Cannabis is the tree of life

Illustration by Taylor Oliphant.

Kaneh Bos, Etz Chaim.

Happy blogiversary, Hipparchia

I’m pretty sure it’s been a year. Go visit over the cliffs, onto the rocks.

Happy blogiversary, Creature & co.

State of the Day is two. Go visit!

Not Happy, Kate

More singing:

• Hallelujah

Recommended reading

Barbara O’Brien @ The Mahablog on the current slate of Democratic candidates.

My own thoughts are similar to hers on this as far as the nomination; as for the general election I would not cast a vote for Hillary Clinton.

A musical offering and other observations

[odeo=http://odeo.com/audio/17137793/view]

NTodd is wicked smart.

Congratulations

to PJ @ Groklaw, for winning a Knowledge Masters Award for Innovation from the Knowledge Trust and the Louis Round Wilson Academy.

Happy birthday to the blogger formerly known as Mimus Pauly

Jim Yeager of Mockingbird’s Medley is 37. Go read his blog. Then watch this.

Happy birthday Monkeyfister

And Karl Rove announced his resignation just in time to mark the occasion.

No real than you are

Reuters has video.

Chickenings writes:

Seems like it is an actual thing:
http://www.egoleonard.com/

And just on the off-chance your Dutch isn’t quite fluent just yet, here’s a bit of what it says…

“My name is Ego Leonard and I greet you from the virtual world. A world which for me stands for luck, solidarity, everything green and blooming, and without rules and restrictions. Recently, my world has been flooded with luck-seekers and those who want power. Many new meetings in my virtual world have left me very curious as to your surroundings. I am here because I thought of your world and wanted to discover and understand it. Show me all of those beautiful things which your world has to offer. Be my friend, and tell me tales, take me on your travels to beautiful landscapes, show me your words and gestures.”

Hat-tip Doug Stych, who is now proud to be called a liberal though I don’t think he’s a parasite.

Happy first blogiversary, Ellroon

I’m a little down about the million threshhold at the moment, but I don’t want to miss acknowledging you.

Happy blogiversary, Monkeyfister

One year old today, Monkeyfister is twelve days older than Cannablog.

happy blogiversary, skippy the bush kangaroo

five years old yesterday.

Is she a good witch, or a bad witch?

Invent your own titles. Fun for the family*!

*Cannablog has been rated PG. Parental guidance suggested.

Eight random things about myself

Ellroon tagged me.

1. All right, here are the rules. 2. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts. 3. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves. 4. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules. 5. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

Okay, here goes:

1. I’m not very good at picking random things about myself to talk about.
2. Unless I am out of town or just waking, you can presume I have taken cannabis within a few hours before or while writing anything here; I would take more cannabis if I could afford it or if I was allowed to grow my own.
3. I have an orphan genetic disease which causes bone pain.
4. I have insurance.
5. I am married.
6. My wife is smarter than me.
7. That didn’t count, because it wasn’t about me.
8. This is an eighth thing and I’m not sure if it’s about me but I wrote it.
9. I don’t actually follow directions unless I must or feel like it.

Now tagging:

• Donna Woodka of Changing Places
• Pygalgia of Pygalgia
• Creature of State of the Day
• Charles of Mercury Rising
• Ombudsben of Ombudsben
• Mimus Pauly of Mockingbird’s Medley
• Mustang Bobby of Bark Bark Woof Woof
• and of course Monkeyfister, but he’s moving and offline for a few days.

I am Shakesville

Whoever is so terrified of a blog to DOS attack it and bring it down?

Shakesville will be back online soon.

Mustang Bobby has the story so far.

Related post:

• I’m Spartacus

Update: Also Shakesville, Shakesville, Shakesville, Shakesville, Shakesville, Shakesville, Shakesville, Shakesville, Shakesville, Shakesville, Shakesville, and of course Shakesville.

One miiillion hits…

driftglass, who doesn’t ever link here, but I still read his blog anyhow.

On that account, or for no particular reason, this is an open thread if anyone feels like using it.

How I found Eris…

Planet X, if you count Pluto. And she has a moon.

Hat-tip Doug Stych, who has a number of interesting stories to report, as he often does.

Some material may not be suitable for children

Hat-tip Bryan @ Why Now?

We can be confident in ourselves.

Chris Dashiell has my confidence.

