Archive for March, 2011

You know something?

Marijuana is less dangerous than chocolate.

Think about it.

Chocolate can kill your dog.

Last week, the feds raided, confiscated and shut down two medical marijuana dispensaries here in West Hollywood California.  They did the same to some 26 similar establishments in the state of Montana.  Dispensaries and growers.  No arrests, no charges, just big, armed dick, officious intimidation and humiliation.  I’ve been to and patronized one of those West Hollywood dispensaries and I’m here to tell you they were as careful and thorough as as any I’ve ever visited.

Why?

Shut up before you even attempt the “gateway drug” or “physically addicting” contretemps.  Forgive me but that shit is silly.  There are zero legitimate studies to prove anything remotely resembling as much and a cornucopia for the contrary.  No one has ever died from smoking pot.  No one has overdosed on it.

But enough chocolate will kill your dog.

Besides, both states allow for it’s legal cultivation, distribution and sale.  The insult to injury as well as established industry lies in the pledge by the Obama administration Attorney General, one Eric Holder, ostensibly at the behest of POTUS himself, to not pursue the purveyors of medicinal marijuana any longer in the states where it was approved by vote of the citizens thereof.

So, why?

You’ll have to bear with me, because although the answer is short, the story is long.

Once upon a time, there was oil and paper and Dupont.  Dupont was mad at hemp because it still made better ropes for the navy than the newly invented nylon.  Then Rockefeller and Hearst got mad too.  They were all mad at hemp because it did each of the things they specialized in better than they did so they made it illegal.  They made cannabis illegal too because black men were encouraged to have their way with white women after smoking it in the form of a reefer and it was an obvious and convenient way to demonize both.   They made both the same thing.  It was a pretty good strategy in light of our relative sophistication at the time.  The great unwashed ate it up.  Then Dick Nixon had has his way by making it a schedule one narcotic and creating the DEA so he could persecute and prosecute the peace loving, antiwar hippies he was so desperately afraid of and here we are.

Told you it was a long story.

The answer is greed and it still is.

Look, what’s going on here is this:  There is no goddamn way the government is going to relinquish control over an industry as lucrative as this.  Certainly not to a bunch of independent thinking entrepreneurs as opposed to the historically complicit corporations they’ve been doing business with for a century or more.  It really is that simple.  There, I said it.  That’s what’s happening.

We just bombed the shit out of Libya.  We’ve been bombing the shit out of people for fifty years to protect the interests of our government and it’s corporations or corporations and our government.  They understand the genie is out of the bottle and they are absolutely committed to tipping at it until those trusted corporations can usurp control of  a commodity so remunerative, that were it fall into the hands of regular Americans, the middle class would have a fighting chance at reestablishing itself and the plutocrats and oligarchs would face the most serious run for their money they’ve seen in decades.  In many ways they are as anxious for it to be completely legal as we are.  But they will trample their own pudenda to see it implemented, regulated and controlled to their benefit, not ours.  Not yours, not mine.

Free market my ass.

Think about it.

In the meantime we bathe in oil and the plastics and textiles that come from it and we waste more paper, plastics and textiles than we used to actually use.  We are at the nadir of our chemical romance renaissance, both pharmacologically and otherwise ridiculously.  All of it can and should be replaced with congruent to superior products made from hemp.  Hemp, at worst an environmentally neutral, renewable resource and arguably the most versatile and efficacious plant known to humankind, does all of it better and cheaper than the prevailing model and the average farmer could, would and should make a killing from growing it.  Hemp makes cotton look Fischer Price.  Local economies would be empowered.  Innovation would transpire.  Manufacturing would spontaneously combust as a result of suddenly being able to make stuff we use and need in our own backyards.

Talk about a revolution……

So see it’s not just the pot.  In fact it’s barely the pot except where big pharma rears it’s ugly head.  It’s the hemp.  Old Republican lizard brains agree with the younger more moderate reptiles.  It’s too profitable and therefore dangerous to fall into the hands of mere mammals.

Following the money indefatigably leads to the big picture.  Now you understand what they are so afraid of.  The federal government doesn’t give a shit if you get high.  Trust me, they’d prefer you’re impaired.  They damn sure don’t give a mad fuck for your safety.  They only care about seat belts and airbags because it’s good for insurance companies.  They only require helmets and  limit second hand smoke because it’s good for insurance companies.  The government doesn’t care how long you live.  They just want you to die as cheaply as possible.  If your disease is of a protracted nature, they’d be happier if you’re not insured.  They just want to control you.  They just want you to die with as little residual burden as possible.

