BANGKOK, Thailand -- Thailand has built what's described as the
biggest industrial-scale medical marijuana facility in Southeast Asia
with 12,000 plants, and will soon allow everyone to grow six cannabis
plants "in their back gardens like any other herb."

Recreational use remains illegal with punishments including
imprisonment. Enthusiasts hope the disappearing resistance to
marijuana's medical use will result in looser laws for public
enjoyment and business profits.

Those changes appear to be gaining momentum.

Government officials on September 2  attended a ceremony in northern
Thailand's Chiang Mai where Maejo University researchers planted
12,000 new marijuana sprouts.

The promising shoots are inside a newly built 32,722-square-foot
(3,040-square-meter) greenhouse with controls for temperature,
moisture and light.

Seeds for the 12,000 plants were provided by the government's
Department of Medical Service.

Officials expect the plants will produce medical-grade cannabis

There is an existential threat to all democracies worldwide, a dark corruption, and sinister plot to rip the fundamental rights and duties of a developed civilization from the hands of the most vulnerable. The vicious beast of American exceptionalism (or exclusionism) has been caught in the hen-house of our governance. Evidence of it's racist, elitist, and over-entitled claw-mark's are all over our metaphorical "collective consensus;" our county-level ballot boxes.

An historic Friday the 13th yellow harvest moon shining a light on an outdoor Jack White show, his Raconteurs going off like Roman candles for the better part of two hours – could there be any summer's night of musical intensity more spectacularly supernatural?

Maybe a Def Leppard/Whitesnake/Blackstone Cherry return-of-the-wish-they-were-still-dead tour, for sure. Or maybe not.

Just kidding, kids. Thus it was at a heavily attended PromoWest amphitheater one warm and humid evening last month, the moon at its advertised farthest-away apogee in a dozen years (a minimoon they call it as opposed to a supermoon which is closest).

Nothing mini about the music that night, strictly super. But I think the infamous numeral of bad luck; the rare cosmic distance between earth and luna; and Jack White's personal nuclear energy made the night one very special bunch of loose ends coming together and sparking maniacally like the devil's lightning.

Exciting as hell!

Good timing. The New York Times just published an op-ed called “Why Republicans Play Dirty.” Lately, the better adjective would be “filthy” if you think of Trump holding up military money to the Ukraine while trying to get the Ukrainians to do a black bag surveillance job on Joe Biden and his son. Or, the ritualistic – like the running of the bulls in Spain – stripping of Ohio’s voter rolls.

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose trampled democracy in Ohio when he removed 235,000 of the state’s voters from voting rolls for not voting in two previous federal elections. Back in January this year he purged 250,000 voters. Sadly, the Free Press previously reported LaRose had promised not to purge.

Monday, September 30, 2019, 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM