Alternative Energy Solar Living Experiment
Current mood: hopeful
Category: Automotive
The Holy Solar crew trucked down to Hopland, California, for the annual SolFest celebration at the Solar Living Institute & left with this song and video.
Post this video on your profile if you like it and leave your comments so we know what you think!
Please forward this on to every alternative energy enthusiast in your realm.
Eco-Friendly Portable Solar-Powered Readers
Current mood: animated
The Green Tech revolution has brought about the worlds first hand-held tree-free reading experience. Electronic books convey the same information as bound editions, without the printing costs to the publisher…or the planet.
J.K. Rowling Pulls Muggle's Move with Punitive Lawsuit
Okay, we're not fans of the Harry Potter books here at Easy Witchcraft. Never mind that the series, which has enjoyed unprecedented marketing and therefore sales, is little more than rehashed old fantasy standbys peppered with embarrassingly awkward proper nouns. We'll also set aside the disturbingly elitist premise of inherited "magical-ness.'
At Easy Witchcraft, we firmly believe everyone is born with the capacity for magic.
Yet another reason for Harry Potter to wake up and try some of the more advanced flavors of magical fiction. You'll be surprised at how good some of it is once you get your head out of the Hog's Warts. See some of our favorites below.
The puzzle of a prehistoric advanced society has stimulated wonder among seekers after ancient wisdom and baffled historians for over two millennia. There are more theories about what that legendary locale was like and where it was located and how the remnants could be found than practically any other tale of primordial people. Yet the tale of a genius race which predated our earliest records has endured exactly for the reason that it resonates so clearly to the quester after knowledge.
New Age book enthusiasts are able to choose from a wide variety of works concerning the riddle of Atlantis, both non-fiction and fiction. The theme is identified by many writers with past lives, and is part of the mythos of Awakening prophecy.
The Greek philosopher Plato first began to write detailing a forgotten Paradise, that he named Atlantis, during the height of his own Athenian civilization. Plato claimed the lost Island lay near the Straits of Gibraltar and met a fateful end about ten millennia earlier.
Prolific author Edgar Cayce described Atlantis as a a huge expanse, about the scale of Australia. As recounted in the seerís inspired vision, the inhabitants of the Island were gifted with many advanced telepathic qualities and tools, and seeded colonies to the strangely reminiscent solar-worshipping civilizations of the early Sumerians and the Empires of native America.
Hypotheses on the location of this culture's remains range from the Eastern Indian Ocean to the Bermuda Triangle, though the likeliest suggestions, of course, are European islands, particularly Crete and Cyprus.
It might never be certain the true story, but the evidence appears overwhelming: human kind has attained high levels of advancement, before the earliest twinkle of what we usually consider as the dawn of civilization.
Lysistrata Revisited: The Trojan Horse Revolutionary
Current mood: quixotic
Category: News and Politics
Lysistrata Revisited
By Indi Riverflow
The civil struggle over the invasion of Iraq has finally reached the grass roots. The peace movement, enlivened by the return of the two-party system (what, is it a democracy again, all of a sudden?) are reviving folksy tactics from the sixties, such as sit-ins and marches, in a quaint push to demand an immediate end to the occupation.
We have die-ins, candlelit vigils, rowdy rallies, and mock occupations of congressional offices. A courageous group, here on the West Coast, has been harassing dovish Democratic representatives, urging them to take a harder line on troop withdrawal, on the theory that Republicans are likelier to call the cops. But if we really want to stop the war, people, the protest is going to have to span from the boardrooms to the bedrooms.
The problem with the peace movement is that the underhanded tacticians are all on the other side.
The war will end when those who support it find their stance costing, not merely lives and freedom, but something really important to them.
If you managed to stay awake through your Greek comedy course, you'll recall Lysistrata, a rather mind-blowing, bawdy gem from the vaults of pacifist literature.
Dating from the Peloponnesian War period, the play absolutely giggles with recycled relevance, as we confront the horrible reality that we are collectively culpable for the slaughter, and unless we get rolling on something more serious than tickling ourselves, tickling itself will be banned by the humorless neo-fascists currently occupying the organs of the body politic.
For those who were nodding off in class, the story goes like this: the women of Athens band together around one central base of power: their very wombs. Weary of the war against Sparta, the wives in Lysistrata heroically organize and go on sexual strike against their husbands, and are joined by prostitutes and priestesses alike in one hysterical act of truly grass-roots direct action that brought the battle of the sexes down to one simple reality:
Love is better than war.
