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I’m not the first to post this today, but it’s cer­tainly worth the read. The fol­low­ing is from Robert Ingersoll’s “What I Want For Christmas.”

If I had the power to pro­duce exactly what I want for next Christ­mas, I would have all the kings and emper­ors resign and allow the peo­ple to gov­ern themselves.

I would have all the nobil­ity crop their titles and give their lands back to the people.

I would have the Pope throw away his tiara, take off his sacred vest­ments, and admit that he is not act­ing for God, is not infal­li­ble, and is just an ordi­nary Italian.

I would have all the car­di­nals, arch­bish­ops, bish­ops, priests and cler­gy­men admit that they know noth­ing about the­ol­ogy, noth­ing about hell or heaven, noth­ing about the des­tiny of the human race, noth­ing about dev­ils or ghosts, gods or angels. I would have them tell all their “flocks” to think for them­selves, to be manly men and wom­anly women, and to do all in their power to increase the sum of human happiness.

I would have all the pro­fes­sors in col­leges, all the teach­ers in schools of every kind, includ­ing those in Sun­day schools, agree that they would teach only what they know and not palm off guesses as demon­strated truths.

I would like to see all the politi­cians changed to statesmen:

• Men who long to make their coun­try great and free
• Men who care more for pub­lic good than pri­vate gain
• Men who long to be of use

I would like to see all the edi­tors of papers and mag­a­zines agree to print the truth and noth­ing but the truth, to avoid all slan­der and mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion, and to let the pri­vate affairs of the peo­ple alone.

I would like to see drunk­en­ness and pro­hi­bi­tion both abolished.

I would like to see cor­po­ral pun­ish­ment done away with in every home, in every school, in every asy­lum, refor­ma­tory, and prison. Cru­elty hard­ens and degrades, kind­ness reforms and ennobles.

I would like to see mil­lion­aires unite and form a trust for the pub­lic good.

I would like to see a fair divi­sion of prof­its between cap­i­tal and labor, so that the toiler could save enough to min­gle a lit­tle June with the Decem­ber of his life.

I would like to see an inter­na­tional court estab­lished in which to set­tle dis­putes between nations, so that armies could be dis­banded and the great navies allowed to rust and rot in per­fect peace.

I would like to see the whole world free — free from injus­tice, and free from superstition.

This will do for next Christ­mas. The fol­low­ing Christ­mas, I may want more.

I think many of us could agree that if some­how these requests could be granted the world would be a vastly bet­ter place.

Via Unrea­son­able Faith and Cynical-C

I hon­estly can barely believe what I’m read­ing when I go through this ad. The list of restric­tions reads like a prison.

All the ten­ants I inter­view aren’t good enough via Friendly Athe­ist

Fixed the pretty URLs and RSS feed (blasted mod_rewrite), added Gra­vatar sup­port, a tag cloud, and a down­load sys­tem that I may or may not ever use.

The Sub­ver­sion install/upgrade method wins again, bump­ing up to 2.7 was a sin­gle com­mand while logged in as www-data on my server and then accesing wp-admin/upgrade.php

Today is the 75^th anniver­sary of the repeal of Pro­hi­bi­tion.  As a fan of alco­hol in all its forms, I fig­ured I’d write up a bit of his­tory and my thoughts on the lessons of Prohibition.

The roots of Pro­hi­bi­tion can be traced to the mid-1800s when cer­tain Chris­t­ian groups, par­tic­u­larly Methodists and later Bap­tists.  Many states passed dry laws lead­ing up to Decem­ber 1917 when the eigh­teenth amend­ment was pro­posed.  The amend­ment took over a year before it was rat­i­fied in Jan­u­ary of 1919 when Utah approved it.  Rhode Island and Con­necti­cut were the only two states to not rat­ify the amend­ment, and in fact both put out state­ments reject­ing it.

Of course many Amer­i­cans did not like the gov­ern­ment telling them what they could drink, so the new ille­gal sta­tus didn’t really do much except cre­ate a black mar­ket.  Now what comes with a black mar­ket?  That’s right, crime.  If it weren’t for Pro­hi­bi­tion, do you really think gang­sters like Al Capone could have made as much money as they made and had the power that they had?

We all know by now that the gov­ern­ment is slow to real­ize its mis­takes, and even slower when those mis­takes are still being backed by pow­er­ful polit­i­cal groups.  Due to the incred­i­ble influ­ence of the reli­gious groups who sup­ported pro­hi­bi­tion it took four­teen years before the twenty-first amend­ment was pro­posed in Feb­ru­ary of 1933.  Once again, Utah was the state that made it offi­cial by cross­ing the 2/3 require­ment on this day 75 years ago.  South Car­olina rejected the amend­ment and North Carolina’s vot­ers decided against hav­ing a con­ven­tion to con­sider it.

I believe these lessons need to be applied to many other recreational-use drugs such as mar­i­juana.  The mod­ern alco­hol dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tem shows how to effi­ciently oper­ate and reg­u­late such drugs, and sales num­bers show how many of us are respon­si­bly using it.  I don’t see any rea­son the same can’t apply to the world’s favorite smok­able plant.

Some argue that legal­iz­ing mar­i­juana for recre­ational use will put every­one in dan­ger with peo­ple work­ing and/or dri­ving stoned.  Again I say just look at alco­hol.  The vast major­ity of the pop­u­la­tion con­sumes it safely and those who don’t are dealt with strictly.  When vapor­ized it has very lit­tle effect on res­pi­ra­tory health (unlike tobacco), not to men­tion it can be eaten, and it is impos­si­ble to over­dose with­out a direct IV injec­tion of THC (unlike alcohol).

It just seems hyp­o­crit­i­cal and point­less to make a safer and more enjoy­able drug ille­gal, fuel­ing a black mar­ket, when we could be reg­u­lat­ing qual­ity and fund­ing projects with taxed while also allow­ing our cit­i­zens to alter their state of mind as they choose.