Jim,

I’ve discovered over the years that sometimes the endnotes can be more enlightening than the text of a book.

I will try not to take your asperions on drunks personally.

I emphatically agree on cannabis prohibition. The fact that 700,000+ people a year are arrested for marijuana violations is one of the biggest farces in contemporary America.

I don’t abstain from direct involvement in the political system - I sometimes vote, though I rarely expect it to do any good. A Washington Post columnist bloviated today:

“When you get past the silliness of candidates’ TV ads and the corruption of how we pay for campaigns, voting is one of the most powerful and emotional acts in our lives.”

What a heap of crap.

I don’t really believe there is a political solution to our mess, it’s a social problem. People have to learn to live peacefully with one another before we can expect the government to stop making war.

My approach however non-conventional it may seem is to focus on the ending of cannabis prohibition, which has a profound social effect in my own observations. Alcohol has certain effects on people which seem to be associated with a level of increased violence in some cases, as when drunken men beat their wives, however much of a stereotype may seen. I’ve never been drawn to violence from drink, and neither perhaps have most people, but on the whole the social impact seems to be a coursening. Alcohol cannot and should not be prohibited but cannabis should be an alternative for adults.

I could write a lot more about the medical and spiritual aspects of what I advocate but I don’t want to hijack your blog. That’s why I have my own.

H.L. Mencken said, “One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms.” Once people get in the habit of laughing at their rulers and the rulers’ media bootlickers, then the tide can be turned.

On the Manichean standard for means - this prejudice against using evil to multiply good could prevent you from ever working on Capitol Hill or the White House.

I’m on the side of peace and against war. Note how the warmongers hate the peace activists more than they even hate their officially proclaimed enemies. They hate us because they know that we are the real opposition to their power.

I don’t hate them in return, but I will mock sometimes because it is important to wake people up and it’s a good way to get people who are on the fence to realize how wrong it is.

You made good points - the Manichean issue is something which I have mused on and wrestled with for many years. 

I absolutely, positively have no objection to anyone reading my books - but it’s fine to offer different perspectives without plowing through either the text or the bucket of endnotes.

The Manichean slant is the key. I have been fascinated to see how easily invoking ‘good vs. evil’ can turn listeners’ minds into mush.

I am amazed to see how rarely the media examines the basic terms - such as the US official definition of terrorism.

And that is a subject which most op-ed editors welcome articles upon about as much as they would welcome articles on [[IT'S LATE AT NIGHT - INSERT THE PERFECT ANALOGY HERE]]

People have been exposed to a rising numbers of factoids for centuries. Thoreau groused mightily about newspapers.

But I am struck that it is intellectuals who often seem to have among the greatest difficulties in keeping perspective.

That’s why Jim’s work is disliked by both sides of the political divide. Jim corrals the smallest of footnoted details of government incompetence and malfeasance and puts them in the context of historical perspective. That’s a death wish for any mainstream reporter, entertainer, or mainstream politician. It’s just not the ‘American Way’!

I’m not saying it’s wrong, in fact I think you have a really good point. But it’s more a consequence, I think, of people having far too many details to keep track of in modern society. Before we had radio and television, most news was local, with the occasional national story. National stories were big stories because they had to be to merit mention in the local papers.

Now in this era of 24 hour national news without local interruption, there is still no sense in covering the finer details because, when there isn’t a big story there are an uncountable number of smaller ones.

There isn’t a solution if you look at it as a problem of journalistic behavior. The nature of the medium determines the quality of its message. Didn’t McLuhan observe something similar?

What we can do, and both you and I are doing it, is present alternative narratives on a different medium. Keep on blogging, it may not be as respectable as writing books, but you reach a potentially greater audience with a timely message that everyone participates in critiquing and modifying. This is a democratic medium.