Everything's connected, but nothing makes sense:
News results for Jimmy Carter, peanut farmerAlso:
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Jimmy Carter, anti-Semite
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Jimmy Carter, Israel apartheid
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Possibly tainted peanut butter sent to schools
A 72-year-old milkman who supplied cannabis to customers on his rounds to help ease their aches and pains was today given a suspended sentence.Sam Jones /GuardianUK
"He said he sold the cannabis to existing customers because they were old and had aches and pains"
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Phelps has also been dropped by one of his sponsors, Kellogg, for having been photographed putting his amphibian features into a glass pipe normally used for smoking marijuana, or so people tell me.George Vecsey/NYTimes
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Cereal and snack maker Kellogg Co. said it won't renew its sponsorship contract with Olympic swimming star Michael Phelps because of a photo that showed him inhaling from a marijuana pipe.AP/NBC
The Battle Creek, Mich.-based company said Thursday that Phelps's behavior — caught on camera and published Sunday in the British tabloid News of the World — is "not consistent with the image of Kellogg."
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After all, smoking pot didn't prevent Barack Obama from becoming president. And obviously, recreational marijuana use hasn't harmed Mr. Phelps, whose prodigious performances have garnered 14 gold medals, the most in Olympic history. If he can smoke pot and perform at such a superhuman level, then perhaps we should reconsider the effects of -- and punishments for -- use of the substance.Stanton Peele/WSJ
But, you're probably thinking, very few presidents, Olympic champions and college students are arrested for drug use. My daughter attends a prominent private university in the city, and she tells me many of her peers smoke pot. Yet neither she nor I had ever heard of a single arrest for this crime on campus.
Who are all of these people getting arrested? And what the heck's the matter with them? Don't they know how to get pot delivered 24/7 to their dorm via carriers from whom you order by cellphone?
Well, here's a hint: 83% of those arrested in New York City in the last decade were African-American or Latino. This occurred even though these groups, while underrepresented among college students, don't actually comprise the majority of drug users.
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Drug hypocrisy's easy to dismiss - it's shallow, superficial, lame - but pretty difficult to understand.
Aside from the large bloc of profit-driven franchise-guarding golden goose-protecting antagonism from the legitimate, as in legal, alcohol industry - I mean you can see why anyone with a paycheck coming in from booze could be anti-pot, and arguing mightily against its presence on the shelves of the local bars and liquor stores, though my informal guess would be even there most of the rah-rah anti-weed action is pro forma and insincere, but why the nice, sincere, worried, decent folks?
Some of it, a pretty small part I imagine, is people who've seen relatives slide off into the deep end, and watched them start by getting high on weed, before they advanced into whatever.
Most of it's political though, or religious in a moral/political sense. And it's because these decent sincere worried good-intentioned folks are being told to be anti-pot, not because experience and inspiration are telling them, because their pastors and priests and the nice people on the television are telling them, often between the lines, without actually saying anything directly.
Most of it's political, in the sense that decisions are being made by politicians in the light of their careers and personal fortunes, to keep marijuana illegal.
Okay but why?
Because the illegal marijuana industry's bigger than cars.
Because the amount of money generated by keeping pot illegal, and thus having its price reflect that artificial scarcity in the face of massive and growing demand, is bigger than the money generated, oh especially now, by manufacturing and selling cars.
And money talks.
And bullshit supposedly walks - though in my experience it's generally to be found walking right along behind the money.
