Grateful Dead

Even as I support Obama's general attitudes towards current political crises, I am struck by the imperial tone of his speech as I am now hearing it. As he goes from one global hotspot to another and utters mounds of platitudes the hypocrisy of the US's actual actions undermines his words and turns them into steaming piles. While the US has not lost all moral authority it has lost most of it, like 90%. Now Obama is saying that the danger to the world is not that America will continue to create empire, but that America will disengage after a decade of war and leave a vacuum of power. It seems to me that Dubya Bush proved that comment wrong on steroids, America leading without a whiff of consultation with any ally. The rest of the speech? Blah-blah Syria; Blah-blah Iran; Blah-blah Israel/Palestine (Sigh...)

She must have been one open-minded and patient lady to put up with Neil's antics! We should all give thanks for her role as editor of collections of beat writer's correspondence and occasional photographer of Kerouac and Cassidy. Interesting that she was portrayed by Kerouac as the bourgeois one who always stayed home in "On the Road" but always was the one Cassidy kept crawling back to...

she lived a long (90 years) and very storied life http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/23/carolyn-cassady

"Hundreds of passengers bound for Japan were stranded in Australia overnight after a snake was found on a Qantas plane at Sydney airport. Staff found the 20cm-long (eight-inch) Mandarin rat snake in the cabin before passengers boarded the Boeing 747 on Sunday. It is not clear how the snake, which poses no threat to humans, had got on the flight from Singapore. A replacement flight left for Tokyo on Monday morning." (Didn't Sammuel Jackson get rid of all those snakes after that terrible movie?

Should be more than ashamed of themselves. A list of of partisan obstructors should be well publicized so they can be culled from the flock next voting season. 40 votes on trying to defund the Affordable Care Act and now one more coupled to lifting the debt ceiling that isn't going to fly either. Isn't this the definition of insanity?

Mr. Speaker has vowed to hold the 2014 federal budget hostage unless the funding for the Affordable Care Act was withheld. WHAT A BONEHEAD! Please contact your rep and senator to lodge your complaint in regard to this obstructive position from the Republican members of Congress.

I've always said that the Bush/Cheney NeoCons (NOT America's) response to 9/11 was absolutely wrong. Prosecuting a war against two countries while prosecuting everybody in this country with the Patriot Act was not an intelligent response. Focusing on NY probably had to be done for the aspect of healing alone. BUT, we could have prosecuted the terrorists around the world with the good will of about 150 countries if we had pursued this as a police action. That is, not involved the military except for special forces ops and had the FBI and Interpol and the NSA track the bad guys. Then use the combined special forces of those countries willing (clandestinely, there were a lot of them like Poland, than nobody ever thought of) and whoop the bad guys. All of the patriotic screeching and ape-like ceremonies of a country and going to war were not needed and, as it played out, overly restrictive of our freedoms. It merely made the country feel worse and scarred a generation of vets., not to mention killed about a million people and injured about 10,000,000 more. Isolationism is a more difficult thing. It points to an extreme and extremes aren't good in foreign affairs. The world's most bad-ass military can't just do nothing when the rest of the world is waiting for a helping hand or leadership in the face of war crimes and the use of weapons of mass destruction. There is a long way between that and taking a kick-back position and not forcefully pursuing economic gain at the expense of others. I for one would like our foreign policy too have much larger tendencies towards isolationism but not become isolationist, if that makes any sense...

It's an interesting thought, and one that would most likely be a boon for our foreign relations. I've been pounding my fists on the table since 9/12/01 that Job Numero Uno in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave is to heal the gaping wound in NYC. Of course, it went largely ignored (except when it got mentioned in motivational speeches) during the Bush Era and seems to have been ignored again for the majority of the Obama Era. Maybe it's my bleeding heart, but is it really necessary to leave the memory of the Twin Towers just a memory? Wouldn't the best way to say, "F**k you!" to the terrorists/jihadists be to rebuild and carry on as if it was merely a scratch? I'm all for leaving other nations to deal with their own problems unless they ask us for help. Jimmy Carter is one of--if not the only--U.S. President to sit in the Oval Office and not fire a single shot, and how is he remembered? Ask any Republican, and chances are the answer you'll get is, "As a coward." But we all know the truest sign of bravery is to see how easily we can enter yet another war and decide to do the exact opposite. Sorry, I just don't think this country's ready for that...yet.

If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen! You're now in a grey business rather than a black business but nothing stands still. If we get a conservative president, it could be prohibition times again... My point is that if you are in that business, expect those headaches. From the standpoint of the recreational/medical user, I want the price to go down. From what I can see the cartels aren't growing special tinctures for specific needs. Therefore the more tonnage they drag in here,the more the price goes down, and it has gone down. Of course, the real answer is to legalize and tax it. Have it graded, branded and available at Seven-Elevens. Use the tax money for anything but environmental/corporate degradation and armaments/war. The grading would cut down on people getting paranoid and driving impaired. I'm totally down with that scenario. If it gets to that point the cartels can become legal exporters from Mexico. They won't fight a war because the price went down. Have I missed something except the current state of anarchic affairs?

Hi all. Hey Now :) Really cool, hopefully site. One on Current events, or things in the World. Or Action :) (Notice I did'nt say activism. But nothing wrong there). Again really good site; to start dialogues with open-ended potentials... O.K. so here I go, diving in. And the subject is..da dum..Medical Marijuana. Now with this, I'm not bringing it up for the pros & cons of it's efficacy. But namely about the subject on the production end. It's a subject that is'nt going away; it's coming toward. And even in Colorado, recreational Marijuana in January. O.K. so Pot is going to be more easily available legally; less-anything resembling red tape. But what I'm curious about is, how do things..groups like the Mexican drug cartels fit into all of this? Yea sure you can have a Dispensary with 4 grow houses with rooms; but what about production in outside acreage? How is all of this production going to be done amiably? For some reason I have a feeling, forsee this whole legal cultivation biz eventually getting violent. Just from the competitive perspective. If sales become legal, or more legal..& cultivation..this is just eventually going to marginalize the cartels operating here stateside. More instances of sabotage,say. Medical Marijuana, or legal Marijuana..I guess I can see or get accustomed more to this concept daily. But I can't see how this is going to 'rise above the waterlevel of social respectability' without it falling into more cartel/crime production market-cornering desires. I don't think much thought has gone into this; Yea growers in Humbolt co. want their product to arrive to market stress free & open. Also in British Columbia. And Morocco too I guess. But again, how are the Mex. Cartels supposed to react. Or any other just-big grower/entrepreneur who owns 1/2 dozen residences..and wants his or her product to be the top dollar...all on the up & up? I don't expect consumption to really go down at all; but I cant' one bit see anything considering itself a south cartel change it's heavy handed market-cornering methods. To be honest it just scares me. Back in the beginning of August I want to say I heard on the news that the Northern Calif. wildfires..there was a suspicion that it started by arson due to a sabotage of Pot fields. 'Turns out this was'nt the case, but I have to admit this was something I never thought of before, yet it does'nt surprise me. Stands to reaso. So thats' my thoughts, on a current subject matter. Can recreational Marijuana actually come to be in the U.S.A. without the gangster prohibition criminal muscle-casualties; to run the whole gambit of it. Extortion, Legitimacy, safe growing etc. If I was the owner of a Dispensary in Colorado, when January arrives I might have more fear of losing my head if not dealing with a cartel representitive. Or having a plan to deal with. If pressure gets applied, who you going to run to?