Gee, I wonder what it could be.

which were better suited to our brains when we thought the sun was a magic ball in the sky.

Or, to put it another way; you wouldn't buy a brand new computer and load it up with Windows 95. It would be ridiculous to try and run 20 year old software on a modern machine and expect good results. But people walk around trying to comprehend the reality of 2016 using semantic maps that were put together 1400, 2000 years ago, or longer. And the results are frequently obvious.

Hell, even our legal and governmental structures are proving woefully inadequate to address modern realities; the FBI is currently attempting to rely on laws from the 70s all the way back to the late 1800s, to address their fight with apple over encryption. We often see people- even some self-identified "progressives"- in a perpetual state of temper tantrum because HBO shows full frontal nudity, that sort of thing.

I am of the opinion that particularly as technology advances at an exponential rate, what is needed more than ever are open source, open-ended, belief systems or meta belief systems, to address the, for lack of a better word, non-euclidian levels of complexity that comprise the data streams we are encountering in the 21st century. Catmas, as the Discordians call them, as opposed to Dogmas.

(It is interesting, as a digression from this digression, that Bill Wilson- again, for all his many flaws- did manage to create in the structure of alcoholics anonymous a very durable, perfect in many ways, model for a decentralized, anarchist bottom-up anti-organization, which contributes mightily IMHO to the durability of the idea and the program. While one can take issue with the steps, the traditions are pretty objectively impressive from that perspective)

But I disagree, I think actual education and information is somewhat incompatible with these sorts of oversimplified bumpersticker aphorisms. Like "abstinence only" versus teaching about STDs and contraception, the approaches are not easily munged together.

I do believe that young minds should develop organically, and that would include avoiding mind-alterants (many of which our young people are inundated with by big pharma, like ritalin) until the brain has sort of figured out where it sits as a baseline and the personality has gelled to a certain extent. "Just say no" as one piece of advice isn't inherently bad in this regard, but again, I do think that an intellectual approach to the issue of "drugs" and education thereof would include as I said upthread, acknowledgement that all drugs and all users and all relationships between the two are not the same.

Hell, we can acknowledge that a glass of wine is occasionally healthy for some people, while also realizing that alcoholism is a deadly nightmare for others. Similarly, it is inane to pretend that something like cannabis isn't only "not bad" but can be downright beneficial for some people, in terms of creativity and other enrichment.

All drugs are not created equal nor are all the people who take them, the reasons they take them, and situations in which they take or use them, nor is every individual's relationship to them.

I fully admit I am a strung out addict, addicted to a drug that I pretty fucking much have to have, every morning, to function normally. If I don't get it I get a monster headache, at best.

I've also dealt with addictions around me far more serious than espresso, of course.

One of the worst in terms of damage and wreckage, by far, being alcohol. There is simply no contest. And then, of course, nicotine. That one killed my Father, with the help of Joe Camel.

But funny enough, neither alcohol, nicotine OR caffeine were the focus of the inane "just say no" campaign, which--- like our nation's misguided drug war; which it enabled and dovetailed with, along with a metric shit-ton of authoritarian, fourth amdendment destroying bullshit fucking up the lives of otherwise law-abiding Americans--- was inordinately focused on marijuana, a drug which by any rational yardstick is far less dangerous than alcohol or nicotine, if not less conducive to tolerating daily menial drudgery than caffeine.

"Just Say No" was designed to, among other things make baby boomers coming off a cocaine binge in the early 80s, feel less guilty and hypocritcal about spewing preachy bullshit at younger people. I can tell you that as one of the younger people of that era, we didn't give a flying fuck about it, any more than the noises about AIDS made us stop having sex the way the media and the boomers kept fantasizing that it did. It was, in a very real way, the equivalent of "abstinence only" education.

"just say no" is an oversimplification and an inane bumper sticker aphorism, which (like drugs) are fine for some people- 12 steppers, etc- but like many bumpersticker aphorisms, it's not even technically true, or correct. It seems to me that some people should say no, some people should say no under certain circumstances, and some people function just fine- in fact, arguably better- occasionally saying yes to certain things that work for them.

And prime among and above all that is that people should be able to make up their own fucking minds about their own lives and their own bodies, insofar as they're not directly harming or endangering anyone else.

Wow, nuance and an actually intelligent approach to a complex situation, imagine that.

That's not what we got from the Reagans or their era. Ever.

admit it.

Next year it will be onto something else.

Witness the tragicomedy of the FBI this week trying to shoehorn the issues around encryption into a 1977 law designed for telephone line surveillance.

Which history are we in danger of repeating, anyway? The '68 nomination of the eminently electable HHHumphrey, or the '72 nomination of crazy loony lefty McGovern?

Fact is, both lost.

In 2004 we nominated the smart choice and lost, 2008 we nominated the "you'd be crazy to---" guy and won.

There's enough examples throughout history to justify just about anybody's argument. In the meantime, every once in a while it's helpful to remind the DUnizens of crankyshuffle dufferboardville - of which I am a proud citizen, myself - that this century belongs, first and foremost, to those born in it.

The rest of us are just running out overextended tourist visas.

Do you play Marco Polo? I play Polo. With my Rubio. Are you threatening me?

Porn, PETA, circumcision,
sports illustrated swimsuit edition
kids on airplanes,
cornflake chicken

population, hipster hats,
superbowl and outside cats

truck nutz hang off ugly cars,
why can I not smoke in bars?
olive garden, peak oil soon,
those NASA fuckers bombed the moon

them at their word.

And it is undeniable that they have had a bone to pick with apple's end-user encryption since it was implemented. I simply do not believe that a) whatever is on this now-deceased person's phone; which I suspect the government already has a good idea about, anyway- is worth the extraordinary effort they're putting into it, other than they want to either establish a precedent OR obtain by any means necessary the tools or knowhow to get around this encryption scheme they don't like... and b) I think the principle of privacy and security is a valid one for a number of reasons already laid out- I am going to proudly side with not just Silicon Valley but also the EFF on these matters, every time.

I believe law enforcement can keep us safe just fine without having to have a magic key into everyone's shit; and it's worth noting that even when they do have these near-omniscient powers they keep demanding, again, they DON'T use them to keep us safe, but like I said, they use em to go after low level drug users.

The Feds or the NSA dont need super secret illegal powers to spy on El Chapo, anyway. It's the person smoking the bong in their basement (or the journalist that has written the article deemed 'subversive') that are the focal points of these, again, extra-legal and extra-constitutional activities. And honestly we all should have learned these lessons long ago, from J. Edgar Hoover, Nixon, and COINTELPRO.

And on that note, I'm sure there are a variety of philosophical points one could take on the issue of privacy vs. security in the case of a terrorist's cell phone, but I do not know how anyone can argue at this point in time that the authoritarian wet dream known as the drug war, en masse, has been anything except a giant taxpayer funded clusterfuck, a failure, and a cruel disaster that has devastated lives and taken a big ol' invasive crap on our constitutional rights in the process. The violence associated with "the drug trade" is, almost exclusively, a function of prohibition just as al capone and tommygun wielding gangsters grew out of the 21st Amendment.