Aristophanes is way headier than Aristotle, just as Groucho Marx is cooler than Karl. The philosophy of comedy is quite serious, except for the clowns who repeatedly insist on getting offended.
Therefore, I boldly propose, in the name of Lysistrata, that all lovers of life adopt a passive pro-peace stance, by steadfastly refusing to have intercourse with anyone who does not support diplomatic solutions to military problems. This will, incidentally, lead to more fulfilling and time-consuming relationships in general.
Feel free to disagree. But the logic is lovely and tested by the centuries. And unless you support the atrocities form Fallujah to Guantanomo Bay, time to vote with your womb or willy. While it still is yours.
Because there is a great deal more at stake than an appropriations bill that could ease poverty in either country, rather than enrich the merchants of death. There is a critical cultural judgment on the line: will we roll over and let the big cocks wag all over the more poorly armed nations of the world, or will we let it be known that this was not done in our name?
We can't take this lying down.
Four years ago, the Blitzkrieg flew into Baghdad, on the flimsiest of pretexts, in a move that openly and cynically labeled itself OIL. Operation Iraqi Freedom has liberated hundreds of thousands of Iraqis from their lives. The next listing in the phone book is Iran, and by the time withdrawal actually begins, we can be sure the war machine will soon be knocking next door, peddling a similar emancipation in Farsi.
Oh, well. We'll just change all the "q's" to "n's" on the protest banners.
Meanwhile, the Shrub is piously busy counting angels on the head of a pin, worried that stem cell research on dead fetuses might somehow impugn the sanctity of human life.
The Resident-in-Thief is a stubborn and unapologetic mess of contradictions, and like the monster under the bed, derives his power from the belief we have in him. We are supposed to believe that this regime is pro-life.
One can only conclude that they expect to need plenty of fodder for the cannons of the future. The sanctity of human life apparently doesn't extend to the victims of imperialist policy.
And yet, in spite of all this, Newt Gingrich managed to find someone to practice being Bill Clinton with.
Someone is going to have to take a stand, and the bulk of the burden will have to fall on the sex workers and interns in Washington. When a hawkish congressman can't find a lunch-hour handjob, the funds for waging war will dry up faster than an unlubricated Trojan.
In a phrase, it means whatever the hell you want it to.
Blues4Kali is written with deliberate disregard for certain conventions and trends that dominate the current vogues and marketing demands of the publishing industry, and for this reason, some readers may react with confusion, distress and outrage.
This is perfectly natural. Do not be alarmed.
In a way, all groundbreaking literature qualifies as "experimental metafiction," until these techniques are adopted by a school of mainstream wordsmiths and enter the libraries en masse. Breaking the rules pushes the envelope, and makes the letter-stuffers of the literary world understandably nervous, for all the write reasons.
Satire, graphic language and symbolism, the irreverent treatment of taboos, and nonlinear story structure have an ancient and eternal place in the scriptures of all enduring cultural canons.
Nothing new about that.
With the ebbs and tides of fickle fate and fashion, the public rarely appreciates the avant-garde, being offended at the indecipherability and discontinuity of the text. Publishing companies, focusing on that bottom line, tend to favor mediocrity over innovation, formula over creativity, and production-line prefab plots to tales of exploration within the forbidden recesses of the mind and soul.
So this novel relies as heavily on "obsolete" techniques culled from the thorny side of social protest literature, as on questionable choices regarding structure and voice which venture beyond the traditional confines of modern Mcfiction.
The flexible first-person, present-tense stream-of-consciousness treatment of the narrative strikes me as the distinctive style feature which is likeliest to bother classicists, both professional and amateur.
Oh, well. Strict rules governing the creation and distribution of serious soulspeak annoys and bothers my Muses, and stern judgment has already been passed on the cowardly cretins running publishing companies into the ground and the reading public with them.
Hel awaits those who are relegating the fate of fiction to the mercies of a marketplace that made stupidity the number-one overseas export of the Murican economy. The parasites will pay. The question is: who? Certainly not the adventurous authors who go out on a limb to make the work of a lifetime mean more than next week's Oprah segment.
To buy or not to buy. That is the driving meditation of these mind-deadening times. Shakespeare would shit bricks to see what they have turned his penny theater into. My mother, while beating me for role-playing as Shylock to my much wealthier goyicshe friends, once misquoted Polonius at me, as if the dark pronouncement were drawn from the Bible instead of the Bard.
