...rainy Sunday...

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“There will be a rain dance Friday night, weather permitting”

~ George Carlin
~~~

Imagine that... the first day of fall -- the autumnal equinox -- and its raining. Aah, rain...

In Thailand my first monsoon rain hit one day while I was riding the bus downtown, heading to my bungalow. I thought I'd run and maybe not get so wet. Hah... monsoon rains are literal sheets of pounding, big-drop rain and there is no avoiding them. I would lay in my hammock on my porch and listen to the approaching deluge as it rattled on the tin roofs that covered virtually every structure in town. As a kid from the Northwest, no stranger to rain, I was impressed.

But this morning's rain is just a sneeze. A misty dampening that won't last long. I've looked at the radar maps and there isn't much precipitation out there. But it started me thinking about rain (I have never known any women named "rain" until these first few years of the new millenium, here in the verdant south Willamette (Will-am-ette, not Willuh-mette) valley. Its a name that fits up here.

When I was doing the anti-nuclear weapons protest thing down in Central CA, we had a massive pounding of rain storms that spring and we were camped on a private farm near the Chumash rez and Solvang. In places around Santa Barbara County rainfall was up to 10 - 12 inches in 24 hours. The meadows and rolling hills we (the protestors planning civil disobedience and supporters, numbering in the hundreds) were camped in were soaking... saturated beyond the rich soil's capacity, water flowing everywhere. Our meetings were held in a huge tent. And if you're not familiar with non-violent civil disobedience organizational practices... well... its something we all need to witness. It is total participatory cooperative democracy in action. Everyone has a voice yet the individual voice defers to the groups who speak thru their spokespeople. Individual speaking is reserved and what you say should have some import.

So its pouring rain, everything is wet and there are people crammed into this tent. Temperatures are cool but mild and the group is discussing tomorrow's action at Vandenberg Air Force Base. Personally, I'm outside digging a trench around this huge tent to get rid of the water flooding off the roof. I'm soaked but stoked. A rain like that is a wonder of nature. At that time I was in the peak of my discovery of myself and my friends as beings of nature and integral parts of nature. We were doing sweats, we were in good health and the efforts to push back against the insanity of the tens of thousands nuclear weapons that were threatening all of the earth's inhabitants were energizing.

A woman was the day's facilitator. Starhawk was the perfect choice for that day. Many people were miserable from the wet and complaining, yet we had business to take care of and the rain was just something else we had to deal with. And we were. Because many of us were working outside in the downpour, not complaining... when I finally heard someone inside the tent say something that must have been almost a curse upon the rain. I entered the tent, dripping rain from my rain gear, shovel in hand and asked to speak. I said something along the lines of "this rain is a blessing upon all the creatures of this land, without it we all cease to exist and rather than complain we need to be grateful for its appearance here with us. We are here as natural beings and we represent all of our fellow natural beings. It is in our best interests to be thankful and respectful." And I went back out to keep digging my trench. The day we went to block the front gate was a day of sun with the storm breaking into a beautiful blue sky and fleeting clouds.

There is a place east of Fresno in the hills leading up to the Sierras that I used to hike and camp a lot. A beautiful creek flows down a steep yet rolling canyon and it is rarely hiked by others so I almost always had it to myself. There is a place where the creek turns a corner around a rock outcrop and then falls about 80' to a pool probably 50' across and maybe 10' - 15' deep. When the rains come to the mountains this waterfall becomes a massive hydrant. The noise of the water is as loud as any rock and roll concert I've ever attended. The water shoots out about 30' and roars... but to see it, you have to hike in the pouring rain.

Opal Creek is another place that has its share of rainy days and the first place that I learned, in Oregon if you don't work in the rain... you don't work. But Opal Creek gets about 100+ inches of rainfall a year. And of course it is that rain that makes the place what it is... Oregon's Gem.

Anyway... the rain has stopped here already. I was just going to post some pictures but had to talk about the rain. And because I do believe that water, an element without which we -- and all life -- would be but dust, is a sacred thing that we defile and disrespect regularly.

But that is another day's rant... I'll leave you with some images both recent and not so, starting with brother Marty getting a workout at McCready hot springs (a good, hot soak):




Davis Lake and Davis Mountain, from Stumpy's Point


Chewaucan River, south of Paisley


Sandhill cranes and Canadian geese


Petroglyph, Crump Lake


Looking northwest towards Silver Lake


Sunset here at the farm with smoke from a forest fire filling the valley


Left hand as seen from the right hand


Following the flume line at Opal Creek, a walk every Jawbone Flats residing caretaker knows well...


Whitehead Creek

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It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

~ Voltaire

