BRITISH DRUG EXPERT SAYS ECSTASY NO MORE DANGEROUS THAN RIDING A HORSE

BBC – Taking the drug ecstasy is no more dangerous than riding a horse, a senior advisor has suggested. Professor David Nutt, chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, outlined his view in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.

The council, which advises the government, is expected next week to recommend that ecstasy is downgraded from a class A drug to a class B one. Ministers have outlined their opposition to any such move.

Professor Nutt wrote: “Drug harm can be equal to harms in other parts of life. There is not much difference between horse-riding and ecstasy.”

The professor said horse-riding accounted for more than 100 deaths a year, and went on: “This attitude raises the critical question of why society tolerates – indeed encourages – certain forms of potentially harmful behavior but not others such as drug use.”

RON PAUL

President is not a powerful enough position for this guy.

Political Axioms

If you don’t read the newspaper you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed. -Mark Twain

Suppose you were an idiot.  And suppose you were a member of Congress…. But then I repeat myself. -Mark Twain

I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.
-Winston Churchill
A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul. – George Bernard Shaw

A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money. -G. Gordon Liddy

Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. -James Bovard, Civil Libertarian (1994)

Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries. -Douglas Casey,

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. -P.J. O’Rourke, Civil Libertarian

Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases
If it moves, tax it . If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it. -Ronald Reagan (1986)

I don’t make jokes… I just watch the government and report the facts.
-Will Rogers

If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free!
P.J. O’Rourke

In general, the art of government consists o f taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other.-Voltaire (1764)

Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you! -Pericles (430 B.C.)

No man’s life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session.
-Mark Twain (1866 )

Talk is cheap…except when Congress does it. -Larry Nevels (2008)

The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin. -Mark Twain

What this country needs are more unemployed politicians.
-Edward Langley, Artist (1928 – 1995)

AND FINALLY…

A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have. -Thomas Jefferson

Quotes from Thomas Jefferson that apply to our lives today.

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***Was Thomas Jefferson a Prophet Too?

Thomas Jefferson in some cases could be called a prophet.

When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe,
we shall become as corrupt as Europe.
Thomas Jefferson

The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those
who are willing to work and give to those who would not.
Thomas Jefferson

It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes.
A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.
Thomas Jefferson

I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the
government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense
of taking care of them.
Thomas Jefferson

My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results
from too much government.
Thomas Jefferson

No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.
Thomas Jefferson

The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear
arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.
Thomas Jefferson

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of
patriots and tyrants.
Thomas Jefferson

To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which
he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
Thomas Jefferson

In light of the present financial crisis, it’s  interesting to read what Thomas
Jefferson said in 1802:

‘I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than
standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control
the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and
corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all
property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers
conquered.’

YOU DON’T NEED GIZMOS TO BUILD GREEN

Save the planet. Kill yourself.

No you don’t, but there’s a shit load of money to be made in promoting, in a coded fashion, just that idea. Just look at publications such as the disgustingly elitist ‘green home’ magazine Dwell (which purports to be aimed at ordinary people, but invariably prints articles about trendy Yup families in their ‘green’ homes who are clearly in the high five-to-six-figure-a-year income bracket, and builders who sneer that their eco-friendly small prefab houses aren’t for “people who live in trailer parks”, and whose ads and promotional pieces are all for companies who sell supposedly ‘earth-friendly’ luxury products that are needless consumer goods just the same), and you’ll quickly come to realize that much of the whole ‘green’ idea is little more than a passing fad aimed at the wannabe hip twenty percent of the economy who can afford to indulge their fantasies of being responsible stewards of the earth while continuing on in the binge-spend-consume lifestyle that they have been led to believe they are eminently entitled to pursue.

-Right Democrat

NAT HENTOFF: JAZZ AND DEMOCRACY

Sam Smith – We’ll still be blessed by his syndicated column, but now that the Village Voice has dumped Nat Hentoff, I’m reminded of what a long and steady influence he has been in my life. I first read him – not as most would today, dealing with such critical issues as our civil liberties – but when he was jazz critic for Down Beat, the must read of any high school and college drummer like myself, especially one who had a show, “Jam With Sam” on the campus radio station. For students like myself, Hentoff was right up there with Freud, Marx and Darwin and other such less swinging minds to which we were being introduced. His evolution from jazz critic to defender of the Constitution makes sense because jazz is one of the great metaphors of democracy.

The essence of jazz is the same as that of democracy: the greatest amount of individual freedom consistent with a healthy community. Each musician is allowed extraordinary liberty during a solo and then is expected to conscientiously back up the other musicians in turn. The two most exciting moments in jazz are during flights of individual virtuosity and when the entire musical group seems to become one. The genius of jazz (and democracy) is that the same people are willing and able to do both.