What I mean to say is, she literally thought that, "neither a borrower nor a lender be," was actually attributable to a commandment issued by God to Moses at Mt. Sinai, instead of a droning pile of unwanted advice issued by a pompous bore everyone mocks. Look it up. And this from someone who theoretically held a Master's degree in education.
There is a legitimate push, among writers and audiences alike, for more comprehensible prose. The "reader response" school of literary criticism derives from common sense: what good is a book, if only the well-educated can grok it?
On the other hand, this play-to-the-Philistines attitude has created a twenty-first century that has already forgotten the dynamic twentieth. Cultural prejudice, social control, and censorship are back in high style, and many readers entertain the delusion that there is something more honest about reading "non-fiction," (an account of an author's opinions and impressions of verifiable events or ideas) than "fiction"(which is popularly identified with "lying").
Metafiction theory transcends these artificial distinctions, emphasizing that truth, being subjective, can never be absolute. Observers can never truly comprehend the inner motives of others, no matter how skillful the analysis. So only through metaphor and example can the experience be justly portrayed, with no pretensions to truth or falsehood, but a steady diet alternating between them.
Just like life.
"Non-fiction" is itself an arrogant myth of frightening proportions, since the bulk of essayists and how-to technicians are expressing a private world view that is not only biased, but unabashedly so. Selecting a subject is the first decision that reveals an underlying motive, and if this motive is not merely money, then social or political change is generally the reason most of these works are ordered and delivered.
All art is essentially propagandistic, promoting the primacy of the author's worldview, and this is true regardless of any ethic of objectivity that may delude the principals. We slant our perspective to accommodate our prejudices, unconsciously if not otherwise, and nothing could be more dishonest than denying this universal truism.
The modernist movement of realism is premised on this dogmatic and unsupportable theory, as put forth by Irish novelist James Joyce and his alter ego Stephen Daedalus: that art is and ought to be static, not kinetic. "Static" seems to me to be synonymous with "boring". Witness the state of modern "literature". Readers are obviously groping after something, and Left Behind ain't it.
With all due respect to the original quantum surfer of literature, James Joyce's Aquinas-loving ass can kiss my tuchus. What could be more useless than art which refuses to face the transformative nature of communicated experience? The world is never justly portrayed as eternal. Even genius, when drunk, proclaims self-deluded circular culture crap as the foundation of a New Age. Always has it been thus.
I boldly say, "bullshit." All art is and ought to be dynamic, not static. Take that, you besotted whoremonger!
Time to revise the standards. Realism has played out, and the postrational revolution is Here. We're just waiting for the public to notice. Quantum physics have made certainty a non sequitur. And Joyce himself would probably be right here saying so.
Every expression is opinion. No perception is verifiable to the satisfaction of a skeptic. And who cares? Proof is for those who lack faith. We can only agree to the truth of a proposition, we can never escape the taint of doubt.
So we must get on with the business of knowing, without being sure, just as we always have. Once again, we are called upon to take that Foolish leap off the cliff, in hopes that this time we will fly.
Verify this:
Poetry has already been widely dismissed in favor of song lyrics, and novels are steadily being reduced to cinema at a breakneck speed. The Faulkners and Plaths of this century are competing with the Aaron Spellings and Avril Levignes for the hearts and minds of a hypnotized public that places a priority on escape over enlightenment, and the effect of this narrowness is harrowing indeed for those who still attempt to think for ourselves.
Freedom of thought itself is on the line. Winston Smith is huddling over his diaries even now, penning sacred swords, bastard contemplations, defiant memories and declaring the primacy of Love. Big Brother is a fraternity prankster with a cruel sense of callous humor, who gets a big dick bigger watching us squirm under the gaze of his malicious voyeurism. Ha ha.
Twenty-two years later, what is most shocking is how well the Republicans followed Orwell's script. He is not the only one violently tossing and turning in his grave.
Market economics has overtaken everything in our Kulture, so it ought come as no surprise that commercialism is dumbing down books as well. Plenty of fine writers are emerging in the recesses of underground poetry slams and all over the damn internet, but, as in music, the distribution network is terrorizing unknown talents, while corrupting the creative juices of those authors both talented and fortunate enough to have a package of stories able to attract the diminishing audience for truly original writing.
Even the greatest of these talents are suffering a steady decline, laboring under conditions that corrupt any artist. Second and third novels are being pumped out to satisfy contractual requirements, rather than artistic ones.
