Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.
P. J. O’Rourke, as quoted in Busted : Stone Cowboys, Narco-lords, and Washington’s War on Drugs (2002), edited by Mike Gray.
On November 17, 1777, the Articles of Confederation were submitted to the states for ratification.
On that date in 1800, the United States Congress held its first session in Washington, D.C.
On November 16, 1532, Francisco Pizarro and his men captured Inca Emperor Atahualpa at the Battle of Cajamarca.
In 1811 on this date, John Bright (pictured above), English academic and politician, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, was born. Bright (d. 1889), famously worked with Richard Cobden against the Corn Laws (repealed in 1846) as well as for the Cobden–Chevalier Treaty of 1860, which ushered in freer trade and closer interdependence between Britain and France.
Those who seek education in the paths of duty are always deceived by the illusion that power in the hands of friends is an advantage to them. As far as Adams could teach experience, he was bound to warn them that he had found it an invariable disaster. Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had been always tragic, chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards.
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907).
On November 15, 1777, the Continental Congress approved the Articles of Confederation — after 16 months of deliberation.
No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790).
English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies.
Roy Blount, Jr., Alphabet Juice (2008), p. 93.
On November 14, 1918, Czechoslovakia became a republic.
Born on the same date 29 years later, American writer P. J. O’Rourke.
There is a heartfelt and near-universal refusal to understand the basic economic principles behind the creation of wealth.
P. J. O’Rourke, Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics (1998), p. 235.
“You start out not wanting to poison the outcome, and you end by poisoning your soul.” But there is a way out.
Click on over to Townhall.com, for one of the more interesting stories-behind-the-story of last week’s election upset. And then come back here, for more information and perspective: