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The Story of Bottled Water

How the soda industry bamboozles us into the biggest con ever.


So...how much of this shabby, inferior, energy-guzzling, unsafe product do you buy?

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So it looks like organizers have more than enough signatures to get a measure put on the California ballot in 2010 to legalize marijuana. The measure would legalize:

Possession by an adult of up to 1 ounce of weed

The right to grow your own in a 25-square foot space on your property

Local governments to decide on sales within their areas


So this would put us more or less back where we were in the 70's, when Steve Martin said in his comedy show, "Boy, I wouldn't smoke marijuana in California these days. You can get a ticket for that!"


Here's my thinking.

I believe weed should be legal for adults to possess, so long as they don't go about doing dangerous things while stoned, like driving heavy machinery or handling firearms. I think both of those should carry stiff penalties.

I believe adults should have the right to grow their own weed for personal use, and that means ANY personal use, medical or otherwise, the above exceptions still applying.

HOWEVER

Given both of those passing into law, I believe selling weed should not be legal unless you have a license, just as with any other comestible. Sellers should have to apply for a permit and submit to occasional inspections if they want to sell to the public. There's way too much shit-headed criminality associated these days with weed, and apologies to all the lovely dealers I've known through the years, it's not the hippie days anymore. The black market in weed gets people killed, so it should go.

Besides, if you can grow your own, you have no need to buy weed. It's probably the world's easiest plant to grow, even easier than tomatoes, for gods' sakes. I should know, 'cause I did it when I lived in Santa Cruz. Not a lot, just a dozen small plants in one oak half-barrel out in the sun on a secluded porch. Got the seeds from a friend, sprouted and planted them. Other than watering, and pouring some fish-meal solution on the soil every three weeks or so, I didn't have to do anything, and got a lovely crop of quite good weed. It was ridiculously easy, and if I'd had the means and legal freedom to do more, I probably could have had a very good crop in that beautiful space. After all, it ain't called "weed" for nothin'!


So I do hope this law passes, because it's about damn time we stopped wasting money on this non-crime, and filling our jails with people who don't deserve to be there. We had legal weed in CA in the 70's, and there was no epidemic of HORRID CRIME OMG. All that happened back then was...people smoked weed. Just like now, except they weren't scared. And nobody died or anything. Imagine that.

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...we've got some fun going on!


Famous screenwriter Paul Haggis (Million Dollar Baby and Crash, among others) has left Scientology. Publicly. VERY publicly.

After 35 years, Haggis has finally cottoned to the fact that Hubbard's Scam is a nasty, power-hungry organization that doesn't care at all about the things it claims to care about. What took him so long, you ask? Well, you know how cults are.

More importantly, what straw was it that finally broke that particular camel's back? To his credit, Paul decided he'd finally had it up to here when the "Church" backed Proposition 8, the hateful anti-gay initiative that stripped California's gay population of its right to marry, even though the right had been granted by our Supreme Court. That was just too much for him, and he quit.

But it's the WAY he quit that's so much fun. He decided bowing out wasn't enough, so he sent a letter to one of the head honchos, a letter which has now gone viral all over the intertubes. And what a letter it is:


Haggis to Hubbard: You all are mean and I'M GOING HOME!!


( Text for the link-phobic )


WOW. I am SO loving this. As I've mentioned before, for most of my life I've lived within a couple of block of the Scientology headquarters, a building that reminds me of nothing so much as the Overlook Hotel from Stephen King's The Shining. (It was an old hospital from the 20's before Hubbard bought it, and now it's topped by a supremely creepy blue neon sign screaming SCIENTOLOGY. At night it can freeze your blood, thus the Overlook associations in my mind.) The recent downhill barreling of this mind-sucking cult makes me nothing but happy, happy, happy.



The story is also over at HuffPo. (Of course the "Church" is denying everything.)

AwardsDaily has it, as well as MovieLine.



It's taking off like a rocket. Laissez les bon temps roulez!



ETA: Brilliant comment over at MovieLine posted under the handle "Tommy Davis" (Davis is the head honcho who's become famous for storming out of interviews when asked about the whackier aspects of L.Ronology)...

So called screenwriter and director Paul Haggis's claims about the Church of Scientology are absolutely ridiculous. They are so offensive as to be not worth responding to. In fact, I am not responding to them, right now. The insinuation that the Church of Scientology would ever use private information to smear it's critics is offensive and vulgar. Why would we need to smear them when they are obviously child molesters? This is a man who, I have it on good authority, poos in his pants. Is that someone we should take seriously? While he is off raping grandma's the CoS is saving lives and ensuring human rights. I once caught a fish so big that Aerosmith asked me to hang out backstage with them, and the suggestion that I did not is profoundly and inescapably homosexual.