And fame is the game: to play we must subject ourselves to agents, slaving under the grueling itinerary formulated to exploit the fame and personality of an artistic community that traditionally values privacy and liberty from paparazzi nonsense more than our Hollywood opposite numbers can afford. Film, for all the virtues that medium contains, has been a devastating influence on budding novelists and readers alike.
Somehow, screenplay adaptability has become a literary virtue. Book club sales are more important than erudite reviews. And short stories, once again, amount to little more than promotional pap intended more to build a mighty name that will hopefully fill bookstores everywhere with Starbucks franchises and fan club meetings, than to provide a way for struggling writers to finance unprofitable artistic endeavors.
And with the advent of the personal computer, the field has gone from crowded to overrun. Mediocre half-assers are everywhere, and the occupation of "aspiring novelist" has a social approval rating somewhere between "porno actor" and "radical political revolutionary."
As I say, for all the right reasons.
What a mess! My mother was right. I ought to have become an English teacher like she wanted. Too late now.
Blues4Kali was written to specifically avoid any compromises at all that address the unpalatability of printing books, like mine, which are ignored and suppressed solely due to unusual styles and subjects that represent radical departures from the mainstream. Deviance is the aesthetic premise of my work. Popularity is beside the point.
Therefore, to a critic who objects to inconsistent grammar, sentence fragments, unfleshed characters, and other crimes against convention, or decries the harshness of satirical pronouncements, or bemoans the use of "gimmicky" techniques, I can say only this: if you do not like these features, you do not understand them.
Feel free to disagree. I look forward to publicly burning your review and hanging you in effigy at my next black magic convention. My coven will haunt you. And you will eternally get what you deserve.
All seriousness aside,
Goddess go between you and harm in all the twisted caverns which lay ahead.
The Mother of All Problems...
Current mood: hopeful
Category: Writing and Poetry
The Mother of All Problems By Indi Riverflow
The Millennium has certainly gotten off to a grim, if not downright dystopian, debut. Wars, climate change and stifling advances in the arts of crass consumerism and mass mind control have made our era turn out less like Heinlein fantasies, or even Orwellian nightmares, than the oft-cited prophesies at the rear end of the New Testament.
Of course, Christian theology is hardly the only system containing a vision of doom proceeding redemption; the end times scenario is a staple of creeds the world over, nearly as ubiquitous as the corresponding creation myth. Human beings seem to have as deeply seated a need for a story of the destruction of the world as for its genesis.
Perhaps every generation is undercut with a sensation of impending doom. Certainly history is loaded with footnotes of discredited date-namers who could not resist the ego urge to define their age as the termination point of time.
So the issue is not whether 2012 will be the next Y2K, or whether solar flares or global warming will do us in, or whose book of half-mad prognostications contains the Ultimate Truth. These issues will resolve themselves by and by.
And if the average individual peering over the edge of the twentieth century felt as strongly that our species was placed precariously on a precipice, as many do today, we can be sure of one thing: six times as many humans are available now to poll on the topic.
Now, some of my best friends are human. Nothing against them, really, and individually, they can be wonderful. And I wouldn't want anyone thinkin' I am anti-human, or anything. That's worse than not being patriotic, or failing to root for the local baseball team.
Yet, upon due contemplation, it seems that there is no serious dilemma affecting the human sphere that would not submit to a solution of fewer heads to count. Nothing is quite so odious about our species as our quantity.
Global warming, which has gone overnight from a Hollywood cause célébré to the center of media debate, is quite obviously exacerbated by human activity. Not merely industrial consumption, or animal agriculture, which are surely intensifying the problem, but merely by existing, all of us share some culpability. Each of us is a heat-producing, carbon-dioxide emitting machine, which leaves a wider footprint on the environment than any other species on Earth.
Nor is overpopulation a third-world issue alone, although the sociological impact of economics can make the fate of the crowded more visibly dire in poor countries than wealthy ones. In terms of resources consumed and waste generated, every denizen of the "developed" world costs what several impoverished inhabitants of more rustic regions do.
One response to this is to retreat, ideologically or physically, to a simpler way of life that shuns the costly comforts of technology. While this may serve to soothe the spiritual and moral concerns of those who forsake the wicked ways of the city to take up farming or crafts, reverting to nature is only a partial solution. The Earth could no more tolerate the billions of humans spreading out to take over the remaining arable land for subsistence tilling, than the millions now shoehorned into the various metropolitan colonies.