Daniel King, Jazz Times – From syndicated columnist to social historian, Constitutional scholar and music critic, Nat Hentoff has played many roles in the field of journalism since the 1950s, but none more notable in the eyes of jazz fans than his roles as leading jazz historian, biographer and anecdotist.

He attended Northeastern University and Harvard University in the 40s and hosted a radio show on WMEX in Boston. He took strongly to the local Boston jazz scene and after studying a year at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1950, he returned to the United States to become associate editor of Down Beat magazine (1953-1957). From there, he launched what would soon become one of the most celebrated careers in jazz journalism.

Hentoff was co-editor of the short-lived Jazz Review from 1958 to 1961 and A&R director of the Candid label in 1960 to 1961, during which time he produced important sessions by musicians Charles Mingus, Phil Woods, Benny Bailey, Otis Spann, Cecil Taylor, Abbey Lincoln and other jazz giants.

Apart from Hentoff’s fame in the jazz world, he has also become a fixture in the debate over free speech; a dual-tasked spokesperson whose writing on jazz music and the First Amendment has done much to concretize the link between the two ideals. His writing on the American legal system landed him an American Bar Association Silver Gavel Award, an honorary doctorate of law from Northeastern University, a Guggenheim Fellowship in education and the respect of a faithful readership worldwide.

Nat Hentoff, Village Voice – I’m not retiring; I’ve never forgotten my exchange on that decision with Duke Ellington. In those years, he and the band played over 200 one-nighters a year, with jumps from, say, Toronto to Dallas. On one of his rare nights off, Duke looked very beat, and I presumptuously said: “You don’t have to keep going through this. With the standards you’ve written, you could retire on your ASCAP income.”

Duke looked at me as if I’d lost all my marbles. “Retire!” he crescendoed. “Retire to what?!”

I’m still writing. In 2009, the University Press of California will publish my At the Jazz Band Ball: 60 Years on the Jazz Scene, and, later in the year, a sequel to The War on the Bill of Rights and the Gathering Resistance will be out on Seven Stories Press with the title Is This America? And I’ll be breaking categories elsewhere, including in my weekly syndicated United Media column, which reaches 250 papers, and my jazz and country music pieces in The Wall Street Journal.

I came here in 1958 because I wanted a place where I could write freely on anything I cared about. There was no pay at first, but the Voice turned out to be a hell of a resounding forum. My wife, Margot-later an editor here and a columnist far more controversial than I’ve been-called what this paper was creating “a community of consciousness.” Though a small Village “alternative” newspaper, we were reaching many around the country who were turned off by almost any establishment you could think of.

Being here early on, I felt I’d finally been able to connect with what had first startled and excited me as I was reading my journalism mentor, George Seldes, the first press critic. When I was 15, I saw his four-page newsletter, “In Fact: An Antidote to Falsehoods in the Daily Press.” He broke stories I’d never seen in any other paper, including The New York Times, stories that gave scientific data on how cigarette smoking caused cancer.

Seldes was also a labor man. You could find “In Fact” in some union halls, and for years, his name was blacked out of The New York Times because, in 1934, he testified about journalists’ wages before the National Labor Relations Board just as the Newspaper Guild was trying to organize the Times. . .

Seldes was also my hero when, after Senator Joseph McCarthy called him into a closed-door session to admit to his Bolshevism, the Great Red Hunter eventually came out of the room, looking unprecedentedly subdued as he told the waiting press that Seldes had been “cleared.” George had intimidated Tailgunner Joe. . .

At 94, Seldes was no longer in the news business, but as I came into his hotel room around nine one morning, he was doing what I do every morning: tearing pages out of stacks of newspapers. Instead of saying, “Hello,” he grabbed a handful of clips, gave them to me, and said, “You ought to look into these stories!” Then, smiling, he said, “I’m getting old, yes, but to hell with being mellow.” In 1995, he died at the age of 104 in Hartland Four Corners, Vermont.

My other main mentor, I.F. “Izzy” Stone, was inspired by “In Fact” to start “I.F. Stone’s Weekly,” where mainstream newspaper reporters also sent stories that they couldn’t get into their own papers.

One of the lessons I learned from Izzy was to avoid press conferences: “You’re not going to get the real story there,” he’d say. Instead, I learned from him to find mid-level workers in bureaucracies whom reporters seldom thought to interview. . .

I was in my twenties when I learned my most important lesson from Izzy Stone: “If you’re in this business because you want to change the world, get another day job. If you are able to make a difference, it will come incrementally, and you might not even know about it. You have to get the story and keep on it because it has to be told.”