We can talk about the drug war and it’s egregious cost and absolute, comprehensive, systemic failure.  Our behemoth prison system where we literally incarcerate more people per capita than any other state or nation on earth, or the fact that we outspend every other country combined on our ability to make war and kill everyone we disagree with.  And I’m happy to point out that the rich keep getting richer as a result, while the poor keep getting poorer.  The concentration of wealth in this country has never been so severe as it is now.  The gap never so wide.  Far less than one percent now own half of us.  Think about that.  Four hundred individuals own half of everything we are and have.  Shut up, stop your brain and think about that one, sobering, fact.

In light of all this, does the notion that they seek to control medical marijuana surprise you at all?  This isn’t about pot.  This isn’t about you’re ability to get high or avail yourself of medicine that just might mitigate your condition.

The forest hates the trees.

I bet it’s easier to actually consume enough chocolate to kill yourself  than it is to smoke enough pot for the same result.  This is absurd.  It’s goddamn ridiculous.

Who’s your daddy?

“The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.” -MLK

Drinks for my friends.

You can always hire half the poor to kill the other half. I didn’t think of that but I wish so bad I did that reading it fills me with shame and regret.

Michigan.

What we stare at.  Fascist.  Dictatorial.

Legislation peristaltically forced down the the throat and through the bowels of the body politic.  Laws.  Laws that provide for the Governor of Michigan, after slashing budgets malignantly, to allow him to declare a state of financial emergency wherever he has burned crops.  Laws.  Legislation that then empowers him upon declaring a state of financial emergency, to strip that slashed and burned township of it’s democratically elected officials and cancel all of it’s contracts.  The legal right to fire any and all persons elected by the people and piss all over any contract entered into via the will of the people.  A law that would then enable him to literally replace those elected officials with non-elected appointees.

The potential to take over every city government in the state of Libya….I mean Michigan.  Financial marshal law.

This after he’s proposed $1.2 billion in budget cuts to local governments and schools and $1.8 billion in tax cuts to corporations.  Do the math.  We don’t need a mathematician here, a third grader with a solar powered calculator will do.  Said third grader will point to an obvious and impending financial crisis while fascist plutocrats will drool and clasp their hands with triumphant glee over the frilly drool bibs they’ve affected since before the Gipper first shat himself in the White House.

Forgive me, this happens all the time but I can’t recall there ever being a law for it.  Plenty of laws against it.  But never for it.    Pantheonic.   Deviously comprehensive.  Help me out here; where is this unconstitutional in light of state’s rights and all?  Is there a lawyer in the house?  No hacks please, we need a good one.

It is cruel and unusual.

His name is Dick Snyder.

I think of him as Snyderdick.

I need for you to see a pattern here.

Work with me.  I’m not the first to point it out but it bears repeating.  We are not broke.  We need to get our fiscal house in order but we aren’t poor.  America (ns), have plenty of money.  We have the largest ever gap between the haves and the have nots, however.  That gap gained breadth enough to surpass third world countries under the previous Dick-in-Bush administration.  It’s no accident.  Trust me.  Again, this shit goes on all the time but it’s never actually been legal.  Until now it all fell under the general malaise known as Reaganomics or trickle down/supply side economics.  In other words, the redistribution of wealth in the opposite direction that so many mouth breathing conservative, pee farty hatriot, fucktardian zombies rail against, absent logic or even common sense.

These guys are dicks.

Now they seek to accelerate the process.  To seal the deal.  To make it even more impossible to beat them back.  We are witnessing and experiencing the dry desert  blowback from the 2010 national election.  Reaping what’s sown.  Immediate consequences for knee jerk stupidity.

Union busting.  Financial dominance.  Concentration of wealth.  Culture war.  Disinformation.  Class warfare.  Stoking the racial and gender divide.  There are millions of long toothed fuckers hacking away with pick axes at what we still take for granted and most of them know not what they do.  Minions.  Tools.  The Republican elite cultivating the idea of not having as much as a Barbie crotch is in control and they bellow and beseech about the opposite but they’re all in when it comes to the government dictating your every move.  What you use your dick for.  Where you put it.  Who gets to see it.  They don’t need your consent to talk to your mother.

