Random Weekly Update 5/13: Treating shop-owners worse than billionaire thieves and yet survivors emerge

Some MJ wisdom found on coedhumor.com

California first legalized medical marijuana 15 years ago. It was around this time that my mom got cancer in Baltimore and her doctor suggested she get some weed from a street dealer since medical herb was more heavily regulated than prescription pharma.

Fast forward to 2010 and I get a medical license for chronic pain due to a nasty shoulder injury. If I've been writing too long my shoulder will start aching. And if I practice any of my regular activities - surfing, climbing, so on, outdoor adventures which makes my life fulfilling, my shoulder is a throbbing mess by end of day. Pharmaceuticals scare the shit out of me - not only have they managed to enslave close to a third of our population but they kill more people annually than heroin and cocaine combined and their use is going up. So I smoke a little weed from time to time to mellow out, ease my shoulder pain, and relax.

Relax, you say? That's recreational use. And what, exactly, is the problem with recreational use of MJ? One day some bastard on the Jackson Hole tram told me he was afraid of going to California because you never know who's stoned driving around. I countered with "I'd rather have stoned drivers than drunk drivers". This dumbfounded the gap-toothed bastard.

Soon I'll write a little something about the stupidity of continuing this harmful war on marijuana which has little effect other than to put more money into the pockets of Mexican drug cartels and fill our prisons with harmless citizens due to atavistic laws based on racial profiling and the hypocrisy of politicians who prefer the deep-pocketed pharma lobbies to dictate what drugs should be sold to our citizens.

But the brief today is the fact that California is cracking down and hard on its medical marijuana dispensaries. They've decided this has gotten out of hand. If every street corner has a liquor store that sells Night Train to homeless alcoholics who shit on the street in front of my past houses in Hollywood and Silverlake that's just A-OK, but a place that sells marijuana to peaceful and mostly gainfully-employed citizens? Unacceptable.

I remember being in line at the dispensary one day behind a classic pachouli-smelling stoner, a square-jawed captain of industry, and a 60-something school marm. They were purchasing a drug much less harmful than alcohol (not to mention pharmas) that they would use more responsibly than most angelenos use the booze and pills. Yet this is what our politicos are wasting our time and money fighting.

Doesn't this just look like a threat to society?

Why is that? Oh right, because it's much easier to focus on shuttering marijuana shops run by upstanding citizens than to try and take on the Crips, Bloods, Latin Kings, not to mention the Zetas, the Gulf, all the narcotraficantes on the other side of the border. You try to fight people selling pharmaceuticals? You get high-powered lawyers taking you to court, thanks Pfizer. You try to fight people selling crack, heroin, cocaine, meth? Hope you got an arsenal backing you up. You crack down on marijuana dispensaries? You send conscientious objectors to jail with little more than an angry yell or two. Obviously this is the right move, though, right? I mean, certainly it's not yet another sign of California slipping backward while the rest of the country moves forward, is it? Let's see - in spite of having been a home to the earliest gay rights movements, California is the most liberal state to not allow gay marriage. And in spite of being a state where medical marijuana was first approved, it's rolling back those laws so people will again have to buy from street dealers supplied by shady folks in Humboldt or murderous narcos.

Still, good thing they're cracking down on these little storefronts mostly run by kind stoners. I mean, certainly they hurt more people than the big banks and such, right?

Or not. I have to give those guys credit, maybe Cali is just cracking down across the board. Wouldn't want to live in such a closed society. I mean, its fight against social and lifestyle liberties is disgusting. But it's also finally taking JP Morgan to task for robo-signing. What's robo-signing? Basically it's a practice where banks cut corners and save themselves time and money that would be spent on stupid stuff like due process and oversight and actually looking into individual cases. This enabled JP Morgan Chase to issue an insane number of debt-collection lawsuits under the premise that the poor little credit-card-holders wouldn't have the sophistication or the legal means to fight them. Included in this grouping are active members of the military who were late on payments because, oh, I don't know, they were FIGHTING TERRORISTS. This sound familiar? It's a now-illegal practice utilized by the big banks to approve and then foreclose on hundreds of thousands of innocent American home-owners. But it's okay, the government made those home-stealing bastards pay. Or did it?