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Over the course of my life, my views on religion and what most people call "God" has changed and evolved. I was raised as a nominal Catholic. I and my siblings attended Catholic schools mainly because my parents felt (quite rightly) that the level of education we would get there far surpassed that of the public schools, even here in California, which in the 60's and 70's was at the top of the nation for children's education. My father has always been an atheist, and my mother, while religious, was very private about it, and rarely spoke on the subject. So my early encounter with religion was almost all based on what I was as an intrusion by outside authorities. Not always an unwanted intrusion, mind, but still an outside influence.

From the first, my most intense religious feeling was directed toward the female figures of religion - the Virgin Mary and her retinue of lady saints. The male figures of Catholicism did not offer me any spiritual nourishment, but rather imposed rules that I resented. The one exception was Jesus, who seemed in his downtrodden and ultimately sacrificial state to be much closer to the female figures than to the all-powerful, arrogant, and deeply unpleasant being claimed as his father, whom I had no liking for at all. Jesus seemed alright to me. True, he had a bit of a temper, could sometimes be unreasonable (that poor fig tree!), and at times flew off the handle, but by and large he was compassionate and at least paid women some attention (unlike his disciples, who mostly seemed like assholes).

As a teenager, I grew completely disillusioned with Catholicism, and by the time I was 19 had left it behind completely. Thanks to the good graces of a friend of mine, I came into contact with the Goddess. It was like coming home (the main image invoked by all people who find their own spiritual path), and I never looked back. After some years, I began to broaden my views, and read up on other religions such as Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, and other faiths, coming to understand that there is value in all faiths - they all have something to teach us, each in its own way. That's the great value of being a polytheist; it makes spiritual truth a much more universal thing. All gods and goddesses finally come to be seen simply as facets of an unknowable truth, something we humans will never be able to grasp fully, so it becomes logical that there are so many different ways to think about this subject. I went from Catholicism's "Our way is the only right way" to "You have something different? Please tell me about it!" Much more comfortable, interesting, and entertaining, as well as convivial.

And somewhere in there I made my peace with Jesus, whom after study of different faiths I recognized as another incarnation of the Sacrificed God, the son of the goddess, Dionysus of the Greeks, John Barleycorn, Osiris, all of whom are cut down to nourish the people. He is another of the Great Teachers, who has evolved through the centuries. I was especially delighted when I read about his similarities to the Buddha, how close their outlooks on life are, and how even the stories told about them are related. Did you know the story of Jesus walking on the water was being told about the Buddha three hundred years before Jesus was born? It's the exact same story, even down to what the Buddha says to the disciple who tries to follow.

All this because I'd like to present a wonderful interview that I just heard online. Terry Gross speaks with Karen Armstrong, a former nun who has been writing about world religions for many years now, with intelligence, grace, and a remarkable evenhandedness. She has a new book out called The Case for God, in which she argues that what many people think of as religion these days is really a very modern invention, something that has developed only over the last couple of centuries. She speaks here about the history of that, and about the problems inherent in treating religion as is it were the literal clinging to incredible fairy tales that so many characterize it as, and how it is imperative that a vision of religion, both older and newer, arise in the world, a vision that sees religion as not a literalist replacement for factual knowledge, but a poetic and metaphorical way of viewing the deeper problems of life, and a compassionate guide for how to deal with one another. Serving the needs of others rather than serving our own beliefs.

The Case for God - Karen Armstrong interview


I know there are some folks on my list who identify as atheists, and I would very much like for those folks to listen to this interview. NOT because I have any interest in changing anyone's beliefs - we pagans do not proselytize, thanks - but because it saddens me to hear so many people talking as if all religious people hold the same simplistic, childish, literal view that has dominated the discussions of religion in the media for the last couple of decades. Really, we're not all fools believing in Santa Claus. Many of us understand that religion is simply a map of the world, and not the world itself. The Buddha exhorted his followers to take care never to confuse the finger with the moon it points towards; if that were a lesson that was taught to every child, the world would be a much better place.

Enjoy!

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From Yahoo News:


Agreement in Colo. lawsuit helps purged voters


DENVER – Thousands of Colorado residents who had been scratched from voter registration rolls will be allowed to cast ballots on Election Day and their votes will be given special protection to ensure they are counted, following the resolution of a federal lawsuit filed against the state.

( Read the rest )


Pretty cool. Let's hope we get more help of this kind.