Now I know you all don't like cops, but we have one on our system and on this list, F. Brackin, and although I imagine that he and I don't see eye to eye on about a million and a half different things, he's a good guy and definitely one of Ithaca's finest. As part of the effort to make downtown Ithaca safer for crime, I had discussed with him providing an anonymous crime reporting e-mail address, so that people could report crime without fear of repercussion. This includes crime within the city and within the police department itself. I know this sounds like a 'Squeal Line' and frankly it is. But it's meant to give good people a safe method of reporting crime to the cops. However since it is anonymous, bad people can also abuse it by false reports or turning in good people who happen to be toking or whatever. We haven't implemented it yet, but its still something I want to do. Comments are welcome. Homer You can stop reading now and hit the next button, there is nothing further for intelligent mature reasonable or civilized people below this line. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE SQUEAL LINE Marijuana happens to be the Holy Sacrament of my religion. Alcohol on the other hand is the Unholy Anti Sacrament. Drugs should not be illegal in any case, because they are a health problem and not a criminal problem. It's not criminal to smoke a flower or snort some poppy dust. Drugs may be bad for you, but they are not criminal. Knowing that drugs are bad for you, and going out and selling them to people in order to get them hooked against their will is criminal. But going out into a forest, and picking up a hooch bud and smoking it is not a criminal thing to do. Criminality is a very clear cut thing. Criminality is the effort to enforce on you an unfair exchange transaction against your will, either through force or deceit, treason and treachery. For example it is the effort to convince you that you are about to engage in a fair exchange transaction that is in fact a rip off, and is intended to be a rip off. Killing you outright of course is the ultimate rip off, as is enslaving you, either spiritually, mentally, emotionally or physically. Drugs can be a form of physical enslavement. Criminals can't produce, they can only consume. They are the picture perfect dictionary definition of "Consumes more than he produces." Once they run out of their initial allotment of energy, they have to consume what others produce in order to keep going. The last effort of a spiritually dying being trying to give, is to take. Criminality is an effort to produce by taking your production instead. This is very clear cut, very mathematical. The criminal always knows what he is doing. The criminal will tell you that you have lots of duties and no rights, and that he has lots of rights and no duties. He can't produce by sowing, so he tries to 'produce' by reaping what you have sown. The criminal tries to make his, the fruits of your labor against your will. People will tell you how bad drugs are for people. In general this is true. It is true of alcohol, tobacco, cocaine, speed, heroin and novocaine. In lesser degrees it is true of pot, shrooms and LSD. Drugs are poisons that have a benefit. Thus they form a dangerous double edged sword. Some drugs like cocaine are very very bad for you. Cocaine in particular makes you feel like you had perfect parents. It allows you to feel like you had a perfect upbringing with no trauma or unreasonableness at all, and you can look on all the nonsense of other people with understanding. But then when you come down, its an electronic hell that is hard to describe. Cocaine can also kill you, you can do too much of it. You can think if you do just a little bit more, you will hit that perfect high, its like a inifinitely annoying little itch that just needs to be scratched, and you do that little bit more and your central nervous system just collapses and bye bye being. Rats in a cage will drink cocaine impregnated water to the exclusion of eating food or drinking anything else. They will continue to drink the cocaine water until they starve to death. This is what you are up against if you do cocaine. Alcohol is similar, too much of it and your breathing will stop, but usually the body pukes it up before it gets that bad. Pot is almost impossible to kill you or overdose, and pretty soon you smoke yourself straight which is like real boring. Most pot heads slow down too so they become MUCH better drivers and coordination is not thrown off. Driving accidents would go way down if pot bars replaced alcohol bars. The down side of course is more people would find religion and give up the rat race and war games. But all drugs have their down side. Herion and the opiates are too horrible to imagine. So its real easy to see why people start considering these drugs bad and making them illegal. But the demand remains and criminals step in to profit from that demand and the higher prices. Governments too start to profit from the drug trade to fund their foreign wars, and the whole thing just becomes a huge exercise in corruption, temptation and seduction. You can control criminality with illegality, but you can not control addiction with illegality, and when you try, you make it impossible to control criminality with anything, because you guarantee that the criminals will always have more money, guns, and lawyers than the government. The government has to fight for every tax penny it gets, drug war lords have money shoveled in their faces by everyone they meet. Whose going to win? But there's another lesson to be learned here. A long time ago there was something called the Opium Wars. The Emperor saw that the British were importing opium into his country presumably in order to get them all addicted. So he declared war on the British which turned out to be one of the bloodiest wars on the planet and went on for YEARS. So how many died or were tortured from the opium? How many died or were tortured in the war? How much pain did the