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On a midnight post-office run (I don’t like to leave Netflix returns in my mailbox; sometimes they get lost) I impulsively stopped for Jack-in-the-Box cheesecake.

Exiting the drive through, I was approached by a panhandler. I shouldn’t have stopped, much less rolled down my window, but I did. He was middle-aged, middle-class, well-kept, well-spoken, and didn’t reek of alcohol or have that gap-toothed meth-head manner to him. (I hate being an easy touch. Dogs, cats, and children pick up on it too.)

“I know you! I’m one of your neighbors, from over there!” — and he points in pretty much the right direction. I hesitate for a moment, thinking, “Well, most of my neighbors are Hispanic, not black…” but I’m more or less sympathetic.

Unfortunately, he runs on:

“Listen, my kid just died, and….”

What? What the fuck? You bring that out, you lay that on me, you damn well better be playing straight.

“What’s the name of the street?” I ask.

His mouth gapes for a moment, then he frowns, and his voice takes on an impatient edge. His middle-class act starts to fray as his script derails.

“I don’t know the name of your street, man! Look, I’m not trying to come across as funny or nothing.” Well, pardon the hell out of me.

“What’s the name of your street, then?”

Long, fumbling pause, then he says a name.

“Never heard of it.” I pull away, and start rolling up the window.

“Hey, man, I got the wrong guy, I’m not trying to come across as funny or nothing…”

On the way back from the post office, there he is, across the street at a filling station, talking to an SUV…

… and pointing in the opposite direction.

You asshole, I think.

You pimp your dead kid to get a fix?

You worthless piece of shit.

Your dead child?

[update: Thanks to David Hardy of Arms and the Law for the link.]

Keep in mind, as you read what follows, that I am not a lawyer, just a citizen trying his best to understand the rules I’m expected to live under.

Mark Bennett, a criminal defense lawyer here in Houston, on his blog Defending People, forwards “notes from the portion of DEA training dealing with the use of deadly force. [My source] tells me that the students would be given certain fact patterns and told to stand up in class and respond with the exact phrases described in the notes to justify a shooting.”

This is life-and-death crucial, but very long, so I’m reproducing the whole thing, with my comments, below the fold: (more…)

Edwin Leap says the most important thing you will read today:

…The modern emergency department is a kind of social sciences laboratory.  In fact, about 30 years into the existence of the specialty of emergency medicine, I feel comfortable saying that we have shown.with remarkable precision that the more radical social revolutions of the 20th century were shameful, stunning failures.  And the reason I can say it is not based on carefully designed studies, or because I’ve observed it from the comfort of the ivory tower of academia, but because I, and many others like me, treat the casualties of those social revolutions day, after day, after day.  Some examples, you ask?

• Drug use is normal, good, relaxing and enlightening.
• Sex is natural and anyone who tries to limit sex is an old fashioned prude
• The way to fix poverty is to give services, food and money to them, so that they will feel compelled to improve themselves
• Families can be defined in any way, family integrity is over-rated and men are entirely unnecessary for a proper home!
• Religion is an impedance to modern thought, and we need to be liberated from it by the clear, crystal light of pure science.

The mantra of ‘free love’ that began in the 60’s wasn’t about liberation; it was about enslavement to the desires of those who started it and who wanted no restraint on their behavior.
…
Do you know why I see children who are anxious and afraid? Do you know why children seek each other out for sex, and have children of their own at such young ages? Because they are terrified. Why is that? They lack the peace of safe and stable families. They lack the boundaries and discipline, born of love, that proper families give. They want the protection, wisdom, affection of a man and woman, together for the long haul. Without those things, we see what we do in the ER; teen mothers, teen fathers, irresponsible parents shifting sexual alliances from week to week, month to month, moving in with lovers and moving away from them.

Read the whole thing. I excerpt here only the barest whiff of the rotting corpse he wants taken off life support.

As noted in comments there, ERs have a huge selection bias. Also, I believe there’s a big difference between condemning bad behavior socially, and punishing it with the law. Sure, drugs are bad, but the War on Drugs is even worse, because it deprives even the sober of their freedom.