Conserving energy and resources is certainly laudable and vital to a healthy relationship with the planet. Sloganeers and activists benefit from telling everyone else to scale back. But conservation isn't a real answer. What good will saving do, if consumption is halved while the population doubles?
I might feel good screwing in an LCD bulb (I've never tried it, but I bet it would feel good…if I could make it work), but if every casino on the strip is running full-on neon nightlights and pumping out thirty-five degree AC on an eighty-degree day, the humble efforts of a well-meaning individual don't amount to a meaningful gesture, let alone a brake on the runaway train of industrial waste.
Some people live, quite contentedly, in a world where there is no population crisis. Plenty of wide-open spaces left! Some imagine a glorious future in which the planet is completely covered by human beings and our food. Some believe that we were given dominion over the Earth as well as a command to be fruitful and multiply.
I believe that we are spreading like a cancer, overrunning the natural order in our mad haste to fill the entire world with our kind. Imagine the Earth consulting in the office of a celestial physician. Would She complain most of the lacerations in Her skin, the contamination of Her bloodstream, the decimation of Her lungs? Or would She be most concerned about the possibility of passing the contagion on to Her neighbors?
Some seek a solution to the problem of population expansion in the stars. Certainly the cycle of history leads logically to the colonization of space. But exporting our extras off-planet only expands the problem.
Along with the huge numbers that would have to be regularly resettled would go the resources they would require for survival. Even if a sci-fi space station could be designed to produce a totally sustainable eco-economy (despite requiring heroic measures to supply everyday needs like air, water and suitable soil), the material and energetic demands of the exodus would surely squeeze the last breath of life from the planet of our birth.
So what to do about this intractable dilemma? Many cynics suggest that the balance will soon redress itself through war and natural catastrophe. Others have proposed such unpopular plans as genocide and forced sterilization.
Controlling conception is theoretically a reality, but the greatest irony of birth control is that it is the province of those responsible enough to use it. Better technology will give choices to those who have access to them, while those least able to provide for large families will continue to produce them.
Faced with no other way to address my part in all this, I submitted to surgical sterilization at a local Planned Parenthood. This decision was practical as well as symbolic; an ounce of free prevention can be worth far more than a pound of $600 cure. I decided years ago that my books would be my children, and with a like-minded partner as well as the assistance of a kind physician do-gooding on his lunch hour, I offered up my reproductive potential to the good of the Earth.
Many people find this hard to understand. They don't fathom why I don't want my own little Mini-me, to indoctrinate with my bizarre ideas. Why I don't care to carry on my line and leave behind a gaggle of descendants to say nice things about me at my funeral.
Mind you, I have nothing against parenthood. On the contrary, bringing a child into the world is so important that every single person who embarks on this course should be prepared to be totally devoted to the task. The replication of the nuclear family is so automatic and presumed that the world is full not only of teenagers demanding to know why they had been born, but parents who wonder the same thing.
The cycle of death and rebirth is tied to the karma of breeding and killing. Like all opposites, they are not so different. As we kill, we give rise to other life (usually our own), and as we breed we generate the possibilities that will lead to a lifetime of innocent murder.
Mystics have been hip to this for ages untold, which helps explain why vegetarian celibates have had such spiritual success. Confused individuals may perceive a bit of moralism in this, but not a drop is contained. This is a practical matter. All karma leads to further entanglement with the material realm. A simple example of this is the way parents require a stable income, whereas the childless are free to be financially frivolous and pursue unprofitable ventures like independent online publishing.
For my part I have been able to find no better way to both limit my environmental impact and distractions from the primary goals of my life than voluntarily surrendering my place among the ancestors of the future. May your descendants, should you choose to make any, enjoy the extra elbow room.
This novel is intended for mature audiences, and contains, like the world, a great deal of gratuitous sex and violence, as well as unflinching frankness and mind-bending ideas of every kind.
If you are not mature, please conceal this book, and the fact that you are reading it, from whatever authority figure is keeping you that way.
YOU CAN GROW UP RIGHT NOW!
The greatest truths are the most difficult to accept. Readers are asked to courageously consider the changes we all need to make, if we are serious about a better world.
Some readers, through inattention, may miss the many levels of meaning and subtle implications contained in each sentence of this novel.
For them, Blues4Kali will suck like cheap porn.
