Tree of Life
Human at YouTube - Human is a singer-songwriter in the group The Human Revolution. They have a number of albums. This one is the last song in their album "Breathe", available as a CD from their store, or from iTunes. This song is about the remarkable hemp plant, cannabis sativa.
Tree of Life
Words and Music by Human of The Human RevolutionI wanna tell yall a little bit about a plant I know that can save the world.
It grows long and tall and has flowers that can make your mind swirl.
Its a sacred plant with a fiber that is resistant to rain and mold.
Its the strongest plant fiber known to man, the best rope youll ever hold.Now the pioneers covered up their wagon train with a canvas made of hemp
Washington and Jefferson grew it on their farms and said to make the most of it.
The first stars and stripes were made on hemp the first constitution too.
Its used around the world for fuel fiber oil medicine and food.If you press its seeds you wont have no need for any other oil,
You can make paints and inks or run your car, grow it back next season itll fix the soil.
The most nutritious seed you can put in your mouth with Omega 6 and 3
We can feed the world with the tree of life and live sustainably.Chorus:
If we cut down all the trees, then we wont have no air to breath,
Grow a field of hemp instead, you can make your paper, build your house from it. The Goddess plant growing wild and free, livin the way we oughta be, gone leave my children a better world than my ancestors left me.The flowers of the female hemp plant make the best medicines on Earth,
Helps cancer and AIDS patients eat their food, helps those with depression overcome the blues,
Glaucoma, Epilepsy, Nausia, Insomnia, Stress, Neurosis, Psychosis, Pain PMS
All the studies have been done all the doctors agree, but the corporations cant make money off this plant you see, because its free, it grows from a seed, wild and free like we oughta be.
The future is growin in our backyards.Chorus
In this modern day when we seem to lack spirituality,
This one plant can bring us back 10.000 years in history.
To the Shiva Parahanas, The Jesus The Christ, to Buddah, The Pagans, The Goddess, The Light. To commune with all the animals, be one with all the trees, to realize the god I seek is inside me.
Yeah the futures in our hands, weve gotta take care of the Earth.
Because the Earth is the mother that gives life birth.
and we can heal all our relations with a single green plant
and we can start right now.Chorus
The Secret Meeting that Changed Rap Music and Destroyed a Generation
Hip Hop is Read - Interesting story from someone who claims to have been party to a 1991 meeting in which the private prison industry enjoined leaders in the music business to support gangster rap. Why? To put more people in prison. Can't speak for its authenticity, and the author sent it anonymously.
Quickly after the meeting began, one of my industry colleagues (who shall remain nameless like everyone else) thanked us for attending. He then gave the floor to a man who only introduced himself by first name and gave no further details about his personal background. I think he was the owner of the residence but it was never confirmed. He briefly praised all of us for the success we had achieved in our industry and congratulated us for being selected as part of this small group of “decision makers”. At this point I begin to feel slightly uncomfortable at the strangeness of this gathering. The subject quickly changed as the speaker went on to tell us that the respective companies we represented had invested in a very profitable industry which could become even more rewarding with our active involvement. He explained that the companies we work for had invested millions into the building of privately owned prisons and that our positions of influence in the music industry would actually impact the profitability of these investments. I remember many of us in the group immediately looking at each other in confusion. At the time, I didn’t know what a private prison was but I wasn't the only one. Sure enough, someone asked what these prisons were and what any of this had to do with us. We were told that these prisons were built by privately owned companies who received funding from the government based on the number of inmates. The more inmates, the more money the government would pay these prisons. It was also made clear to us that since these prisons are privately owned, as they become publicly traded, we’d be able to buy shares. Most of us were taken back by this. Again, a couple of people asked what this had to do with us. At this point, my industry colleague who had first opened the meeting took the floor again and answered our questions. He told us that since our employers had become silent investors in this prison business, it was now in their interest to make sure that these prisons remained filled. Our job would be to help make this happen by marketing music which promotes criminal behavior, rap being the music of choice.
What do you want?
Kerodin at III Percent Patriots - Kerodin is a Constitutionalist.
If you do not want a Constitutional America, fine. But have the balls to market what you are truly selling.
For you folks who don't know what you want, or do not want Restoration, we do not have enough in common to warrant my ever allowing you on my flank. One day, when it is down to Constitutionalists and non-Constitutionalists, you'll decide that there can be only one.
I posted the following comment:
I could be a Constitutionalist, too, if Bill of Rights enforcement were added. That means that any congress critter, cop, soldier, judge, or any other sworn servant of the people who infringes the Constitution, in even the smallest way, would be immediately booted from office and forever forbidden to serve. Unconstitutional arrest would be treated as kidnapping, a capital offense. That means every narc hanged. (The Constitution establishes the common law as the basis for US law. In the common law, a crime must have a victim, a corpus delicti. Drug "crimes" have no such victim. Neither do tax, licensing, or registration "crimes"). It also means NO gun laws, anywhere in the country. "Shall not be infringed" means exactly that.
Of course, legislators would be allowed to offer amendments to the Constitution itself, but NOT to the Bill of Rights. Any non-amending legislation that was unconstitutional, meaning 99% of what they pass into "law" these days, would get them booted, on the day it was proposed.
The problem here is enforcement. How to keep it from sliding back into what we have now, supposedly a constitutional republic, but in reality, a police state from top to bottom. How to keep the three branches, which are supposed to keep each other honest, from operating in collusion, as they do now. I have no solution to that problem. It faltered almost immediately the first time (can you say "Whiskey Rebellion" or "Alien and Sedition Acts"? Thought you could), failed horribly with Lincoln's war, and has been a zombie walking since FDR.
