I was watching The Song of Bernadette recently. They used a phrase that I thought was very interesting. To those who believe no explanation is necessary and for those who do not believe no explanation will do. It is a neat phrase but it seems to refer to faith and completely excludes critical thought and logic from faith. What it seems to do, in my estimation is to divide the argument into those who blindly accept and those who absolutely reject the validity of a point outright without evidence to support their stand. I reject any such mode of thought. I accept the rule of The Church without argument, based on the fact that her rule stems from the personal teachings of My Master given to the apostles and kept by her and based also on her 2000+ years of eperience giving wisdom far in excess of mine. I however hold no such position on anything else. All things other than the magesterium of Holy Church are up for debate. In fact I believe that my views can be supported by critical thought based on the certain evidence. Not merely philosophy.
All to often today the idea of critical thought is tossed out of the window and actions and philosophies are based entirely on feelings or on ones personal thought no matter how lacking in merit. We started this, to the extent it has risen to, in the seventies.
People have always been prone to base their choices on emotion or "feeling over substance". One only has to look at the division in the Christian church to see the rise of the idea that an individual has greater wisdom than a Church founded by God that has been around for millenia. But in the past speaking against the insanity of "feeling over substance" was allowed. People used to be looked down upon for being ruled by emotion and not by logic. Today we reward errant illogical and biased thought, so long as it is biased the right way. We are so concerned about peoples feelings that we will not offend the poor dears by stating flatly that they are behaving like idiots. Furthermore we call them progressive and reward them. There is a use for people of this sort. In a Democracy a demaogogue will easily prey on the weak minded by a passionate plea to their base desires or at least to their emotions and steer them into voting for a certain policy based entirely on the emtional content of the issue. Whole world views and life choices of great consequence are decided on mere gut reactions. This fact is why we were given a Republic in the begining, with a constitution that set the rules of how the Republic was to be run and how the power was to be divided. Most of all to limit the power of the government so that the people always had enough purchase on the political power of the nation to limit the abusive nature of the government without using force of arms.
Friday, December 28, 2012
Monday, December 10, 2012
Don't step on the grass Sam.
Yeah that's the thing I'm thinking about right now. For those of you who are familiar with Steppenwolf, I mean the band not the book, and their song 'Don't step on the grass Sam" this is where I am headed.
I don't know whether to sing the praises of Cannabis or to simply acquiesce to the fact that it just won't go away. I guess I'll do both. You know another state legalized it. I think it won't be long before the whole of the United states will be turning toward Wash. D.C. with their thumbs to their noses and pipes in their collective fists. The only entity that will keep it illegal will be the Federal Government.
Won't that be interesting? The 50 states saying yes and the federal government trying to say no. Can you imagine another Obamaesqe character in the white house pissing and moaning about Arizona wanting to enforce federal and state law about illegal immigration but accepting their thumbing their noses at Cannabis law?
Where this will all go I am not sure but I am sure that so long as it sticks with cannabis there's no real problem. What?, you say, are you crazy endorsing the use of cannabis? No really I'm not. Before I straightened out and became a Catholic and started to something very like abiding by the law, I used to get stoned. Of course I did. I've been a biker of sorts for a long time. And one thing you can count on Scooter trash to do is exactly what they please. So I smoked and sold and grew. Yes officer that was over 7 years ago. More like 20 something. But the point is that if you grow up with a certain behaviour you either see the danger in it or see it as harmless. Or both. I personally see Cannabis as pretty harmless. It is no corrupter of youth beyond what the other dangers that beckon to the youth of this country are. And for heavens sake drop that line about it being a gateway drug. Gateway where? If a teen picks up a beer and drinks beer off and on for a while before he lights up a joint then the gateway drug was beer. But if he smokes cigarettes first then the gateway drug was cigarettes but if he is like the guys I did my last half year with in high school and has a ring in his back pocket from a snuff can. Well the gateway drug was Copenhagen or Skoal or Grizzly. You can blame all sorts of things on all sorts of things but if the person is going to take harder drugs then they will do it with or without Pot. I was into much more potent stuff a year before I smoked my first joint. When I had quit the other stuff and straightened out a bit I still smoked a bit. I quit that out of necessity. The people who were the type that I got in trouble with were the ones who sold or knew where to get pot. I had a promise to not get into trouble to keep so I had to switch playthings and playmates.
