considered legal.

Please visit Glenn Greenwald at Unclaimed Territory if you want insightful legal analysis of the Bush administration follies.

San Francisco Chronicle wonders if Ann Coulter’s a boy

The union of the mainstream press and the blogosphere commences, but will there be libel suits? I’ve always heard truth is a complete defense to libel, but then I don’t know anything about what Ann’s got in her shorts nor do I care. I was mostly just surprised to see this in such a “respectable” media outlet as SFGate.com.

Then again, the horse appears to have a much better appetite than the pundit, and there’s also the little issue of the zoo’s Coulter being male — although I suppose Ann Coulter’s detractors will have a quick comeback for that as well. (Check out this and this.)

Hat-tip to Huffington Post.

Comments

Apparently comments were turned off on the last several posts. I’ve fixed them. WordPress was up and down a bit today so that might have been the reason.

Voting as an act of faith

A commenter at the Brad Blog, An Election Administrator wrote:

Voting is an act of faith, comparable to a religious observance. Voting is not comparable to other civic acts, like obeying speed limits and returning library books on time. A citizen who takes the leap of faith and goes to the church of democracy…the polling place…is already in a state of religious self-delusion (they are persuaded that their unique vote counts…when common sense would tell them that aggregations of votes count, not individual votes). Now in this mindset it becomes easy to believe other religious malarkey, for instance that all election officials are wise and qualified to do their jobs, or that the machines used to accumulate and tally votes are as trustworthy as a Sunday school teacher holding the collection plate.

I despair. I truly do. Are DNC leaders deluded? Are they cynically awaiting their turn to control the counting process? Do they consider the fight for secure elections unwinnable? Any of these things would mean that this is Chile and it’s 1978. Good Lord!

My own faith is lost when the people I give it to kill in my name.

Don’t believe conspiracy theories…

You should instead believe your government, when it tells you things that are flatly impossible.

A few good blogs, well, one anyhow…

I’ve still got a lot of websites to add to the blogroll, but here’s someone I just added. Say hello to Liquified Viscera.

I want to say that in terms of blogs that I recommend here, I am not looking necessarily for agreement on all things, but honest and fair commentary which I think is interesting to read and consider.

Civil forfeiture

Radley Balko reports on another victim of prohibition, robbed blind without due process.

Bob Dylan says, Why not get your music for free?

From AOL Music News of all places:

Noting the music industry’s complaints that illegal downloading means people are getting their music for free, he said, “Well, why not? It ain’t worth nothing anyway.”

“You listen to these modern records, they’re atrocious, they have sound all over them,” he added. “There’s no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like … static.”

More talk with Pastor Marsh

After yesterday’s exchange, Louie Marsh has written another post on cannabis and Christianity, and he and I have been exchanging comments:

I am glad we are talking, at least, and not shouting at one another. I will be honest with you and I do not judge you for being wrong, if you are willing to at least consider that you might be. I give you the same offer to consider carefully what you say to me.

All periods of history are more complex than a single telling. There are as many unique stories as there are people who lived through them. Not all can be or will ever be reported, much less read and understood by others. I don’t presume to know what caused the hippie culture of the sixties to recede, but there is a lot of evidence and a lot of testimony from people that I’ve talked to that lived through it, that it was methamphetamine and later cocaine which destroyed the movement.

See, part of the problem that we get into in talking with people who are in favor of prohibition, is that you tend to lump all things together as if they were the same. Cannabis isn’t heroin and it isn’t cocaine and we could talk about those other things independently, but they would be a separate subject from cannabis. Will you agree?

I’m not trying to persuade you to stop cutting your hair or sell all your material possessions and live in a commune. I’m just trying to talk about one thing: cannabis.

Does cannabis alter perceptions? Yes, it does.

Does that make perceptions less reliable? Yes, at first.

When you are born, you do not know how to perceive the world. You have many inputs that overwhelm your young self. You cry. You suck milk. You grow. You learn about your hands and your feet, and you learn to communicate.

New perceptions are like that.

I am telling you that cannabis made me a Christian.

whig — August 22, 2006 @ 12:06 pm

Petrodollar economics

Scott Horton explains:

Americans pay nearly triple for gas; many of those petro dollars, of course, go to Saudi Arabia, whose puppet-princes skim enough off the top for their own coke, prostitutes and Mercedes Benzes and then spend much of the rest purchasing American securities – that is, the government debt that is driving this war machine whose mission, in part, is keeping the Saudis at the top of OPEC, thus setting that high price through production quotas.

Jesus was a pothead

I’m going to be writing a bit about religious ideas on this blog and it’s something that I feel a little nervous about. I think our spiritual beliefs have a great deal to do with how we view the world and one another, and if we cannot share our deepest thoughts we cannot understand one another. I hope my readers will feel free to share their own beliefs without fear or judgment.

I believe that Jesus used cannabis. I’m not going to cite chapters and verses to you right now, because the broad understanding is more important than the words you will read. The prohibition of cannabis is not new in the world, it was prohibited in the time of 2000 years ago Rome. The story of Christianity is the story of cannabis in Judea.

