Canna bureaucracy

Some thoughts on a snowy morning.

The cannabis question has been with us for over a century, now.  From the earliest days of the colonies, hemp was a prime crop, one which George Washington planted not only as a textile, but in hopes of supplanting tobacco as a recreational smoke. Extracts of hemp oils and flowers were used by physicians in the Royal Court and in the New World, its properties had been explored by the early rulers and scientists of China and one would have to have a completely unrealistic view of mankind to believe that no one on Earth had ever taken the time to select and crossbreed the frost and drought-resistant plants for stronger resin and larger flowers.   We’re curious little monkeys.  Gregor Mendel was just the first one to write notes about it.

Cannabis is relatively benign, but let us be honest, very little on this world is beyond abuse. No doubt over the centuries, people who have lacked motivation or fallen on hard times or suffered from underlying depression have taken to smoking too much hemp at too young an age for too long, and wound up roughly as smart as a football bat.

Fact is, people have ruined their lives with just about everything possible, cradle to the grave, since there were two of us here, according to most of the stories that have been going around since fire was new.  

None of those stories ever goes on to tell how making rules ever actually stopped people from doing those things.  The long list of punishments for breaking the rules suggests that, human nature being what it is, maybe the whole rule thing never worked out any better for them than it has for the United States and her once again tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to be free.

Prohibition, the bastard stepchild of conspiracy theory, corporate manipulation and racism, has wandered a strange and checkered road to the present, where it once again rises before us in all its complexity of ignored facts, generations of institutional prejudice and billions in federal salaries and private-sector profit, emerging scientific understanding  suppressed by the minority of sharply divided opinions for a variety of political agendas,  a struggle of cultures and values in which almost every voice of science, compassion and reason has been ignored.  Even with the example of one failure glaring from less than a century in the past, the United States Government continues to pursue a path of interdiction, instead of innovation.

And the fault does not fall at any single doorstep.

Too many of the spokespeople for both sides have too much invested personally to truly see the big picture; ego, an addiction to the limelight, or a bulldog-vicious determination to win at all costs, even the loss of allies and friends and at the price of bloodshed and destruction.  Conversely, too many on both sides see and care solely about the big picture- at the cost of any awareness of the individuals involved, save a tactical awareness of their value as images, either for vilification or promotion, distraction or filler.

Let’s be clear from the start; like Samuel Clemens’ friend Mark Twain, I wouldn’t belong to any group that would have me.  A critical thinker in the tradition of Mister Twain, Cummings, Asimov, and Heinlein,  I find no contradiction between being an outspoken advocate of absolute freedom and equality for cannabis and hemp users, providers and growers, and my beliefs in maintaining a strong intelligent military, reducing the cost and intrusion of government, reforming campaign contributions , putting an end to the welfare-poverty treadmill, preserving the Second Amendment, enforcing the death penalty, and reducing taxes. 

I am an American with personal reasons for wanting this plant returned to our use above and beyond the simple fact that the Government has no right to prohibit it.

I am not some welfare daddy trying to score free government weed without losing any of my SNAP benefits or having to actually pay the rent in the apartment where I neglect my kids while dealing crack and bath salts.

Oops… sorry, did I drop a stereotype? 

Guess what?  They don’t exist without examples.

Sell your PC crap to someone who hasn’t slept in their vehicle inside the urban blight of a major metropolis for the better part of a month.

I am also not some “let’s all go save the planet” fan who has a signed copy of “An Inconvenient Truth”.  I personally think Algore is a full of shit as the rest of the talking heads pimping a cause.  He flew around in a huge jet and traveled in a limo, he lives in a mansion and his wife was the genius that decided outlawing Judas Priest would end teen suicide, remember? If George W. Bush did a decent thing in his career, it was keeping Gore out of the White House.  No one was ever delusional enough to think that Dubya was a genius, maybe because, for as many stupid things as he said, he never claimed to invent the Internet.

I know that cannabis oil doesn't cure cancer, although it has a devastating ffect on some cells and tumors some of the time.  And I know that it will take a lot more than this "seed-bearing plant" to aaccomplish the "healing of the nations" or even the restart of the American economy.

So I’m a contradiction.  In the end, the only thing I have in common with 95% of the people in the movement to end Prohibition is a desire to consume and possess the byproducts of a simple plant in a responsible fashion without fear of fine, citation, arrest, seizure or invasion of my property.  We share a common goal.  I don’t have to like them or invite them over for lunch. Many of them are zealots as bad as if not worse than the opposition.  

As a group, we have achieved some stumbling steps, in much the same fashion that the buffalo once migrated in vast numbers, traveling in a generally east-west direction across the Great Plains.  Calling it a concerted effort would have been stretching things a bit, indicating a directing will where there was only instinct and appetite.

