The northlondonhippy

Archive for October, 2007

I brought a new kitty-cat home yes­ter­day and I don’t mean the fuzzy vari­ety. I pur­chased my very own copy of Leop­ard from my local Apple Store!

I did debate going last to the Apple Store last Fri­day night at 6pm, when they launched their lat­est and great­est oper­at­ing sys­tem, but I hate crowds and I hate peo­ple and quickly thought bet­ter of it. Besides, did I really need a free tee-shirt?

When I bought my first iMac, nearly 3 years ago, it came installed with Pan­ther, but a few months after that, I upgraded to Tiger, which I ran on all my Macs until yesterday.

Tiger is a great OS, sta­ble, easy and intu­itive to use and it brought me 2 and 1/2 years of com­put­ing bliss. Leop­ard appears to be the next log­i­cal step in the devel­op­ment of OS X.

The “300 new fea­tures” Apple keeps tout­ing is prob­a­bly a bit of an exag­ger­a­tion, but over all the changes appear to be welcome.

I spent yes­ter­day upgrad­ing my 3 main sys­tems, my new 24” iMac, my Mac­Book and my Mac mini. Each sys­tem took around an hour and I upgraded, rather than clean-install or archive-and-install. Apple soft­ware tends to be sta­ble and trust­wor­thy, plus I had the weekend’s field reports online to warn me of poten­tial instal­la­tion hazards.

One of the issues flagged up by the first installers, was some­thing called Appli­ca­tion Enhancer, a 3rd party frame­work, utilised by some 3rd party soft­ware. This frame­work causes a con­flict in the instal­la­tion which bricks your Mac, leav­ing you with the dreaded blue screen of death! Updat­ing to the lat­est ver­sion of Appli­ca­tion Enhancer will pre­vent this and if its too late, there are fixes posted on the net which show you how to rem­edy the situation.

Only one of my Macs, the Mini, had AE installed and I caught it before upgrad­ing, so no wor­ries there. The Mini was the first sys­tem I upgraded, because at a year old, it’s the old­est of my 3 systems.

The upgrade was a breeze, the installer walked me through a few screens, rebooted from the DVD and presto-change-o, it rebooted into Leop­ard, with all my orig­i­nal set­tings and files right where I left them.

After that, I did the iMac, which was extremely quick, around 40–45 min­utes from start to fin­ish. I fol­lowed that up with the Mac­Book, which took a lit­tle over an hour.

As each sys­tem booted up into Leop­ard for the first time, I had the chance to explore the new sys­tem. The first thing you notice is the login screen has a new back­ground, the Leop­ard desk­top photo. That makes a nice change from the plain blue back­ground, though I know there’s a sim­ple Ter­mi­nal com­mand to change it.

The sys­tems all boot up faster under Leop­ard. I don’t really know how Apple do this, it was the same with Tiger. Appli­ca­tions also seem to launch faster and in gen­eral all three sys­tems seem slightly more responsive.

I like the new look, the change in folder icons, the slightly translu­cent menu bar and the redesigned dock, all work very well. The Stacks con­cept is also very cool; when you click on a folder in the dock, the con­tents are quickly revealed for easy access. Put your Appli­ca­tion folder on the dock, if you haven’t already and you’ll have a very quick, easy way to launch any App you have installed. It’s sim­ple and clever.

Speak­ing of sim­ple and clever, the new-look Finder win­dow is much bet­ter too. The side­bar has been reor­gan­ised and is much more use­ful, with group­ings that make explor­ing your hard drive and other com­put­ers on your net­work that much easier.

Cov­er­flow, a fea­ture added to iTunes last year, is now part of the Finder and it makes brows­ing through files a pain­less task. Even bet­ter is Quick­Look, which does exactly what it says on the tin — select an item, hit the space bar and you can see just what’s inside the file, whether it’s a text doc­u­ment, spread­sheet or video — it’s all preview-able!

