Call AARP...

Now is the time to legalize cannabis. With so many users over 50 (thanks for reminding us, Willie), enforcing anti-cannabis laws is burdening the prison system beyond hope.

Is right and wrong contextual? Obviously.

For people who argue that cannabis is a gateway drug: no moreso than alcohol. Because the truth is, alcohol is a gateway drug, and it's a gateway to the same hard drugs that we worry about: heroin, crack, coke, whatever. However, it's only a gateway for people who crave altering their perceptions. Call that craving whatever you will: self-medication? avoiding reality?

People who come back from addiction and then try to save the rest of us from their ordeal see their own weakness in everyone else. That's narrow minded and patronizing. Perhaps the biggest difference between alcoholics and drug addicts is that most alcoholics (besides Dubya) understand that they have a weakness that others don't have.

As baby boomers age, they experience the aches and pains of withering bodies. And they self-medicate with cannabis in order to continue being productive. Why is it illegal to use a relatively benign agent that enhances non-competitive productivity? Might as well tear legs off flies and withhold morphine from someone whose arm has been blasted off with an RPG.

It's time for AARP to close ranks with NORML.

The Lord's Work

I think there's a tipping point in religion. We talk about tipping points in other areas of life: in social and business structures, for example. And there are macro tipping points too: points in geological time, like the points where "life as we know it" changed on earth, species died out, civilizations disappeared.

In religion, the tipping point that I think is the most interesting is the point where the stories that have won converts for centuries, in some cases, lose their value, their attractiveness. It is at that point that a religion's adherents use coercion, and ultimately violence to maintain membership and win converts.

Apply as appropriate.

This time

I don't know many people who think they're in the right time. Most people I've talked to think they "belong to another era."

When I was younger, it was teen-age girls who had silly romantic ideas of various eras in the past. Now it's middle-aged men who like to say they're romantic (read: 'don't like feminists') and belong to some golden age of chivalry. Gag and gag.

Then there are those who are ahead of their time. Once we recognize them, we celebrate them, but only from afar -- either in time, space, or emotionally. And the reason we only celebrate them from afar is because... they're kind of creepy.

Rendering Homage

Are we vassals of the oil companies?

Why else would we send our children to die for them?

vas‧sal [vas-uhl] –noun
1. (in the feudal system) a person granted the use of land, in return for rendering homage, fealty, and usually military service or its equivalent to a lord or other superior; feudal tenant.