I have watched as the “leaders” (really the spokespersons) have led this fight, mainly from the rear or the conference hall or the buffet line, in much the same way that the rutting bulls contested for dominance among those ancient wandering herds and steered their direction.  

I’ve seen them online, in pics and clips, seen podcasts and TV spots, watched hours of YouTube, seen them hobnob with famous musicians and actors, representatives and senators, film makers and glass blowers, hot chicks and tattoo artists and horticulture experts from across the globe.

I’ve seen pics of them at the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, at the Hard Rock Cafe and Colorado smoke shops, at festivals and gatherings, rallies and benefit concerts.

I haven’t seen any of them in handcuffs.

Maybe I expect too much.

Maybe I’ve read enough history to recall that very few people have ever managed a major shift in consciousness signing petitions, appearing on their own TV show online, or playing by the rules.

But in the end I am ronin.

I would like to say that I bow to no man, or creed, or banner, but I’m too cynical for that. I have folded down like an abject slave in the face of necessity and hunger and despair, surrendered courtesy and grace to anger and self-righteousness, and broken every vow of honor I ever took on my name.

I have no honor, nothing to lose, no shame left.

I stand to gain nothing by my honesty, except to reclaim maybe just a shadow of that honor.

Always a fair trade.

We are being led by fools.

On both sides.

While Moms for Marijuana walked the halls of Congress and retired LEOs LEAPed, the checks and balances system has been further dismantled around us amid the smoke and mirrors of market instabilities, the start-up of Obamacare, budget battles and disingenuously-manufactured terrorist attacks. 

While Congressmen and gubernatorial candidates smiled and made promises, corporate patents on seed stock and genetic information have placed much of the potential benefit of legalization forever beyond our reach, without a word from advocacy groups or the Department charged with protecting your right to fair Commerce practices.  

Your President and mine took the occasion of his re-election to sign the Indefinite Detention and Detainment Act into law on New Year’s Eve of that same year, while continuing to raid dispensaries, seize property, arrest seniors and kill veterans, keeping the troops in the Middle East, detaining innocent people in Gitmo, losing diplomatic personnel in Benghazi.

While attempting by every means possible to separate Americans and especially patients from their right to keep and bear arms, the Attorney General’s office and assorted law enforcement agencies lost track of hundreds of weapons.  Almost fifty of then were later linked to shootings, in some cases the deaths of federal officers. Despite rallies following Newtown and Aurora, the National Rifle Association remains silent about Illinois legislation to remove the handgun rights of medical cannabis users.

They does this because supporters of legalization who are members allow them to, and because the leaders of the cannabis advocacy groups do not call for activists to speak out on their websites and at their rallies, to demand that they truly defend the rights of ALL gun owners.

The Supreme Court has been busy defending the rights of Monsanto (the folks with the patent rights to you future crops of cannabis and hemp) to grow and sell genetically manipulated organisms without labeling, with no idea what the long-term effects of consumption or environmental impact may be.  

During the same period, the SCOTUS continued to deny American citizens the right to grow and possess a plant with a proven history of over 5,000 years of nutritional and medicinal applications; denied simple cultivation and personal consumption to law-abiding U.S. citizens, including those with pressing medical needs and chronic or terminal ailments.  

Exemptions have been granted in the case of Washington State and Colorado, but how can there geographically-defined freedom or exclusion from those freedoms inside anything that can honestly be called The United States? And yet the advocates are happily, busily taking the longest possible path to challenge this absurdity; endlessly submitting petitions and chatting on live streaming podcasts, between demonstrations on the best way to clean your glassware and a showcase of that mad Tahoe Kush.

Our government will relent and allow experiments to crossbreed the avian flu virus into humans, a potential weapon and a contagion nightmare, but North American research into the uses and true effects of the multiple components of cannabis proceed at a snail’s pace, regaining lost information in microscopic steps, while advocates judge the best pot brownies in Denver.

The Federal government placed the plant and its byproducts in the Schedule of Control Substances as a dangerous narcotic with no medical value despite the findings and recommendations of a Presidential Commission, the same Federal Government that holds two medical patents on cannabis derivative medicines, Sativex and Marinol.

And while all this has happened, we have been endlessly distracted by polls and petitions, and the breathless reporting of yet another court case.  We have smiling statements made by people in Brooks Brothers suits but nothing about a rally on the Capitol Mall, or a serious, media-covered, large-scale protest outside a Supreme Court trial, led by the people who travel around the country assuring us we are making progress when down here on the ground, evidence of that progress is pretty thin.

Why does it seem as if NORML, the Marijuana Policy Project, the Campaign for the Restoration and Regulation of Hemp and most of the rest of the advocacy groups are competing with each other?  Why fight for the spotlight?  

What does it matter if Steve Elliott interviews someone on the other end of the country from the Capitol Building, the only place where anything that truly matters is going to happen now that Colorado and Washington have managed to vote in legal cannabis, albeit in much different forms?

We have half a dozen advocacy groups, most founded around and by lawyers, and yet no one in them seems able to read a government text, or sort out the legalese of the Acts in question. We are asked to ask congress to ask the President to sign an Executive Order in direct contravention to the checks and balances system, then asked to tell the President to tell a Congress (who should have been listening to we, the People for the last three decades and have clearly not been) that they need to ignore the short-term millions from pharmaceutical and faith-based super PACs and private prison contractors and vote for us, the folks who have no choice but to pay them for ignoring us.

We attack the office and person of the Attorney General, and alternately demand and plead for him to show us mercy, as soon as he is done firing the head of the DEA, changing the rules for the OCNDP, freeing the cannabis prisoners and expunging all their records, reforming immigration, arresting and charging his boss with treason and pulling monkeys out of his butt.

Really?

No, not really.  I made up the part about the monkeys.

We’ve had a Constitutional, bi-cameral, capitalist government for quite a while now.  It functions in a limited number of ways, when it comes to making and repealing laws, adding and removing things from lists, etc.  It is a maze, but it is a maze with a limited number of entrances and two possible exits, winners and losers. 

Inexplicable is the fact that it has so thoroughly baffled the people who claim to be “working for change from the inside”, who have been admired and celebrated for “fighting the good fight” since the day Nixon’s ink dried, but none of whom seem to have a clue how to get from Point A (Prohibition) to Point B (Legalization) without creating a mountain of paper, a mass of online traffic, and a massive top-heavy lobbying machine with twelve million drivers and no clear map.

Why is this?

Marx had a simple way of breaking down most social questions, and it was a fairly valid one.

Who profits?

What happens if government simply surrenders?

Yes, we all know that it won’t happen, but what if?

What if tomorrow you were free to walk out on your front porch and light up the fattest joint you could roll? 

What would happen if you could walk over to your girlfriend’s house and spend the afternoon watching “Bones” completely baked on brownies?

What would really change in the world if you could grow your own tomatoes and cucumbers and cannabis right there in your garden, for yourself, or to trade to your 18-yr-old-or older neighbor for some cucumbers or melons or carrots?  What if you paid for a simple vendors’ license and a spot at the farmer’s market and sold it as-is, let the buyer beware, and if caught, let the illegitimate seller beware as well?  What if big growers could sell and ship their products under the same tax codes as alcohol and tobacco, or, in the case of hemp, the same rules and protections as corn and soybeans?  What if every insurance company agreed to accept cannabis as a legit medicine?  If bars could once again offer smoking sections that for the first time included a tasteful selection of cannabis?

What if the intoxication levels and penalties for cannabis DUI were the same as alcohol?  If bars, convenience and liquor stores, tobacco sales and adult novelty sales all had to be 1,000 feet from schools just like bud bars and dispensaries?

What would the people who spend their days and nights making speeches and standing in front of cameras and making up the news any way they want do for a living then?  What would they be without the identity of advocates?

What benefit is it to them if the rest of the world is free?

Free to forget them?

Because face it, we aren’t talking about inspiring people here.  Mason Tvert is a smart guy, he writes good copy, but he looks like one of his favorite lines is “Super-size it!” Mister T wasn’t exactly leading the charge, nor was Steve Elliott bellowing a call to war while waving a copy of Hemp News and a slice of pepperoni  at his side, when Obama failed to even mention cannabis in the State of the Union Address, despite early predictions and broad hints on the MPP page and Hemp News that the Choom Boss would do so.

Let’s face it, once the big bang of legalization is over, working through the smaller stuff like how we are going to regulate quality and chemicals and certify organic is going to be B-O-R-I-N-G. No one is going to read the last Weedblog post about how determined delegates hammered out acceptable levels of nitrogen in shake, loose, outdoor grown, Kush (to be used for baking only) or which company failed to win an organic certification, except the kind of people who still read Mother Jones or the Christian Science Monitor.

Not the people who are going to invite you to smoke some badass Lebanese with their stripper girlfriend, or get you kick-ass seats to a game or concert.

So things get dragged out, just a little longer than they might necessarily need to be.

More petitions, more rallies, more fundraisers and podcasts.

Just a little more of that sweet fame, the most addictive and ephemeral rush of all, made all the more sweet by how little most of the bigger names truly deserve to be famous or admired.  They may have shaken a lot of hands and kissed a lot of ass, raised a lot of money, and hosted a lot of dinners, but who are they, and where have they been?