opium cause? How much pain did the war cause? Did it get rid of opium? So this is a tenet of my religion. "Drugs are bad, drug wars are worse." And remember that when someone starts ragging on pot in particular, its almost a sure bet they are in a rotten mood because they had caffein in the morning to wake up, they smoked cigarettes *ALL* day long to work, they had brandy in the evening to 'unwind' and took aspirin to kill the headache at night to go to sleep. So please, do my God a favor and spot the hypocrisy where it is ok? Although I believe that drugs should not be illegal, in general one must take full responsibility for the fact that they are and keep your use of them to yourself. That means don't do them in public, don't flaunt them, don't trade them with people you don't know, and don't endanger yourself or others concerning them. You just help the enemy win if you do. AND DON'T MAKE A LIVING FROM THEM. Anyone who has a vested interest in making a profit from drugs is in fact in direct cahoots with the war criminals who made and keep drugs illegal in the first place in order to profit from them. You think the mafia wants drugs to become legal? They pay senators millions of dollars a year to vote against legalization. If some turkey thinks he's cool and tokes or trades out in the open on the commons, and he gets caught, and those around him come under suspicion and investigation, and its traced back and back, and some brave producer in the fields is busted and the plants are destroyed, then the wise ass turkey in the street has committed a grave sin against my personal religion. And the wrath of my God is not easy to watch that befalls on the wretch who makes such a transgression. Therefor if you are a good person who is quietly breaking criminal laws written by criminal lawmakers that inure only to the benefit of criminals, it is your duty to do so responsibily and quietly and not ever ever get anyone else in trouble for it. This is not a war where you go out into the middle of battle field, toking a joint, with your stupid middle finger up in the air, you know what I mean? And if someone is doing something stupid that is endangering things, for himself and for others, you take him aside and you explain to him very clearly that what he's doing is not ok, and that he has to stop it. If he claims that you are butting in on his profits, then he is a criminal pure and simple and you turn him into the police yourself. Good people who are not used to anonymous communications tend to be terrified of them, because they know anonymity can be abused by the bad. But frankly the bad are more terrified of anonymity, and if you start turning in people who are stealing, beating on their children or worse, or making an unreasonable profit from drugs that shouldn't be illegal in the first place and making an ass of themselves in the process then you will in fact take a big chunck out of the real crime in the world, and make your own life safer to do the right thing, even if its only to toke in your bedroom or the gorge. Remember drugs are a Holy Sacrament, you don't just do them because you can or its cool, and you certainly don't use them to prove what a flying asshole you are. If necessary you use them to help you find the God State within you, or why you are all tied up in knots from a society gone mad. They are for personal reflection and enhancement, they are not for kicks or escape. Also remember that when something desirable with a high demand like pot is made illegal, lots of truely criminal elements step in to profit from this. They have no interest in enhancing communication with their inner selves, let alone for your well being. They don't care that drugs have a poison aspect to them (ALL drugs!) and need to be used only as Holy Sacrements, all they care about is maximizing their profits. Half the time they don't even USE the drug and hold it and its users in contempt. These people are real bad news, and they will ruin it for you and the rest of your good friends if you just stand back and don't do something about it NOW. It's these people who get the cops and the drug dogs called in, its not your buddies off toking in the woods listening to the sounds of the waterfall or smelling the columbines. I don't particularly buy into the idea that we are our brother's keeper, but we are our own keeper, and criminals get away with what they do because the good are afraid of them and don't know how to communicate that fear in an effective manner. They are also afraid that when the laws are criminal themselves, that they might go down with the baddies, if they report them. How many of you would feel comfortable inviting a cop into your home. Not many right? That's because there are so many bogus laws, that almost everyone is doing something wrong about something. The cops know this, that's why when they come to your door and you invite them in, they often refuse, they don't want to know about it. If we just got rid of the surface layer of bogus laws to the point where 80 to 90 percent of us felt totally comfortable with the cops in our homes, the whole face of society would change. Getting rid of the drug laws and the drug cold war would go a LONG ways towards making this a peaceful place again, and the crime rate would go way down because the communication and affinity levels between civilian and cop would soar and the criminals wouldn't stand a chance. Homer ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Homer Wilson Smith News, Web, Telnet Art Matrix - Lightlink (607) 277-0959 E-mail, FTP, Shell Internet Access, Ithaca NY homer@lightlink.com info@lightlink.com http://www.lightlink.com ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Send mail to majordomo@lightlink.com saying unsubscribe commons-L To unsuscribe from commons-L subscribe commons-L-digest To subscribe to the digest subscribe commons-L-announce To subscribe to the annnounce only list index commons-L To get index of archives get commons-L 199801 To get a specific archive