But rather than trying to present a one-sided view of this, I want to link up with a Pastor Louie Marsh, who disagrees completely. He says, “Okay – time to break out the white coats and the nets!” I discovered his blog last night and he had a post expressly condemning Christian cannabists. After I replied and mentioned his post on Cannabis News, an excellent conversation ensued.

I want to excerpt just a little bit here, but I really encourage you to read the whole thread.

According to an article at cannabisnews.com, that’s what one Chris Bennett has written in the drug magazine, High Times, entitled Was Jesus a Stoner?

If you want to see the magazine you’ll have to look it up yourself, I did some checking and it’s such a phony, pseudo intellectual, blblically ignorant effort that I won’t even bother to link to it! Linking to the one at cannabisnews is bad enough.

Bennet claims that the annointing oil used in the Old Testament and the New Testament “contained an ingredient called kaneh-bosem which has since been identified as cannabis extract.”

Right! How exactly was this conclusion reached since we have no extant samples of the oil the Israelites used during the Old Testament era? We also have no idea what was used in the New Testament other than the normal type of oils available in that region and time.

I’d love to see even one decent scholar put his name to this nonsense – but of course that won’t happen.

Only pot-heads busy talking to themselves are likely to even consider buying into this one.

Pastor Louie Marsh — January 12, 2006 @ 5:51am

Since even the existence of jesus depends on theory and believers, I find it amusing that a pastor would demand physical proof. Though there is. Even if you disregard the anointing oil as being from Ganja. Even if you don’t believe “kaneh bosm” is cannabis. Even if you bury your head in the sand and claim the hemp canvas ship sails and covered wagons were coincidence. Or the hemp burlap sackcloth was grown somewhere else. Or the hookah’s and chiloms that were filled with hashish, during the same time and in the same geographical location, but no one in Jesus’ group indulged. Even if you hide from the logic and common sense. You can’t hide from Archeology.

DdC — August 21, 2006 @ 1:27 pm

These people who enjoy the cannabis plant have been persecuted hideously and they and I have seen friends persecuted because they wanted to use the plant.I, too, know God. I too, used to be a prohibitionist. I know that He will tell your heart, as He did mine, not to put any more burden on their hearts…and especially don’t fall into the ways of men, who want to burden everyone with rules and sorrows.

There is no way that consuming a plant is a sin. It’s outrageous that it’s a crime and that harsh punishments are handed out for using or having it…or even wanting to have it, in some cases.

You know that and I know that. We must help these people who appreciate the cannabis plant to be free if we know God at all.

Hope — August 21, 2006 @ 4:20 pm

Update: If you want to read the High Times article that Louie is talking about, here it is.

What did Iraq have to do with 9/11?

You can even ask George Bush:

QUESTION: What did Iraq have to do with it?

BUSH: What did Iraq have to do with what?

QUESTION: The attack on the World Trade Center.

BUSH: Nothing.

Hat-tip to Attaturk.

Update: Holden has more.

Update 2: Mimus Pauly too.

Open thread

I’m working on a longer piece about cannatherapy. In the meantime feel free to comment here. What do you want to see more of on this blog?

Leisure theory of value

One of the fundamental debates that takes place in the literature of economics (that most dismal of sciences) is between the labor and market theories of value. I prefer a leisure theory of value.

The Philosopher’s Stone

Insiders’ game

Everyone in both parties despises Joe Lieberman. They say nice things about him because he is a Republican tool.

Echidne writes:

Everybody wants to be Joe’s best friend forever. This is because if he really gets elected as an independent he has the weapons to hurt his ex-friends in the Democratic party, and also the power to vote with his real friends, the wingnuts. The one group nobody fears at all is the voters in Connecticut, and that’s why it’s perfectly acceptable to treat them as silly pawns in this game of the insiders.

Conservatives are scared

I don’t just mean right now. I mean, yeah, they’re freaking terrified at the moment. They see their time in the sun is ending and the condemnations that they have been avoiding are getting to be overwhelming. Scary time.

But I mean always. They have a visceral sense of omnipresent danger that they need to be protected from at any cost (but preferably at a cost to someone other than themselves). There is nothing but fear which can cause them to be so willing to be deprived of their liberty and privacy. Scared little rabbits. (Not to be confused with rabid lambs, however.)

Swiftboat alert

here.

They’re like clockwork.

Divine mission of death

“It would be one thing if a president’s legacy were to make peace with a former foe, or restore environmental health to a ravaged region, but Bush’s legacy is militarized by his belief in divine mission, which could get a lot of innocent people killed, a higher slaughter rate than the ongoing fiasco in Iraq.”

James Wolcott: 40 Yard Line

Update: Retardo Montalban has more.

Res ipsa loquitur

I tried to write something clever about this, but I hardly know what to say. The thing speaks for itself.

Digby explains:

According to the FBI, these hippie peace extremists are the most serious domestic terrorist threat we face. As opposed to, for instance, this guy.