Just recently a lawsuit against basically the major banks (BofA, Wells Fargo, and, surprise surprise, Morgan Chase) ended in a settlement of $9.3 billion. This sounds like a lot until you do the math and figure out it means that each homeowner who was wrongly foreclosed on - now, to clarify, this is a person who no longer has his or her home - received about $300 bucks. And then there's the other side - the banks hired the regulators and consultants who were reviewing their individual cases. That would be like a mafiosi hiring the prosecuting attorney trying to indict him for RICO. And how much did the banks, which paid the people it had wronged $9.3B, pay these consultants? $2 billion fucking dollars. Disgusting. So basically, the government allowed companies to once again fuck with the system in spite of receiving huge chunks of government bail-out monies and, in fact, allowed them to stage their own farcical display of adhering to the rules. Why does the Tea Party not protest outside these banks?

The original Tea Party wasn't about protesting the government- they were about protesting the government passing laws aimed to benefit the British East India Tea Trading Company. The original Tea Party was an act of stealing and destruction of property from a private company - sounds more like Occupy Wall Street or Communism to me. Though the Tea Party isn't anti-corporate, they're anti-government. And the government is apparently anti-them. Which really brings into question the name but, hell, that would take way too much time to learn all that. Like, you'd have to read, like, a page of stuff.

Tom Toles summed it all up in a comic

In a disgusting move reminiscent of the political and social ideology targeting perpetrated by administrations past, the IRS had been auditing and targeting conservative groups for the past few years. They've fucked with tax exempt status, over-scrutinized non-profit ledgers (which, c'mon, aren't the tightest anyway because they're nonprofits and can't afford a 10-person accounting staff) and in general fucked with any orgs which have the name "tea party" or "patriot" in their documents. Even more shocking, they didn't really find anything out of the ordinary. Elsewhere, though, people have found something pretty amazing. 3 women survived a deranged kidnapper who held them for 10 years.

Ariel Castro is the worst kind of scum. He kidnapped, raped and caged 3 women for a decade. One he impregnated several times - and after he found out about the pregnancies, he would beat her in the stomach and starve her until she miscarried. Another he forced to have a baby in a kiddie pool without any medical attention. He's so disgusting even his brothers have said they want nothing to do with him and hope he rots. In jail. I personally hope they castrate him, balls and shaft, without anesthesia. Then they can either let him bleed to death or cauterize it with a flaming chunk of metal and make him live the rest of his life pissing out of a poorly-sewn wound. But the real story is these women never gave up; they endured such a horrible fate for so long and yet never quit. This is true ambition - never giving up in spite of the most depraved and wicked life. Always looking for escape. Like that woman in the collapsed factory.

Last week I wrote about the collapse of a garment sweatshop in Bangladesh which killed hundreds. This last week, against all odds and as a tribute to the hard-working workers digging through the rubble of the collapsed building, a female survivor was found. After 17 days buried amidst the ruin of a shittily-made factory, a woman named Reshma was found in a muslim prayer room. Praise Allah, this is what religion is all about - offering refuge, a place to hope for one's survival. Not as an excuse for hatred and war.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world an Argentine city buried under about 30-feet of water for the last quarter-century has re-emerged, a modern-day Atlantis.  That is, if Atlantis had actually reappeared. It gives one hope.

If a woman can be found buried alive for over 2 weeks, 3 women and a baby born in the most squalid of conditions can escape to freedom after a decade of captivity under a vile monster, and a city can re-emerge from its watery grave, then maybe we have a chance of a better tomorrow. A place where government resources are pulled from the pointless bottomless hole of our war against mary-jane and turned towards punishing the real blue collar crooks, where corporations are no longer able to prey on the less intelligent or less resourceful average citizens of this supposed great nation, where the government doesn't see targeting and/or attacking its ideological opponents as "business as usual"; where twisted demons spawned from hell can be better identified and dealt with, where profits are no longer put before lives, and where we can all truly be proud of our treatment of each other.

I mean, if a city can rise from the sea in two and a half decades, anything's possible, right?

- Ryan