By far the most use­ful new addi­tion to the Finder is the screen-sharing func­tion, some­thing I do quite a bit with my Mac Mini.

My Mini is con­nected to my LCD TV and I use it pri­mar­ily for media, music and video. When I want to down­load some­thing on Bit­Tor­rent, I nor­mally con­trol the Mini from my iMac via an open source pro­gram called “Chicken of the VNC”, but I don’t need to use that any more, because a bet­ter, ver­sion of it is now part of the OS.

The screen shar­ing is fast, faster than Chicken of the VNC, but by far the best thing is it can repro­duce my Mighty Mouse’s right click. I could see how this func­tion would be of use to peo­ple with fam­ily and friends who have Macs, you can effort­lessly con­trol their machine and show the per­son on the remote Mac how to do some­thing, with­out too much trou­ble. If you have more than one Mac on your home net­work, I’m sure you will find this a use­ful tool.

The other major change I’ve noticed while using my Mac Mini is the com­pletely redesigned Fron­tRow. The user inter­face now matches the Apple TV, it’s more respon­sive and reacts to the remote con­trol faster. It’s also organ­ised more log­i­cally and you have finer con­trol over media play­back. This is a very solid and wel­come upgrade, espe­cially for me because I use Fron­tRow so much.

Another wel­come change is the new Down­loads folder, which is a new cat­e­gory of Home Folder. It lives on the Dock and I’ve already set up my Bit­Tor­rent client to use it. It means never hav­ing to hunt around for a down­loaded file again, that’s a very good thing!

In gen­eral, all of my Apps are work­ing well, as is every­thing on all three com­put­ers and I’m lik­ing every­thing I’ve seen so far.

I’ve yet to get my head around Spaces, the vir­tual desk­top tool, though I can see how it would be use­ful to man­age and run groups of related appli­ca­tions. I need to exper­i­ment with it a bit.

My one dis­ap­point­ment so far is Time Machine, which I haven’t set up yet. I upgraded to the new Air­port Extreme last sum­mer, in antic­i­pa­tion of Leop­ard and Time Machine, because of the AirDisk func­tion. AirDisk is the abil­ity to attach a USB hard drive to the Extreme and have it func­tion as a net­work attached stor­age (NAS) drive and use it for Time Machine. Apple touted this func­tion right up until recently and then all ref­er­ences to it disappeared.

I’m guess­ing that the func­tion­al­ity is still not work­ing prop­erly and at some point, it will be added back to Leop­ard. I hope so, any­way. Until then, it will only work with dri­ves attached to each Mac, locally and that makes it just too involved and expen­sive. My plan was to have one cen­tral drive work­ing with Time Machine on all 3 Macs and I’m prob­a­bly going to wait for this fea­ture before set­ting up this great new auto­mated back-up sys­tem. It’s a minor dis­ap­point­ment and one I am sure they are work­ing hard to address.

If you’re con­sid­er­ing an upgrade to Leop­ard and any of the new fea­tures appeal to you, then go for it! It’s solid, sta­ble and adds lots of cool new fea­tures to your already very cool com­puter! Apple will con­tinue to tweak Leop­ard over the com­ing years, with bug fixes and new fea­tures, just as they have with Tiger.

Rumour has it that Tiger is due for an update as well, which means Apple will con­tinue to sup­port it for some time to come. That means there’s no rush to upgrade to Leop­ard, but there’s noth­ing stop­ping you from tak­ing that next step in Apple’s OS evo­lu­tion! Fol­low in the hippy’s foot­steps and you’ll be run­ning the most advanced oper­at­ing sys­tem in the world!

While it may appear to the casual reader, that I’ve missed 2 days of post­ing, already blow­ing my “100 posts in 100 days” chal­lenge, I actu­ally haven’t. The score so far is:

16 days
18 posts
(includ­ing this one!)

So you see, I’m really still ahead of the game.