It’s agreed, then

Star-Telegram:

UNITED NATIONS — The U.S. and Russia have agreed to dismantle the U.N. agency that searched Iraq for weapons of mass destruction and affirm that Saddam Hussein’s government had no such arms at the time of the American invasion in March 2003.

Hat-tip Doug Stych.

Somehow we were lied to, weren’t we?

Time to end “Most Favored Nation” status yet?

Children’s toys, above, poisoned with lead paint.

(Article from the Consumerist forwarded by my wife.)

Site news and thanks

So my pal Monkeyfister says he’s going out of town for the Memorial day weekend, tells his readers to come by here because I always have such great films on the weekend.

I appreciate it, really, but I’m going out of town too.

So I put some things on autoqueue, and you should enjoy them I hope. Maybe Whitishrabbit will post some things as well if she’s around. I may be spending a few days away from the computer altogether, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t consider my readers.

If you’re new to Cannablog, welcome.

I’m still here until Saturday morning, so don’t be surprised to see a few more current event type posts until then.

For my parents’ generation

Related posts:

• My grandparents’ generation
• System of music

Is that a bustle in your hedgerow?

The arboreal articulture of Axel Erlandson.

Hat-tip ggwfung.

Recommended listening:

• To Bedlam and part way back
• As the Leonids fertilize the earth…

Pictures of beautiful women

Don Imus is more despicable than anyone I can think of. Not only does he have the need to be insulting and rude to his audience and guests, he thinks that in the life of a young woman who has achieved some accomplishment deserving praise, she ought to be cussed at with racist and sexually offensive terms. Don is a wealthy, wealthy man. He’s got everything money can buy, doesn’t he? And all he’s got for it is hatred and disgust for himself and everyone on the planet.

Yeah, I’m big pimpin’ alright. I’m telling you. These are women who deserve respect.

But you gotta go read the General, so you know what this is about. Inform yourself about the people you see on television and listen to on the radio, see the victims of their hatred, and be disgusted. I won’t demand anyone be fired, no. If his employers intend to convey the message he conveys, they should keep him on, and they should wear him as a badge of pride, such as cometh before the fall.

Update: MSNBC has reportedly fired Don Imus. No word on CBS yet.

Update 2: CBS has also canceled his contract. Hat-tip Waveflux.

Eurocentric, but good.

My generation remembers, and we do not forget the terrible price inflicted. We need a time to heal.

The times in which this was made and broadcast, we were children, they could say no more than this much. We can say more now. We need to learn to live in peace with one another and to respect our different traditions, while allowing our children to go outside our old traditions. We need to acknowledge that the sins of our forefathers are visited upon their victims, and make our own apologies for having the fruits of injustice. Yet the good that our fathers did may outweigh any incidental harm if we can all find a way to share the fruits of joy and love with one another.

I ask forgiveness of all who may think I have done them a harm by existing, or by accepting any gift which helps to sustain my life, if it ever occurred at your expense and without permission. I do not wish to be led astray from the truth by hopes of wealth, but I wish to preserve and protect that which is valuable to all of humankind.

If you feel I have done a greater harm, or if I have done one that could not be avoided that requires more explanation, I will ask that I be told. This is not the place for putting personal grievances which require knowledge of who I am, but to what you see before you. If you feel I am unjust or wrong, tell me so.

On blogonomics

Melissa McEwan, my friend who runs Shakesville (formerly Shakespeare’s Sister), has an excellent post about how we as a blogging community might sustain ourselves. Obviously we can do this out of our pockets and free time for only so long, but we do not want to become compromised by anyone for the sake of a coin. Advertisers will limit what you can or cannot say. Mimus Pauly wrote a long but very good post about this the day before yesterday. For him this must be always a part-time endeavor, his advice — don’t quit your day job (he hasn’t).

But good writers should have a way to write full-time. Good bloggers should be able to make this a profession, and afford to feed themselves and their families without selling out. The alternative is that you will have no good bloggers that do it for a long time, and eventually our whole ecosystem will be corporate shills like we have on the mainstream media today.

We need patronage, we need to do some things to make a network of bloggers that can rate one another in terms of worthiness, and help new bloggers get connected with a source of funding. We need a structure that is more than each of us having a donation box, as patrons may not know about more than a few of the larger blogs, and some of us blog semi-pseudonymously for good reasons.

Cannablog is a blog about cannabis, and I am a medical marijuana patient in California. This is information I have made public and I feel no great concern about my safety in saying so. California law protects patients. The federal government may have other ideas, and that is something that needs badly to change. Though I feel safe now, I am not safe forever, if it does not. But in other states, medical patients who are living and not dying because they take cannabis are constantly at risk of arrest and imprisonment by local and state officials now. If they want to be bloggers and honestly talk about how cannabis helps them, they cannot use their names. This needs to change.