The publisher and author would both like to praise the medicinal herb, cannabis sativa, for providing much-needed anxiety relief and spiritual healing during the dangerous and action-packed events depicted herein. All hail the Kali flower! Om Shakti Kali Kali Ganja!
Due to the highly metaphorical nature of this work, the author advises reading this text in a relaxed, meditative state. Blues4Kali is best experienced to the tune of musical accompaniment, of a rhythmic and sacred nature, and with ready access to an encyclopedia and a text on comparative mythology.
The author recommends live recordings of Vedic chanting. It's even cooler than you'd think at first.
If you find that type of repetitious music annoying, we enthusiastically endorse the poetic albums of Dar Williams and Ani Difranco, and specifically the live recordings of the Grateful Dead and The String Cheese Incident.
These artists had what it takes to serve as background music for the majority of the composition of this work, which was rhythmically generated to these inspiring sounds, and the author would like to bless as well as thank them for supplying the soundtrack to this exploration of the soul.
Savor this experience. What's your hurry?
Some sentences deserve a second look. Speedreaders will waste everyone's time, by hustling to the destination, without being able to understand what the journey means. Invest your time in a truly transformative perspective. There is no prize for missing the point of this exercise.
Kali has something very important to tell you. Please take the time to understand this most maligned Mother Goddess, for your own sake and that of our crumbling world. She has waited six thousand years to tell Her side of the Story, and She is quite cranky about interruptions.
PAY ATTENTION! PAY ATTENTION! PAY ATTENTION!
BOOKWIDE SPEED LIMIT: 75 WPM (words per minute/white powder molecules)
Remedy for Bureaucracy
Current mood: hopeful
Category: defiant News and Politics
Remedy for Bureaucracy By Indi Riverflow
The holistic health community is scrambling for autonomy, as pending FDA legislation proposes to regulate the nutritional supplement industry. This wide-sweeping measure likely will not fulfill the fears that alarmists project, but the attempt to hijack yet another basic liberty, under the banner of safety, highlights a trend that appropriates personal choices to medical review.
Smacking of globalism, the Trilateral Commission's Codex is an ironic reversal of U.S. ideological imperialism: alternative remedies and health products could be redefined as restricted drugs, as part of an attempt to bring Uncle Sam in line with stricter guidelines across either border.
Substances with any physiological effect inside the body might be regarded as a "drug," completing the absurdity which fails to distinguish between pharmaceutical products and the fruits of nature. Even water could theoretically fall under new strict regulations.
For that matter, why not air? Oxygen is an extremely addictive drug. To witness the tremendous changes air can cause in a body, simply do without it for a few minutes.
If we are to believe the very frightened folks organized against adopting the Anti-CAM guidelines, passage could lead to a prescription requirement for vitamins and enzyme therapy. Well, maybe the mainstream will be roused to protest.
Miscategorizing and restricting medicinal herbs is nothing new; enforcing arcane prohibitions against plants, such as cannabis, has made the Murican prison industry the envy of the world's tyrannies. More recently, the Chinese herb Ma Huang, or ephedra, has fallen prey to the ban-happy FDA's presumption of power, after over four thousand years' use as a natural remedy for respiration-related illnesses and learning disabilities.
At work is a profound prejudice against those induced states of mind which have not been specifically authorized by the real drug dealers, who are content to spew out pharmacological tweaks, designed for every condition, from everyday anxiety, to a reduced inability to respond to the prospect of sex.
The medicalization of marijuana has always struck me as a mediocre half-measure for this very reason, despite being an irresistible sop to the decriminalization movement. Not because bringing healing herbs to the ill shouldn't be a priority, but because equating herbs with synthetic chemicals begs the deeper constitutional, and even theological, questions about government domain, which come about when human beings deign to issue legislation against a plant.
As usual, the real motivation behind this power grab is to promote the pharmaceutical stranglehold on health care dollars. Ultimately, few serious freedoms are threatened if a couple of vitamin companies get elbowed off the shelves. The true risk is that the precedent will be advanced even further to attack freedom of thought.
Regardless of what the Supreme Court has been stacked to say, it ought to be obvious to any eighth grader that the Constitution does not extend dominion over nature to federal agencies.
So for those who stood still for the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act, and the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, and the hysteria-filled removal of ephedra in 2004-they are coming for your Echinacea, your amino acids, your b-complex energy blend. Years of collective complacency are paying off for the corporate oligarchy that will someday own and license the very atmosphere we breathe.
hopeful
animated
cantankerous
amused
peaceful
creative
accomplished
quixotic