But think about it. If you have never smoked pot what do you think it does to people? Are you one of those who believes in the "Marijuana Madness" image of pot smokers? Do you really think that a person can be a real nice guy one minute and light up a joint and become a pot smoking sex fiend the next? No it doesn't do that. If you are a nice person before you light up you are a nice person after. It's sort of like having a few drinks. Except the police will tell you that except in extreme cases they would rather deal with a pot smoker than a drunk. It's been my experience that a pot smoker is much less likely to get violent than a drunk. That is if they are not violent to begin with. Marijuana use in the normal range just doesn't cause anybody to do something they aren't going to do in the first place. Sure the weed does lower inhibitions but like I said it isn't going to cause a Catholic Virgin to strip naked and "do it" if they don't seriously want to "do it" already. In fact what one can expect is a euphoria of sorts maybe a a bit of giggling if they smoke enough they will become uncoordinated and maybe confused. But you have to be pretty stoned or smoking some serious chronic weed for that. And no matter how much you use you will not overdose. I have been about as high on weed as you can get in the past and took a whole 12+ hours to come down and still did not overdose. A pot high usually lasts an hour to three hours unless you keep smoking. I got a terrible case of dry mouth but my life was never in danger. No one else was ever in danger either. And I never got addicted. In those days I could smoke. If I did that now I would have to have my albuterol inhaler handy.
Of course no one with any sense of responsibility would advocate that children of any age should use it unless advised by a physician. But it is safer even in the long term than Alcohol and diabetics can use it if they can get by the munchies, the propensity of pot to make you eat anything you can get your paws on. I remember a green variety the sellers said was from Mexico that we could get in the early 70's. It would make you feel very good, happy and contented and chatty and giggly and then as soon as we could find our way out of those bean bag chairs, bar the door Nellie. We were a holy terror for Moon Pies and Cherry Smashes and Dr Pepper. Point is that we smoked quite a bit of pot and had allot of fun and did no one any harm and never once endangered our lives because of the pot. We did stupid stuff but hey, we were crazy. We were gonna act dopey with or without the pot.
I like to watch that border wars series. I think the American people need to understand what kind of folks are causing the mayhem in that border war and what they are capable of. Used to be that we would saddle up and ride down to Ciudad Juarez and go partying. Sure it could be tricky then but if you didn't step out of line too bad there was just about nothing you could do that $50.00 couldn't buy you out of. The locals usually didn't cause you any mayhem because you were their source of income. A dollar would keep them running for a couple of days and running well. They could eat high on the hog literally for five bucks a day. But now if you go down there you run the very real risk of getting caught up in a Sinaloa / Zeta firefight. I've even heard of American women getting kidnapped and sold off down there. A large part of the money that funds these crazies who line the road to Monterrey with heads and decapitated corpses is from pot. Of course billions is consumed by our DEA and Border Patrol in stopping Pot, a stupid plant, from crossing the border. Even the local sheriffs and the forest rangers have a dickens of a time trying to stop the growing of pot. in the meantime there are Meth labs and crack labs going great guns using dangerous chemicals needing to be busted and they can barely get to them.If they didn't have the pot to contend with I think they could be freed up for the more dangerous stuff.
Did you know that pot is classed on a level with LSD? Since when did pot get dangerous enough to be placed on level with LSD oh yeah and Heroin? You have got to be kidding me you say. No I'm not. Sure there are anti-pot zealots out there that will announce their ignorance to the world and proclaim that pot is as dangerous as Heroin and as mind bending as LSD. I tell you that based on personal experience, no it is not even almost dangerous. But the Law will beat themselves silly trying to eradicate it. They will also proclaim the dangers of smoking pot and nearly wet themselves to haul in a hundred pounds from the smugglers. It looks like quite a bit on Tv but while they are busting the hundred pounds a half a ton is crossing elsewhere and is north bound. Then there is the home gardener who will install a set of grow lights and keep a few plants in the basement or the garage. Not the folks who rent a whole house for the purpose of growing a thousand plants but the old hippie who keeps a couple of plants in self defense. He never buys or smokes it in public but he nevertheless has at any one time a pound of prime bud. You cannot stop him unless you plan on ignoring the constitution and start searching the whole neighborhood one house at a time. The fact is America despite that silly war on plants you are surrounded by weed. Someone down the block is growing a plant or two. You can't stop it.