~~~

The BIG lie...

~~~

“A lie cannot live.”

~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
~~~

Now surely, if a law is to have any validity at all, it must be founded in truth, yes? But what happens when a lie is a law's foundation? What happens when that lie is told and retold and retold again... well, obviously if a lie is told often enough it becomes accepted as truth.

That is exactly what has happened with the laws against cannabis (and yes, cannabis is pot, marijuana... even hemp). And this phenomenon of history is very well covered withing the drug policy reform arena. One of my favorite versions comes from my friend Pete Guither over at his blog Drug WarRant. If you are tepid in the least about your opposition to Prohibition stop by Pete's and be renewed. In fact if there is room, grab a place on Pete's couch. (inside joke there... if you've ever seen the anti-pot commercial, "Pete's couch," you'll get it...)

Pete's version of the history of pot's Prohibition is here: Why is Marijuana Illegal?

And knowing Pete won't mind, rather than write up things all over again I'm just going to borrow snippets from his work.

So come on along and relearn some history:

Those who voted on the legal fate of this plant never had the facts, but were dependent on information supplied by those who had a specific agenda to deceive lawmakers. You'll see below that the very first federal vote to prohibit marijuana was based entirely on a documented lie on the floor of the Senate.

You'll also see that the history of marijuana's criminalization is filled with:

Racism
Fear
Protection of Corporate Profits
Yellow Journalism
Ignorant, Incompetent, and/or Corrupt Legislators
Personal Career Advancement and Greed

"A documented lie on the floor of the Senate"... ummm... I think some folks call that perjury.

OK... lets continue on with this fantastic journey:

America's first marijuana law was enacted at Jamestown Colony, Virginia in 1619. It was a law "ordering" all farmers to grow Indian hempseed. There were several other "must grow" laws over the next 200 years (you could be jailed for not growing hemp during times of shortage in Virginia between 1763 and 1767), and during most of that time, hemp was legal tender (you could even pay your taxes with hemp -- try that today!) Hemp was such a critical crop for a number of purposes (including essential war requirements - rope, etc.) that the government went out of its way to encourage growth.

The United States Census of 1850 counted 8,327 hemp "plantations" (minimum 2,000-acre farm) growing cannabis hemp for cloth, canvas and even the cordage used for baling cotton.

In the early 1900s, the western states developed significant tensions regarding the influx of Mexican-Americans. The revolution in Mexico in 1910 spilled over the border, with General Pershing's army clashing with bandit Pancho Villa. Later in that decade, bad feelings developed between the small farmer and the large farms that used cheaper Mexican labor. Then, the depression came and increased tensions, as jobs and welfare resources became scarce.

One of the "differences" seized upon during this time was the fact that many Mexicans smoked marijuana and had brought the plant with them.

However, the first state law outlawing marijuana did so not because of Mexicans using the drug. Oddly enough, it was because of Mormons using it. Mormons who traveled to Mexico in 1910 came back to Salt Lake City with marijuana. The church was not pleased and ruled against use of the drug. Since the state of Utah automatically enshrined church doctrine into law, the first state marijuana prohibition was established in 1915. (Today, Senator Orrin Hatch serves as the prohibition arm of this heavily church-influenced state.)

Other states quickly followed suit with marijuana prohibition laws, including Wyoming (1915), Texas (1919), Iowa (1923), Nevada (1923), Oregon (1923), Washington (1923), Arkansas (1923), and Nebraska (1927). These laws tended to be specifically targeted against the Mexican-American population.

