Brandon

What lectures do you have to trade? I have both Peikoff's Phil of Education, 27 hours of vintage brilliance, and the Consciousness as Identification by Binswanger, as well as over a dozen other from Peikoff, Lisa Van Damme, Pat Corvini, David Harriman, and others. -Brandon

Places of Learning By Brandon Cropper Copyright 2006 Colleges and universities are places of learning. In it four years now, a degree I am earning. Or that at least is the plan that is offered, When through many courses I’ve duly suffered. In classes taught by wise professors, I’ll grow a beautiful plume of feathers. Yet I perceive my feathers are pluck’d; And from the nest I’ll soon be shook. For things beamed at me by erudite teachers, Require one’s faith, and are more fit for preachers. They say my reality is made by perception, Built by my mind - the perfect deception. They tell me the world is all an illusion, And I wonder how they escape the confusion. In Quantum Mechanics this thought is treasured: A thing isn’t real until its been measured. But if this is so, which measurements show it? If something’s unreal, how could anyone know it? (Einstein said subatomic cause and effect, Not understood now, may be someday yet.) Picasso they say revolutionized art, But I think his paintings don’t look very smart. As painterly genius they offer us Pollock, Who, drunk, smears his canvas in meaningless frollick. ee cummings they offer as new poetry, But it has no rhyme or rhythm or beat. They give us James Joyce who penned Ulysses, And tell us this nonsense is full of deep mysteries. A mystery is right, but they haven’t a hint; The question is how did this crap get to print? They speak of the poor, downtrodden have-nots, And say government healthcare is spotty in spots. Western doctors don’t know the real human needs, Alternative medicine they proffer - indeed! Evolution, they say, hasn’t answered all questions; Intelligent Design is the offered succession. And these are the learned men of the time? The feast of unreason! - on nonsense they dine. God help us all to escape a Dark Ages - In every field we need newborn sages. As an atheist I know to not kneel and pray; A rebirth of reason must bring back the day. And so, my professors, I bid you adieu; I’ll drop out of college and start my own school. The End

The following essayspeaks for itself, but I'll just preface: I'm new to this forum and this is my first post. I started chatting on a Libertarian Forum a few weeks ago and quickly found that even the supposedly pro-freedom Libertarians are suckers for all the fallacies that plague the "common" people, that is non-Objectivists. So here I am, looking for a rational groupd with which to discuss stuff and things. BTW, the essay is Copyrighted, please note. An Essay on Illegal Drugs By Brandon Cropper Theme: The illegalization of drugs creates more problems than it solves. Many people say the War on Drugs is an abject failure. With over a million people in jail, drug use is as widespread as it has ever been. If the lives ruined by imprisonment and being marked for life as a felon are counted as casualties, the War on Drugs has had as many casualties as all other wars in American history COMBINED. (Civil War: 500,000, WWI: 120,000, WWII: 300,000, Korea: 57,000, Vietnam: 37,000, total: 1,014,000.) It is my purpose in this essay to show that the government prohibition of drugs causes many more problems than it solves. But this should be kept in mind by the reader: the following examples and arguments are the practical end of the War on Drugs. On the theoretical end it is unjustifiable for the government to regulate drugs because the government exists in order to protect individual rights. Protecting citizens from their own self-destructive behavior is beyond the province of a government of justice, and enters the province of a government of tyrannical and coercive nature. The rights to life, liberty and property alone justify the argument that the government has no business prohibiting drugs. However, many pragmatic Americans today believe that if the government can do some good in society by controlling drugs, it is justified in violating our rights and liberties. This essay is intended to show that government control of drugs does only harm to society. Any educated adult is familiar with the law of supply and demand. It is an elementary truth that for a given commodity in demand, when its supply diminishes, the price goes up. When its supply is copious and plentiful, the price will fall. This basic economic fact has an insidious effect in the Drug Wars: when the government “succeeds” in capturing a shipment, or reducing the supply of drugs, the price goes up. This increases incentive for people to commit ever more dastardly crimes to obtain the drugs which are diminished in quantity but not diminished in demand. As drugs become more expensive, possession of them becomes an ever-greater status symbol. The crime associated with obtaining and distributing drugs is blamed for as much as 75% or more of the American crime rate. That is, if drugs were legal our crime rate would fall by up to 75%! This is often countered with the argument that if drugs were legal and widely available, crime would be even more rampant because “everyone would be high all the time.” Such an argument reveals two things: a blatant ignorance of history, because anyone who knows about Prohibition knows it caused crime to skyrocket, not fall; and a belief that our society is under a permanent, violent siege, an evil scourge of drug use, the effects of which our wise government is so benevolently mitigating. The exact point here is that government control of drugs increases their use and damage. These facts are horrifying in themselves, but a closer look at the nature of crime created by drugs prohibition reveals an even more tragic side of the story. A great deal of crime today goes unreported because of the involvement of drugs. For example, a drug dealer may have his house broken into and ransacked by people looking for drugs. The break-in will likely not be reported because of the dealer’s distaste for officers of the law, whose primary goal is to send him to prison. The robbers are well aware of this fact, and use it to their advantage, stealing anything of value from cd’s to cash to guns to jewelry and so on. The drug dealer who has sustained the loss gets little sympathy from the public, and the police, ostensibly in existence to protect citizen’s rights, cannot be called to the scene for the very reason that they would quickly arrest (violate) the drug dealer. Few people would take such injustice sitting down, and a person inured to the effects of extralegal justice would be likely to seek revenge on his own. The drug dealer then robs, shoots or kills the people who robbed him, with the result that the crime escalates from a mere monetary issue all the way to a violent death for the very simple reason that the cops are as much an enemy as the people who started the cycle by robbing the dealer. This extralegal justice is known as vigilanteism. It is created by the rapacious government law that exists allegedly to protect citizens from crime and violence. By creating a need for vigilante justice, drug laws CREATE crime and escalate its violence. There is yet another disastrous effect of drug prohibition: adulterated substances, or drug purity. It is a universal practice in drug dealing to “cut” or dilute the purity of drugs in order to increase the amount the dealer is able to sell, inflating his profits. The buyer may use the drugs, which are diluted fairly uniformly, without incident for weeks or months. Then a shipment or package comes through which is of higher purity than has been available for months or longer, or perhaps a new and inexperienced dealer sells some stuff without cutting it appropriately, with the result that users who had been accustomed to a certain dose now need much smaller amounts for the same high. But they don’t know that until they try the stuff. The result: inadvertent overdose, leading to hospitalization and often death. Overdose is a danger inherent in using illegal drugs, but it is accompanied by other disturbing effects: when users hear of a death by “OD” rather than being afraid of the currently available substance, they actually desire it, seeking it more ardently because “That’s good stuff, pure man!” The death of a fellow-user attracts them to the source like flies to honey. Another effect of adulteration is that a dealer can actually murder his customers if he sees fit, for example a customer seems to be putting him in danger by visiting too often, or committing crimes too visibly, so he sells the user some extremely pure stuff without telling him. Result: OD. Of course such murderers are immune to prosecution because of drug prohibition. Lastly, when an overdose occurs, the victim is frequently left to die, not out of callousness of other users, but because by bringing him to a hospital or calling an ambulance they place themselves at risk of imprisonment for involvement with the drug racket. The vast majority of “OD Deaths” would not occur if drugs were legal. (Certainly some still would occur, just as occasional deaths from alcohol poisoning occur.) The final and most prevalent effect of drug prohibition is the creation of a status symbol out of otherwise mundane substances. Everyone knows that Coke-A-Cola had cocaine in it originally. Back then, the local pharmacy or apothecary had supplies of the drug in various forms. It is obvious that the drug was not at that time a status symbol. When it becomes illegal, this is no longer the case. Suddenly, the guy with a fat bag of coke is the Man at the party. All the girls want to get with him tonight, all the guys admire him, want to be him. Whatever the cool guy does, others emulate. This effect is highly visible in the drug culture today: although it is known and accepted that a person dealing large quantities will sooner or later be jailed, he is admired and esteemed while “at the top.” Whole styles and fads are based on the possessions of wealthy drug dealers, some present examples being a big Cadillac, lots of “bling” (diamonds and gold), beautiful women hanging on each arm, a chrome pistol, and tattoos. A jail record is also a mark of prestige. Such is the effect of illegalizing drugs. Whole new markets are created out of what was before an inane ingredient in soda pop. Today we put caffeine in soda. If it were illegalized, people would be paying $100 a gram and shooting it into their veins in no time. People would be shot, killed, robbed, raped for the new equivalent of vivarin. It is possible to turn heroin back into the boring drug called Laudanum in the 1800’s. Its possible to put coke back into soda, and get it off the streets and out of the hands of gun-wielding thugs, who are all-too-often our own children. LEGALIZE. For the sake of rights, freedom and justice, legalize all drugs completely. For the sake of our children, for the sake of the good, for the sake of our wallets, for the sake of our liberty, LEGALIZE! The End Copyright 2006, Brandon Cropper brandonjesse (at) hotmail (dot) com