Even those who have done great things tend to lose sight of the goal, to begin mistaking themselves for the cause.  Maybe because they have nothing truly invested. 

I bet less than a hundred members of NORML could name the President, or CEO, or whatever it is you have over there… I don’t pay much attention myself, in truth.  But he looks good in a polo shirt and sweater.  Bet he plays a mean game of golf, or tennis…

Bet he never met arranged to meet someone from a bulletin board business card and a phone call, with his heart in his mouth and a fistful of wrinkled twenties in hand for a bag of unknown buds.

Or wondered if his truck was being broken into by the crack whores outside as he watched his wife walk through a door into another room with a guy carrying two Glocks and a handful of prison tats that said bad things about his past, with two more guys who could have been his brothers riding shotgun (literally) at the bullet-scarred street door to the dispensary, while a meth head muttered and raved to your left and a tinfoiler on your right tried to explain the connection between fluoride, HAARP, chemtrails, 9/11, the Jews, the Vatican, the Borgias and the World Health Organization.

Bet he’s never assumed the position.

No, most of these guys look like the guys who acquired Microsoft stock about the time it got to be worth something, who couldn’t or didn’t get a foot in the door with lobbies and PACs, who wanted something a little edgy, a little different from a stint as a public defender, with all the legalese but with no real risk. Like one day, fresh back from Cancun or South Padre, they looked around and said “Hey, the trust fund is running a little low… but I hear advocacy pays pretty well!”  With that decided, they probably put the game on the flat screen, cracked another microbrew and called their escort service to have her deliver a quarter of whatever sounded funky and cost the most, that week.

I know that’s judging by appearances, but that’s the impression these guys give; a little hipper, a little smoother, with a little more on the ball than you and me, and in no particular hurry to take the fight to the wall.

Players. 

Insiders.

Imagine what working-class Joe thinks, watching people who don’t have the conviction to actually put themselves on the line, preaching to him about rights he sees slipping away every day as he tries to earn enough to eat and pay the bills, while they fly from convention to interviews to TV spot.

Think of the curious people who surf through our discussions and comment sections online, who read the illiterate frenzy and fantastic stream-of-consciousness ravings, the scam or sting ads to order drugs through the mail or internet, the profanity and the posing thug-lovers and the hundred other forms of human trash on display.  Why do these things stay up on websites for days?  The users no longer care about the integrity of the movement, because the leaders have no true personal involvement, and integrity is a luxury in the age of the backroom deal. 

How can we be accepted as being any better, when so little of what we show the world is any better?

Try to see us through the eyes of a church-going grandparent, living in what was once a small town now overrun by spoiled college kids and arrogant money, filled with lies but confronted again and again by people who seem bent on becoming the embodiment of every drug stereotype.

 What of the veteran, on the fence, living on a pittance from a government that would rather forget, just another forgotten face who sees just how little the talking heads at the top actually give a damn, be it the top of the Veterans’ Administration or of the reform movement, about the brothers and sisters in arms slain and incarcerated in this lost war.  Once the rally ends and the petition is signed, how many legalization crowds give a thought to the plight of those same veterans?  How many offer a word, a meal or a ride? 

Think of the hundreds of thousands who have not spoken, yet.

There are so many applications for hemp, and so many uses for cannabis and its extracts.  Let us not allow those potentials to be stolen by blind trust in our representatives, or by ignoring the eternal greed and treachery of Prohibition’s offspring, the pills-punishment-incarceration-and-rehabilitation complex.

The polls predict success and increasing acceptance, among people who cared to respond. 

That headline was true a week before Reagan won the election.  Two years later, Nancy and her celluloid cowboy rode into history by restarting a billion dollar drug war, while Oliver North was arming twelve-year-olds and establishing coke routes into the United States from South America. 

Victory is a certainty when it is written into both law and history books.  Until then, it is just a convenience of perspective.

Look at how the herd moves.  Decide if the direction we are headed is correct, and if the speed at which we move is satisfactory.

If not, do something. 

Yourself.

Write a real email, not a form letter, to your state and federal representatives.  If you are in D.C., go look up your congressman or woman and tell them what you care about.

Emotional social media posts change nothing in the real world, and waiting for someone else to look after your best interests is accepting that someone else will decide what those best interests are and where they lay.

For every victory, there is a cost.  Count on it. Your enemy does.  

Time to grow up and accept the terms of this fight, even if the smiling faces online don’t want to see the storm ahead.

The tide is turning, according to the people who get paid to tell you exactly that.

I still say, Question authority.  Any authority. 

Even the cannabureaucracy.

Even mine.

But remember who has been there, on the line, and who has not.