Nevertheless, the attitudes Leap describes are real. My generation, the hippie generation, the peace and love and grooviness generation, is to blame, and we will go down in history as social traitors who destroyed, in only one or two generations, the richest, freest, most powerful nation that has ever been.

===

I cannot resist adding: Obama and his party whole-heartedly embrace the attitudes and policies Leap excoriates. The eyes of Palin, her running mate, and their party leaders, are clouded by decades of socialist, feel-good pap, but they dimly perceive the truth (McCain, of course, survived years of the tender, loving instruction of Obama’s idols), and they are struggling, however weakly, to campaign on the twin pillars of liberty and duty.

North Charleston News Channel WDPE, via Pete Guither at Drug WarRant:

Police said there was so much marijuana they couldn’t let reporters see it because the smell would overpower them. They instead showed pictures of the haul.

Pete “noticed that they just left it sitting in a room with cops working (I guess they could handle the smell, unlike reporters).”

Exactly, Pete. After all, they’re The Only Ones that have superhuman resistance to violence-inducing pot fumes and gun radiation.

---

Monday bonus: Smoking Gun post with the video of Lee Paige, the Only Ones type specimen. If you haven’t watched this DEA idiot tell a classroom full of children that he’s “the only one professional enough…to carry a Glock 40″, right before literally shooting himself in the foot, you do not understand how profoundly evil the War on Drugs and Guns truly is.

…And the Federal Government wants to help.

1-800-SUICIDE is a privately owned, non-profit phone network that provides anonymous suicide counseling. A few years ago, they made a terrible, terrible mistake: they accepted a grant from the Federal Government.

Now the feds want to take control of the phone number. Likely result: instead of anonymous counseling, you get the cops.

I do not even know how to express the rage I am feeling as I type this.

I’ve said this before. I’m going to say it again now. I’m going to say it over and over and over until it sinks in:

We do not trust the government to read our mail. We do not trust the government to stop us on the street and ask for our papers. We do not trust the government to listen in on our phone calls. We do not trust the government to come into our homes and businesses and search our records or our belongings.

And yet, many of you f… — excuse me while I suppress a stream of shrieking profanity — many of you think you can trust the government with your health care? With the intimate personal records that it requires? Are you mad, or just so [deleting foul word] stupid that you cannot manage your own lives and in fact deserve to have your most intimate secrets in the hands of the people that want to turn 1-800-SUICIDE records over to the police? While taking half or more of your salary, and condemning you to a lifetime of filling out mind-numbing forms for the privilege of doing so.

God. Damn. You.

Wake the fuck up!

These people do not want to help you. They want to own you, every hair on your head, every cell in your body, every base-pair in your DNA. Every thought in your brain, if you give it to them.

Stop already. Just stop.

Because if you give them yours, they’ll take mine too, and if that happens, I will kill myself.

But I will take as many of them with me as I can, rather than let them take me away, and turn me into one of you.

God Damn You.

You asked for this.

The next President of the United States will probably give it to you, good and hard.

---

“Them,” Dave? “They?” Who “Them”? That’s crazy talk, you know.

SAMHSA, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Adminsitration. Currently running 1-800-273-TALK, a competing suicide hot line. If you call this number, knowing that it is run by the feds, you deserve every single degrading humiliation they inflict on you, you idiot. Better you should just kill yourself now, OK?

Department of Health and Human Services

And the usual suspects, like the IRS, the DEA, the BATFX….

Over at Houston Criminal Defense Lawyer, Mark Bennet explains why you should never agree to take an alcohol breath test in Texas:

In Texas, the administrative license suspension for refusing to blow is 180 days. We frequently beat the ALR suspension. If we don’t, an occupational license is available.

The administrative license suspension for blowing and failing is 90 days. But a failed breathalyzer gives the government a lot more leverage at trial. And in Texas a first DWI is a criminal offense that’ll significantly restrict your liberty, give you a lifelong criminal record, and cost you a whole lot of money (H/T Austin DWI defense lawyer Ken Gibson).