I’m not going to drop the ball on this one; I’m going to keep to my word and pro­vide 100 posts within 100 days. Some days, I may post more than once, other days I may take a break, but the end result will be the same.

Am I ratio­nal­is­ing? Am I bend­ing the rules? Who’s to say? I’m the one that made the rules, which I think answers the ques­tion more than ade­quately. And I did men­tion cor­ners might have to be cut.

I’m going to post one or two more lit­tle bits today, as well, so I can stay ahead of the post count. The fur­ther ahead I get, the bet­ter. It’s all about gen­er­at­ing fresh con­tent, to keep all of you informed, enter­tained and amused.

Are you dig­ging it already? Is your RSS reader con­fused by all this hippy activ­ity? Get used to it! I might be minded to keep up the pace after the 100 days elapse. It could happen!

The fol­low­ing arti­cles pro­vide the foun­da­tion for my “cannabis truth series”. These reports are the sources and ref­er­ences I used when putting it together.

A few peo­ple emailed ask­ing if I could pull this list together — I can and I have. I hope you all find it use­ful. Please feel free to refer peo­ple to this page, or my “truth series”, espe­cially when you spot mis­re­port­ing or mis­in­for­ma­tion on the sub­ject in the press. You’re going to be see­ing lots of that in the near future, so please don’t hes­i­tate in point­ing out the truth to those who pub­lish unsub­stan­ti­ated lies!

Gov­ern­ment drugs pol­icy does not work, says report
by Alexan­dra Top­ping
Fri­day March 9, 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/drugs/Story/0„2029756,00.html

Tak­ing the harm out of drugs
by India Knight
March 11, 2007
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/india_knight/article1496833.ece

Cannabis use down since legal change
by Alan Travis, home affairs edi­tor
Fri­day Octo­ber 26 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2007/oct/26/drugsandalcohol.homeaffairs

Fewer young peo­ple using cannabis but more are turn­ing to cocaine
by Richard Ford, Home Cor­re­spon­dent
Octo­ber 26, 2007
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article2738569.ece

Cannabis use is ‘falling fast’ among young adults
By Nigel Mor­ris, Home Affairs Cor­re­spon­dent
26 Octo­ber 2007
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/crime/article3098871.ece

Drugs strat­egy debate ‘is a sham’
by Jamie Doward, home affairs edi­tor
Sun­day Octo­ber 21, 2007
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0„2195985,00.html

Think Again: Drugs
By Ethan Nadel­mann
September/October 2007
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3932&page=0

Legalise all drugs: chief con­sta­ble demands end to ‘immoral laws’
By Jonathan Brown and David Lang­ton
15 Octo­ber 2007
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article3061121.ece

For­mer pris­ons inspec­tor backs call to legalise drugs
By Nigel Mor­ris, Home Affairs Cor­re­spon­dent
16 Octo­ber 2007
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article3063804.ece

Skunk strength has dou­bled, stud­ies sug­gest
by Alan Travis, home affairs edi­tor
Mon­day Sep­tem­ber 17, 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/drugs/Story/0„2170798,00.html

Warn­ing issued over cannabis adul­ter­ated with glass beads
by James Ran­der­son, sci­ence cor­re­spon­dent
Fri­day Jan­u­ary 12, 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/drugs/Story/0„1988627,00.html

I smoked cannabis. I went mad. But life’s not that sim­ple
by Rufus May
29 July 2007
http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article2814693.ece

Experts dis­miss case for cannabis reclas­si­fi­ca­tion
by David Batty and agen­cies
Fri­day July 27, 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/drugs/Story/0„2136450,00.html

Debunked: politi­cians’ excuse that cannabis has become stronger
By Jeremy Lau­rance, Health Edi­tor
21 July 2007
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article2788634.ece

Reefer Mad­ness Revis­ited
by Fran­cis Sedge­more
11 June 2007
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/francis_sedgemore/2007/06/reefer_madness_revisited.html

Cherry pick­ing data to prove a point about cannabis
by Ben Goldacre
Sat­ur­day March 24, 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0„2041711,00.html

As well as relay­ing my own per­sonal expe­ri­ences with cannabis, I’ve been keep­ing track of the truth and the lies sur­round­ing my favourite plant for quite a while now. I thought it would a good time to put links to some of my more rel­e­vant posts together on one page. I did some­thing sim­i­lar, but with a more lim­ited scope a cou­ple of months ago, and I left quite a few older entries out.