But why would you want to stop it? Okay smoking anything except BBQ is not good for your health. That is sure. But the use of cannabis is not dependent on smoking. There is a method called vaporizing. The pot is heated to just below the smoking temperature and it vaporizes. No kidding. there is also the tincture. You put a bunch of chopped buds into alcohol and let soak covered. Then strain and the alcohol has the active ingredients in it. You can either let it stay in the alcohol or add oil and let stand uncovered. The alcohol will evaporate off and viola Hash oil. Or you can use hash or hash oil or tincture in cooking. What's hash? Well it's like distilled pot. The part of the pot that intoxicates is a set of cannabanoids contained in resinous hairs called trichomes on the buds of the plant. If you cut the buds off and let them dry for a while then there are several methods that you can use to break those little nearly microscopic trichomes off. They will stick to each other and if you press them together into a shape you will get the traditional brick like appearance of Hashish. The hashish or hash can be smoked or eaten. Fat likes it. You can put it into margarine or butter when you are baking and make some powerful brownies or candy or whatever.
These alternative methods are popular amongst the modern medical users of cannabis. And if you are thinking that the idea of pot as a medicine is just a pile of "bovine scat", think again. Victorian doctors in the famously restrained country of Britain tested and saw that it did have valid medical uses. Queen Victoria used it to relieve female cramps and to help with her depression after the King died. I'll guarantee that you never found a woman much more devoted to Christianity than Queen Victoria in the Protestant churches. The British army in India picked up smoking ganja (pot) from the Sepoy troops and found it to be very good for treating the nausea that came along with certain camp diseases and they found that it caused very few problems with morale. In fact today medical marijuana is used to treat the tremors of palsies and ease back pain, relieve pressure in the eyes of a glaucoma patient, help with depression and a list of other things. The plant has quite a few active compounds in it. The THC or tetrahydracanabinol and some thing called CBD or canabidiol and other active components found in different levels in different strains of the two types of cannabis used for medicinal purposes have very different effects depending on the levels of the different components in the pot. It's been used for relieving maladies from anxiety attacks to alleviating the nausea and restoring the appetite of cancer patients. Meth and crack and LSD and heroin and the other drugs in that schedule do not do that and they kill. Pot doesn't. Pot seed is used in many uses from bio fuels to beer. Yeah I've seen it, I drank some in Canada.
Besides the cannabis sativa and the cannabis indica, the intoxicating strains, there is cannabis ruderalis. One of its strains is Hemp. Any old sailor knows what hemp is. The Bosun's locker of the older ships were filled with it since some of the best rope or line to a sailor was made of hemp. It is one of the strongest fibers we can grow. It can be used for rope or for shirts and pants or for whatever your mind can dream up where a vegetable fibre is needed. And of course it can be used for bio fuel. We used to grow it. The War Dept. experimented with it in WWII because of the Japanese invasion of the major latex producing nations of the world. They found it had all sorts of promise then they banned it. Along the way they banned the sativas and the indicas. Now they are working on Poppies who knows what is next? Let's just legalize it then we don't have to fight a non-enemy and waste our resources on a quixotic task of trying to eliminate a very useful plant.
I don't know whether to sing the praises of Cannabis or to simply acquiesce to the fact that it just won't go away. I guess I'll do both. You know another state legalized it. I think it won't be long before the whole of the United states will be turning toward Wash. D.C. with their thumbs to their noses and pipes in their collective fists. The only entity that will keep it illegal will be the Federal Government.
Won't that be interesting? The 50 states saying yes and the federal government trying to say no. Can you imagine another Obamaesqe character in the white house pissing and moaning about Arizona wanting to enforce federal and state law about illegal immigration but accepting their thumbing their noses at Cannabis law?