So if you knew you were going to blow higher than .08, you might rationally decide that the improved chance of beating the DWI was worth the possible extra 90 days of driving on an occupational license.

This extends an earlier post, in which he explains the breath tester in use here in Texas, the  Intoxilyzer 5000, has a 25% margin of error.

And here, he explains why the whole DWI thing is ridiculous anyway: DWI is a victimless crime. Sure, it makes you more likely to cause injury, but in fact, most of the time it doesn’t.

Please see “Comment Policy” over in the sidebar, to your right, which points to a spam comment I edited for my evil pleasure, just like the policy says.

I’m making this post specifically so I can put  “Bud Hookup” tags on it, in the hopes that this will pop up in a web search next to their ads.

In a Land of the Truly Free, these filthy scammers would be driven out of business by homegrowers. They’d be forced to fall back on outright burglary and mugging, and would be shot by citizens exercising their right to keep and bear arms.

If you’re wondering, Bud Hookup is one of a number of businesses selling unspecified plant material packaged and marketed to make you think you’re getting a legal substitute for marijuana. (It is, of course, in the sense that baking soda is a “legal substitute” for cocaine.) See this Cannabis Culture article, “Fake Buds Exposed!” for the debunking.

On the other hand, I have to admit that anybody who would spend $50 on unknown dried leaves and then smoke or ingest them in any manner at all pretty much deserves whatever happens to them.

Still: Hookup?

Eat shit and die slow, you lying spamming scum.

Now, dammit, I have to remember what it was I really came here to write.

[update]

Woo Hoo! Number four on Google in less than 24 hours!

[click for readable full size]

One of my standard dinner table debate tactics is “Do you trust George Bush to…? No? Then why do you trust him to be the only one with the guns?” And one of the “trust” questions is, “Do you trust George Bush to tell you whether or not you can smoke that joint? Remember, if he can tell you you can’t, he can tell you you must.” That last gets scoffed at.

No more, I think.

Melanie Wertin at the Lawrence Journal World and News writes:

President Bush’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health wants to screen all schoolchildren for mental illness. The law has been passed in some states, and the program is called TeenScreen. Normal kids are labeled mentally ill with an array of disorders such as mathematics disorder, reading disorder, conduct disorder, just to name a few. This is ludicrous, and parents need to be aware of what is happening so they don’t let their children fall into a statistic.

Despite the evidence linking psychiatric drugs to suicide and violence, these drugs are prescribed to millions of children and teens based on subjective diagnoses made without any physical tests, such as blood tests, brain scans or X-rays.

[My comment over at Alphecca.]

“New Freedom”. >>Shudder< <

That’s even better than “Homeland Security”.

Today, in recognition of the Great American Smokeout, I had my annual cigarette.

Take that, you goddamn nannies.

>cough, cough<

New research suggests that psychedelics can have beneficial effects:

Last year two top journals, the Archives of General Psychiatry and the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, published papers showing clear benefits from the use of psychedelics to treat mental illness. Both were small studies, just 27 subjects total. But the Archives paper–whose lead author, Dr. Carlos Zarate Jr., is chief of the Mood and Anxiety Disorders Research Unit at NIMH–found “robust and rapid antidepressant effects” that remained for a week after depressed subjects were given ketamine (colloquial name: Special K or usually just k). In the other study, a team led by Dr. Francisco Moreno of the University of Arizona gave psilocybin (the merrymaking chemical in psychedelic mushrooms) to obsessive-compulsive-disorder patients, most of whom later showed “acute reductions in core OCD symptoms.”

I believe this to be true, because I’ve looked at some of the research that was done before the narcs broke up the party.

But, dammit, this is from Time magazine! I know how deceptive their war reporting is; how, then, can I believe this just because I want to?

I’m going to console myself with the thought that they’re just quoting from peer-reviewed journals in the relevant field, and hope that they’re not leaving out the part where all the study subjects went crazy and tried to enlist after they came down.

Via Insty.