I’ll aim to update this list­ing again, in the future, as I add more related content.

So, with­out fur­ther delay, here is “the northlon­don­hippy cannabis truth series”:

A brief his­tory of the hippy and cannabis — 29 June 2006

“Dri­ven by moral panic” — 9 March 2007

Don’t just take my word for it — 11 March 2007

Class C = Sig­nif­i­cant Fall in Cannabis Use — 26 Octo­ber 2007

Sci­ence con­fuses me — 25 Octo­ber 2007

Act­ing with­out think­ing, a pol­icy with­out foun­da­tion — 21 Octo­ber 2007

The ratio­nal voices are get­ting louder, but is any­one in power lis­ten­ing? — 16 Octo­ber 2007

Find­ing truth amongst the lies — 24 Sep­tem­ber 2007

Enlist­ing in the bat­tle over cannabis — 30 July 2007

Demand and sup­ply — another angle on the sta­tus of cannabis — 30 July 2007

It’s not as black and white as they would have you believe — 30 July 2007

But what do real experts say about reclas­si­fy­ing cannabis — 30 July 2007

That Lancet cannabis study, the Daily Mail and the truth — 30 July 2007

Don’t just take my word for it (again) — 30 July 2007

The northlon­don­hippy offers to be the voice of rea­son, truth, san­ity and expe­ri­ence regard­ing cannabis — 30 July 2007

The GUARDIAN of truth — 12 June 2007

False hys­te­ria sells — 27 March 2007

A home­grown har­vest — 13 March 2007

Brave Peo­ple — 27 Octo­ber 2007

Recently, I’ve been fol­low­ing a par­tic­u­lar ongo­ing bat­tle against cannabis.

This fight is tak­ing place right now, between some very brave peo­ple who are run­ning a cannabis cafe in Sus­sex and the police.

Here’s a report from the local news­pa­per, cov­er­ing the case, which will give you a bit of back­ground as well as a snap­shot of where things stand today:
http://www.theargus.co.uk/search/display.var.1777072.0.cannabis_cafe_puts_up_the_barricades.php
=========================================
Cannabis cafe’ puts up the barricades

The down­grad­ing of cannabis to a class C drug has led to a series of cannabis cafés open­ing across Sus­sex. Police have faced an uphill bat­tle try­ing to close these ille­gal premises.

(22nd Octo­ber 2007)
==================================

Have you ever read any­thing more ludi­crous? You would think they were stag­ing an assault against an Al Qaeda cell, primed and ready to attack a city cen­tre shop­ping dis­trict in the run up to xmas!

Do the police really have the time and bud­get to be tar­get­ing a peace­ful, non-violent group of old ston­ers in such an over-the-top and unjus­ti­fi­ably harsh manner?

The peo­ple are con­tin­u­ing to oper­ate this cafe are extremely brave and coura­geous, for they are tak­ing direct action to protest an unfair and unjust law, which crim­i­nalises decent, hon­est, oth­er­wise law abid­ing folks for noth­ing more than smok­ing a bit of dope!

The police are show­ing no signs of let­ting up the pres­sure, as the follow-up arti­cle in another local paper, shows. You can check it out RIGHT HERE and vote in their online poll of whether the police should con­tinue to per­se­cute these good people.

