Hemp & Marijuana the Billion dollar crop

Published August 5, 2012 | By Iowadawg

Again, I believe the USA should allow the raising of hemp! For a number of reasons, of which for recreational drugs is really at the bottom of the list. Yes, I still think marijuana should be legalized. But look at hemp this way:

alonmg-politics:

conservativesforboobs:

Forget drugs. It’s frustrating that every time I got to hear about being green I wonder why we’re cutting down trees when it takes 4 months for a hemp field to re-grow itself and the paper is like a thousand times stronger.How can we cry about killing the planet when we don’t have the freedom to use all our resources? And then you got morons who criticize the “free market” when they don’t even understand what it means.

Screw Environmentalist reasons, it’s just flat out cheaper to grow and maintain a hemp paper source than the many years it takes to replant trees to be cut down. It’s overall better for our economy!

Hemp & Marijuana the Billion dollar crop

It was called the billion dollar crop in 1938 popular mechanics magazine. This also happened to be 1 year after it was banned in 1937.

Popular Mechanics, 1938

Published only a few months after hemp was banned as “The demon weed Marijuana” that made “Mexicans and negroes rape white women,” this article proves more than anything else that the war on drugs has been a total farce.

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The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance
Cicero, circa 55 B.C

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Late Sen. Byrd–One-Time KKK Member–Got FBI Docs on Civil Rights Movement Via CIA Leak

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — U.S. Sen. Robert C. Byrd obtained secret FBI documents about the civil rights movement that were leaked by the CIA and triggered an angry confrontation between the two agencies in the 1960s, according to newly released FBI records.

Byrd, who died in June 2010 at age 92, had sought the FBI intelligence while suspecting that communists and subversives were guiding the civil rights cause, the records show. Decades before he became history’s longest-serving member of Congress, or gained the title “King of Pork” for sending federal funds to West Virginia, the Democrat had stalled and voted against major civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s. He also belonged to the Ku Klux Klan while a young man in the 1940s, and the FBI cited that membership while weighing his requests for classified information, the records show.

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Clint Comes Out of the Closet, Endorses Romney

In recent years, Hollywood conservatives have been as deep in the closet as 1950s gays. But Barack Obama, the man of hope and change, has changed that. The times are so terrible that more and more entertainment industry conservatives are coming out and risking irritating their fuddy-duddy liberal peers, maybe even losing a job or two into the bargain.

The latter is not a problem for the latest Hollywood con to come out, Clint Eastwood, who just publicly endorsed Romney with the words “the country is in need of a boost.” (No kidding!) Clint has arguably been America’s finest director for the last decade or so. The likes of Sean Penn abandoned their bourgeois lefty politics in a heartbeat to work with him. So no job issues for Clint.

And everyone has known Eastwood was a man of the right for years now. He just hasn’t made a very big deal about it, unlike the mouthier libs. He has more class. Clint is a figure out of old Hollywood when stars shut their mouths and did their work.

So his coming out is not inconsequential. One wonders what his peers — the Redfords, Beattys, etc. – think. Some of them are such knee-jerk liberals that they probably just put it down to Clint imitating his make-my-day character and don’t give it another thought. But I suspect not all. The extremity of the economic situation is not lost on all these people. They just don’t have the guts to speak. Walking around Hollywood now is not like it was a year or two ago. You don’t hear anyone publicly defending Obama. What you get mostly is silence and a seeming desire to change the subject.

Whether Clint is the stalking horse for more major entertainment figures to start coming out for Romney remains to be seen. But one thing is clear: After three plus years of the Obama administration, it’s easier for Hollywood conservatives to declare themselves, not harder. What an irony.

From HERE.

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One Year Ago: President Downgrade’s US Credit Slash

Happy anniversary, America. One year ago today, President Obama presided over the first national credit downgrade in US history. From the August 6, 2011 edition of the Wall Street Journal:

A cornerstone of the global financial system was shaken Friday when officials at ratings firm Standard & Poor’s said U.S. Treasury debt no longer deserved to be considered among the safest investments in the world. S&P removed for the first time the triple-A rating the U.S. has held for 70 years, saying the budget deal recently brokered in Washington didn’t do enough to address the gloomy outlook for America’s finances. It downgraded long-term U.S. debt to AA+, a score that ranks below more than a dozen governments’, including Liechtenstein’s, and on par with Belgium’s and New Zealand’s. S&P also put the new grade on “negative outlook,” meaning the U.S. has little chance of regaining the top rating in the near term.