Around the country, a lot of reporters are being excessed, and print newspapers may soon become collectors’ items. But over the years, my advice to new and aspiring reporters is to remember what Tom Wicker, a first-class professional spelunker, then at The New York Times, said in a tribute to Izzy Stone: “He never lost his sense of rage.”

Neither have I. See you somewhere else. Finally, I’m grateful for the comments on the phone and the Web. It’s like hearing my obituaries while I’m still here.

Change You Won’t Believe

The peak oil story has not been nullified by the scramble to unload every asset for cash — including whomping gobs of oil contracts — during this desperate season of bank liquidation. The main implication of the peak oil story is that we won’t be able to generate the kind of economic growth that defined our way of life for decades because the primary energy resources needed for it will be contracting.
Just as global oil production peaked, our economy evolved into a morbid hypertrophy, and the chief manifestation of it was the suburban sprawl-building fiesta that has now climaxed in the real estate bust. By the early 21st century, when so much American manufacturing had been swapped out to Asia, there was no business left except sprawl-building — a manifold tragedy which wrecked the banks that financed it, and left the ordinary people mortgaged to it with ruinous liabilities.
That economy is now in its death throes. The “normality” it represents to so many Americans is gone and can’t be brought back, no matter how wistfully we watch it recede. Even so, it was obviously not good for the country. The terrain of North America has been left scarred by unlovable objects and baleful futureless vistas that, from now on, will shed whatever pecuniary value they once had. It represents the physical counterpart to the financial mess that has been left to the young generations to clean up — and the job will take a very long time.
We have to, so to speak, get to place mentally where we can face the kinds of change that are now necessary and unavoidable. We’re not there yet. It’s not clear whether the elected new national leadership knows just how severe the required changes will really be. Surely the public would be shocked to grasp what’s in store. Probably the worst thing we can do now would be to mount a campaign to stay where we are, lost in raptures of happy motoring and blue-light-special shopping.
The economy we’re evolving into will be un-global, necessarily local and regional, and austere. It won’t support even our current population. This being the case, the political fallout is also liable to be severe. For one thing, we’ll have to put aside our sentimental fantasies about immigration. This is almost impossible to imagine, since that narrative is especially potent among the Democratic Party members who are coming in to run things. A tough immigration policy is exactly the kind of difficult change we have to face. This is no longer the 19th century. The narrative has to change.
The new narrative has to be about a managed contraction — and by “managed” I mean a way that does not produce civil violence, starvation, and public health disasters. One of the telltale signs to look for will be whether the Obama administration bandies around the word “growth.” If you hear them use it, it will indicate that they don’t understand the kind of change we face.
It is hugely ironic that the US automobile industry is collapsing at this very moment, and the ongoing debate about whether to “rescue” it or not is an obvious kabuki theater exercise because this industry is hopeless. It is headed into bankruptcy with one hundred percent certainty. The only thing in question is whether the news of its death will spoil the Christmas of those who draw a paycheck from it, or those whose hopes for an easy retirement are vested in it. But American political-economy being very Santa Claus oriented for recent generations, the gesture will be made. A single leaky little lifeboat will be lowered and the chiefs of the Big Three will be invited to go for a brief little row, and then they will sink, glug, glug, glug, while the rusty old Titanic of the car industry slides diagonally into the deep behind them, against a sickening greenish-orange sunset backdrop of the morbid economy.
A key concept of the economy to come is that size matters — everything organized at the giant scale will suffer dysfunction and failure. Giant companies, giant governments, giant institutions will all get into trouble. This, unfortunately, doesn’t bode so well for the Obama team and it is salient reason why they must not mount a campaign to keep things the way they are and support enterprises that have to be let go, including many of the government’s own operations. The best thing Mr. Obama can do is act as a wise counselor companion-in-chief to a people who now have to leave a lot behind in order to move forward into a plausible future. He seems well-suited to this task in sensibility and intelligence. The task will surely include a degree of pretense that he is holding some familiar things together and propping up some touchstones of the comfortable life. But the truth is we are all going to the same unfamiliar new territory.
The economy we’re moving into will have to be one of real work, producing real things of value, at a scale consistent with energy resource reality. I’m convinced that farming will come much closer to the center of economic life, as the death of petro-agribusiness makes food production a matter of life and death in America — as opposed to the disaster of metabolic entertainment it is now. Reorganizing the landscape itself for this finer-scaled new type of farming is a task fraught with political peril (land ownership questions being historically one of the main reasons that societies fall into revolution). The public is completely unprepared for this kind of change. We still think that “the path to success” is based on getting a college degree certifying people for a lifetime of sitting in an office cubicle. This is so far from the approaching reality that it will be eventually viewed as a sick joke — like those old 1912 lithographs of mega-cities with Zeppelins plying the air between Everest-size skyscrapers.
The crucial element in the transformation underway will be emotion. The American experience for a few generations has produced an adult population with very childish instincts, increasingly worse each decade. For instance, the desperate power fantasies among the younger tattooed lumpenproles — those with next-to-zero real economic power — suggest a certain unappetizing playing-out of resource competition when the supply of Cheez Doodles and Pepsi starts to dwindle. But even the heretofore gainfully employed middle classes are pretty lost in fantasies at least of comfort an convenience. For years now, I have wondered how their sense of grievance and resentment will be expressed when the supermarket shelves run bare and the cardboard signs get taped over the local gas pump and the cable TV gets cut off for non-payment. You wonder, to put it bluntly, how far gone we really are.
____________________________________
My new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available at all booksellers.