As of this writ­ing, 92% of peo­ple respond­ing to the poll, do NOT want the police to con­tinue with this waste­ful use of their resources. Or as one of the many peo­ple who com­mented on the arti­cle online points out:

“Inter­est­ing that the police can spend thou­sands on har­rass­ing a few old ston­ers, but were unable to attend when my car had its’ win­dows smashed by van­dals on Tues­day. It’s this low-level anti­so­cial crime that is the prob­lem, not spliff smok­ers lis­ten­ing to Pink Floyd…”

Think about it, would you rather have the police harass­ing a group of peo­ple sit­ting inside a cafe, smok­ing a bit of weed, or would you pre­fer they go after gen­uine crim­i­nals who might mug your granny for her pen­sion money, or break into your car to steal your stereo?

I think the answer to that is so fuck­ing obvi­ous that it gives me a headache!

Most of the police offi­cers I’ve spo­ken to per­son­ally would like to see cannabis decrim­i­nalised or legalised, because they know their time would be bet­ter spent tack­ling real crimes. Why do we dis­re­spect our police forces so much by ask­ing them to waste their valu­able time and resources on some­thing so utterly pointless?

Trac­tors for cannabis raids? Are tanks and F-16’s going to be next? Where does it stop?

I don’t know where, but I do know when. As soon as humanly pos­si­ble, please!

My “100 post in 100 days chal­lenge” seems to be work­ing out for me so far and for you too, my beloved hip­py­fans. Just check out all the new content!

Forc­ing myself to get back into the very good habit of post­ing at least once a day is help­ing to focus my mind and improve my writ­ing. I’ve been very slack of late and my daily out­put has suf­fered as a result of this. I don’t just mean here on the hippy, but with other things I’ve been work­ing on too.

Recently I asked, is this still a blog? With new found par­tic­i­pa­tion on my part, does that mean my site is becom­ing a blog again?

I think that would depend upon your def­i­n­i­tion of a blog, or weblog to give it the full title.

I rarely tell you what I’ve had for lunch, which in my mind is a pre­req­ui­site com­po­nent of any blog, so I’ve already failed my first test. In gen­eral, this site has evolved into far less of a diary of my life, and is more of a forum to express my views on what­ever par­tic­u­lar sub­ject (or lack thereof) takes my fancy.

Post­ing every day also doesn’t jus­tify call­ing this a blog, as some blog­gers post dozens of times a day, oth­ers post spo­rad­i­cally and oth­ers still don’t post at all. Remem­ber ghost blogs?

I sup­pose the one thing that really decides if this site is a blog or not is whether I wish to call it one. I sup­pose it makes life eas­ier for every­one to think of me as a blog­ger and this site as a blog. Oth­er­wise, I could end up leav­ing myself devoid of descrip­tion. If I’m not a blog­ger, what am I in the generic sense?

I’m not the web­mas­ter here, I don’t actu­ally admin­is­ter my own site, I mainly pro­vide cre­ative direc­tion and con­tent. I didn’t design the lay­out, the graph­ics, I didn’t even choose the Word­Press soft­ware that is the tech­ni­cal frame­work we use here.

If I was to choose a title for myself; one that actu­ally expresses what I’m presently doing here, I would prob­a­bly opt for “inter­net colum­nist”. It doesn’t exactly trip pleas­ingly off the tongue, though and there is no obvi­ous short­en­ing of it to “net­nist” or “net­col” either. Per­haps I defy description?

It wouldn’t be the first time!

Just as I am a mis­fit in the real world, a square peg for an end­less suc­ces­sion of round holes, I’m exactly the same in my online incar­na­tion. Maybe, I’m what­ever I want to be that day, or only for the par­tic­u­lar post I’m writing.

I might pop up one day and tell you what I’ve had for lunch. I might review a film or a TV show, or talk about my love of elec­tron­ics and gad­gets, or rec­om­mend some music (which I haven’t done in ages!) or most likely, I might tell you again why legal­is­ing drugs makes sense. I might tell you anything!

The one thing you can be cer­tain of is that what­ever I’m writ­ing about, I’ll tell the truth about it to the best of my abil­ity, I’ll be hon­est about myself and the world around me. I’ve been doing that since day one and I don’t intend to change that now!