Where this will all go I am not sure but I am sure that so long as it sticks with cannabis there's no real problem. What?, you say, are you crazy endorsing the use of cannabis? No really I'm not. Before I straightened out and became a Catholic and started to something very like abiding by the law, I used to get stoned. Of course I did. I've been a biker of sorts for a long time. And one thing you can count on Scooter trash to do is exactly what they please. So I smoked and sold and grew. Yes officer that was over 7 years ago. More like 20 something. But the point is that if you grow up with a certain behaviour you either see the danger in it or see it as harmless. Or both. I personally see Cannabis as pretty harmless. It is no corrupter of youth beyond what the other dangers that beckon to the youth of this country are. And for heavens sake drop that line about it being a gateway drug. Gateway where? If a teen picks up a beer and drinks beer off and on for a while before he lights up a joint then the gateway drug was beer. But if he smokes cigarettes first then the gateway drug was cigarettes but if he is like the guys I did my last half year with in high school and has a ring in his back pocket from a snuff can. Well the gateway drug was Copenhagen or Skoal or Grizzly. You can blame all sorts of things on all sorts of things but if the person is going to take harder drugs then they will do it with or without Pot. I was into much more potent stuff a year before I smoked my first joint. When I had quit the other stuff and straightened out a bit I still smoked a bit. I quit that out of necessity. The people who were the type that I got in trouble with were the ones who sold or knew where to get pot. I had a promise to not get into trouble to keep so I had to switch playthings and playmates.
But think about it. If you have never smoked pot what do you think it does to people? Are you one of those who believes in the "Marijuana Madness" image of pot smokers? Do you really think that a person can be a real nice guy one minute and light up a joint and become a pot smoking sex fiend the next? No it doesn't do that. If you are a nice person before you light up you are a nice person after. It's sort of like having a few drinks. Except the police will tell you that except in extreme cases they would rather deal with a pot smoker than a drunk. It's been my experience that a pot smoker is much less likely to get violent than a drunk. That is if they are not violent to begin with. Marijuana use in the normal range just doesn't cause anybody to do something they aren't going to do in the first place. Sure the weed does lower inhibitions but like I said it isn't going to cause a Catholic Virgin to strip naked and "do it" if they don't seriously want to "do it" already. In fact what one can expect is a euphoria of sorts maybe a a bit of giggling if they smoke enough they will become uncoordinated and maybe confused. But you have to be pretty stoned or smoking some serious chronic weed for that. And no matter how much you use you will not overdose. I have been about as high on weed as you can get in the past and took a whole 12+ hours to come down and still did not overdose. A pot high usually lasts an hour to three hours unless you keep smoking. I got a terrible case of dry mouth but my life was never in danger. No one else was ever in danger either. And I never got addicted. In those days I could smoke. If I did that now I would have to have my albuterol inhaler handy.
Of course no one with any sense of responsibility would advocate that children of any age should use it unless advised by a physician. But it is safer even in the long term than Alcohol and diabetics can use it if they can get by the munchies, the propensity of pot to make you eat anything you can get your paws on. I remember a green variety the sellers said was from Mexico that we could get in the early 70's. It would make you feel very good, happy and contented and chatty and giggly and then as soon as we could find our way out of those bean bag chairs, bar the door Nellie. We were a holy terror for Moon Pies and Cherry Smashes and Dr Pepper. Point is that we smoked quite a bit of pot and had allot of fun and did no one any harm and never once endangered our lives because of the pot. We did stupid stuff but hey, we were crazy. We were gonna act dopey with or without the pot.
I like to watch that border wars series. I think the American people need to understand what kind of folks are causing the mayhem in that border war and what they are capable of. Used to be that we would saddle up and ride down to Ciudad Juarez and go partying. Sure it could be tricky then but if you didn't step out of line too bad there was just about nothing you could do that $50.00 couldn't buy you out of. The locals usually didn't cause you any mayhem because you were their source of income. A dollar would keep them running for a couple of days and running well. They could eat high on the hog literally for five bucks a day. But now if you go down there you run the very real risk of getting caught up in a Sinaloa / Zeta firefight. I've even heard of American women getting kidnapped and sold off down there. A large part of the money that funds these crazies who line the road to Monterrey with heads and decapitated corpses is from pot. Of course billions is consumed by our DEA and Border Patrol in stopping Pot, a stupid plant, from crossing the border. Even the local sheriffs and the forest rangers have a dickens of a time trying to stop the growing of pot. in the meantime there are Meth labs and crack labs going great guns using dangerous chemicals needing to be busted and they can barely get to them.If they didn't have the pot to contend with I think they could be freed up for the more dangerous stuff.
