A Kansas Customer Makes Retail Headlines

I forgot all about this! An Abilene, Kansas man happened to be in Washington on July 8, when Top Shelf, a store in Bellingham, opened and sold the first bag of recreational marijuana retailed there since 1937. It was heralded as the very first weed to be retailed in the state of Washington, but that seems unlikely, since the federal prohibition laws against it have only been in effect since 1937. The man's name is Cale Holdsworth, and since he only bought two grams, his purchase probably did not survive the trip back to Kansas! It's nice to see Kansas in the news for something other than Kris Kobach's latest legislative lunacies or Westboro Baptist Church's shenanigans.

* No, I do not support recreational drug use, so don't be running to your mama or your local pharmacist crying that I do. I simply prefer to see your tax dollars and mine spent on something besides the prosecution of victimless crimes.

What Do SOPA And Alcohol Prohibition Have In Common?

Our lawmakers are considering a bill to create a new and unnecessary law, called "stop online piracy act", or SOPA. There is a similar bill floating around in the Senate, called "protect ip act", or PIPA. At first, this did not sound like a big deal. No one likes their work, copyrighted or not, plagerized. But these bills, when examined more closely, go far beyond protection of any artist or writer. These bills give anyone, particularly anyone will a high profile lawyer and a lot of money, the right to call any internet provider, server, or host of any blog and cry and complain that their own copyrights have been violated by someone, and get the blog or website shut down. No notice, warning, or due process. Not even any actual proof that a copyright violation actually occured.

The folks who would benefit from the passage of SOPA are Hollywood and Warner Brothers. They want to go back to the days of player pianos and phonographs, and record stores, which not only sold records, but bongs and hookahs. That would be okay, because record stores were cool. And if SOPA passes, record stores will be back, inspiring rebellion to this law, as the pendulum swings both ways. Most Americans are too young to remember alcohol prohibition, but when Wikipedia puts it's site back up, information about alcohol probition can be gotton there. Prohibition did not work. People drank anyway, and brewed and distilled their own booze. Since there was no way to control and regulate the booze, some of it was actually dangerous to drink. Also, the Mafia got it's feet planted firmly in the ground, here in the United States, during alcohol prohibition, and is still here today, along with other organized crime cartels that have made a lot of money, thanks to prohibition laws.

The entertainment industry is a lot of fun. Everyone enjoys movies and TV. But does the entertainment industry really need to bite into any American's first amendment and fourth amendment rights to freedom of experssion and the right to due process in order to make a profit? Does the population at large owe it's constitutional rights to Hollywood? Somehow, it seems the answer should be "no".

Wikipedia, Google, and lots of other sites have altered their online appearances in protest of SOPA. The White House is taking this debate very seriously. The next steps, if this bill were to pass and become law, would be a massive recall of many of Americans' personal freedoms. Here is a link to the petition that you may sign online to make your voice heard about SOPA. Please sign it.

Galileo and Copernicus were not allowed free expression, despite the fact that they were not doing any harm to anyone, and were right in their suspicions! The Catholic Church was the master of all it surveyed at the time, and it's censorship made a serious attempt to keep everyone as uninformed and uneducated as possible. Nostrodamus wrote his grimoirs in French and couched all of his ideas in rhyming quatrains to thwart church and government censorship. Do we want to go back to that? Just who benefits from an uneducated populace, anyway?

Police In Kansas Confiscate $100,000 Of Pot But NO Arrests!!

How Funny! In this article, we are told that the police in Kansas actually raided and confiscated over one hundred thousand dollars worth of marijuana on several sites in Linn County, Kansas, but arrested no one! Speculating that the growth of all this marijauna must be the "work of Mexican nationals", not the work of Mexican Americans, or other kinds of Americans, not the work of Mother Nature, or even the work of Satan, but the "work of Mexican nationals", they installed camaras, in hopes that those growing this crop might come back for photographs! This is almost as funny as the character of Barney Fife on Andy Griffith, for those of you who are old enough to remember black and white TV. There may even be a few people out there who are old enough to remember the days when marijuana was not illegal, and this would not have been considered a newsworthy story.

"Prohibition laws", as we call them, were not fashionable in this country until alcohol prohibition was passed. Lots of well-meaning teachers and historians will tell kiddies in school that temperance activists, like Carrie Nations, got that law passed, but I don't think so. I think the Mafia had more to do with passing prohibition, since they are the ones who benefitted from it and got rich because of it. And after alcohol prohibtion was finally repealed, citing the many, many problems it caused this nation, the Mafia, and possibly other organized crime groups influenced our elected leaders to outlaw marijuana. Think, for a minute, about all the money drug cartels would NOT make if marijuana were legal. Also, inasmuch as references to Mexicans are concerned, back in 1937, when marijuana was federally outlawed, lots of congressmen and senators, after they voted on it, made very prejudiced comments about Mexicans. Just do a google search on the subject if you don't believe me.

I have been clean and sober for a long time, and have no more need for pot than I have for tequila, but I do not need to tell anyone else not to drink in order to keep tequila out of my diet. I feel the same way about pot. We have a child, Adam Herrman, who has been missing in Kansas for over ten years, and efforts to find him have all but ceased. I have not seen any renewed efforts by the police to find him in over a year......but we have plenty of police resources to put up camaras at suspected pot farms and try to get pics, and then when we don't get any pics, there is still plenty of time for the cops to confiscate all the pot! Where's the eye-rolley when I need it? Or perhaps I need a middle finger emoticon for this.................

Kansas! Get a clue! First of all, as a parent, I resent the false teaching in schools about why drugs are against the law. If the government really cared about anyone, Adam Herrman would never have been adopted by abusers and have gone missing. We have prohibition laws because our representatives are in the back pockets of folks who run drug cartels. Lets go ahead and tell the truth about it to our children. It's what I tell mine. Next; we need police to find missing children, arrest domestic violence thugs, respond to auto accidents, apprehend theives, and make angry fistfighters cease and desist. Why should tax payors have to pay for the police to harvest and destroy a field of pot?

And Kansas cops, this is for you, although you've probably already inhaled: