I was asked to write an article about “420.” Apropos, I guess, considering my name. So I began conceptualizing the piece. Perhaps a few interesting innuendos and stoner stories peppered with a traipse through time. As light-hearted as 420 seems to be, there are also uneasy overtones to this holiday of the high. Where to begin.

How about at the beginning. The vaunted Wikipedia confirms that “four-twenty” was coined at San Rafael High School forty-five years ago as clandestine code used by some students to denote a specified time and place for consuming cannabis – 4:20 pm in the shadow of Louis Pasteur. The term morphed to mean a need to find weed. Mushrooming through the local Grateful Dead culture, 420 landed in the hands of High Times’ Steve Bloom in the 1990s, pollinating globally through one of cannabis culture’s most time-honored magazines.

So with the approach of this hempy holiday, a happy 420 to you!

There are two things we all need to know about the upcoming 2016 election:

1. Millions of likely Democratic voters have already been stripped from the voter rolls in critical states like Ohio.  The key reporting on this has been done by the great Greg Palast (www.gregpalast.com), who has shown a computer program coordinated by the Republican Secretary of State of Kansas is being used in some two dozen states to steal from a substantial percentage of the citizenry their right to vote.  The raw numbers are high enough they could have a significant impact on the presidential, US Senate, House and many other elections this fall.  

Orphan struggles to survive in mesmerizing ‘Jungle Book’

The best movie I’ve seen so far this year is about a boy who was raised by wolves. It may also be the most harrowing movie of the year to date.

Disney’s The Jungle Book tells the story of Mowgli (Neel Sethi), who lives with the wolf pack that took him in as an infant. Though he clearly doesn’t fit in with the other “cubs,” he’s loved and protected by adopted mother Raksha (Lupita Nyong’o) and the rest of the clan. He’s also watched over by Bagheera (Ben Kingsley), the stern panther who brought the orphaned child to the wolves in the first place.

Mowgli’s odd but comfortable existence is upset during a dry spell that brings the human-hating tiger Shere Khan (Idris Elba) to the local watering hole. Honoring the truce that’s enforced when the water level is low, Shere Khan spares the boy’s life but claims the right to kill him at a later date—or to take revenge on the rest of the wolf pack if he’s denied this privilege.

No matter how long I debunk and refute and mock and condemn arguments for wars, I continue over and over again to conclude that I'm still giving advocates for war too much credit. How ever little I take seriously as rational ideas the notions that U.S. wars can be defensive or humanitarian or peace-keeping, it's always too much. Wars' supporters, in large part, do not themselves actually hold such beliefs. Rather they have a lust for war that must be examined outside of any question of utilitarian impact.

I'm referring here to the mental processes of both top officials deciding to wage war, and ordinary members of the U.S. public expressing their approval. Of course, the two are not identical. Motives of profit are hushed up, while phony motives such as waging wars in order to "support the troops" are manufactured for public consumption but never ever mentioned in the private emails of war makers. Nonetheless, there is great overlap in the thinking of all members of a culture, including the thinking of cynical politicians in a corrupt regime, and there are points on which virtually all politicians, from best to worst, agree without giving the matter any thought.