I recently attended a tax preparers’ gathering, and part of the advice we received as Colorado licensees regarding marijuana businesses was this: don’t advise them in any way or prepare tax returns for them. Don’t touch them.

The reason: at the federal level, pot is still illegal. Our licenses could be in jeopardy if there is a crackdown. We could be subject to prosecution for aiding a criminal enterprise.

A commenter down below left this morsel, which was superb, the reason why blogging is more than fun – even worth the effort. If he put it in a letter to the editor of the Missoulian, would be it published? I don’t know, but doubt that it would. It’s the kind of information that scares the gatekeepers of conventional wisdom. Newspaper editors don’t receive phone calls from advertisers or the publisher telling them what they can and cannot print. They intuitively understand what is acceptable and not. It is a shared consensus of silent power within a community, state and nation.

There I go again. Here is the comment:

Former Missoula resident Dan Baum, author of “Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure” got the money quote from Nixon Aide [Bob] Haldeman on why they chose to make a war on cannabis. Haldeman said that although they were fully aware that cannabis didn’t present any significant public health threat that you couldn’t outlaw rock music, black people or long hair so they just outlawed the common denominator. In other words they did it because it aided oppression of the young and the black. It allowed a culture war and a culture war victory for the side of repression.

Marijuana laws have long been enforced or ignored for various reasons. It is currently illegal because its use is widespread, thus allowing the state to use law enforcement selectively to punish groups that threaten its power. In this case, and going back to the successes of the Civil Rights movement, the targeted group is African Americans.

For this reason, the new and sensible laws passed in Colorado and Washington will not stand. The Feds may be tolerating us right now, but it is a mere tactical problem – how to crack down with the least amount of public outrage. So, and pure speculation of course, I venture that there will be late-night raids on dispensaries, and that our tooly local news outlets will remain silent when it happens.

It’s that shared consensus among the powerful I mentioned above.

Selective law enforcement and selective prosecution sound similar, and to me seem interchangeable. Both are hallmarks of tyranny. Examples:

Hate Crimes: This is a darling of the liberals because it speaks of moral superiority. Who is to say, for example, that the brutal murder of Mathew Shepard was not a hateful act? But the concept of a “hate crime” takes us beyond crime and punishment and into the realm of attitude. We already allow for mindset – premeditation, passion, inebriation, etc., but “hate” takes us into a subjective area that allows punishment of thought processes.
Continue reading “Law and tyranny” →

Two items on today’s agenda before I lapse into a comatose state doing a tax return that I’ve been pushing aside for days:

One, I put up a post yesterday called “Marijuana and tyrants” I think. It is a subject I want to address in-depth soon, but wrote that late in the day, and I am never pleased with my writing late in the day and deleted it. It will be back, as I think that the only reason why a basically harmless substance like marijuana is illegal is that its use is so widespread that it allows law enforcement the luxury of selective enforcement, and that this explains the huge disproportion of African-Americans in our prison system. This also tips into the War on Drugs, which I believe evidence shows to be a cover for counterinsurgency abroad and attacks on civil liberties and use of selective law enforcement at home. I’ll give it another shot later this week.

Second, I seriously considered banning a certain well-known person yesterday and this morning, as I don’t want this place to be anything like Cowgirl. But then I thought of a better way: If you use the expression “dude” or “you see” your comment will be queued for moderation. This, I thought, would allow us the opportunity to talk about him using his name, while he would think that he is banned because his comments don’t appear.
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PS: In updating the moderation section to include those phrases, I found the word “Kailey.” I was not aware it was still there, as neither of them are banned. Sorry boys.

I saw the movie Wolf of Wall Street yesterday. At three hours, it is too long. Scorsese could have made a better, shorter movie. But to the issue at hand, some relatives of ours, very nice and conservative in outlook, were troubled by both the sex scenes and the manner in which Wall Street is portrayed as a drug-infested psychopathic amusement park.

This is not a movie review. There are hundreds of them out there for you, and man do I miss Roger Ebert at times like this. I either sought his opinion out before deciding what to see, or after a movie just to see what I missed.

Scorsese bases the movie on the book of the same name. Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill are over-the-top throughout. Wall Street brokers are portrayed as boiler-room hucksters, and are all getting high not only on Quaaludes and cocaine, but also conquest. Every now and then someone in the movie has a legitimate moral qualm. But there is really only one rule: they do not rat on each other.

There is full frontal female nudity throughout, and Skinemax-like simulated copulation. That is a nice relief from the intense psychological violence of the boiler room scenes. For that reason alone I would put the movie on our TV screen as I play Angry Birds on the iPad. I have excellent side vision, and instantly know when those scenes are on.

And here is my backdrop, which I did not share with our relatives: The psychopathic personality is not satisfied with the ordinary joys of life – making things, working daily toward long-term goals, love and relationships or even caring about others in general. Consequently, life for them is pursuit of thrills, adrenalin rushes. They do not know fear, and so are found climbing mountains, sky diving, preaching from a high pulpit – anything that gives them a rush. They are drawn to the world of finance for the quick score, laughing when their victims realize they’ve been had. That’s conquest, the ultimate thrill.

I think Scorsese went for the jugular here, as he has probably seen it himself throughout his career. But there is very little physical violence, unlike his mobster films. Instead, he’s going after the real criminals in silk suits and Italian loafers.

No major Wall Street investment firms were harmed in the making of his movie. After the most recent bubble, no one went to jail. They are now busy re-inflating our next nightmare.

More fun below fold, right out of Scorsese’s world.
Continue reading “Dwarf tossing on Wall Street” →

No disrespect intended towards Liz at all. I just don’t do this sort of thing, but liked what I ran across this morning from the author of Red Badge of Courage. The man had unusual insight even in his twenties (he died at age 28):

The Wayfarer
Stephen Crane
The wayfarer,
Perceiving the pathway to truth,
Was struck with astonishment.
It was thickly grown with weeds.
“Ha,” he said,
“I see that none has passed here
“In a long time.”
Later he saw that each weed
Was a singular knife.
“Well,” he mumbled at last,
“Doubtless there are other roads.”

Selwyn Bromberger, a professor of philosophy at MIT, was shown convincing evidence of conspiracy around JFK’s death in 1969. Impressed, he said

“If they are strong enough to kill the President, and strong enough to cover it up, then they are too strong to confront directly … if they feel sufficiently threatened, they may move to open totalitarian rule.”

No word, to this day, on who “they” are.
Continue reading “Better left alone” →

While all of this is going on, the constellation Virgo (virgin) is apparent in the night sky. So it might be said that the sun is born of a virgin, since Virgo is the constellation symbolizing of fertility.

Later in the year the sun will nurture the growth of plants that sustain life, including grapes with which we make libations. Indeed, the sun turns water into wine.

There are twelve months, twelve apostles, twelve tribes of Israel, and twelve signs of the zodiac.

Of course, most of the ancient myths that we still celebrate today happened during the Age of Pisces, symbolized by the fish. I still see some of those on the back of automobiles.

And most amazing to me, the ancient Sun God, even with the multiple languages on earth and thousands of years having transpired, is still referred to us in english-speaking culture as “The Son.”

Merry Christmas, everyone. Myths are important. I do not denigrate them. We even have people in government who supervise our popular myths, among them Oswald, 19 Arabs, cherry trees and rail splitting, and virgin birth. As far as I know, the only virgin ever to give birth to a child was Doris Day.

I would like to add some order to the matter of conspiracies, a topic for which an ordinary person can be ridiculed and led to confounding arguments far from the matters of importance. To wit:

• The term “conspiracy theorist” is a CIA invention, and a bit of a PSYOP even of itself. It is meant to separate those who do not believe official truth from those who do, and cast them in a negative light.

It’s clever. Before we ever get to evidence or perps or motives, we have to overcome the presumption that our thought processes are corrupted. In fact, once at that point, most people never bother to look at evidence due to fear of ridicule. Orwell called it Crimestop.
Continue reading “Forecast for tomorrow: Much like yesterday” →