On to the Main Event
Arthur Silber is back, after a long absence (last post almost two months ago). I hope his health permits him to explore the central theme outlined here.
... It is not simply that politics is a symptom of more fundamental factors. Politics, in itself, is a sideshow, a distraction, a camouflage. Politics is the means by which power is wielded over human beings. That is all it signifies; that is all it has ever signified. A few of the critical questions are: Who wishes to wield such power? Why? To what ends? And, why are so many people willing to submit to the demands of power?
When we begin to understand the answers to those questions (and many related ones), we begin to see the outlines of what ought to concern us -- where, if you will, the real action is. Political developments are the final result of these underlying dynamics. To focus on politics alone is to engage in the futile rearrangement of derivative elements. This is also why politics is so endlessly repetitive and stultifying, and why a focus on politics alone is so sickeningly boring, when it is not horrifying. Today, it is usually both. "Oh, God! Another horror! How awful!" If you pay attention, you realize that all the horrors you note are the same horrors that occurred a year ago, half a century ago, 200 hundred years ago. This is true even in periods of tragically temporary revolutionary change; see "Concerning the American Change in Management" for an extended consideration of how the American "Revolution" quickly abandoned genuine revolutionary change and instead resurrected age-old patterns of exploitation and oppression. The American "Revolution" ended immediately after it had begun.
Yes, It Is a Police State
Steven Horwitz at The Freeman - Mr. Horwitz has decided that TSA, SWAT Teams, and "papiere, bitte" have now crossed the line. The Land of the Free is now a full-blown police state. Unlike him, I don't consider metal detectors at airports to be reasonable, unless mandated by the private airport or airline, not the government. It's still an unwarranted search.
The list of reasons is fairly long, but we can certainly start with our favorite gropers at the TSA. In my ideal world, airline safety would be the responsibility of those with the most directly to lose financially from doing it poorly: the airlines and the airports. But even in a world where government has taken on that responsibility, we should be protected by the Fourth Amendment against “unreasonable” searches. It’s one thing to walk through the standard metal detector, which seems reasonable, but when we are expected to pose virtually nude in a submissive position for government agents, and when refusing to do so earns you a feel-up that would count as sexual battery in most states, that is something else entirely.
If I had told you 20 years ago that in 2011 this is what would happen every day to thousands of travelers — including toddlers and the handicapped — at U.S. airports, you would not have believed me. And on top of everything else, it doesn’t work! It’s mere “security theatre.” When residents of the United States have a legitimate fear of being sexually abused by agents of the State when engaging in peaceful air travel, we live in a police state.
The Case of the Missing Terrorists
Paul Craig Roberts at The Freedom School - if America were really threatened by terrorists, there would be lots of dead terrorist-hunters by now. Since Jose Rodriguez, John Yoo, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, William Kristol, Max Boot, Condi Rice, Colin Powell, and Dick Cheney are all still breathing, Mr. Roberts concludes that the terrorist threat is a hoax. He's probably right.
The “War on Terror” is a hoax, one that has been successfully used to destroy the US Constitution and to complete the transformation of law from a shield of the people into a weapon in the hands of the state. By destroying habeas corpus, due process, and the presumption of innocence, the “War on Terror” has destroyed our security.
To Hell With Public Schools
L. Neil Smith at The Libertarian Enterprise - Old idea, but good to see a new statement of it. I don't remember if it was Neil or Vin Suprynowicz who originated the idea in the last paragraph quoted below.
It is time to end the public schools.
...
While we're here, exactly what's wrong with bringing an AK-47 to school? Within living memory, kids used to bring their rifles so they could hunt rabbits on the way home. (I'm not sure my dad ever did this, himself, as a little kid in Walden, Colorado, but there's a photo around here somewhere showing him cuddling his "kitty"—a bobcat with enormous tufts on its ears.) In crumbling concrete jungles like "progressives" have made of, say, Detroit or the South Bronx, it might even be necessary for survival. Last time I looked there wasn't any qualifying age on the Bill of Rights, and that includes the Second Amendment.
There's an extremely good reason for that. The Bill of Rights isn't about us, it's about them. It isn't a list of things we're permitted to do, it's a list of things they aren't allowed even to consider.
...
Be that as it may, it is time—and past time—to put these public torture and indoctrination centers out of our misery. It is time to let the kids go home, empty the criminals out of the buildings and raze them to the ground, so that not one stone is left standing on another, and to sow salt on the ruins. And if you can tell me where that idea comes from you were clearly not educated in the public schools.
Stacey Litz
I've been following the Stacy Litz debacle. Ms. Litz is a liberty activist who was entrapped and arrested for drugs, and who turned informant in an attempt to keep herself out of jail. Very sad tale, but I'm not posting to talk about her case in particular.
I've become accustomed to the drug war, after years of following it. The war on some drugs is the "War on Freedom" about which I was talking when I started this blog over ten years ago. I still want to crucify all the narcs, and their congressional overlords, every time I read about them destroying someone's life, for harming nobody. And I mean literal crucifixion: scourge first, as graphically portrayed in Mel Gibson's movie (Mark 15:15 describes that 40 minutes of torture as "when he had scourged him"), build a cross, tie the narc to it, drive large nails through its wrists and ankles, plant it in a hole, and watch it writhe in agony and die of thirst over three days. Maybe even give it water to prolong the torture.
I'm not proud of that fantasy, but there it is.
The Jones Plantation
Larken Rose at YouTube - great 12-minute video making a point that words proclaiming your freedom are not the same as freedom. Your chains? Break them.