Copyright 2006 On Painting By Brandon Cropper There is an invention we all take for granted today. When it was new, over 150 years ago, it challenged the nature and purpose of the art of painting. The earliest version was the degeurotype. We call it the camera. In the mid 1800’s as the camera became a way of life, the idea that an artist should render as life-like a picture as possible was challenged. What is the value of a painstaking recreation of reality if it can be done as easily with the *click* of a new-fangled camera. Why paint a bowl of fruit, or a ball room dance, or anything? Just take a picture. There are two possible answers to the dilema. The painters of the mid-1800’s in Europe gave the following answer: We will no longer reality as it is; we will paint reality as we see it. This answer was only possible because of the philosophy of Plato, descended to Descartes, purified in Immanuel Kant, which was transfixing the European continent in this period. According to Kant, we don’t see the real reality with our senses: we just see the reality that our senses show us. Our perception of reality is not direct, it is filtered through our senses and organized by our mind. Being indirect knowledge of reality, our perceptual knowledge is also incomplete, imperfect. (Kant suggested that faith must fill the gap.) The results of this philosophy created Karl Marx, Otto von Bismark and Friedrich Nietzsche. In the feild of painting, it created men who gave up the depiction of reality to the camera, and attempted to show their reality, their own personal reality, as they themselves saw it. Cezanne is said to have thought there was “something wrong with my eyes.” He painted the same mountain over and over, blurry. The school was Impresionism. Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Eugène Delacroix (see his de: Porträt des Frédéric Chopin), Vincent van Gogh, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The climax: Pablo Picasso paints Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. With Picasso, modern art is truly a fully flowered phenomena. Today we are victims of the admirers of Pollock. Modern art no longer even pretends to be painting anything, unlike the vulgarity of Cubism which at least had the virtue to pretend to be painting soemthing, however destorted. But what is the other answer we can give to the challenge of the camera? It must be said here that perhaps it never was proper to paint bowls of fruit. What should be and is proper to paint? Things you can’t take a picture of. Tings you can’t normally see. Before the time of the camera, a beautiful woman’s portrait may be proper. But when the camera comes available, the subject of a painting becomes much more challenging to select. You can’t take a picture of the signing of the declaration of independence (it happened over two hundred years ago), but it is a subject which remains important today. It is also impossible to take a picture of the Battle at Marathon in Greece, hundreds of years before Christ was born. But it is a facsinating and important story, and could make an inspiring view if one were skilled enough to depict it. The skyline of a new city on the moon, or ___________. The possible choices of what to paint are limitless, dictated only by your own values: what do YOU want to paint? The end Copyright 2006 Brandon Cropper brandonjesse (at) hotmail (dot) com

Poetry’s Virtue or On the Nature of Poetry A Poem and Essay By Brandon Cropper Copyright 2006 What sanctifies poetry? What is its virtue? What brings a good line to life? What makes a good rhyme ring true? Music is sugar for the ear; A poem is sweet in this way; Rhyme is sugar one hears; Meter is words’ joyful play. A poem with no rhyme Or time in its verse Sours the ear, And approaches perverse. the end ***** What if I said e e cummings had no value as a poet? Assuming I were not hung from the nearest lamppost on a meat hook, I would add that John Donne was a tremendously valuable poet. Such an evaluation goes against every basic assumption of the modern art culture. It is assumed today that all art is sacred. Art, by modern definition, is anything that anyone says is art. I say this definition is nonsense. How could I so arrogantly elect myself the final judge and pronounce who is and isn’t a poet? I believe it is justified and here are my reasons. Poetry’s Musical Nature Poetry is unique: it is a form of communication, and simultaneously a form of art. It is my contention that the essential characteristic of poetry, which differentiates it from all other written communication, is the quality of music, including rhythm, rhyme and meter. There is no other form of writing which mixes the qualities of music with the qualities of prose. When the properties of music are divorced from writing, then the remainder is no longer poetry by definition. The question may arise: “Why can’t a set of powerful, memorable lines be called a poem, even if they don’t rhyme?” To this I must say I have written “poems” that didn’t rhyme or have rhythm or meter, but they aren’t a finished product until they have been forged into a poetic form. Sometimes when I am writing down inspirational lines for a possible poem, I get a line or set of lines or phrase that is so powerful and inevitable that I can see no way to change it for the better. The language or cadence may grab my attention, or it may be some more elusive quality, accountable only to my own tastes. But for whatever reason, the lines sometimes don’t want to lend themselves to recasting. When this happens I set those lines aside, sometimes for months or even years before trying again to find a poetic form, a workable rewording. So I regard such “poems” as the beginning notes from which a truly poetic statement may be formed with some effort. Here is an example of a poem which I liked and was unable to alter at first: A Human Romance She was with me but not mine - Her eyes were sleepy with beauty. I had her; I did not own her. I was a captive of my captive - and she felt she was too. The skin on her body reminds me of milk While her delicate voice recalls for me silk. Her beautiful eyes burn a hole in my sole. Why did I have her? I still do not know. I woke on a morning when she was with me; I sat up to ponder her morning physique. No make-up and puffy eyes; a red crease on her cheek. But her beauty transcended my scrutiny. I saw only perfection in her visage. end I loved that line “captive of my captive - and she felt she was too.” And I loved the part where she was “sleepy with beauty.” These lines expressed my feelings on the subject so perfectly that I left them unaltered for almost three years. Then one day, reading the poem, I decided it was just too good to leave unfinished, so I sat out to get more rhyme. Here is my revised version, with changed portions in italics: A Human Romance I had her; I did not own her, But this did not make me blue. I was a captive of my captive - And she felt she was too. She was with me but not mine - Sleepy with beauty, she was supine. Her skin’s complexion reminds me of milk, While her delicate voice recalls for me silk. Her beautiful eyes burn a hole in my sole. Why did I have her? I still do not know. I woke on a morning when she was with me; I sat up to ponder her morning physique. No make-up, puffy eyes, crease on her cheek. But her beauty transcended my scrutiny. I saw only perfection in her visage. the end What had seemed inevitable and unchangeable turned out to be good material for an even better version. Here is one more example of a poem which hit home for me, and was hard to change: Your Softness (On missing Marta) You are fading into the past And I’m scared. You are going where memories dim And your face will be clouded by time. And yet I cannot stop you Because you do not hear me. I scream from frustration But softly, because I know it won’t help. And besides, softness reminds me of you. end I was stalled for over two years on the above. Each time I read it, the language was so potent in reviving the feelings that went into the poem, I couldn’t believe it could be improved. So it remained unchanged until... Your Softness (On missing Marta) You are fading from my mind. The process frightens me. You’re withdrawing into the past, Through time’s shroud soon not to be seen. You are going where memories dim; Your face will be clouded by time. And I cannot travel with you - For you are no longer mine. How can I stop you from moving away, Into shrouded clouds of time? I scream your name - its all I can say - Frustration is God’s cruelest crime. I scream softly - soft for three reasons: Deep sorrow dampens my voice; I know you don’t want to hear this; And I know all this was my choice. And besides, softness reminds me of you. The end What was before a terse nine lines has become, with some effort and pencil grease, a well-structured sixteen line poem with a finishing declaration, left unmatched so as not to detract from the feeling of desperate sorrow in the speaker’s voice. I am very happy with the revisions. Working and reworking the lines to get a workable rhythm and rhyme means that the poet must comb over every syllable and carefully choose every word, especially if he has a particular word he wants to use in a given place. This leads to the astounding conscientiousness of every syllable in a well-written poem. Changing one word, even one syllable, can wreak havoc on a finished product. Inversely, the poem may be rough in a spot because it has a single extra syllable, or lacks one, or a word the poet wants to use doesn’t fit. But once this is overcome, the result feels like a law of nature: one feels the poem couldn’t have been otherwise. This repeated editing to get the words to fit the poetic form is certainly responsible for the purposeful and inevitable feel of a good poem. A good poem had to be this way. But the task can be daunting. How does one get started? Getting in the Mode of Poetic Writing I have found a very useful tool that I often use when writing a poem: I read poetry beforehand. Good poetry, almost anything from before the year 1900, and never “free verse”. Reading poem after poem, all with rhyming, rhythmic qualities, gets one’s brain into a mode of thinking that automatically tries to form sentences and phrases with a rhythmic beat, or rhyme. Its like forming a short-term habit, giving your mind the instruction: think like this. The joy and delight I get from writing a good poem, then reading it over and over, is irreplaceable, and the qualities of music are indispensable for this end. Prose as such is simply the organization and presentation of ideas, concepts. Poetry is prose plus music. If you have ever read a line in a poem and thought it didn’t quite work, and read it again, shifting the emphasis or stress on a certain syllable or word that made it conform to the rest of the line or stanza, you have experienced the musical quality of poetry. Note the delightful qualities of music in the following classic poem: Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening Whose woods these are I think I know, His house is in the village though. He will not see me stopping here, To watch his woods fill up with snow. My little horse must think it queer, To stop without a farmhouse near, Between the woods and frozen lake, The darkest evening of the year. He gives his harness bells a shake, To ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound's the sweep, Of easy wind and downy flake. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep. -- Robert Frost Take note of the pattern Frost forces upon your handling of the word ‘promises’. It is not significant in itself, but it demonstrates the delight your mind takes in the musical qualities with which he has infused the poem. This musical quality is like the tongue's delight with sugar, like sex for the sex organs, like a beautiful woman for the eyes - it is pure sensory pleasure, music to the ears. Grammar A note of caution to would-be poets: Don’t break grammar to make a line work. Sure, its been done, even by the greatest poets, but it detracts from the quality of the work. Interrupting grammar in order to make a line correctly rhyme is an interruption of the poem, and has the effect of a speed bump or stop in the wrong place. This is not to say that every line needs to be a complete sentence or thought, but the ideas in the lines must match the beat or rhythm, so that one can keep the beat and still get the idea. Pausing at the end of a line for the next line can cause a loss of the thought if the grammar fails to break in the same way as the poem’s rhythm. An example follows, taken from a poem by Emily Dickinson, self-titled “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died”: I willed my keepsakes, signed away What portions of me I Could make assignable, - and then There interposed a fly. In this example, the poem’s beat demands a small pause after “I” in the second line, but the grammar demands that “I” be read with “Could make assignable” and will not permit a break. This causes the stanza to read awkwardly. It is not irredeemable death for this to occur in a poem (note that Dickinson is widely published) but popularity does not mean quality or profundity (note that Hitler was elected to office and Picasso’s paintings sell for millions of dollars). Reading Frost’s “Stopping by Woods” one is not halted for grammar breaks, and there are no half-rhymes like food-good or ran-town. That is what makes it such a classic and pleasurable read. I have heard “Stopping by Woods” derided as “sing-songy” as if the essential musical quality were a detraction, a vice. I believe that the evidence is available for anyone’s ears: good poetry exhibits the qualities of music. The public at large still understand this - just listen to the top 40 some time. This is because the joy of poetry, of rhyming, is a sensory pleasure. One doesn’t need to study some philosopher or attend a lecture on the qualities of good poetry - one can hear it. Note that it is mostly in the universities today that they read e e cummings and James Joyce. This is no coincidence: an appreciation for tempo and melody comes naturally to the human brain. It requires active indoctrination in subjectivism for people to start believing that e e cummings is a real poet even though he has dispensed with poetry. To say that this musical quality, this one essential that is unique to poetry, is not necessary to make a good poem, is to declare that your definition of poetry is not the same as mine. Rhythm, rhyme and meter make poetry what it is. A poem without these is not a poem, by definition. And a poem with them is a most delightful pleasure for the ears and soul. The End

Thank you for the reply. If it doesn't rhyme its called "blank verse" provided it has rhythm or meter. If it has no rhyme, rhythm or meter, its called prose (provided it is sensical). Under the above statement, the works of e e cummings doesn't fit in any catagorey - and can only be classified as an abberation. By defintion, a lack of rhyme disqualifies a work as poetry. It may be blank verse (much of Shakespeare, for example) or it may be in archaic language that gives it a "poetic" feel, like Anthem. But poetry, by definition, is that art form whose medium is the sound of concepts. Music doesn't need to have words at all, and the best music in my opnion (Tchaikovsky, Strauss, DeBussy, and a few more) had no words. Poetry is words arranged to have musical qualities, modern nihilism notwithstanding. Brandon

Poetry is that art form whose medium is sound of concepts Copright 2006 Brandon Cropper Poetry’s Virtue * or * On the Nature of Poetry A Poem and Essay By Brandon Cropper What sanctifies poetry? What is its virtue? What brings a good line to life? What makes a good rhyme ring true? Music is sugar for the ear; A poem is sweet in this way; Rhyme is sugar one hears; Meter is words’ joyful play. A poem with no rhyme Or time in its verse Sours the ear, And approaches perverse. the end ***** What if I said e e cummings had no value as a poet? Assuming I were not hung from the nearest lamppost on a meat hook, I would add that John Donne was a tremendously valuable poet. Such an evaluation goes against every basic assumption of the modern art culture. It is assumed today that all art is sacred. Art, by modern definition, is anything that anyone says is art. I say this definition is nonsense. How could I so arrogantly elect myself the final judge and pronounce who is and isn’t a poet? I believe it is justified and here are my reasons. Poetry’s Musical Nature Poetry is unique: it is a form of communication, and simultaneously a form of art. It is my contention that the essential characteristic of poetry, which differentiates it from all other written communication, is the quality of music, including rhythm, rhyme and meter. There is no other form of writing which mixes the qualities of music with the qualities of prose. When the properties of music are divorced from writing, then the remainder is no longer poetry by definition. The question may arise: “Why can’t a set of powerful, memorable lines be called a poem, even if they don’t rhyme?” To this I must say I have written “poems” that didn’t rhyme or have rhythm or meter, but they aren’t a finished product until they have been forged into a poetic form. Sometimes when I am writing down inspirational lines for a possible poem, I get a line or set of lines or phrase that is so powerful and inevitable that I can see no way to change it for the better. The language or cadence may grab my attention, or it may be some more elusive quality, accountable only to my own tastes. But for whatever reason, the lines sometimes don’t want to lend themselves to recasting. When this happens I set those lines aside, sometimes for months or even years before trying again to find a poetic form, a workable rewording. So I regard such “poems” as the beginning notes from which a truly poetic statement may be formed with some effort. Here is an example of a poem which I liked and was unable to alter at