See, its getting ugly already and we he haven't gotten to the serious campaign of perjury. Lies and bigotry... a great foundation upon which to build our laws. Not...

In the eastern states, the "problem" was attributed to a combination of Latin Americans and black jazz musicians. Marijuana and jazz traveled from New Orleans to Chicago, and then to Harlem, where marijuana became an indispensable part of the music scene, even entering the language of the black hits of the time (Louis Armstrong's "Muggles", Cab Calloway's "That Funny Reefer Man", Fats Waller's "Viper's Drag").

Again, racism was part of the charge against marijuana, as newspapers in 1934 editorialized: "Marihuana influences Negroes to look at white people in the eye, step on white men's shadows and look at a white woman twice."

So, if you are white, and your child is starting to look like a black jazz musician... check their room, they may be smoking pot!

In 1930, a new division in the Treasury Department was established -- the Federal Bureau of Narcotics -- and Harry J. Anslinger was named director. This, if anything, marked the beginning of the all-out war against marijuana.

Harry J. Anslinger



Anslinger was an extremely ambitious man, and he recognized the Bureau of Narcotics as an amazing career opportunity -- a new government agency with the opportunity to define both the problem and the solution. He immediately realized that opiates and cocaine wouldn't be enough to help build his agency, so he latched on to marijuana and started to work on making it illegal at the federal level.

Anslinger immediately drew upon the themes of racism and violence to draw national attention to the problem he wanted to create. He also promoted and frequently read from "Gore Files" -- wild reefer-madness-style exploitation tales of ax murderers on marijuana and sex and... Negroes.

Are you detecting the trend here? Well, just wait. Now comes the titillation... exciting yellow journalism from the Wm Randolph Hearst media empire (and you thought the tabloids were weird...), from the San Francisco Examiner:


"Marihuana makes fiends of boys in thirty days -- Hashish goads users to bloodlust."

"By the tons it is coming into this country -- the deadly, dreadful poison that racks and tears not only the body, but the very heart and soul of every human being who once becomes a slave to it in any of its cruel and devastating forms.... Marihuana is a short cut to the insane asylum. Smoke marihuana cigarettes for a month and what was once your brain will be nothing but a storehouse of horrid specters. Hasheesh makes a murderer who kills for the love of killing out of the mildest mannered man who ever laughed at the idea that any habit could ever get him...."

On the farm, in the barnyard... this is what is called manure. And people bought it! They bought this outrageous pack of lies and it is a legacy that has been built on for 70 years... and they still buy it today!

But wait... where would this story be without Richard "Dick" Nixon?



(hey, and I'm sorry if this is a bit long, but it is a topic I've been studying for over a decade and it takes some time to explain)

So, how does Tricky Dick come into this farcical play of life? Remember those White House tapes? Yep...

Once-Secret "Nixon Tapes" Show Why the U.S. Outlawed Pot

[quote]

Congress, when it passed the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, temporarily labeled marijuana a "Schedule I substance" -- a flatly illegal drug with no approved medical purposes. But Congress acknowledged that it did not know enough about marijuana to permanently relegate it to Schedule I, and so they created a presidential commission to review the research and recommend a long-term strategy. President Nixon got to appoint the bulk of the commissioners. Not surprisingly, he loaded it with drug warriors. Nixon appointed Raymond Shafer, former Republican Governor of Pennsylvania, as Chairman. As a former prosecutor, Shafer had a "law and order," drug warrior reputation. Nixon also appointed nine Commissioners, including the dean of a law school, the head of a mental health hospital, and a retired Chicago police captain. Along with the Nixon appointees, two senators and two congressmen from each party served on the Commission.

[end quote]

It is a Presiden't perogative to make appointments as he (so far, only hims, all white, no hers) sees fit. And in this case he stacked the deck. But ya know what? the truth won out...

[quote]

The Shafer Commission -- officially known as the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse -- took its job seriously. They launched fifty research projects, polled the public and members of the criminal justice community, and took thousands of pages of testimony. Their work is still the most comprehensive review of marijuana ever conducted by the federal government.