Tides go in and out, and a wise person does not build too close to the sea on the advice of those who have never sailed deep waters.

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Cannabis cures cancer.  Any questions?

Reach For The Skies, an alternate answer to climate change extremism

Global warming.

Climate change.

Three decades of speculation and predictions ranging from grim to ridiculous.

We were told that by now the polar ice caps would be surf on the shores of Appalachia and the Sierras.  Polar bears were to have begun dying in record numbers as they found greater and greater distances opening between ice floes, pestilence and disease would run rampant as winter vanished and global drought spread to the few places still above the waves.

Or was it that New York would freeze solid after a tidal waves swept over the Himalayas…?

Whichever form of apocalypse was predicted, it hasn’t happened. Not to the degree or at the rate predicted.  To be honest, if it weren't for the media hype, you would be hard-pressed to find much evidence or effect of this "disaster".

Then again, we’re throwing darts at a pretty big board, and betting on outcomes our grandchildren won't live to see.  Set against a background of millions of years, our data collection period is tiny, a blip in geological time. 

Nor is the data devoid of inconsistencies, fabrications, distortions and large gaps, like the massive shut-down of weather stations that followed the end of the Soviet Union, or the ongoing decommissioning of our own military bases around the world.

But instead of acknowledging these problems and working toward an intelligent response, through a world-wide dialogue, we instead see the discussion carried on over our heads by bureaucrats and academics who barely deign to acknowledge the existence, much less the importance of the “common man on the street” as they gather behind armed guards in distant venues to decide the world’s fate over a catered organic luncheon.

What emerges are usually regulations that end up hurting only small and local businesses with fines that are easily paid and regulations that are routinely broken by larger companies (the ones who actually hosted the meeting in Zurich or Brussels or any other place the average working Joe or Josephine won’t be flying this weekend).  Then all of the people who were so concerned about the environment get back in their private, armored limousines, with their security detail and secretaries, and drive back to the airport to board their private jet for the flight back to whichever capital of capitol they call home, while the scientists Skype and upload to their blogs and hope the answers will secure another year of funding.

The third world sees the corporate empires and the superpowers once again nodding their heads in solemn agreement that they, the meek, must wait a few more generations to inherit the earth that our appetites are reaping from under their feet, torn from under mountains and fouling the waters to profit the same captains of industry and personalities who created and feed on our current self-involved society, no matter how “off the grid” we may conceive ourselves to be.

And “on the street” that is the internet and the press, the middle class and the poor see celebrities from every background staking a claim on their share of the limelight as politicians thunder support and denials; lots of talk, not much action.

What should be straightforward answers to admittedly complex questions are emotionalized to the point of melodrama, a series of ever-changing dire predictions meant not to find answers or encourage discussion, but to instead drive us into a frenzy of regulation and compliance and what amounts to neo-Luddism.

Is our climate changing?

Yes.

Is mankind contributing to that change?

Yes.

Can mankind stop those changes without devastating the entire planetary economy and dooming our grandchildren to lives of dysfunctional regulation and government intrusion on a planet that will quite likely die anyway with the first unlucky asteroid or active supervolcano (like the one under Yellowstone)?

Yes.

Really?

Yes.  With courage and sacrifice and vision, with an equality of risk and opportunity for every nation and every human, there may be a future for Earth, and definitely for humans.

Is the answer in carbon caps or recycling or alternative energy?

Well, yes and no. Yes, eventually, and to some degree, and certainly the time to improve what we know is now.  I love the idea of battery cars and solar panels, virtual marketplaces and work-from-home.  I watched the Jetsons every day after school as a kid.

But this is reality, and the reality is, no matter how green your product, it most likely requires you to dig it up, cut it down, pick it, squeeze it out, refine it, manufacture it, package it, prep it for transport, usually by a combination of internal combustion vehicles, freight trains, and/or via massive engines across vast oceans or through the skies, to distribution points and service centers which were, mostly, not built of green materials or using eco-friendly techniques, which consume vast amounts of energy for lighting and equipment, where marketing of some sort will be required to sell it to consumers who will probably throw it away instead of recycling it.  Even the movement of data requires huge amounts of electricity which is, in most cases, generated by burning coal which is taken from the rubble of what were once quiet mountainsides in Appalachia.  This presents a bit of an oxymoron when so many of the eco-warrior proponents of green technologies use so much electricity in maintaining their careers as well as spreading their words among the faithful.

The same clan that “knows” how to lessen our impact love to sell glib pseudo-answers by painting a glowing future of determined environmentalists rolling up their ethical sleeves to march resolutely toward clean skies and air, restored forests and dolphins dancing with whales in emerald seas; new answers and alternative energies.