Read all HERE.

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This is right to the point about welfare and the welfare state!

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Misreading the Quran

From Jay Schalin at American Thinker:

Few topics are more important to the future of the free world than its relationship with Islam. Muslims are on the march, here and in Europe, and many make it clear that they have no intention of leaving the West as they found it.

Frighteningly, the university dialogue about this crucial relationship, which often spills over into national policy, is usually controlled by academics who willfully ignore Islam’s less savory aspects. Whether they deliberately aid the cause of “jihad” or are so enamored of their own studies of the Islamic world that they are blind to its dark side doesn’t matter; either is perilous to our society’s long-term security.

Carl Ernst is one such academic. There is little question that he is an important voice in Middle East studies. He is the William R. Kenan Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, the former chair of the religious studies department, the co-director of Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations, the director of the Duke University-UNC Consortium of Middle East Studies, and a board member of the national Middle Eastern Studies Association.

Yet, with a background in comparative religions instead of history or political science, he seems ill-equipped to comprehend the worldwide emergence of radical Islam in a broader sense. His latest book, entitled How to Read the Qur’an: A New Guide, with Select Translations, defends the Quran against Western criticism, largely by emphasizing literary and structural techniques rather than the major themes. It is a paean to minutiae; Not only does Ernst miss the forest for the trees, but he misses the trees for the leaves.

It’s not the first time that Ernst has tried to introduce the Muslim holy book in a more benign light than perhaps it deserves. He caused a national controversy at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2002 when he convinced the school to assign Michael Sells’ Approaching the Quran as its summer reading program selection required for all incoming freshmen.

Critics attacked the choice, saying that Sells’ book whitewashed the Quran’s violence by eliminating the more questionable chapters (suras). It was considered especially divisive coming the year after the 9-11 terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

Ernst defended his support for Sells’ book in a 2003 Spirituality and Health article, in which he concluded:

One happy response to the tragedy of September 11 has been a thirst for knowledge of Islam. This summer reading program was a small step in that direction. As the Qur’an asks, “Are those who know the same as those who do not know?

It astonishes to hear an American to speak of a “happy outcome” of 9-11, especially if that outcome caused Americans to learn about Islam according to the terrorists’ wishes. He missed entirely that the surge in interest in Islam was because people wanted to know why it compelled its followers to commit such terrible acts — not because they sought its wisdom. And quoting the Quran to authoritatively affirm his comments seems provocative beyond the pale.

Ernst also raised questions about his allegiances in 2008, when he traveled to Iran to accept an award for scholarship directly from the radical Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Ernst intended How to Read the Qur’an to be a first exposure for college and even high school students. But it is no straightforward introduction to a complex subject. Ernst eschews thematic discussion of the book, the method most likely to provide the basic understanding that should be the purpose of a first exposure.

The Quran is important because it has affected hearts, minds, and events for 1,400 years; a first exposure should deal with its meaning and influence above all. But the key issues are of little concern to Ernst:

Although some readers may be particularly interested in sura 4, “The Women,” for its focus on gender issues, or in suras 8 and 9 because of their attention to warfare, those questions would be most relevant for a subject-oriented approach to the Quran … which is not the main concern of this book.

Instead of tackling the most relevant issues, Ernst presents the Quran according to its technical building blocks, a technique sure to confuse the novice rather than illuminate. In doing so, some important themes are mentioned, but in a tangential, scattershot manner that instills vague impressions rather than understanding.

In How to Read the Qur’an, Ernst attacks Western critics of the Quran for tending to “take individual verses out of context” when they point out its ominous meanings. But the Quran contains over 100 passages urging violence in a variety of contexts, including jihad. If the angry words appear on page after page, then perhaps they are the context, and there is no reason to doubt that violence is expected of the faithful.

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