After reviewing all the evidence, these drug warriors were forced to come to a different conclusion than they had at first expected. Rather than harshly condemning marijuana, they started talking about legalization.

What!?!?!? Law and order types? Swayed by the truth of their own research...? Wow. How times have changed...

[quote]

[...] in the end, the Shafer Commission issued a report that tried to correct the "extensive degree of misinformation," to "demythologize" and "desymbolize" marijuana. They reported finding that marijuana did not cause crime or aggression, lead to harder drug use or create significant biochemical, mental or physical abnormalities. They concluded: "Marihuana's relative potential for harm to the vast majority of individual users and its actual impact on society does not justify a social policy designed to seek out and firmly punish those who use it."

The most important recommendation of the Commission was the decriminalization of possession or non-profit transfer of marijuana. Decriminalization meant there would be no punishment -- criminal or civil -- under state or federal law.

Nixon reacted strongly to the report. In a recorded conversation on March 21, the day before the Commission released its report, Nixon said, "We need, and I use the word 'all out war,' on all fronts ... we have to attack on all fronts." Nixon and his advisors went on to plan a speech about why he opposed marijuana legalization, and proposed that he do "a drug thing every week" during the 1972 presidential election year. Nixon wanted a "Goddamn strong statement about marijuana ... that just tears the ass out of them."

[end quote]

Aaah... and those White House tapes...

[quote]

Nixon's private comments about marijuana showed he was the epitome of misinformation and prejudice. He believed marijuana led to hard drugs, despite the evidence to the contrary. He saw marijuana as tied to "radical demonstrators." He believed that "the Jews," especially "Jewish psychiatrists" were behind advocacy for legalization, asking advisor Bob Haldeman, "What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob?" He made a bizarre distinction between marijuana and alcohol, saying people use marijuana "to get high" while "a person drinks to have fun."

He also saw marijuana as part of the culture war that was destroying the United States, and claimed that Communists were using it as a weapon. "Homosexuality, dope, immorality in general," Nixon fumed. "These are the enemies of strong societies. That's why the Communists and the left-wingers are pushing the stuff, they're trying to destroy us." His approach drug education was just as simplistic: "Enforce the law. You've got to scare them."

Unfortunately, Nixon did more than just "scare them," whoever they were. His marijuana war rhetoric led to a dramatic increase in arrests. One year after his "all out war" comments, marijuana arrests jumped to 420,700 a year -- a full 128,000 more than the year before. Since then, nearly 15 million people have been arrested for marijuana offenses.

[end quote]

(btw... thanks to Kevin Zeese and Alternet for a great report)

Now... consider all that. Is that the kind of "truth" that we found our laws upon? Yep. And that is the foundation underlying my getting fired for what I do on my day off.

Nobody said life has to be fair right? Right....

There is a 3rd part to this saga. So stay tuned...

Next: Who cares if it may cure cancer?
~~~

“We accept too damned many things on the explanations of people who could have good reasons for lying”

~ Frank Herbert

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community...

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“A world community can only exist with world communication, which means something more than extensive software facilities scattered about the globe. It means common understanding, a common tradition, common idea's and common ideals.”

~ Robert M. Hutchins
~~~

This blogging stuff is interesting. It remains its own phenomenon with many many people unaware that such a thing as a blogosphere exists.

Looking at the map of visitors is interesting... I mean for me, I know who some of those dots are. But I'll be darned if I'm aware of who all you other folks are. We've had visitors here from virtually every continent. And I'm sure not going to speculate why or how folks from Colombia and Australia and Brazil and Germany and Norway and Iceland and Mexico and Canada and... well... thats pretty cool.

Hey neighbor! S'up?

When I think about other places and other nations I know that the people there are what the Firesign Theater came to call:

Just Folks...



Firesign Theatre being a bunch of very wise men. Or is that wise guys?

Anyway... I know we all share the same basic situations. We have families and friends, and just folks we care about. We are all the same. And its not you and I, or you and I, its not any of us, that have problems and differences we have to settle with F-15s and RPGs. I mean I can only speak for myself but I sure don't see a need for all this militarized b******t our world's governments continually demand we keep them stocked to the hilt with. Heck, nobody needs to attack us here in the US, we're pretty good at killing ourselves. Wait long enough and we'll do ourselves in. And then you can have all the 7-11s.