They do this by exaggerating an economic crisis of their own devise.  I’m not saying we’re not in trouble, I’m just pointing out that it’s their fault and now they’re bashing us over the goddamn head with it.  They’re looking to mitigate it on our dime but they’re not so stupid as to have it be as bad as they paint it.  These fuckers have more than enough to make it okay.  But they understand it would be painful.  Not excruciating.  More like a prick of the finger for a small class of people who are accustomed to having their pricks fingered.

See?  Patterns.

“This is about a lot of things. This is not about a budget. This is using or fabricating crisis to push for an agenda you’d never be able to sell under normal circumstances, and so you have to convince everyone that these are not normal circumstances. These are desperate circumstances and your desperate measures are there for somehow required. What this is has a name. It is called shock doctrine.” -Rachel Maddow

They would have you believe that the other 98% is in favor of a class war when it is the very battle they march to every day, in every way, relentlessly, without acknowledging it, while consistently blaming it on everyone else.

They figured out a long time ago the power of blaming the opposition for their own crimes.  They embrace hypocrisy with a huge hug as lascivious as a pasty aging pedophile would.

Simultaneously, they get all self righteously puffy over a much meatier hand in government.  Even on the local level.  Despite what they shout from the rooftops about the size of government.

They accuse average Americans of what they know they are profoundly guilty of, while bulldozing everything they say they stand for.

See the pattern?

Rome is burning.

Republicans campaign against arsonists.  Republicans love to play with matches.  Republicans hate firefighters.

Fucking Republicans.

Drinks for my friends.

It’s all building up to something.

I’ve landed three butts on the target windowsill 25 feet across the way.  Three perfect arcs. 25 feet.  I am pleased.   I’m not sure my life has become perceptibly better but I feel it coming on.  I’m all gleeful with the obvious pregnant portent.  We got fat, hot, greasy corn dogs with plastic pillows of cheap mustard and flat Coca Colas in sweaty waxy cups without enough ice.  I taste sauteed mushrooms in an exotic sauce.

I imagine fields of green.  Caviar.  A nice blanc de blanc.

You think the people of Wisconsin suffered defeat today?  Think again.  Republican greed driven fuckery has reached critical mass and opposition to it is about to spill over.  The most salient observation here is that Wisconsin state Republicans have completely surrendered the notion that this issue is fiscal, at least not in the context we’ve been led to believe and understand.  Fiscal for us as opposed to fiscal for them.  Some of us already knew that but they just painted faces with it.  The unions have already conceded virtually every issue that has anything to do with money.  The fight is over the ability to bargain as a group.  A force.  An equal and opposing force.  See, unions represent the last and only bulkhead with campaign cash enough to counter lubricate the fat arrogant chili meat and grease shitting corporations.  I don’t doubt the union pile isn’t a little filthy.  I swear to Dog the plutocrats have and can afford entire teams for toilet bowl maintenance.  Bet they wear hazmat suits and otherwise drink tea in the breakfast nook.

Anyway, yeah.  Scott Walker’s eyes are too close together.  That always bothers me.  His approval rating has tanked enough for his haters to spark up stogies.  Close enough for a cigar.  He went too far.  I have to tell you I’m not entirely sure what will happen here.  So what I’m gonna do is tell you what I hope will happen.

1) Al Franken shows up and wrestles Scott Walker face down onto the capitol steps.  It’s a violent and vulgar display of physical prowess and domination.  In the movie AIRPLANE! someone asked for a little lite reading and was rewarded with a pamphlet on famous Jewish athletes.  Al Franken was listed.  Bloody and humiliating for any American male who doesn’t know how to fight.  Conservatives will bray about invented homoerotic aspects and call for Franken’s death by stoning.  Franken will respond by getting the Nobel prize for something and become a UFC champion.

2) The people storm the gates of the palace.  Count on this.  I am.  I want them to bring as many faggots as possible, you know, torches.  C’mon, make your gay friends come.  Solidarity!

3) The entire country wakes up and realizes what’s at stake.                                                                                                             Uh, I gotta default to the people aren’t stupid they just don’t pay attention theory.  I think this is a beginning.  It sure as hell isn’t an end. There’s a fine line between resolve and willful ignorance.  As dumb as they are, they don’t lack discipline.  We on the other hand while still a mess, aren’t stupid and are starting to make herding cats seem possible. 

4) Since the wealthiest country in the world spends almost half what the entire world does on the ability to kill shitloads of people, we finally get free boxes and bottles of every food product with high fructose corn syrup listed as a top ten ingredient.  From cereal to soda we are covered.  It’s the Republican New Deal.  Pay no mind to those ordinances, they’ll be dumping sewage in a neighborhood near you.  You might as well feel free.  It’s all going to shit, that’s the style.