FEDERAL APPEALS COURT THROWS OUT PART OF PATRIOT ACT

ACLU – A federal appeals court upheld, in part, a decision striking down provisions of the Patriot Act that prevent national security letter recipients from speaking out about the secret records demands. The decision comes in an American Civil Liberties Union and New York Civil Liberties Union lawsuit challenging the FBI’s authority to use NSLs to demand sensitive and private customer records from Internet Service Providers and then forbid them from discussing the requests. Siding with the ACLU, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit found that the statute’s gag provisions violate the First Amendment.

“We are gratified that the appeals court found that the FBI cannot silence people with complete disregard for the First Amendment simply by saying the words ‘national security,'” said Melissa Goodman, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. “This is a major victory for the rule of law. The court recognized the need for judicial oversight of the government’s dangerous gag power and rejected the Bush administration’s position that the courts should just rubber-stamp these gag orders. By upholding the critical check of judicial review, the FBI can no longer use this incredible power to hide abuse of its intrusive Patriot Act surveillance powers and silence critics.”

The appeals court invalidated parts of the statute that wrongly placed the burden on NSL recipients to initiate judicial review of gag orders, holding that the government has the burden to go to court and justify silencing NSL recipients. The appeals court also invalidated parts of the statute that narrowly limited judicial review of the gag orders – provisions that required the courts to treat the government’s claims about the need for secrecy as conclusive and required the courts to defer entirely to the executive branch.

Jesus ‘healed using cannabis’

Jesus was almost certainly a cannabis user and an early proponent of the medicinal properties
of the drug, according to a study of scriptural texts published this month. The study suggests
that Jesus and his disciples used the drug to carry out miraculous healings.The anointing oil
used by Jesus and his disciples contained an ingredient called kaneh-bosem which has since
been identified as cannabis extract, according to an article by Chris Bennett in the drugs magazine,
High Times, entitled Was Jesus a Stoner? The incense used by Jesus in ceremonies also contained
a cannabis extract, suggests Mr Bennett, who quotes scholars to back his claims.
“There can be little doubt about a role for cannabis in Judaic religion,” Carl Ruck, professor
of classical mythology at Boston University said. Referring to the existence of cannabis in anointing
oils used in ceremonies, he added: “Obviously the easy availability and long-established tradition of
cannabis in early Judaism _ would inevitably have included it in the [Christian] mixtures.”

Mr Bennett suggests those anointed with the oils used by Jesus were “literally drenched
in this potent mixture _ Although most modern people choose to smoke or eat pot, when

its active ingredients are transferred into an oil-based carrier, it can also be absorbed through
the skin”. Quoting the New Testament, Mr Bennett argues that Jesus anointed his disciples
with the oil and encouraged them to do the same with other followers. This could have been
responsible for healing eye and skin diseases referred to in the Gospels.

“If cannabis was one of the main ingredients of the ancient anointing oil _ and receiving
this oil is what made Jesus the Christ and his followers Christians, then persecuting those
who use cannabis could be considered anti-Christ,” Mr Bennett concludes.

DRUG- BUSTS this seems like it sucks, but maybe it is a step towards legitimization and “de-gangsterization”

Jennifer Squires, Santa Cruz Sentinel Medicinal marijuana caregivers may be prosecuted as drug dealers, according to a state Supreme Court ruling. The ruling upholds a Santa Cruz County Superior Court jury decision that found medicinal marijuana user Roger Mentch, 53, guilty of cultivating and possessing marijuana for sale. Mentch, who was arrested by sheriff’s deputies in 2003, claimed he was a caregiver for five medicinal marijuana patients. He also opened the Hemporium, a medicinal marijuana collective in Felton, where he sometimes sold the pot he grew. . . The court ruled primary caregivers must have an established care-giving relationship with the patient prior to providing that patient with medicinal marijuana, according to the decision. Also, primary caregivers can only provide pot to those patients, not sell the drug to other medicinal users or collectives. Therefore, Mentch’s sales to the Hemporium and another collective in the county amounted to dealing drugs