From George Orwell’s reminiscences of boarding school days in 1915 comes this jewel of an aide-memoire:
A feeling of doom descended upon me. So I was guilty too. I too had done the dreadful thing, whatever it was, that wrecked you for life, body and soul, and ended in suicide or the lunatic asylum. Till then I had hoped that I was innocent, and the conviction of sin which now took possession of me was perhaps all the stronger because I did not know what I had done.
Forty-five years later both Kinsey reports had been published, Atlas Shrugged and Stranger in a Strange Land were best-sellers, and every boy had surreptitious access to articles debunking superstition and pseudoscience in Satan’s own Playboy Magazine. Christian National Socialist Truths had–like their predecessors asserting that beer and rum led to murder, insanity, suicide–become the object of braying laughter, and nobody believed that touching oneself would result in blindness, insanity or hair growing on the palms of one’s hands. Enter Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary as the involuntary Saviors of doomed disciplinarian dogma.
Senator John F Kennedy established a dallying liaison with next-door-neighbor and later acidhead artist Mary Pinchot Meyer back when Huxley and Leary were early adopters. A year before the assassination the name Dr Dana Farnsworth began appearing as attribution in fake news “scientific” articles insinuating that LSD and similar drugs “have the power to damage the individual psyche, indeed cripple it for life.” The “scoutmaster’s stern talk” was again resurrected to save youth from leather-winged Satanism. Here was Satan’s own drug “abuse” as replacement for the disparaged and discredited self-abuse theories of the previous century!
Sure enough, Congress and the Several States deputed bands of armed thugs authorized to arrest, rob, shoot and kill such LSD users as had not already leapt to their deaths out of skyscraper windows. Abusive fathers whose daughters ran away from home now had The Devil’s Own Temptation as an alibi–until medical examiners disproved the hogwash after the furore had died down.(link) Millions upon millions or youths meanwhile met for Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Hendrix, The Doors, Cream and Mammas and the Papas, etc. concerts to disprove by experiment the rabid disinformation–yet were robbed, jailed and shot just the same for another three decades. Nixon was forced out, the Libertarian party began getting pro-choice votes before there even was such a thing anywhere else, and now earns a thousand times as many votes as in that 1972 election–a share now growing at 80% a year.
So here we are 49 years later. Those pro-choice, anti-war, and pro-rights votes stopped the Prohibition-Dixiecrat-Republican fascist dreikaiserbund from threatening birth control clinics with guns, and have by now removed deadly prohibitions on many plant leaves… Best estimates indicate that Libertarian candidates have drained off over 200 million votes since 1972. Many a fascist kleptocrat has lost to a communist kleptocrat (and vice-versa) after local voters chose instead to cast ballots for THEIR OWN FREEDOM!
Today a new bunch of pseudoscientists assert that “electrical generation has the power to damage the collective environment, indeed cripple it”–unless men with guns are sent out to arrest, rob, shoot and kill such electrical energy providers as have not already been lynched by addled regulators. Since the evident victims of this latest superstitious lynch mob consist predominantly of instigators of the earlier superstitious lynch mobs enacting Comstockism, national prohibition, Blue Laws, military involuntary servitude and additional cruel prohibition laws, it is not at all easy to work up a lot of sympathy while schadenfreude comes quite naturally.
The LP has no prejudice against electrical energy, so elections–to the extent not rigged by Nixon subsidies–now include a sort of Darwinian intelligence test that will determine the survival of the parties most fit to cope with a reality-based environment.
Find out the juicy details behind the mother of all economic collapses, and how its causes changed the laws. Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 is available in two languages on Amazon Kindle, each at the cost of a pint of craft beer.
Brazilian blog…
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