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Jerry Mander nailed it with his book, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. I remember my mother’s beseeching “but it’s [smoking ganja] escaping from reality!” My response was “watching TV is escaping reality.” It was but a few years later I had a college instructor who had never owned a TV and I was shocked. Shocked I tell ya… but I did kill my television and didn’t own one for at least 10 years or more.

Smoking ganja isn’t an escape, it’s like putting on shades when you go outside on a sunny day…

Hey, (back on topic) what happened to our treatment guest blogger? he should comment on this…

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there is one minor problem with your assessment however: the vast majority of people don’t really give a shit.

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What I find just unreasonable/illogical is we have thousands and thousands of laws on the books. So many that any giving times you can be beaking laws and not even know it.

To live under such a system that can criminalize you at anytime is unacceptable. Its slavery.

I live my life according to some of the easiest laws to follow..the ten commandments. It doesnt matter if you believe in god or not, those few rules can carry you through life, we dont need thousands of laws telling us what we cant do..

I feel in this case we should rid our selves of the cant do list and make a list of laws that says what we can do(and it will be a short one compared to the cant do list)…as the list shrinks…then maybe people will recognize thier loss of freedom and inalienable rights.

Its too easy for this “ruling” government to vote its self powers and take away our freedoms for thier own agendas.

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“…and to the republic for which it stands…” – U.S. Pledge of Allegiance

Technically, the U.S. is a republic.

Effectively, any government on Earth is an oligarchy. To understand this, you should watch the awesome “The Nature and Origin of Human Rights” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkSHg3JV_V8)

Each branch of government generally works against our movement, so our problem is not due to an imbalance of power there.

What has escaped too many Americans is the right to liberty as specified in the U.S. Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, the all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men…”

Unfortunately, too many Americans get lost in the words “men” and “Creator”, discrediting our Founding Fathers for their generation’s unethical ownership of slaves and degrading women.

What every American needs to focus on (and pass down throughout posterity) is to the extent we realize liberty is the extent we naturally realize all rights granted to us (making our foundation much easier to learn and teach for the benefit of the masses).

Liberty is self-evidently a naturally-given and unalienable right, without exception.

This means that the only limit against liberty is the right itself (optimal liberty in a civilized society).

Our public servants nor the public majority has the authority to take away your right to liberty (the power of the minority — e.g. drug users, gay people, racial minorities, etc.) Our public servants are supposed to be securing your rights, and that is where the legal lines need to be drawn (murder, assault, theft, and any other act directly infringing upon a person’s rights remain illegal).

Of course, the U.S. Declaration of Independence is not law.

That is where our supreme law (our Constitution) comes in with the Bill of Rights (amendment nine) saying:

“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

Other rights retained by the people must include the aforementioned self-evident ones.

A critical balance of power missing is the one between the government and the governed.

Since the latter too often fails to strongly wield the simply-defined right to liberty to publicly expose government overreach, such overreach is basically never revolted against.

Our public servants have ironically severely revolted against the limits of power defined in our Constitution from ‘day one’, and “We the people” (the true rulers of the U.S.) have failed to put down that revolution, because we apparently do not have the power to do so.

What they never taught you about American history is that our written national foundation (including our supreme law) was authored by rebels, arguably the greatest activists ever.

Our nation was designed (as carefully as possible) to oppose the abuse of power similar to that exercised by the king our founding fathers rebelled against.

Our public servants, who pay for the writing of your text books, and pay your teachers’ salaries (all with our money), and who wanted you to learn our written national foundation at an age when you do not care, do not want you to know that, because it is a legitimate challenge loudly exposing the unbelievable disaster they have unjustly created for over two centuries now.

That disaster is the result of “We the people” allowing our public servants to rule over us, ironically abusing their power to create unjust and very crude blanket laws to go after, among other abuses, the abuse of the private sector (hint to the political left in our movement who condone such government abuse for this sake), and drug abuse.

The New York Times recently had a piece on the “New Deal version” of our Commerce Clause (the sole “constitutional” basis for the CSA), claiming that version has given us some of the “best things” from government.

What that piece fails to mention is to have those “best things”, all we had to do was sacrifice the power of the minority — i.e. liberty as defined in our country.

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Well, according to what I was taught in school, the U.S. government was modeled after the Greeks and Romans democratic state. But I suppose they could have lied about that too.

There is no perfect form of government, but it is my understanding that the founders went with a democratic model because it gave everyone an equal voice, more or less, in principle.

Furthermore, they created the 3 branches, the Executive, Judicial, and Legislative, with the main purpose of checking and balancing the others. I was taught that this was also a form of democratic infrastructure because it also extended the concept of group participation.

What we have now, however, ever since the DEA and the War on Drugs became such a domineering part of it all, has been something that the founders warned us about, which the Federalist Party has wanted all along; government run by the Executive branch alone, forcing the Judicial and Legislative branches beneath its will.

No more checks and balances means much less of the true American democracy which was originally intended. Empowering the Executive branch has led to endless war and tyranny, just what the founders warned us about.

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“Researchers have long recognized the strong correlation between stress and substance abuse.”

The U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) is our public servant hub when it comes to substance abuse.

Given the aforementioned strong correlation (stated back in 1995 even), one should be able to safely assume the word “stress” is prominently displayed on SAMHSA’s home page (www.samhsa.gov).

Out of the roughly 100 words on their home page, “stress” is not one of them.

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Uh, these united States of America has never been a democracy, our Founders hated democracy, they knew the truth of democracy, that it is a trap:

“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what’s for dinner.” -Ben Franklin

“A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.” -Thomas Jefferson

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