I want to ensure that they can be funded somehow, to be given help so that they can afford to live, so they can feed their families. They are capable of being great writers and bloggers, and if you think otherwise, if you think this blog is substandard in any way, then I would ask you to please leave a comment and tell me what you’d like to see me do better.

This is, for me, a labor of love. I do it because I must do it. I do it because it is more important to try to stop war than anything else I can do, and this is how I can help to achieve that objective. But I must eat. All must eat.

Break on through to the other side

Hat-tip Appalachian Slacker.

Related post:

• Modern conservatives

Recommended viewing:

• Stoner genius
• A change of perspective — understand highness.

Taxonomy

It is because we were hunters, because
we killed for a living, because we matched
wits against the whole of the animal world,
that we have the wit to survive even in a
world of our own creation.
—Ardrey

Homo domesticus.

Press release

From United States Senator Russ Feingold.

SENATE MAJORITY LEADER COSPONSORS FEINGOLD BILL TO REDEPLOY TROOPS FROM IRAQ
April 2, 2007

Washington D.C. -­ U.S. Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) announced today that they are introducing legislation that will effectively end the current military mission in Iraq and begin the redeployment of U.S. forces. The bill requires the President to begin safely redeploying U.S. troops from Iraq 120 days from enactment, as required by the emergency supplemental spending bill the Senate passed last week. The bill ends funding for the war, with three narrow exceptions, effective March 31, 2008.“I am pleased to cosponsor Senator Feingold’s important legislation,” Reid said. “I believe it is consistent with the language included in the supplemental appropriations bill passed by a bipartisan majority of the Senate. If the President vetoes the supplemental appropriations bill and continues to resist changing course in Iraq, I will work to ensure this legislation receives a vote in the Senate in the next work period.”

“I am delighted to be working with the Majority Leader to bring our involvement in the Iraq war to an end,” Feingold said. “Congress has a responsibility to end a war that is opposed by the American people and is undermining our national security. By ending funding for the President’s failed Iraq policy, our bill requires the President to safely redeploy our troops from Iraq.”

The language of the legislation reads:

(a) Transition of Mission – The President shall promptly transition the mission of United States forces in Iraq to the limited purposes set forth in subsection (d).

(b) Commencement of Safe, Phased Redeployment from Iraq – The President shall commence the safe, phased redeployment of United States forces from Iraq that are not essential to the purposes set forth in subsection (d). Such redeployment shall begin not later than 120 days after the date of the enactment of this Act.

(c) Prohibition on Use of Funds – No funds appropriated or otherwise made available under any provision of law may be obligated or expended to continue the deployment in Iraq of members of the United States Armed Forces after March 31, 2008.

(d) Exception for Limited Purposes – The prohibition under subsection (c) shall not apply to the obligation or expenditure of funds for the limited purposes as follows:

(1) To conduct targeted operations, limited in duration and scope, against members of al Qaeda and other international terrorist organizations.

(2) To provide security for United States infrastructure and personnel.

(3) To train and equip Iraqi security services.

# # #

Related post:

• Mensch

Copyright be damned, and torturers go to hell real quick

Here is Terry Jones. Via Why Now?

Call that humiliation?

No hoods. No electric shocks. No beatings. These Iranians clearly are a very uncivilised bunch

Terry Jones
Saturday March 31, 2007
The Guardian

I share the outrage expressed in the British press over the treatment of our naval personnel accused by Iran of illegally entering their waters. It is a disgrace. We would never dream of treating captives like this – allowing them to smoke cigarettes, for example, even though it has been proven that smoking kills. And as for compelling poor servicewoman Faye Turney to wear a black headscarf, and then allowing the picture to be posted around the world – have the Iranians no concept of civilised behaviour? For God’s sake, what’s wrong with putting a bag over her head? That’s what we do with the Muslims we capture: we put bags over their heads, so it’s hard to breathe. Then it’s perfectly acceptable to take photographs of them and circulate them to the press because the captives can’t be recognised and humiliated in the way these unfortunate British service people are.