Some­times, this blog just writes itself and the fol­low­ing entry is ripped straight off the front page of today’s Guardian newspaper.

The head­line reads “Cannabis use down since legal change” and it was writ­ten by their Home Affairs Edi­tor, Alan Travis, based on the lat­est report by the British Crime Sur­vey. Mr. Travis has con­tin­ued to pro­vide fair, bal­anced and respon­si­ble cov­er­age of this very impor­tant issue. That can’t be easy in the cur­rent cli­mate of fear and false infor­ma­tion and I would like to pub­licly thank him for that. Please take the time to read HIS REPORT.

A few key quotes:

1) “Gor­don Brown’s plans to tighten the law on cannabis by increas­ing the penal­ties for pos­ses­sion suf­fered a fresh blow yes­ter­day as the lat­est offi­cial fig­ures showed the deci­sion to down­grade the drug had been fol­lowed by a sig­nif­i­cant fall in its use.

British Crime Sur­vey sta­tis­tics showed that the pro­por­tion of 16– to 24-year-olds using cannabis slumped from 28% a decade ago to 21% now, with its declin­ing pop­u­lar­ity accel­er­at­ing after the deci­sion to down­grade the drug to class C was announced in Jan­u­ary 2004.”

2) “…the BCS fig­ures pub­lished yes­ter­day showed that cannabis is begin­ning to lose its allure with teenagers. The pro­por­tion of fre­quent users in the 16–24 age group, who were using the drug more than once a month, fell from 12% to 8% in the past four years.”

3) “The decline in cannabis con­sump­tion prompted a call from the inde­pen­dent UK Drugs Pol­icy Com­mis­sion to take deci­sions about drug clas­si­fi­ca­tion out of the hands of min­is­ters. Dame Ruth Runci­man, the commission’s chief, said: “We do not believe the cred­i­bil­ity of the cur­rent sys­tem or the clar­ity of mes­sage has been enhanced when, in just the space of seven years, five home sec­re­taries have sought one way or another to address the clas­si­fi­ca­tion of cannabis.”

Good pol­i­cy­mak­ing had been over­shad­owed by “pol­i­tick­ing”, and much of the con­fu­sion among pub­lic and politi­cians stemmed from mis­un­der­stand­ings about the clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tem. The com­mis­sion also says there is no evi­dence a drug’s clas­si­fi­ca­tion deterred use, and sug­gested that instead of tin­ker­ing the whole clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tem should be placed out­side the direct con­trol of politicians.”

4) “Claims that “super­skunk”,.. (is) dom­i­nant were also under­mined by police and cus­toms seizure fig­ures.… (with skunk mak­ing up) less than one-third of the (UK) market.”

The sig­nif­i­cance of this report can­not be under­es­ti­mated. It con­tra­dicts absolutely every lie com­ing from the gov­ern­ment on their jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for pos­si­ble reclas­si­fi­ca­tion of cannabis. It pisses all over much of the bull­shit we’ve been read­ing the news­pa­pers over the last few months too.

I think Dame Runci­man is onto some­thing when she says the deci­sion should be taken away from min­is­ters. She is so right. Drug use is mainly a health issue, and should not be con­fused with legal or moral arguments.

The Guardian wasn’t the only news­pa­per to cover this story, as you can see for your­self in The Times and the Inde­pen­dent. The truth always finds a way!

I’m look­ing for­ward to this Sunday’s “Inde­pen­dent on Sun­day”, to see how they can spin this one into some silly-assed shite.

Yes, IoS, you print a hell of a lot of silly-assed shite when it comes to my beloved cannabis and I am really get­ting bored with it. I’m guess­ing a senior edi­tor there must have a teenage son or daugh­ter who got into trou­ble and decided it was eas­ier to blame weed, then take responsibility.

