The Fort Hood shooter was a religious nut.

 

The gunman in the Fort Hood shooting was a religious nut.

I don’t give a crap if it’s politically incorrect or not. This guy was out there.

MAJOR Nidal Malik Hasan, the gunman who killed 13 at America’s Fort Hood military base, once gave a lecture to other doctors in which he said non-believers should be beheaded and have boiling oil poured down their necks.

How could the Army miss this? He’s giving public lectures saying this shit and they let him stay in the Army?

I could see being kinda tolerant of someone who’s a Muslim in the armed forces if they’re at least loyal to their country and their commanders. I mean, I don’t like religious weirdos of any stripe but if they’re keeping it to themselves, I see no need to mess with them.

But it really sounds like this guy was pretty obvious, saying that he considered himself a Muslim first and an American second. Now, to be fair, I can picture some Army guys saying they’re Christians first and Americans second, but Christianity hasn’t (yet) come out in favor of going postal on your fellow soldiers.

He also told his colleagues that non-Muslims were infidels condemned to hell and should be set on fire.

Ya know, I bet if I went into an airport and got in line and said some of those same things in a loud voice, I wouldn’t make it onto a plane. Yet this guy was in the Army. And a psychiatrist, too.

(Why do I suddenly hear “Shrink, I wanna kill,” in my head?)

Well, there’s one more point in favor of sacking the whole meme of Islam. To the dustbin of history, and not a moment too soon. Sorry, but any meme that says I ought to be set on fire can–well–go to hell!

 

Breckinridge Colorado legalizes cannabis

Yay!

Breckinridge, CO legalizes cannabis!

If you’re in the mood to go skiiing, you might want to consider hanging out in Breckinridge, Colorado. They just totally legalized pot and paraphernalia.

Of course, it’s still not legal according to state law. You’ll still get in trouble if you’re caught driving stoned (although I don’t know how they’d prove that, unless you’re actually toking up in the car). Breckinridge is just this little small town (pop. 3000), so a local ordinance like that doesn’t really have any effect if you get busted by state cops or DEA or something.

But hey! The good citizens of Breckinridge not only made pot legal, and paraphernalia legal, they chose to make it legal for everyone, not just medical patients. Not any of this sorta-kinda-maybe legal stuff. They actually had the balls to just go ahead take that big step.

Hurray for Breckinridge! Maybe if enough little places in America turn sane like this, we can have a real “land of the free and home of the brave”.

Single payer quietly croaks

Oct 30–

Well, it’s official.

No single payer option single payer option in this health care reform bill. Maybe we’ll get the public option, but states won’t have the option to set up a single payer system in their states even if they want to.

Surprised? Me neither.

Not that I’m all that sold on the public option, I think single payer would have been better, but, hey, I’ll take what I can get. But I’m wondering if the public option will survive this whole process.

County Council asks why the durn helicopters are still flying

Oct 23–

Just in case you’re following our local news about how the lowest law enforcement priority, known here as the “Peaceful Sky” initiative, is playing out, here’s a link to a story about our county council talking to the local police.

I wasn’t there, but the story in our local paper here says that every single private citizen who testified urged the police to stop eradicating marijuana.

Now, in a way I can kinda sympathize with the police and prosecutors who are in the sticky position of being sworn to uphold state and federal laws, as well as being answerable to the local citizens here on the Big Island. They’ve got 58% of the voters telling them to make pot eradication the lowest priority, and state law telling them that certain medical patients are legal for marijuana, and then federal law telling them to bust all them damn potheads.

The three helicopter eradication missions flown this year were before the Department of Justice released their recent memo telling prosecutors to leave medical marijuana patients alone; so perhaps now that there’s a more sensible federal policy in place, our prosecutors can follow the local law without being pulled in two different directions.

Our local low priority initiative directs the council to reject grants or funding earmarked for cannabis eradication; so where’d they get the money to fly all those helicopters? They’re not cheap.

