marijuana

This week on #GoodNewsNextWeek: We catch up with 20 headlines showing some of the ways we're winning - from eagles vs. drones to freed cats and whistleblowers.

Prolegomenon. Let us begin with an immutable fact of human behavior, specifically contemporary American behavior. Americans simply hate the truth. The troublesome truth, the uncomfortable and (dare I remind you) the inconvenient truth. Truth that bristles and frightens and awakens and piques. Truth that confronts us with the lie of contemporary fable masked as history. History, as Tolstoy reminds us, would be a wonderful thing if only it were true. Truth would be a wonderful thing if only it were pleasant.

The stakes have never been higher for legal marijuana.

Fake News? That’s redundant.

In an interview with Rolling Stone published November 29, Barack Obama said that he doesn’t think legalizing marijuana would end America’s drug problem, but he believes it should be regulated like cigarettes and alcohol. The outgoing President added that regulating marijuana is a wiser way of handling the issue than continuing to treat it as a Schedule I drug. [1]
Source: Rolling Stone

The marijuana industry is growing by leaps and bounds across the country. And industry players are spending money on lobbying and have even been contributing to friendly candidates. Since 2010 the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) has given contributions of between $500 and $1,000 to, among others:

Something about pizza, toxic armories and the future of farming + this day in history w/"A date which will live in infamy" and our song of the day by Robyn Hitchcock on your Morning Monarchy for December 7, 2016.

Fake News and Alt-Right are the latest incantations of the attempt to reroute discussion and illumination of fraud and governmental deceit. Before them was the granddaddy of deflection: the conspiracy theory. 

Learn to work the saxophone • I play just what I feel • Drink Scotch whiskey all night long • And die behind the wheel
In my years I have never seen anything quite like this. And for good reason.
Who am I? I spell out simply.

The most beautiful words ever enunciated and the most surely under threat of extinction. Broadly inclusive yet exquisitely imprecise. Magnificently vague in coverage yet the first line of defense against tyranny of expression and thought and the expression of the simple idea. The troublesome idea. The noxious and noisome. This is the essence of who we are as a republic. Let me explain and give examples accordingly.