The IoS cam­paign smacks of per­sonal inter­est, bor­der­ing on vendetta. As jour­nal­ists, you’re sup­posed to be the dis­pas­sion­ate observers, you’re not meant to fur­ther your per­sonal agenda with lie after lie. I have an agenda as too, but I back it up with the truth and per­sonal expe­ri­ence and am try­ing to do some gen­uine good. If the IoS con­tin­ues like this, they will be exposed and no one will trust any­thing else they publish.

Is the rep­u­ta­tion of your news­pa­per worth back­ing los­ing horse? The hypocrisy you’re show­ing will do you no favours. You can’t con­tinue to ignore the hard facts and it would be much bet­ter for you to come out now with an edi­to­r­ial, explain­ing you got it wrong and revert back to your pre­vi­ous and long run­ning cam­paign to legalise weed! We’d for­give you if you did!

I don’t see how any­one can ignore these hard facts and reli­able sta­tis­tics, but I’m sure our gov­ern­ment will find a way. If they can avoid the truth to jus­tify the war in Iraq, it will be a piece of piss to do the same thing with weed. Both of those things make this hippy very sad.

I get con­fused, some­times, by all the dif­fer­ent, con­flict­ing bits of infor­ma­tion offered to me on any given day.

I try to dis­re­gard as much of it as I can, but when it comes to the bat­tle over cannabis, my ears prick up, which is markedly bet­ter than a prick up your ear.

The cur­rent lies being ped­dled about weed must be con­fus­ing to a lot of folks out there. The pow­ers that be are not-so-subtly work­ing hard to shift pub­lic per­cep­tion. They want you to think mar­i­juana is the devil’s weed; that it will turn your chil­dren in psy­chotic killers who are only con­cerned with where their next fix of dope is com­ing from.

This por­trayal couldn’t be any fur­ther from the truth if they tried. Oh wait, they are try­ing and they are not in remote prox­im­ity of even a reflec­tion in a pud­dle of piss of truth.

Yet, the news­pa­per head­lines scream with out­ra­geous anger and hyper­bole over the dan­gers of cannabis.

Head­lines can be wrong. Fre­quently, they are. It’s eas­ier to par­rot some make believe fact, if that fic­ti­tious fact cre­ates fear and moral indignation.

Here’s some­thing you won’t be read­ing in any respectable news­pa­per, any time soon. A recent study car­ried out by a respected Dutch uni­ver­sity, com­pared the teenage brains via MRI scans of two groups of teenagers; group A were reg­u­lar weed smok­ers, group B never touched the stuff.

Guess what? There was no dis­cernible dif­fer­ence in the results, between the two groups. Or as it says in the head­line of the arti­cle I’m quot­ing, “Cannabis not dan­ger­ous for young people”.

Could you imag­ine the front page of the Daily Mail or the Inde­pen­dent on Sun­day splash­ing the same head­line across their front page? Nei­ther can I, but a hippy can dream and this hippy does. Far too much.

I’m not really a hippy, but I do play one on the internet.

That con­fes­sion shouldn’t be a huge sur­prise to you, as I’ve said on more than one occa­sion on this very blog that I’m not an actual hippy.

I’m a gen­uine cap­i­tal­ist, not like the peo­ple who run the coun­try. I believe that mar­ket forces should dic­tate what the mar­ket sells; demand should reg­u­late sup­ply. That is one of my biggest argu­ments for legal­is­ing drugs. Peo­ple want them and the black mar­ket steps in where the con­trolled mar­ket fails.

If you’re anti-legalisation, then you’re not a real cap­i­tal­ist and I can’t take you seri­ously over any eco­nomic issue. Are you lis­ten­ing Mr. Brown? And you Tory twats? I hope you all wrote that down!

Gen­uine hip­pies don’t believe in sur­vival of the fittest, they believe in a world where we all help one and other. All you have to do is step out­side your front door for 30 sec­onds and you’ll see how unhippy-like the world truly is in that regard. Peo­ple are cunts and they treat each other like cunts. That, my friends, is a sure thing.

