Been too busy

And not feeling all that well. Sorry. Still thinking; will write it out soon.

Possible topics!

1. Punk culture relies on powerlessness. It's self-defeating. What happens when punks can actually accomplish something or manage to build real lives? Suddenly they're not punk any more? But my values haven't changed; what gives? I know it's cliche to say that punk requires you to be young, poor, and angry, but is that really true? I think about these things.
2. Medication and culture. People talk about a nation of Prozac zombies, and insist that "for thousands of years we got by without brain meds. Why is everyone depressed now?" Well, you know what? For thousands of years we got by without antibiotics and contraceptives, too.
   Anyone with the least real grounding in evolutionary biology will tell you that evolved organisms are designed imperfectly; "suboptimal design" is one of the key supporting arguments in favor of biological evolution, in fact. We are emphatically not perfectly suited to our environment. We are a makeshift job, adapting old parts to new tasks as well as can be managed by random repurposing until something works.
   And on top of that, we're not even in our environment any more! Our environment is an African savannah with low, broad-branched trees! We have created an artificial world that suits some of our needs, mostly the physical ones, without anywhere near the time needed to biologically adapt to it.
   Is it any wonder it helps a lot of us out to tweak old, outdated brain chemistry a little? Consider it a software patch to allow an old, old program to run in a new operating system. We're not tinkering with a system that's perfect if left alone and kept from getting unbalanced; we're simply trying to keep a hodgepodge assemblage of random parts working smoothly. We're not deviating from the "correct" blueprint of human design and operations because there isn't one.
   
   Science: it works, bitches!
   
   
3. Apparently Rick Steves, the travel guy from the long-running European travel show on PBS, was the keynote speaker at Hempfest up here, and is a chair member of NORML. Who knew? He's a really cool, really, well, normal guy. He says he's seen what good marijuana laws can do for a country. I believe him.
   I'm not a user myself, but you know what? It's about time we pulled out heads out of our asses about cannabis here in the United States. It's a gateway drug, sure, but you know why? Because we tell people that they might as well be smoking crack. If our government assures them of that, well, why wouldn't they?