5) Michelle Obama, undeterred by withering criticism, dons a cape and a skin tight super hero outfit to fight for nutrition and labor issues.  She wears thigh high boots and her costume is kind of a corset.

6) I want Andrew Dice Clay to be the new spokeshole for the goofcock Republicans and their Governor in Wisconsin.  No shit Dice can play an excellent villain.  I’m not gonna wax poetic about his range but he could play Walker.  Picture it.  Seriously, he’d be so fucking perfect.  He’d have to get svelt.  If he still has hair, let him keep it.  Imagine Dice as Cheney.  Now that he’s older.  I’m getting excited.  Have to shave him for that.  I’ve never written a script but I have the vehicle for the Diceman.  Anybody have his number?

This guy Scott Walker is a punk, a patsy and a fucking puppet who has everything but the best interest of the people who elected him at heart.  As far as I’m concerned, teachers should be paid better than sociopath     avaricious CEOs.  What they do is far more important.  No fat cat plutocratic piece of shit ever inspired me at all, much less to the degree that my own public school teachers did.  You wanna talk about a lazy, tit hogging worthless class?  Let’s talk about politicians and the people who buy them to monopolize and manipulate hardworking Americans.

This ain’t over.  They’ve done themselves a lethal disservice and perhaps finally gone too goddamn far.  This is fucking sick.  Every reason Wisconsin Republicants and those in every other state for that matter, give for doing this is an absolute shameless and hypocritical lie.  We might be broke but it’s not nearly as bad as they would have us believe and I guarantee it’s nowhere near our fault.  When I call my mother this week and we inevitably land on this subject, she will say “Fucking Republicans”.  The ONLY time my mother ever uses that word.

We are having this debate while a mere 400 of them own more than half what over 150 million of us regular citizens do.  By far the largest income gap in our history.  While our elected leaders solicit and implore  us 150 million to sacrifice more, again and again.  While they try to tell us that our modest, middle class income is the reason for our current crisis and impending demise.  While they cut social programs and threaten social  security, medicare and medicaid without altering by one cent the $50 billion in subsidies to energy and oil, the most profitable business in the history of mankind.  The trillion a year or so we hurl at “defense”.

Any logical, sane person from any other era in our planet’s history would have no trouble deciding that Americans are probably among the largest group of chumps ever.  It’s tragically authentic.  Embarrassingly and empirically valid.  Woe is us.

We are still a nation of one person one vote.  There are even efforts to mutilate that but let’s table that for tomorrow.  I’m awed and inspired by the citizens of Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Indiana.  We are at a tipping point.  It is time for every single American to put on those comfortable shoes to march.  To remember the pen can be mightier than the sword of multinational conglomerates.  One person, one vote.  Now or never or I promise you, one person one vote will go the way of the dodo.  They would love nothing more.  What do you think they’re doing now?  These bastards have goals, they have an agenda.

Drinks for my friends.

I was in a casino bar in Vegas the other night.  I never used to pretend to play video poker for free drinks.  You can get double Tanqueray martinis for milking five dollars on Jacks or better.  It doesn’t get much better.  So I do that now.  I was with my new boss and he stepped away for a minute.  I didn’t notice the kid sidling up and manning his machine and place at the bar at first.  As soon as I did, I tapped him and told him the seat was occupied and pointed out the half finished hefeweizen.  Apologetic, polite and gracious he was.  We began to chat.  He used the phrase “preciate you now” a few times and I guessed out loud he was from South Carolina.  I was right.  Nice guy.

At some point, politics became a subject.  I don’t doubt it was by my hand or mouth.  By this time my new employer re-emerged and a lively discussion commenced.  The boy (26 years old) rocketed a phrase that shook and shocked me.  I’ve read all about such pronouncements and proclamations but never actually heard them uttered directed at me in person.  Just tossed off.  “So who kills Obama?”, he said.  I wanted to throat punch the skinny little ignorant fuck.  This kid who was so pleasant and unassuming.  You know that feeling when something happens with so much unexpected suddenness it tilts you enough you just can’t behave normally for a time?

He was in town for a NASCAR race not as a spectator, but actually working for a racing team.  Nationwide not sprint.

I decided to continue talking to him and figure out where that cracking lightning bolt of abject ignorance came from.