Paradoxically, the same idealists have time and again inflamed the social media, marched and written angry, emotional letters to stop a hydroelectric dam from endangering stocked fish migrations (in some cases actually demolishing functional structures in a country whose infrastructure is a fading memory).  

They put their faces in magazines and on billboards, have spoken out at film festivals and music awards, demonstrated against a nuclear power plant or, closer to home, shot down a proposed wind farm that would have replaced tons of coal as it created new local jobs and attitudes toward alternative energy and science in general, instead of leaving the local people wondering why, once again, humans had to do without because the project was potentially endangering some animal or another, in this case bats that were already dying by the hundreds from entirely different causes.

The odds of a bat being killed were lower than the odds of winning the Powerball Lottery, but humans lost anyway. 

(Not the humans who stopped the project, or dam, or power plant, no, they rarely stand to lose a thing to their idealism.  Most of the time, they don’t live near the thing they protest, and wouldn’t know or care unless a newsletter told them they should.)

I have no problem with activism.  It founded this country, made important changes in human rights, and ended more than one war.  I have a problem with activists who do not walk it like they talk it. 

I have no problem with science- I’ve been a science fiction fan since picking up “I, Robot” at the tender age of 11, which was just a few years after we set foot on the moon. I watched the shuttle development and read sci-fi and science magazines and Nova, had a subscription to Scientific American and took every science class I could cram into in high school. I kept up with scientific and technological progress, and then watched our space program slowly die through the development of the Internet and the chaos we know as cyberspace and the social media, the biggest platform for climate change “experts”.

I have no problem with global climate change discussions except that there is no discussion.

People who “know what they are talking about” simply do not. I spent three years with two very thorough, very critical professors in biology and chemistry, and the rest of my life so far reading books by even more demanding scientists.  If you have not read the data yourself, if you have not actually done the math, not just what is defined for you but the things that occur to you, even if they lead nowhere; if you cannot ensure the validity of test results, records and measurements, then you “know” only what you have been told.  

And what passes for information these days is often produced by people who are looking for research grants and political clout, vying for tenure and publication and sometimes just wanting to be part of something much larger.

Are there scientists out there trying to quantify this problem with no agenda but the search for truth?

Inevitably, but the inconvenient truth is that among them there are people who do not support the current model of change, who refute several pivotal points of global warming theories, who are far from agreement on a “solution” to our current situation or if it even represents a true crisis.


More troubling is the fact that more than one scientist who supports the claim of catastrophe has calculated that even if we shut off every facet of our technology that produces carbon emissions, carbon levels will continue to rise for another century, and a meaningful change in greenhouse gas levels would not happen within the next 500 years.

They are shouted down as “deniers”, instead of consideration being given to them as accomplished and peer-reviewed scholars in their own rights, outside this issue.  Anyone who points out the emerging school of doubt, no matter how they may have reduced their own impact or how frugal their lives may be, will soon find themselves a pariah, who will be lumped in with the owners of monster trucks, Duck Dynasty T-shirts and Confederate flags, or treated like dangerous criminals.  


Anyone attempting to point out the fallacies or debate the accuracy of data can count on being rabidly attacked by online communities and discounted by celebrities who mouth the dogma of climate change responsibility and activism while they publish photos, video, and interviews, fly from coast to coast or across the oceans, update their Facebook ethics, tweet, and participate in sports and gatherings, conventions and careers whose impact on the planet matches that of some small countries.

I don’t look for my answers from fame in the first place, but so many of the people I respected as individualists and renegades are scrambling for the bandwagon, people who seemed to have found a place at the edge where they had moved beyond the politics and power games and fame stepping obediently into line with popular culture and giving expert advice on a subject they truthfully know little or nothing about.

Too many of the climate change experts offer nothing but cause and effect answers.  Their only refuge seems to be dogma: Live Simply So That Others May Simply Live (ignore my BMW, stereo and flat screen, and why do you hate dogs?).  Reduce (your expectations), Reuse (the stuff I give away for credit at REI and still write off my taxes), and Recycle (see all my Mondavi bottles in the trash?  New vineyard, just planted in ’85, used to be a small family farm, got it for the back taxes, can you imagine?).  Today’s scientists seem forever bent on regurgitating failed ideas in new permutations, determined to legislate and regulate us into Eco-Heaven Here on Earth.

But the answer is not to be found here, on Earth.

The answer is up there, where John Glenn’s footprints are still waiting for us to come back and see them in person.  The answers are there, at the center of our planetary orbit, pushing out more energy in a second than we have used in all of human history, and there, in the Lagrange points where we can use the energy of that sun to forge and mold the materials lying there in the form of dust on the back of the Moon, or in chunks from fist to city size in the asteroid belts, in the atmosphere of Venus and on the arid plains of Mars.