I’m over-generalising, but you get the idea. The more self­ish you are, the bet­ter your chances of sur­vival are. If you put your­self ahead of every­one else, you’re prob­a­bly going to come out on top. Of course, there are excep­tions to this rule as well.

Think about your boss, or bosses in gen­eral. They all tend to share a com­mon belief that they are bet­ter than the peo­ple work­ing below them. This belief doesn’t come from hav­ing the more senior role, I’m sure they all believed they were supe­rior prior to that. If any­thing, that innate belief in supe­ri­or­ity is what got them the job in the first place. But reach­ing that posi­tion of power can come with a price, and the price can be dis­missal from a hot­shot, high pay­ing gig.

I’m not self­ish enough, but then I don’t claim to be the fittest and wor­thy of sur­vival. I wouldn’t last 2 min­utes in the real jun­gle, I don’t have that killer instinct, much as I pre­tend I do. I’m too pseudo-philosophical and too much of a pseudo-intellectual to care about any­thing enough to really fight for it. I’d be chewed up, swal­lowed down and shat out by a big­ger, meaner, scarier ani­mal than me.

And that would be OK. If you believe in the laws of the jun­gle, then you have to accept your fate. I accept mine every day the good lord above sees fit to let me wake up and endure another day.

Like I believe in “the good lord above”! You didn’t buy that shit, did you? There is no god, there’s only hip­pies and occa­sion­ally, once in a gen­er­a­tion, there are hip­py­gods. I am that hip­py­god and have the busi­ness cards to prove it.

Except, I’m not really a hippy. I don’t even own a pair of san­dals, never mind love beads.

What are “love beads” any­way? Could a real hippy let me know? Pre­ferrably one that was older than 6 when the 70s started, I was 6 when 1970 started and I just don’t know what they are.

I bet these peo­ple know. I mean, the peo­ple in THIS REPORT from today’s Inde­pen­dent, which checks up on some for­mer hip­pies to see if they are still liv­ing the dream.

I guess the Indy left me out of that list because they think I am cur­rently a hippy and they prob­a­bly already know I was 6 when the 60’s ended. It still would have been nice for them to phone me, you know, just to say “hi”.

I know you guys at the Indy are com­ing here, hang­ing out, read­ing my shit. I men­tion your rag too much for you not too. I don’t mind if you sniff around my nether regions a bit. I kinda like it, actu­ally, but usu­ally I expect a bit of din­ner or a drink before I let some­one do that sort of thing to me.

Don’t worry, I still dig your Monday-Saturday edi­tions, but you really need to sort those dorks at the IoS out. Their lies, exag­ger­a­tions and mixed mes­sages on cannabis are ludi­crous, hurt­ful and unhelp­ful and they should cease imme­di­ately. You know it makes sense!

Early on in my career as the northlon­don­hippy, I cre­ated a sim­ple test to see if I was a bad per­son or not. I stum­bled upon it while search­ing for some­thing else recently and I thought it was worth trot­ting it out for you again.

I mean, think about it…what are the chances of all of you stum­bling upon it inde­pen­dently. Zero! I’ve got too much con­tent span­ning too many years for any­one to dis­cover one par­tic­u­lar thing I wrote nearly three years ago!

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(orig­i­nally posted 22nd Jan­u­ary 2005)

I scored an “8″, which makes me a very bad boy indeed. All I need to do is con­struct a false idol and mur­der some­one and I’d have a per­fect score. Note to hippy: Must try harder!
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Wasn’t that fun? Are you as bad as this hippy?

Best if all, it just saved me from hav­ing to come up with some­thing fresh and new today, while still main­tain­ing my “100 posts in 100 days” riga­ma­role. I’ve been awake for 27 con­sec­u­tive hours, I think I’ve earned a lit­tle bit of slack.

Good­night, god bless, drive safely and don’t for­get to tip the wait-staff!