Did you know that pot is classed on a level with LSD? Since when did pot get dangerous enough to be placed on level with LSD oh yeah and Heroin? You have got to be kidding me you say. No I'm not. Sure there are anti-pot zealots out there that will announce their ignorance to the world and proclaim that pot is as dangerous as Heroin and as mind bending as LSD. I tell you that based on personal experience, no it is not even almost dangerous. But the Law will beat themselves silly trying to eradicate it. They will also proclaim the dangers of smoking pot and nearly wet themselves to haul in a hundred pounds from the smugglers. It looks like quite a bit on Tv but while they are busting the hundred pounds a half a ton is crossing elsewhere and is north bound. Then there is the home gardener who will install a set of grow lights and keep a few plants in the basement or the garage. Not the folks who rent a whole house for the purpose of growing a thousand plants but the old hippie who keeps a couple of plants in self defense. He never buys or smokes it in public but he nevertheless has at any one time a pound of prime bud. You cannot stop him unless you plan on ignoring the constitution and start searching the whole neighborhood one house at a time. The fact is America despite that silly war on plants you are surrounded by weed. Someone down the block is growing a plant or two. You can't stop it.
But why would you want to stop it? Okay smoking anything except BBQ is not good for your health. That is sure. But the use of cannabis is not dependent on smoking. There is a method called vaporizing. The pot is heated to just below the smoking temperature and it vaporizes. No kidding. there is also the tincture. You put a bunch of chopped buds into alcohol and let soak covered. Then strain and the alcohol has the active ingredients in it. You can either let it stay in the alcohol or add oil and let stand uncovered. The alcohol will evaporate off and viola Hash oil. Or you can use hash or hash oil or tincture in cooking. What's hash? Well it's like distilled pot. The part of the pot that intoxicates is a set of cannabanoids contained in resinous hairs called trichomes on the buds of the plant. If you cut the buds off and let them dry for a while then there are several methods that you can use to break those little nearly microscopic trichomes off. They will stick to each other and if you press them together into a shape you will get the traditional brick like appearance of Hashish. The hashish or hash can be smoked or eaten. Fat likes it. You can put it into margarine or butter when you are baking and make some powerful brownies or candy or whatever.
These alternative methods are popular amongst the modern medical users of cannabis. And if you are thinking that the idea of pot as a medicine is just a pile of "bovine scat", think again. Victorian doctors in the famously restrained country of Britain tested and saw that it did have valid medical uses. Queen Victoria used it to relieve female cramps and to help with her depression after the King died. I'll guarantee that you never found a woman much more devoted to Christianity than Queen Victoria in the Protestant churches. The British army in India picked up smoking ganja (pot) from the Sepoy troops and found it to be very good for treating the nausea that came along with certain camp diseases and they found that it caused very few problems with morale. In fact today medical marijuana is used to treat the tremors of palsies and ease back pain, relieve pressure in the eyes of a glaucoma patient, help with depression and a list of other things. The plant has quite a few active compounds in it. The THC or tetrahydracanabinol and some thing called CBD or canabidiol and other active components found in different levels in different strains of the two types of cannabis used for medicinal purposes have very different effects depending on the levels of the different components in the pot. It's been used for relieving maladies from anxiety attacks to alleviating the nausea and restoring the appetite of cancer patients. Meth and crack and LSD and heroin and the other drugs in that schedule do not do that and they kill. Pot doesn't. Pot seed is used in many uses from bio fuels to beer. Yeah I've seen it, I drank some in Canada.
Besides the cannabis sativa and the cannabis indica, the intoxicating strains, there is cannabis ruderalis. One of its strains is Hemp. Any old sailor knows what hemp is. The Bosun's locker of the older ships were filled with it since some of the best rope or line to a sailor was made of hemp. It is one of the strongest fibers we can grow. It can be used for rope or for shirts and pants or for whatever your mind can dream up where a vegetable fibre is needed. And of course it can be used for bio fuel. We used to grow it. The War Dept. experimented with it in WWII because of the Japanese invasion of the major latex producing nations of the world. They found it had all sorts of promise then they banned it. Along the way they banned the sativas and the indicas. Now they are working on Poppies who knows what is next? Let's just legalize it then we don't have to fight a non-enemy and waste our resources on a quixotic task of trying to eliminate a very useful plant.
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