It is also unacceptable that these British captives should be made to talk on television and say things that they may regret later. If the Iranians put duct tape over their mouths, like we do to our captives, they wouldn’t be able to talk at all. Of course they’d probably find it even harder to breathe – especially with a bag over their head – but at least they wouldn’t be humiliated.And what’s all this about allowing the captives to write letters home saying they are all right? It’s time the Iranians fell into line with the rest of the civilised world: they should allow their captives the privacy of solitary confinement. That’s one of the many privileges the US grants to its captives in Guantánamo Bay.

The true mark of a civilised country is that it doesn’t rush into charging people whom it has arbitrarily arrested in places it’s just invaded. The inmates of Guantánamo, for example, have been enjoying all the privacy they want for almost five years, and the first inmate has only just been charged. What a contrast to the disgraceful Iranian rush to parade their captives before the cameras!

What’s more, it is clear that the Iranians are not giving their British prisoners any decent physical exercise. The US military make sure that their Iraqi captives enjoy PT. This takes the form of exciting “stress positions”, which the captives are expected to hold for hours on end so as to improve their stomach and calf muscles. A common exercise is where they are made to stand on the balls of their feet and then squat so that their thighs are parallel to the ground. This creates intense pain and, finally, muscle failure. It’s all good healthy fun and has the bonus that the captives will confess to anything to get out of it.

And this brings me to my final point. It is clear from her TV appearance that servicewoman Turney has been put under pressure. The newspapers have persuaded behavioural psychologists to examine the footage and they all conclude that she is “unhappy and stressed”.

What is so appalling is the underhand way in which the Iranians have got her “unhappy and stressed”. She shows no signs of electrocution or burn marks and there are no signs of beating on her face. This is unacceptable. If captives are to be put under duress, such as by forcing them into compromising sexual positions, or having electric shocks to their genitals, they should be photographed, as they were in Abu Ghraib. The photographs should then be circulated around the civilised world so that everyone can see exactly what has been going on.

As Stephen Glover pointed out in the Daily Mail, perhaps it would not be right to bomb Iran in retaliation for the humiliation of our servicemen, but clearly the Iranian people must be made to suffer – whether by beefing up sanctions, as the Mail suggests, or simply by getting President Bush to hurry up and invade, as he intends to anyway, and bring democracy and western values to the country, as he has in Iraq.

· Terry Jones is a film director, actor and Python
www.terry-jones.net

Please help

I need some advice on how to continue to blog as I have been and still make a little bit more than nothing with two clients across the country one of whom may soon cease to be able to afford me due to the financial condition of his main client. I am in no risk of starving, between my wife’s graduate stipend and a bit we got for our condo when we moved we are okay, but we’re thinking we might want to have kids sometime and it can’t happen if we’re already running a small deficit every month.

Do you prefer plagues of locusts?

What is six times nine in base thirteen?

The act of writing is the means by which our consciousness can be focused and analyzed for coherence. If our thoughts are jumbled we would write in such a fashion. If we have a point to make, our thoughts can be arranged around that point. If we are searching for something which others could help find, our thoughts might be phrased as questions. If we already know the answer, it might be that in asking it of others we answer it to everyone.

What is the Ultimate Question?

You know. Life, the Universe and Everything.

Can you compute?

Following, the back of the Regional Transit Connection ID Center Processing Fee Receipt calculation, and verified by my wife, the graduate statistician.

Happy blogiversary, Libby!

Last One Speaks is four years old, yesterday.

Pirates are the ones that steal the gold, not the kids listening to the music

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) are a bunch of music pirates that extort money to line their own pockets from people who cannot afford to defend themselves from barratry and who are accused of the awful sin of unauthorized listening to music.

Not that I have a strong opinion about them or anything.

Chuck Dupree has more.

Update: Xeni Jardin writes about the RIAA going after a ten-year-old girl (seven when she’s alleged to have done the dirty downloading deed).

The little ones understand, and laugh

Hat-tip Ellroon.

So easy even a caveman could understand it

Glenn Greenwald:

First, the President began his Press Conference by admitting that the administration’s explanations as to what happened here have been — to use his own words — “confusing” and “incomplete.” Why, then, would Congress possibly trust Bush officials to provide more explanations in an off-the-record, no-transcript setting where there are no legal consequences from failing to tell the truth?

Related posts:

• A real problem for somebody
• First denial, then anger. Next up?
• Impeachment testimony

Social Anxiety- A common thread?

Hypothesis: Anxiety disorders play a key role behind the immense popularity of internet interactions.

Disclaimer: This observation isn’t backed by Harvard studies (as far as I know), I didn’t read up on it or seek supporting statistics; Im working from simple observation.