You know right, that Lewis and Clark's whole mission was to scout locations for 7-11s? Think about it...

So, no pictures, just this short post about y'all. Its nice to meet you. Thanks for stopping by.

(Looking at that map again... I must've pissed off Russia and most of Africa. Oh, another thing... since I didn't make the extras' casting call for her movie last summer in Portland I still haven't heard from Jennifer Anniston. Poor girl, must've broke her heart...)

~~~
[edited to add]

OK... I've posted about 30 pics of the Eugene Celebration Parade over at my photo blog.

Enjoy... this is a people's parade. Several local celebrities showed up, pols Bobby Greene, Peter DeFazio, Mayor Kitty Piercy, mayoral candidate Jim Torre... even Barack Obama showed up... and the green goddess made time from this season of ripening produce.

~~~

OK... a line has been crossed...

~~~

The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom.

~ Justice William O. Douglas
~~~

I'm not a flag-waver. I don't put made in China "I support the troops" stickers on my car. But I am a veteran, a volunteer during Vietnam. Both my older brothers were volunteers as well. My dad (RIP) was a vet of WWII, fought in the Battle of the Bulge...

... and while I can't speak for any of them, I believe in the principles of liberty, freedom and equality. Each person's business is their own and unless they have breached etiquette and intruded upon another by their actions what they do is their business. And their's alone.

I've been putting this post off for quite awhile but recent events tilted my qwerty at a dangerous angle and now I am compelled to do some ranting.

(big breath... let my prana catch up to my karma... You know the song, "Goin' up the country" by Canned Heat? Next time you hear it, pay attention to the lead voice and put the image of Kermit the Frog to it)

... sigh... ok, I'm calm, for a little bit at least...

Back on the subject of my firing... Was I fired for... poor performance? No, all my performance ratings are excellent. I'm on time, helpful to my co-workers and make them laugh, appreciated by my customers... I didn't moon anybody or swear out loud in front of a pack of toddlers. None of those frequent and common atrocities in retail land.

No, I was fired for doing something on my day off that millions of people do every day in probably every country on the planet (and maybe... out there as well...).

(see, now here is where, as a writer, I havta figure out if I provide some background info or just dive into it...)

And I know some of you may be shocked, and never drop by for a donut again... but... well... I smoked a bit of pot. On my day off.



And then I went and peed in a bottle for all the good little folks deriving their income from an entire industry dedicated to violating the 4th Amendment of the Constitution.

For those who don't remember:

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Did I know my company had random tests? Yep. I could have passed any day along the way. Except for that week...

hmmm... what if it wasn't just the roll of the dice? What if they do really see everything we do? hear everything we say? (I'm sooo glad you can't see me with my tinfoil hat)



What? I'm 56 (soon to be 57) years old and most certainly don't need to be monitored on my day off. The funny (well... not really funny) part? If I had gone out on Friday nite and snorted up a few lines of whichever white powder was available (and white powder is always available somewhere), smoked some opium or tripped on LSD I would have peed clean. But not with pot/cannabis/mah-reee-wanna/reefer/tea/ganja/bud... it is the only one of those very few "illicit" substances that actually clings to your fat cells cells instead of being water soluble. Water soluble meaning you flush it through your system rapidly...

Now, as much as I've tried to avoid the topic, because it really is Nobody's Business what I do on my time, I've got to lay down a few lines of type here.

And its not like I was working in some high stakes national security position. I was working as a retail clerk... and a good one I was(/am) too. Aah well... this IS Oregon and even among that large voting majority of us Oregonians with common sense and a very middle class populism there are those who will swallow whatever lies the government feeds them and say "ummm, that was good. More please."