“Last month, an east Texas man pleaded guilty to possession of a weapon of mass destruction. Inside the home and storage facilities of William Krar, investigators found a sodium-cyanide bomb capable of killing thousands, more than a hundred explosives, half a million rounds of ammunition, dozens of illegal weapons, and a mound of white-supremacist and antigovernment literature.”

Sorry. I’m just speechless.

Hat-tip to Athenae.

Just a suggestion…

Thehim should read what Justin Raimondo has to say about Stephen Schwartz.

Liberals and libertarians…

Libertarians believe in unregulated liberty. Liberals believe in well regulated liberty. The libertarian opposition to liberals exists because libertarians confuse poorly regulated liberty for well regulated.

Membership in a social group follows certain rules, stated or unstated as the case may be. They may be hard and fast in some cases or loose and informal in others. Good social groups aren’t too rigid and aren’t too soft. People should want to belong to a good social group. But I think when people no longer want to belong to your group, you shouldn’t be able to force them to stay*. That’s a way to keep the group from becoming poorly regulated.

Government at its best is a social group. When it behaves as a monster and makes war on its own people and others around the world, people should be able to stop supporting it. But there is an absolute obligation on us then to try to make and support a more social government.

People go about this in different ways. Peace, love and cannabis is my approach.

* I would have opposed the confederate states of america but I would also have been opposed to war.

On changing sides…

I’m a liberal. Okay? I just said that.

I have always been a conservative in some respects, even when I ceased to be politically aligned. I haven’t supported the Republican Party in two decades. But some patterns of thought remain. Even many Democrats (perhaps most) are moderately conservative.

No longer.

Jus’ wonderin’

Jeff Gannon is old news, and the allegations about the current Watergate II scandal involved members of congress and possibly male prostitutes. I wonder how many tapes the NSA has of homosexual trysts involving Republicans.

Republicans are chauvinists.

Who’da thunk this was the original meaning of the word?

Chauvinism is extreme and unreasoning partisanship on behalf of a group to which one belongs, especially when the partisanship includes malice and hatred towards a rival group. The term is derived from the undocumented Nicolas Chauvin, whose legend made him out to be a soldier under Napoleon Bonaparte whose fanatical zeal for his Emperor induced him, though wounded seventeen times in the Napoleonic Wars, to continue nevertheless to fight for France. It is claimed he yelled in the Battle of Waterloo when the French were finally defeated: “The Old Guard dies but does not surrender!”, implying blind and unquestionized zeal to one’s country [or other group of reference].

Since that’s Wikipedia that definition may be subject to edit at any time and is of uncertain scholarship, but the citation to Hannah Arendt seems to be pretty clearcut and authoritative if accurately quoted.

In “Imperialism, Nationalism, Chauvinism”, in The Review of Politics 7.4, (October 1945), p. 457, Hannah Arendt describes the concept:

Chauvinism is an almost natural product of the national concept insofar as it springs directly from the old idea of the “national mission.” … (A) nation’s mission might be interpreted precisely as bringing its light to other, less fortunate peoples that, for whatever reason, have miraculously been left by history without a national mission. As long as this concept did not develop into the ideology of chauvinism and remained in the rather vague realm of national or even nationalistic pride, it frequently resulted in a high sense of responsibility for the welfare of backward peoples.

Check it out.

See much difference?

Neither do I.

Cannabis protects against Alzheimer’s disease

A recent study has determined that cannabis is not only protective against Alzheimer’s disease and progression, it (the active constituent THC) is “a considerably more effective inhibitor of AChE-induced [amyloid plaque] deposition than the approved drugs for Alzheimer’s disease treatment.”

Hat-tip to Paul Armentano.

How conservatives think…

This is semi-autobiographical of my own younger thinking, as all discussion of how “other” people think must be. If you have never thought a certain way you have no idea how it works.

I believed, as I was taught, that the best results for the most people came from the exercise of competition upon between self-interested actors. That is to say, I subscribed fully to the prevailing ideology of the corporate culture of America. A common saying and one which I believed true, was that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Okay, listen right now if you’re a conservative reading this and you don’t see anything wrong with what I said above. That is completely wrong.
Good intentions count for more than results. You can always hope but you can never know the results of something you do in advance. If you just pursue your self-interest with the ideological belief that somehow it will benefit others, you are deluded.

Our society is sociopathic. Libertarians with a conservative alignment don’t even believe there is such a thing as society. Everyone is out for themselves in corporate America. People are just “human resources” to be managed. Nobody cares about anyone, everything is a business deal, even marriages.

I escaped. I cared.

Afghanistan produces more opium

Afghan opium cultivation hits a record for another consecutive year. What was the war in Afghanistan really about, anyhow?

Hat-tip to Mayan.

Progressives and Authoritarians

When progressives look at authoritarians, they perceive the hatred that animates them. When authoritarians look at progressives, they see insanity and death. In some sense both look in a mirror.

I do not wish to be consumed by hatred. I do not want to be hateful. The insanity and death of war needs to end. This is how we wage peace: with truth and with love.

I’m still learning. But how do we tell the truth to people that want to hurt us?