Turns out he was egregiously uninformed and surrounded by similarly ignorant people.  He had no idea more jobs were created under Obama in two years than under Dumbya in eight.  No idea that the auto industry bailout wasn’t an attempt to nationalize the industry and that most of the money had been paid back or that GM was now healthy in the black.  No idea that TARP was implemented by Bush.  No idea that unions were why he got overtime pay, sick leave and weekends.  No idea that the Tea Party was in no way a grassroots movement but rather funded by those among the very wealthiest in our country.

However brief, it was surreal.  He honestly turned out to be a nice guy.

I just couldn’t stand it.  I needed to understand from whence it came.  I needed to have my suspicions confirmed.  And they were.  He did.  He told me everything I needed to know.  Everything I already knew.  Everything I already understood.  Everything he didn’t know and everything he didn’t understand.   His whole deal was exactly what I assumed it to be.  What’s more, is he was so painfully unsure about what he was saying.  What he was so reflexively repeating.  It was simultaneously awful and affirming at the same time.

Simultaneously awful and affirming.

Awful.  Everything I needed to know.  Everything I already knew.  He was wrong because he didn’t know shit.  He had no idea what the truth was.

I didn’t challenge him, I merely pointed it out.  Without confusion.  Absent any ambiguity.

Affirming because I understood, not for the first time, that the rub was explicit.  Obvious.  Easy.  Convenient.

He’d been manipulated.  Beguiled.  Almost effortlessly bewitched.

The President of The United States is a nigger.  A Muslim.  A socialist.  A communist.  Not one of us.  Not a citizen.  A man with an overt agenda; to destroy America.

That’s what it was and that’s what it is.

As much as I knew that.  As much as I understood that.  As much as I owned that.  Here it came from an otherwise decent and respectable young man’s mouth.  As I spoke with him I began to see it in stark relief.  Somehow, as fair and polite as he was, not even he was able to see his views for what they were.  He was decent and it broke my heart.  I can’t describe how sad it made me.  I was crushed.  He was racist.  By accident but deliberate, through little fault of his own.  By proxy.  He told me he watched Fox and listened to Limbaugh because “…..they tell it like it is and will say what everyone else is afraid to admit.”

He wasn’t able to define socialism or communism when I prodded him with a smile.

America’s greatest threat lies threat lies in it’s own people.  The nicest people you could ever hope to meet.

Fucking ridiculous.

Drinks for my friends.

I’m out of town for a trade show the next few days and couldn’t find something to be pissed off enough to write about and still endeavor to bring a unique perspective.  So, have some more Dracula movie titles.  The objective is absurdity.  I urge you to contribute your own and not fear the abstract.

Dracula can’t help but worry about the towel bar in the bathroom. It appears to sag.

Dracula gets introspective in a heartbeat.

As far as you know, Dracula loves kitties.  What you don’t know is that he loves to eat them.

Dracula feels a solidarity with bed bugs.  Think about it.

Dracula was thinking about the chronic, sweet moist pineapples of ganja, when he snagged the head of his penis in his zipper.

Dracula makes a connection with the clerk at the 7-11 who wears a turban and has a weird wrap around beard.  Then Dracula has an epiphany and feels he can relate to the Jewish people.  It’s not long before Dracula starts to sample various ethnocentric cuisines.

Dracula cold cocks the woman at the toll booth.

Dracula brushes his teeth to TAPS.

Dracula is into hot dogs.  He’ll sample your dog.  Whatever you got.  Dracula likes cheese on just about any dog.  Know that.  Dracula appreciates different textures on a dog.  Bacon, tomato or pickle.  He likes to visit Wienerschnitzel in his favorite black button up shirt with the red stitched pentagram on the breast pocket.  He combs his hair and brushes his teeth and fangs.  Dracula always spots the man in charge and at least makes eye contact.  What Dracula really wants is to make friends with the man in charge.  To shake his hand.  Dracula likes to visit Wienerschnitzels wherever and whenever he finds them.  Dracula’s favorite is the chili cheese dog with mayo, mustard and onion.

Dracula’s car is custom.  Very custom.  Dracula wears the latest shoes and underwear.

Dracula has all stainless steel appliances and his counter tops are all granite.  Not marble.

Dracula absolutely covets old photographs.  It’s not just that he can’t appear in them, he really likes the smell.

Dracula is not ashamed of being bi-sexual.  He identifies with the gays and the straights.  Dracula doesn’t understand the problem.

He really is an easy going guy, Dracula is.

Dracula contemplates the viscosity of the bleu cheese in his bullet hole.

Drinks for my friends.