See, there is this document... I think I've mentioned it before (oh yeah, just above!) ... anyway... this document is kinda like David Letterman's Top 10 lists. But it pre-dates Letterman. Well, #4 on this list is pretty cool. But it is in not such good shape these days as the government has... altered... it just a bit. You know, deleting a few items here, changing a few words over there... even though that document is forever in the care and control of this nation's citizens. This "Top 10 list" belongs to the people. A set of rules... guidelines and principles handed to us by our nation's founders as a tool to keep the government in check. Not an instrument for the government to modify as it sees fit in order to control the populace. In fact it is so cool I think I'm going to repeat it (for those of you on drugs):

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Now, as many times as I've read this during my growing-ever-longer lifetime (I know I had to memorize it as a kid in school) I've never seen an "except when" in there. Do you see that anywhere in there? Now... I may be getting older (a "classic" now) and even tho' I can't see out of one eye (and I'm blind in the other) I sure as heck can't find that "except."

Like I said, I'm only going to do this once, so take notes if you have to. (Oh, and just to further impale the point I'm making, I have a whole bunch of ex-criminal justice professionals -- cops, judges,prosecutors, etc -- who agree with me.)

There are a whole lot of reasons not to like drugs (reason #1... Tweakers!). But as anybody knows that has experimented with any of the mood altering substances in the human pharmacopeia (and lord knows there are thousands of ways, many fatal, to alter consciousness) , there are reasons to like drugs. Now me personally... I've tried a few over my half century plus.. Some I liked some I didn't. Ganja is one I do like. As a creative person it works for me. It also has health benefits. With arthritis holding a prominent place in the genes on my mother's side of the family I know the good herb has helped stem a disease (arthritis) that crippled my uncle and gnarled my mother's hands. But since I haven't been consuming any pot for almost the last 12 months, my hands were starting to feel the effects again. I've already got one finger that has twisted at a weird angle with a pretty gnarly knuckle and another finger joint has been swelling and starting to do weird things over the last few months. Plenty of mornings I had to flex my hands and take an ibuprofen or two in the morning to make it through my work day.

But ibuprofen has damaging side effects if taken for too long a period of time. I'm not a big fan of pharmaceuticals (the drugs or the corporations), preferring instead to use herbs, massage, hot springs, a healthy diet and exercise. Of course I've used pharmas when they've been prescribed but I can count the number of times I've gone to the doctor in the last 30 years on one hand. And part of that comes from my dislike for western medicine in general. Throw western medicine in with western style "civilization" and you've got a dangerous brew.

Too many times in my life I've felt like I was born a few hundred years too late. To have seen this country before it was fenced and cross-fenced, strapped down by highways and byways and its forest stripped, its waters dammed, dyked and polluted...

...sigh...

Anyway... going back in the human past for far longer than we have been *cough* civilized we have been either hunting and gathering or farming, often a combination of both. And across the continents of our globe we developed differently in our diverse communities. But being human... many many truths were shared. We as a specie share common traits, biological more than cultural and social, genetically bound.

The Hopi speak of several past worlds that all ended because our behavior was not... mmm... conducive to societal success. But with the passing of each world went that contingent of humanity that survived and followed the path that led them on to the next world. And so we did it all over again. Again, a few became many. And then, again, too many.

But in spite of all this passing of humanity... shaping us, making us into who we have come to be today was the environment in which we lived. I try and share the pieces I find of that once unfenced global whole with my landscape photography. This beautiful, beautiful planet I love taking photographs of has always sustained us. Whatever our wealth, whatever our sustenance, it has always come from the earth. And there is but one... at least right now, for us.

And amidst this wealth of resource we call earth we have always had the resources to heal our hurts. For thousands and thousands of years many of the planet's plants and muds and frog juices and moth wings and fluids and substances of vast descriptions, were known for the have medicinal components they hold. And once, way back, these were the sum of our medicinal options. So we carefully remembered them, passed the knowledge on, developed preparations, learned the best and most useful parts and in which season to gather them. Caring for wounds and aches and pains came from caring for one another. Still today, in our modern technological world, we discover new medicines in remote ancient rain forests and isolated desert glades. In the fish and other ocean life forms living deep in our seas we find much more and continually are reminded how much we don't know. And seemingly what we have forgotten is the caring. Yes, many, many of us do care. I know, I know... but there is a rift, an open wound that won't heal and it continues to fester... and our propensity to do harm flares up and disturbs the balance of what should be lives full of good living. But there is no curing salve for that affliction, save our own efforts...