Basis: First a reference here or there: A favorite blogger will mention a bout of agoraphobia, a reader comments on ‘being shy’. A friend links to a friend who has just endured a terrible panic attack.

Skip to a thread forum where one person admits to crippling anxiety disorder. First one, then three, then nine people come out of the woodwork with words of encouragement and similar confessions.

Overthink: Doesn’t it make sense that the internet would provide the best socializing alternative for those with acute shyness, agoraphobia or crippling anxiety? We all need to socialize. Trends in westernized cultures actually exacerbate feelings of isolation, both through social stigmas toward people with mental health hang-ups, and a general movement toward solitary activities, independent pursuits, and families that are supposed to be ‘self-sufficient’ rather than integral members of cohesive societies that rely upon, and provide for others in their community.

Solutions: Hm. Do you approach the individual or the society? I don’t know how to cure societal ailments, but on the individual anxiety issue, maybe ask whig.

Happy blogiversary, Attaturk

Two years old today!

Space, the final frontier

Watch this from NASA via Carnacki.

A song of seeds, the food of love

“She’s trying to stop me from helping you!” Click the video to watch it elsewhere, it won’t embed.

Opening the threadgates

I don’t know, it sounded kinda cool to me…. What’s on your mind?

4:20 of Woodstock ’99

Various items

1. I began this post intending to write about broadcast reform, but got sidetracked. The public airwaves belong to the public, they are not the private property of licensees to spectrum. We the public own the spectrum in common and for our benefit, not for private profit unless that is consistent with our own public interest. I will come back to this in a future post but welcome general discussion in the comments.

2. It happens that America has come to believe in an economic theory of competition, a capitalist Darwinian survival of the fittest. Shamefully, we treat people as human capital, as resources to be exploited and consumers to be sold, and not as independent members of the public whose object the government is meant to serve. But we do not have a government of, for and by the people today. We have a government of, for and by the rich and powerful.

3. We do not need to compete in everything, we can cooperate instead. We can help one another with our ideas and our efforts to achieve a common purpose. This is not communism, this is just community.

Free software has taught me to be generous with my own talents, and to be able to use the commons at will means we are assured of our freedom and independence, because we cannot be held hostage to the proprietary limitations of the rent seekers.

4. I’m going to be posting another version of the Chromosphere in a day or so, maybe later tonight if I’m inspired enough. This project is really a life’s work for me, even though it is only a bare skeleton of the idea currently sketched out and on display. This is a new way of communicating, a living language. It is an old way of communicating, too. Perhaps we are all having conversations around one another and not understanding.

In the meantime, please do check it out if you can spare ten minutes, and if you feel like tossing me a dime or buying me lunch sometime you can use Paypal from there. I prefer not to ask donations here at Cannablog, because I don’t ever want to have my politics or my religion or any of my beliefs a matter of monetary gain. But if you like my work and want to support free software, art and music, I sure appreciate it.

Update: version1 has been released.

Try tempting me with a carrot.

Housekeeping

If you are subscribing to this blog’s site feed (and according to WordPress.com, about 70 of you are on average every day), consider switching to using Feedburner. I’m told it’s much nicer, but let me know if you think otherwise.

Also, I want to remind you that we still have an open blogroll policy. Link to cannablog and I will reciprocate. I do not promise to keep blogs on my list indefinitely, if I feel like removing a link for any reason I’ll do so. But for now and to continue to build out this network, link up.

Meta-observation: Were my words enforceable: Law would say that if you add me, I must add you, even if I could then immediately remove you; Equity says it makes no difference, the result is the same if I do not follow the procedure, I have discretion.

Heard about Houston? Heard about Detroit? Heard about Pittsburgh, PA?

Watching my recent visitors compared to those who have been reading this blog for awhile, we are becoming more of a musical tribe and less of a political one. Unfortunately for my desire to abstain from national politics, I cannot put out of my mind the pictures of torture that have been committed. And it is not the actual photographs, which I would not care to see more than I must, but the knowledge that it is going on even now and worse.

This is still a political blog, until the administration and those who continue to dehumanize the world with such foulness are removed from power. We must restore civilization now.

Chromosphere now playing

At this new website.

No warranty, this has been tested to work only on Firefox 2.0.0.2 on Mac OS X, and might not even so in your case.

To reduce the chance of difficulties, install the JSyn plug-in before proceeding.

Related post:

• Rough sketch of Chromosphere