The talking heads will no doubt scream of pollution, of the pressing needs of the poor, of the risks of terrorism and corruption.  Ask them to compare the total pollution of the company manufacturing their skis, their parachute and hang glider, their climbing equipment, or their yacht, just for a single year.  Ask them about the children who are manufacturing those items in Asia. Now ask them how many lives will be changed for the better by continuing to manufacture those items, and exactly how it will benefit the planet in the next twenty years.  Ask them just how many of the top people in their field come from third world nations, and how much that is changing the lives of every single person where those unlikely few come from.


And remember that, in the age of space exploration, no one seemed very worried or excited that yet another hypoxic athlete had scaled or skied off of yet another frozen chunk somewhere in the Himalaya or the Karakoram, sailed across the ocean faster than the other millionaires, or got killed jumping off of a cliff in a squirrel suit.  Fame is a much greater addiction that fossil fuel, and sponsors don't like playing second fiddle to national survival and programs on which they cannot cash in.

Madness is continuing to do the same things and expecting new conclusions. Space manufacturing, resource extraction, colonization and exploration starts to look a lot less fantastic, and a lot more promising, compared to the insanity of trying to fix the exercise wheel from inside the rat cage.

You do not have to grow up wealthy or politically connected to be a colonist or an explorer.  In the age of the remote control, you need not even be an athlete.  Astronauts work with math skills that are taught in high school, or were, when we still had schools more worried about education that cultural diversity or slowing down an entire education process for the slowest learners and newest arrivals.  No one has to be an astronaut, but allow those who could to soar, instead of tethering them forever to someone who, no matter how Pollyanna your philosophies of nurture vs nature, is never going to be anything but a clerk, a mechanic, or a plant worker.  

No, I am not an intellectual elitist- we need every one of those positions, waitresses and tattoo artists, carpenters and landscapers as well as engineers and scientists and explorers.  It has always been the dreams and sweat and sacrifice of the people “on the street” that have inspired and driven the engine of mankind’s greatest accomplishments, and it always will be those dreams that carry us through the darkness.

But if we are to make the intuitive and creative leaps necessary to find those new answers and truly create alternative energy sources and devices, we need children who are educated and inspired to reach beyond their limits, and goals that will not simply make the same few corporations a few more billion dollars for nothing of consequence.  We need more than regulations and policies that do nothing to advance the species and everything to cement the power of those who do not want us off the surface and out from under their control.

The difference between government and business grow smaller by the day, because, increasingly, corporations control our governments with lobbyists and contributions above and below-board, while more and more politicians leave “public service” to work for the same companies that are bending and breaking laws designed to protect the environment and the citizens.  Once they are done being “servants of the people”, most become businessmen, and businessmen love monopolies.  Competition is for the birds, as anyone who has ever had to design and fund an ad or re-election campaign against a superior competitor will tell you. Scare people bad enough, give them no options, and they’ll buy anything, at any price.

At present, we have only one planet on which to produce and purchase goods, be they cars, vegetables, forms of government or the modes of exchange.  Our market is, in effect, bounded by the same atmosphere we are poisoning to make the goods we need and so deeply desire.

But instead of looking up, beyond that atmosphere, to where we have already set foot and explored, however briefly, we look around, bewildered, at the sea of conflicting information and opinions.  We drive in cars made of ultralight materials and listen to digitized music and still somehow believe that there is no value in space, as orbiting satellites give us road and weather information that saves lives and increases harvests, while others map the depths of the ocean and explore the furthest corners of the earth.  With fragments of the moon and the history of spaceflight proudly on display in our nation’s capital city, we are mesmerized by the cult of personality and well-presented “scientific” docudramas into searching for hope in the dirt between our feet. 

Instead of dreaming of the stars and following those who dared to be different, we look to the same earthbound people who got us into this mess: talking heads with little or no actual scientific training using space-age materials and technology while preaching minimalism for others and practicing a mysticism that almost excludes technological advancement. 

We listen to researchers who weren’t quite smart enough or competitive enough to make it at NASA or Goddard or Virgin (and, sadly, some who were), in universities and think-tanks that are not grant-funded to tell us that we need to divide our eggs among more baskets, who would not dare suggest that we create new forms of government and commerce, not here, but a hundred thousand miles out of reach of the interests which currently have a stranglehold on those powers and the profits of change.