Among these medicines so miraculously co-existent here, with us, is a plant that has a very ancient relationship with humanity. So old is the relationship that we carry receptors for its various components within our bodies on a cellular level. This plant has fed us, it has clothed us, it has been the paper upon which great documents have ben written and it has held our ships together in the navy that first defended our shores... we have used it as a medicine as far back as any civilization's recorded history and far far beyond that. Among the most ancient medicinal traditions still being utilized today, this plant holds a place. Even here in the modern U.S, it was a part of the our pharmacopeia until the middle of the 20th century and is once again.

Now, I hope you don't mind my version of a history lesson. I mean this is it. We live it. And those years behind us are our histories. And those human histories have passed and passed and passed... and always amidst those lives and generations we have lived, aware. Human consciousness is no young thing. We have been proud, upright beasts for awhile now. Among all these passings truth has grabbed hold now and again. Things like gravity and the laws of attraction. Aah, the laws of attraction... without it we would not be here today.

I'm getting distracted... women have that effect on me. Nice days do that too...

In my roundabout manner I'm saying that our oldest traditions are nature based. Our knowledge all comes from observation of nature. Physics is our way of describing those laws, discovered through our observation. And whether its anti-gravity or UFOs or leaves changing color in the autumn... everything has its place in this ordered chaos of life. Even tho' it is kind of weird that techically speaking we really aren't cohesive material beings because matter doesn't really exist except as whirling bits of neutrons and electrons with just monumental gaps of... cosmic foam... what Malcolm calls custard... in between these electrically whirling dervishes.

Pardon another bit of digression. When I lived out in Oregon's southern desert in the Warner Lakes basin, radio reception really sucked. As in there wasn't any. Well, actually, there was... during the day we got one AM station from Klamath Falls. Country music. And 3 times a day, Paul Harvey (Hello America!). But at night? At nearly a mile high? The AM dial came alive and I discovered Art Bell. Yeah, Art Bell talked about a lot of things. Some of his guests were phonies or blowhards but many were really interesting. Some even educational. Like physicist Michio Kaku. And of course lots of UFO, crop circle, bigfoot type stories and discussions. And I must say I have some good stories from 2 out of 3 of those... but it was Michio Kaku that grabbed my attention. I've never been a higher math kind of guy. Arithmetic I have down. Too many years of selling things and doing the figuring in my head. Carpentry showed me what geometry is about. I have the Pythagorean thing down. Something about triangles and hypotenuses and two squares equals the sea squared. Its mighty handy to know.

So, as our natural selves evolved (questionable, but that is another day's blog) we utilized all that was around us. And lo and behold there, right around us all this time, is a plant that some have labeled as a camp follower. And that plant has served us well. The plant? Well, if you haven't figured it out, its cannabis. Hemp. Ganja, pot, marijuana...

So in today's world, I'm told "son, because it is so old humanity doesn't even know how old our association with cannabis is and even tho' no one has ever died from it (and never will), well... just-you-never-mind that it is proving to be an effective cancer fighter and useful in treating many conditions and ailments -- including but not limited to Multiple Sclerosis, arthritis, Alzheimer's, alleviating problems assocated with chemo-therapy, reduces stress and much more -- just ignore all that. The fact is it is illegal and you broke the letter (if not the spirit) of the law."

Well... hello? I have no qualms with that. Lets just ignore all the data and science, all the patient testimony (anecdotal.... pffft... what do the patients know about how medicine works?) that corroborates our historical association. But if we want to stand by the law...

... surely there is a reason pot was outlawed in the first place?

Well... no. The banning of pot is a fraud and it has been perpetrated upon us for over 70 years. A lie that has fueled one of the most wasteful and oppressive bureaucracies ever.

Next:

The Big Lie

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“Why don't they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as well as prohibition did, in five years Americans would be the smartest race of people on Earth.”

- Will Rogers

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