Supposedly they had leftover money from the last fiscal year, and the Department of Land and Natural Resources received a $475,000 eradication grant from the DEA in February. (Yes, that was after we voted in the “Peaceful Sky” law.)

I strongly suspect, and actually hope a little, that these flights we’ve been having are just somebody’s way of spending the rest of the money that’s left without actually giving a crap about the actual pot. I could see that. There’s money in the budget–if you give it back some other jerk’s gonna spend it on himself–so why not fly a few last helicopter missions and give the money to the people it would have gone to anyway? Of course, if that was what was going on, couldn’t they have just handed out the checks and left the helicopter on the ground? Just saying.

So. Hopefully they’ve spent all there durn eradication money. I suppose the DEA will still fly us, though.

Yay for Kelly Greenwell, council representative from Kona, who took the opportunity to rip the cops and lawyers a new one, saying, “The number of rapes, the number of lost children, the amount of horror that goes on in the dark corners of this island need to be looked at. Chasing somebody who’s smoking a goddamn cigarette made of marijuana is insane.”

Another Councilman apologized to the cops for having to defend themselves, but hey, did they think we were going to be all happy that they’re flying right over our yards after we already told them to quit wasting time going after cannabis? You’d think the name “Peaceful Sky Initiative” would have tipped them off. Maybe they thought we’d just smoke another joint and forget all about it.

Put up your health insurance horror story at namesofthedead.com

 

I was just thinking today that someone should do this and then I hear that someone has. 

 

Alan Grayson announces website naming the dead.

 

If you know someone who has died because of inadequate insurance, you should send your story to http://www.namesofthedead.com. 

 

When I surf around on the Net I seem to find story after story of people who have been abused by the insurance companies in one way or another. I’m glad someone is putting it all in one place.

Even more compromises on health care

 

 

Aak! I saw a brief quote from this in my newspaper a few minutes ago and went to the net to look for the story.

 

This article says that the White House will not–that’s not–commit to a health care bill that would cap insurance premiums. Yeah, I had to read it twice, too.

 

Instead of helping regular people by insisting that the insurance be reasonably priced, they’d rather side with the insurance guys and insist that they be able to charge whatever the heck they want for premiums.

 

I coulda swore that Obama mentioned “affordable” care. How ya gonna make sure it’s affordable for anyone when the insurance premiums are already sky high and the insurance industry is free to hike them up even more?

 

Obama also will not–that’s not–demand a final bill with a public option to drive down costs through competition. 

 

“There will be compromise. There will be legislation, and it will achieve our goals: helping people who have insurance get more security, more accountability for the insurance industry, helping people who don’t have insurance get insurance they can afford, and lowering the overall cost of the system,” White House adviser David Axelrod said.

 

“There will be compromise.” No kidding. There’s been nothing but compromise from the very beginning, when our leaders wouldn’t even consider single-payer. 

 

They still claim that the new legislation will have more accountability for the insurance industry, but if they’ve already ruled out capping insurance premiums then I don’t have a lot of hope for that goal. Same for the goal of helping people to get insurance they can afford. I don’t think those guys in Washington have a clue what we can “afford”. 

 

 

 

 

Atheism gaining ground in America

Hey check this out. 

 

This has some statistics about how popular or unpopular religion has become in America between 1990 and 2008.

 

(You’ve gotta see the picture! “A priest, a minister, a rabbi, a generic Christian, a Muslim, and a mainline Christian walk into a bar…”)

 

When looking at the graphs, remember that the first two bars in each graph represents the percentage of population that considers themselves to be in that category; the second two bars indicates the actual population in millions. Since population is always rising, the first two bars probably tell the story better than the second two.

 

Most religions have become less popular between ’90 and ’08. Only the Muslims picked up a little, and they only went from 0.3% of the population to 0.6%.

 

It’s the “no religion” category that really picked up steam. In 1990, 8.2% of the respondents indentified as non-religious; in 2008 that had climbed up to 15%.

 

Alright! Now, see, there is some good news in the world. 

The imams of Oklahoma restrict abortion access

 

New Oklahoma abortion law will publish patient information.

 

As of November 1, doctors in Oklahoma will be compelled to post the details of every abortion they perform online. Part of this information contains the patient’s age, marital status, and race; her financial condition; her education; and the total number of her previous pregnancies.

 

Two Oklahoma women are challenging the law in court. Go sisters!

 

Even putting aside the absolute outrageousness of forcing a doctor to publish this patient information at all, the amount of information being published about the patient could be used to identify her in a small community.

 

So, will the good Christians of Oklahoma start engaging in “honor killings”? We’ve already seen abortion providers being shot–it only takes a small rationalization to start calling the women getting abortions “murderers”.

 

You know this isn’t really about publishing the information so people can have the information, although that’s pretty bad right there. The idea is to make it so hard and so dangerous to get an abortion in Oklahoma that no one will do it. They’ll make it to where it’s “legal” but almost unobtainable.

 

Oklahoma is a hard place to be female. Oklahoma actually has a law on the books that says that a “man is the head of the household”. They tried to repeal the law in the ’80s–and they couldn’t repeal it because the Christians wanted it kept there, and they had the votes.

 

I grew up in Oklahoma. It’s a scary place to be different from the norm. And religion is firmly entrenched there. There’s different denominations of Christianity but most people profess to be a Christian of one kind or another. Baptists predominate but there’s plenty of Pentecostals and Churches of Christ and various other forms of Protestants–not so many Catholics but they’re there. 

 

People in Oklahoma are pretty friendly until or unless they find out you’re different from them in some way. Then you’re going to hell. When they’re not telling the unbelievers that they’re going to hell, the different churches tell each other that they’re going to hell. 

 

I guess you have to be there to know what it’s like to grow up there. Imagine that nearly every single person you come across at church or school or in your neighborhood all believe the same basic myth. God created the world and there’s a heaven and a hell, etc. To profess to think something else is to invite ridicule and argument and perhaps even ostracism. 

 

Some churches are worse. You can tell the women in the Pentecostal churches ‘cuz they weren’t allowed to cut their hair or wear makeup or pants. Ever.

 

I knew this girl whose parents were Pentecostals and when she tried to date a Catholic boy, they sent her away to Alabama to live under virtual house arrest with another Pentecostal family. As if she had stolen a car or something.

 

I was also taught in church that black people weren’t supposed to marry white people. No Bible reference, they just insisted it was a sin.

 

You can get life for a pot plant there. Think about that. Life. For one plant. Life.

 

Not everyone is into that religion stuff, I guess, but when I wasn’t hanging around religious people, everyone I met was constantly griping about how bad they wanted to get out of Oklahoma.

 

If the Christian dominionists ever take over a significant section of the United States, I would bet it would be in Oklahoma. I’m sure they’d love it if they could pass enough horrible laws to drive out every freethinking non-Christian from the state. 

 

Hopefully they won’t but I sure as heck wouldn’t live there again as long as they have so much influence. Just like I wouldn’t want to live in Iran, or Saudi Arabia, or Afghanistan, or anywhere else that religion has too much influence.

 

The plight of women in Afghanistan and the plight of women in Oklahoma are similar–the one thing that keeps the women of Oklahoma from being treated as badly as the women of Afghanistan is the fact that Oklahoma is in the United States, and we still have freedom of religion here. The preachers in America have power but they don’t yet have official power. For now.  

 

I think these draconian anti-abortion laws demonstrate that if our government really was run according to “Christian values” or the “laws of God” or whatever the euphemism is, we would have a lot more laws, not less, and the government would be much more involved in our private lives.

 

(On a side note, maybe we should let them have Oklahoma. It’s hot as hell in the summer, prone to tornadoes and the occasional huge winter storm, and mostly pretty flat and featureless. And the Ogalala aquifer is running out of water, but since a lot of them don’t believe in global warming anyway, they won’t realize that they’re sitting on a doomed area until it’s too late.)

 

I wish we could run something like an underground railroad, in both Oklahoma and Afghanistan, and help all the women who want to leave to get out. Just drain those places of their women. Picture some Taliban/Christian jerk coming home from a long day of oppression in the name of bullshit to discover an empty house.

 

Eh, you no like your women no more? You want to treat ’em all bad? We fix it, we take ’em away for ya…

 

The one big problem with that idea is that we’d have to take those women somewhere else–presumably in a rational state in America. But we don’t support women in those states either; support for women in our “reformed” welfare system is a lot like Oklahoma’s abortion laws–legal but nearly unobtainable. 

Gallup Poll shows Americans more tolerant of cannabis

 

Oct 19–

According to a new Gallup poll, 44% of Americans are now in favor of making marijuana legal and 54% are opposed.

 

The numbers in this story are broken down by region, party affiliation, and age. Westerners approve of legalizing marijuana by a clear majority (53%). Liberals are more likely to approve of legalization than conservatives. Neither of those really surprises me.

 

I noticed in this story that when you break it down by age, old people were less likely to be in favor of legalization (28%), the 50-64 crowd (*cough* baby boomers *cough*) only approved by 45%, and the under-50 crowd approved by 50%.

 

(How come the baby boomers only approve by 45%? Maybe the pot back then wasn’t as good as nostalgia advertises, huh?)

 

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? I’m shamelessly wondering how long it will take for the minority voting bloc to die off. I know. I’m terrible. 

 

Hopefully that’s not what it would take for us to finally have some common sense cannabis freedom. The fact that cannabis is becoming more popular, or at least, not so reviled, is a good sign. I like good signs.

 

In fact, one of these stories suggests that 

 

If public support were to continue growing at a rate of 1% to 2% per year, as it has since 2000, the majority of Americans could favor legalization of the drug in as little as four years. 

But, you know, in the ’70s people thought for sure that pot would be legal any day now. They were so sure they quit working towards it, and the ’80s brought backlash. Please, this time let’s carry this thing all the way through. 

 

Are you a consumer of cannabis? If so, please always remember that you are an ambassador for our plant. If you act like an asshole when you’re stoned you’re gonna make us all look bad. 

 

But then, one of the big reasons that cannabis is popular is that you can smoke it and relax and mellow out; pot smokers don’t start a bunch of fights or go out and kill people out of the blue; and they don’t look all wasted and sick like meth heads or coke heads or crack heads.

 

I have met several men that smoke pot who say, “I smoke pot. If I drink alcohol, I get in fights.” Usually when I meet a man who says this, he’s the kinda guy who’s not even interested in alcohol. And I’ve gotta say, if a man knows that one habit will make him violent and one will make him mellow and he chooses the latter, doesn’t that sound like a wise choice on his part?

 

Yeah, I use marijuana for medical purposes. I smoke it for everybody else’s health. I get stoned and then I don’t want to choke the shit out of people.

 

 

 

Department of Justice finally shows common sense

 

Department of Justice memo advises leniency on medical marijuana.

 

Like a cool breeze wafting in the window unexpectedly, we got refreshing surprise today.

 

The Department of Justice sent out this memo telling federal prosecutors to leave medical marijuana patients alone, as long as they are clearly complying with the medical marijuana laws in their state.

 

At last! Sanity! Common sense! (*gets up and does little dance*)

 

And, if you’re into state’s rights, it’s good, too. About time the federal government recognized the rights of states. 

 

The text of the memo can be found here, and it does say that this is not an effort to legalize marijuana by any means, and federal prosecutors are still instructed to prosecute marijuana cases that are not medical cases. 

 

If you’re following the laws of your state, sticking to the amount of pot and plants you’re supposed to have, not selling pot to minors, don’t own a gun, not committing acts of violence, laundering money, selling other illegal drugs, etc, then you are now officially too much trouble to prosecute. Yay!