Those are the people behind the voices crying “Wolf” instead of an intelligent response to climate change.  Those are the people who would love for mankind to forget our dream of the stars, to reduce our expectations, let the probes and remote sensors and drones take all the risks.  It offends certain climate change proponents that we worry less about the atmosphere than getting above it so that we may survive the worst-case scenarios, instead of bravely, stupidly going down with the ship.  It annoys some tech-heads that humans ever survived going into space before decades of their hallowed scientific probes had paved the way and that some of them, a dwindling minority of dreamers, still believe that we should and ultimately must do so again and in great numbers, if we are to survive as a species, and if we are to have any hope of healing this planet.

But, in the end, in the midst of the fury on the forum and the internet, I recall that no one remembers the guys like me, who cheered for space flight and were forever changed by that dream come true. Just as it is not technicians or the designers of those first spacecraft that we remember, beyond the names of Goddard and Von Braun and the other pioneers.  It is not the designation of the landers or the space buggies or the deep space orbiters that live in the minds of those who saw, and the imaginations of children around the globe. It is not those “experts” who decried the pollution, the expense, or the risks.

It is the men and women who explored and triumphed, inspired and in some cases died.  It is the human being, so far from home, and surrounded by death and desolation, who saw, beyond the answers and horizons of this world, a new frontier, and who took one small step for a human, one giant leap for Mankind.

If I have a problem with all of our answers, it is not that they reach too far, but that they do not reach far enough.

Lost Worlds

If a picture is worth a thousand words, here is an encyclopedia of the back corners of Smoke Hole Canyon and the surrounding region.

Free solo, anyone?  Privately-owned Eagle Rock, last pitch of Karma Cracks.

Macdaddy Mike Stewart cranking into the sketchy section of Cherry Lane, Darkside.

There but for the grace of God...

Absolutely astounding and heartbreaking to be reminded of just how much more people care about dogs and cats being left outside than the homeless, who are all "bums", "dope heads", losers, drunks, sex perverts and welfare leeches. 

Most of them are VETS, as in the men and women who put their lives o the line and served this country to defend YOUR rights. They are out in the streets because of how badly being ordered to kill women and children to defend the price of oil messed them up, because they alone survived being blown up by an IED while on patrol, or because they were subjected to incredible abuse or rape by toxic commanders who couldn't make it anywhere they didn't get paid to scream at kids in their underwear.... Not one of these is their fault... many of them joined believing they could better themselves, or trying to become part of a proud tradition, not a forgotten generation misunderstood and put down by their own families and countrymen.

So many folks love police dogs who do what they do because they are TRAINED AND ORDERED TO DO SO, while bragging that they walk right by someone who did their best to be a true American patriot. 

Remind me again about that dog that cured a disease, wrote an inspiring book, painted a magnificent canvas or carved an inspiring sculpture, who led an army, founded schools and hospitals, or fought (of their own free will, not because they had been trained to do so) to keep this country free. When a society cares more about its pets and its politics than its members, you can see the end from there...

This country seems to support the troops right up to the point that they come home as broken individuals, then it's "Nothing to see here... just some dopehead bum who is waiting for his next Obamacare check."

Memories of Devil's Canyon

Sitting here in Wild'n'Wonderful West Virginia, thinking back on winters past, some of the best of them spent in Northern Devil's Canyon, in the Dripping Springs Mountains of Arizona.  

Resolution Copper has once again been denied their application to swap other, smaller chunks of AZ for this jewel... no thanks to climbers or their advocacy organizations... it was the San Carlos Apache Indians who accomplished this feat.  

But like all corporations, although they are treated like people in the eyes of the law, they live on a timescale of immortals, planning for decades-long campaigns to wear down their unfocused and weak-willed opponents, who will all too quickly move on to some place like The Homestead, because the climbing rags and a few asshats claim those spots are "the best climbing in Arizona".  

Of course, that particular crag is now closed, since climbers just can't stay off private land or limit their impact...

So, reaching to the back of the rack, and a bit closer to the present, I pulled up a few images of the incredible views and rock of that seldom-visited crag which I believe to be one of the best in all of Arizona, in hopes that perhaps the lazy, scene-driven climbers of the Valley of the Sun and the rest of the U.S. just might be inspired to speak up and act.

Urge Congress to enforce the same EPA regulations on foreign companies that U.S. companies must follow.  Understand that we are doing many of the same things in other nations, including Australia, which is corporate HQ for Rio Tinto/Resolution. 

The Silent Scream Boulder, high on the shoulder of King's Crown Peak.

The Melting Man area, on the road to King's Crown.

Cindy Gray, taking a break from the wind, Windlass Gardens Wall, above Shenandoah.

If climbers do not act, now, and in a unified fashion, instead of feuding like children and backstabbing each other and the climbing community over old slights that have NOTHING to do with the issue, then this place will, someday, be nothing but an open pit mine skirted by a carefully-placed freeway. 

And the the climbers of the world will have no one but themselves to blame.