first: A Human Romance She was with me but not mine - Her eyes were sleepy with beauty. I had her; I did not own her. I was a captive of my captive - and she felt she was too. The skin on her body reminds me of milk While her delicate voice recalls for me silk. Her beautiful eyes burn a hole in my sole. Why did I have her? I still do not know. I woke on a morning when she was with me; I sat up to ponder her morning physique. No make-up and puffy eyes; a red crease on her cheek. But her beauty transcended my scrutiny. I saw only perfection in her visage. end I loved that line “captive of my captive - and she felt she was too.” And I loved the part where she was “sleepy with beauty.” These lines expressed my feelings on the subject so perfectly that I left them unaltered for almost three years. Then one day, reading the poem, I decided it was just too good to leave unfinished, so I sat out to get more rhyme. Here is my revised version, with changed portions in italics: A Human Romance I had her; I did not own her, But this did not make me blue. I was a captive of my captive - And she felt she was too. She was with me but not mine - Sleepy with beauty, she was supine. Her skin’s complexion reminds me of milk, While her delicate voice recalls for me silk. Her beautiful eyes burn a hole in my sole. Why did I have her? I still do not know. I woke on a morning when she was with me; I sat up to ponder her morning physique. No make-up, puffy eyes, crease on her cheek. But her beauty transcended my scrutiny. I saw only perfection in her visage. the end What had seemed inevitable and unchangeable turned out to be good material for an even better version. Here is one more example of a poem which hit home for me, and was hard to change: Your Softness (On missing Marta) You are fading into the past And I’m scared. You are going where memories dim And your face will be clouded by time. And yet I cannot stop you Because you do not hear me. I scream from frustration But softly, because I know it won’t help. And besides, softness reminds me of you. end I was stalled for over two years on the above. Each time I read it, the language was so potent in reviving the feelings that went into the poem, I couldn’t believe it could be improved. So it remained unchanged until... Your Softness (On missing Marta) You are fading from my mind. The process frightens me. You’re withdrawing into the past, Through time’s shroud soon not to be seen. You are going where memories dim; Your face will be clouded by time. And I cannot travel with you - For you are no longer mine. How can I stop you from moving away, Into shrouded clouds of time? I scream your name - its all I can say - Frustration is God’s cruelest crime. I scream softly - soft for three reasons: Deep sorrow dampens my voice; I know you don’t want to hear this; And I know all this was my choice. And besides, softness reminds me of you. The end What was before a terse nine lines has become, with some effort and pencil grease, a well-structured sixteen line poem with a finishing declaration, left unmatched so as not to detract from the feeling of desperate sorrow in the speaker’s voice. I am very happy with the revisions. Working and reworking the lines to get a workable rhythm and rhyme means that the poet must comb over every syllable and carefully choose every word, especially if he has a particular word he wants to use in a given place. This leads to the astounding conscientiousness of every syllable in a well-written poem. Changing one word, even one syllable, can wreak havoc on a finished product. Inversely, the poem may be rough in a spot because it has a single extra syllable, or lacks one, or a word the poet wants to use doesn’t fit. But once this is overcome, the result feels like a law of nature: one feels the poem couldn’t have been otherwise. This repeated editing to get the words to fit the poetic form is certainly responsible for the purposeful and inevitable feel of a good poem. A good poem had to be this way. But the task can be daunting. How does one get started? Getting in the Mode of Poetic Writing I have found a very useful tool that I often use when writing a poem: I read poetry beforehand. Good poetry, almost anything from before the year 1900, and never “free verse”. Reading poem after poem, all with rhyming, rhythmic qualities, gets one’s brain into a mode of thinking that automatically tries to form sentences and phrases with a rhythmic beat, or rhyme. Its like forming a short-term habit, giving your mind the instruction: think like this. The joy and delight I get from writing a good poem, then reading it over and over, is irreplaceable, and the qualities of music are indispensable for this end. Prose as such is simply the organization and presentation of ideas, concepts. Poetry is prose plus music. If you have ever read a line in a poem and thought it didn’t quite work, and read it again, shifting the emphasis or stress on a certain syllable or word that made it conform to the rest of the line or stanza, you have experienced the musical quality of poetry. Note the delightful qualities of music in the following classic poem: Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening Whose woods these are I think I know, His house is in the village though. He will not see me stopping here, To watch his woods fill up with snow. My little horse must think it queer, To stop without a farmhouse near, Between the woods and frozen lake, The darkest evening of the year. He gives his harness bells a shake, To ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound's the sweep, Of easy wind and downy flake. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep. -- Robert Frost Take note of the pattern Frost forces upon your handling of the word ‘promises’. It is not significant in itself, but it demonstrates the delight your mind takes in the musical qualities with which he has infused the poem. This musical quality is like the tongue's delight with sugar, like sex for the sex organs, like a beautiful woman for the eyes - it is pure sensory pleasure, music to the ears. Grammar A note of caution to would-be poets: Don’t break grammar to make a line work. Sure, its been done, even by the greatest poets, but it detracts from the quality of the work. Interrupting grammar in order to make a line correctly rhyme is an interruption of the poem, and has the effect of a speed bump or stop in the wrong place. This is not to say that every line needs to be a complete sentence or thought, but the ideas in the lines must match the beat or rhythm, so that one can keep the beat and still get the idea. Pausing at the end of a line for the next line can cause a loss of the thought if the grammar fails to break in the same way as the poem’s rhythm. An example follows, taken from a poem by Emily Dickinson, self-titled “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died”: I willed my keepsakes, signed away What portions of me I Could make assignable, - and then There interposed a fly. In this example, the poem’s beat demands a small pause after “I” in the second line, but the grammar demands that “I” be read with “Could make assignable” and will not permit a break. This causes the stanza to read awkwardly. It is not irredeemable death for this to occur in a poem (note that Dickinson is widely published) but popularity does not mean quality or profundity (note that Hitler was elected to office and Picasso’s paintings sell for millions of dollars). Reading Frost’s “Stopping by Woods” one is not halted for grammar breaks, and there are no half-rhymes like food-good or ran-town. That is what makes it such a classic and pleasurable read. I have heard “Stopping by Woods” derided as “sing-songy” as if the essential musical quality were a detraction, a vice. I believe that the evidence is available for anyone’s ears: good poetry exhibits the qualities of music. The public at large still understand this - just listen to the top 40 some time. This is because the joy of poetry, of rhyming, is a sensory pleasure. One doesn’t need to study some philosopher or attend a lecture on the qualities of good poetry - one can hear it. Note that it is mostly in the universities today that they read e e cummings and James Joyce. This is no coincidence: an appreciation for tempo and melody comes naturally to the human brain. It requires active indoctrination in subjectivism for people to start believing that e e cummings is a real poet even though he has dispensed with poetry. To say that this musical quality, this one essential that is unique to poetry, is not necessary to make a good poem, is to declare that your definition of poetry is not the same as mine. Rhythm, rhyme and meter make poetry what it is. A poem without these is not a poem, by definition. And a poem with them is a most delightful pleasure for the ears and soul. The End Copyright 2006 Brandon Cropper

Copyright 2006 On Painting By Brandon Cropper There is an invention we all take for granted today. When it was new, over 150 years ago, it challenged the nature and purpose of the art of painting. The earliest version was the degeurotype. We call it the camera. In the mid 1800’s as the camera became a way of life, the idea that an artist should render as life-like a picture as possible was challenged. What is the value of a painstaking recreation of reality if it can be done as easily with the *click* of a new-fangled camera. Why paint a bowl of fruit, or a ball room dance, or anything? Just take a picture. There are two possible answers to the dilema. The painters of the mid-1800’s in Europe gave the following answer: We will no longer reality as it is; we will paint reality as we see it. This answer was only possible because of the philosophy of Plato, descended to Descartes, purified in Immanuel Kant, which was transfixing the European continent in this period. According to Kant, we don’t see the real reality with our senses: we just see the reality that our senses show us. Our perception of reality is not direct, it is filtered through our senses and organized by our mind. Being indirect knowledge of reality, our perceptual knowledge is also incomplete, imperfect. (Kant suggested that faith must fill the gap.) The results of this philosophy created Karl Marx, Otto von Bismark and Friedrich Nietzsche. In the feild of painting, it created men who gave up the depiction of reality to the camera, and attempted to show their reality, their own personal reality, as they themselves saw it. Cezanne is said to have thought there was “something wrong with my eyes.” He painted the same mountain over and over, blurry. The school was Impresionism. Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Eugène Delacroix (see his de: Porträt des Frédéric Chopin), Vincent van Gogh, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The climax: Pablo Picasso paints Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. With Picasso, modern art is truly a fully flowered phenomena. Today we are victims of the admirers of Pollock. Modern art no longer even pretends to be painting anything, unlike the vulgarity of Cubism which at least had the virtue to pretend to be painting soemthing, however destorted. But what is the other answer we can give to the challenge of the camera? It must be said here that perhaps it never was proper to paint bowls of fruit. What should be and is proper to paint? Things you can’t take a picture of. Tings you can’t normally see. Before the time of the camera, a beautiful woman’s portrait may be proper. But when the camera comes available, the subject of a painting becomes much more challenging to select. You can’t take a picture of the signing of the declaration of independence (it happened over two hundred years ago), but it is a subject which remains important today. It is also impossible to take a picture of the Battle at Marathon in Greece, hundreds of years before Christ was born. But it is a facsinating and important story, and could make an inspiring view if one were skilled enough to depict it. The skyline of a new city on the moon, or ___________. The possible choices of what to paint are limitless, dictated only by your own values: what do YOU want to paint? The end Copyright 2006 Brandon Cropper brandonjesse (at) hotmail (dot) com

Where's the poetry forum? Copyright 2006 Brandon Cropper Picasso By Brandon Cropper He sensed the presense of madness And saw his chance for fame; Without learning the painterly art, He could give as profound the inane. He saw that art was corrupted, Egalitarianized, To the lowest common devisor, From the values the Renaissance prized. The stuff he made they call art, Though that’s just a sign of the times, A symptom of the corruption, A signal of reason’s demise. The stuff he painted was nonsense, Random chaotic trash, Hostile to reason and purpose, Destructive, hateful and crass. Today it is called Abstract Art. This corruption does have a source: His name is Immanuel Kant, Irrational without remorse. Immanuel Kant is the motive at base; His fallacies trace back to Descartes. Descartes brought Plato back from disgrace, And here, we find the chain starts. So it turns out we have Plato to thank For creating all this insanity, And making occur in our world today A state of boastful inanity. The End Copyright 2006 Brandon Cropper brandonjesse (at) hotmail (dot) com

The following essayoutlines the nature and distinguishing characteristics of poetry. I owe an incalculable amount of my understanding of poetry to Dr. Leonard Peikoff, as per his course "Poems I Like and Why" which is an excellant listen. However, the following essay adds much in the form of examples and clarification he had the time to only touch on. I hope you enjoy, but please note the work is Copyrighted. Copyright 2006 Brandon Croppper Poetry’s Virtue * or * On the Nature of Poetry A Poem and Essay By Brandon Cropper What sanctifies poetry? What is its virtue? What brings a good line to life? What makes a good rhyme ring true? Music is sugar for the ear; A poem is sweet in this way; Rhyme is sugar one hears; Meter is words’ joyful play. A poem with no rhyme Or time in its verse Sours the ear, And approaches perverse. the end ***** What if I said e e cummings had no value as a poet? Assuming I were not hung from the nearest lamppost on a meat hook, I would add that John Donne was a tremendously valuable poet. Such an evaluation goes against every basic assumption of the modern art culture. It is assumed today that all art is sacred. Art, by modern definition, is anything that anyone says is art. I say this definition is nonsense. How could I so arrogantly elect myself the final judge and pronounce who is and isn’t a poet? I believe it is justified and here are my reasons. Poetry’s Musical Nature Poetry is unique: it is a form of communication, and simultaneously a form of art. It is my contention that the essential characteristic of poetry, which differentiates it from all other written communication, is the quality of music, including rhythm, rhyme and meter. There is no other form of writing which mixes the qualities of music with the qualities of prose. When the properties of music are divorced from writing, then the remainder is no longer poetry by definition. The question may arise: “Why can’t a set of powerful, memorable lines be called a poem, even if they don’t rhyme?” To this I must say I have written “poems” that didn’t rhyme or have rhythm or meter, but they aren’t a finished product until they have been forged into a poetic form. Sometimes when I am writing down inspirational lines for a possible poem, I get a line or set of lines or phrase that is so powerful and inevitable that I can see no way to change it for the better. The language or cadence may grab my attention, or it may be some more elusive quality, accountable only to my own tastes. But for whatever reason, the lines sometimes don’t want to lend themselves to recasting. When this happens I set those lines aside, sometimes for months or even years before trying again to find a poetic form, a workable rewording. So I regard such “poems” as the beginning notes from which a truly poetic statement may be formed with some effort. Here is an example of a poem which I liked and was unable to alter at first: A Human Romance She was with me but not mine - Her eyes were sleepy with beauty. I had her; I did not own her. I was a captive of my captive - and she felt she was too. The skin on her body reminds me of milk While her delicate voice recalls for me silk. Her beautiful eyes burn a hole in my sole. Why did I have her? I still do not know. I woke on a morning when she was with me; I sat up to ponder her morning physique. No make-up and puffy eyes; a red crease on her cheek. But her beauty transcended my scrutiny. I saw only perfection in her visage. end I loved that line “captive of my captive - and she felt she was too.” And I loved the part where she was “sleepy with beauty.” These lines expressed my feelings on the subject so perfectly that I left them unaltered for almost three years. Then one day, reading the poem, I decided it was just too good to leave unfinished, so I sat out to get more rhyme. Here is my revised version, with changed portions in italics: A Human Romance I had her; I did not own her, But this did not make me blue. I was a captive of my captive - And she felt she was too. She was with me but not mine - Sleepy with beauty, she was supine. Her skin’s complexion reminds me of milk, While her delicate voice recalls for me silk. Her beautiful eyes burn a hole in my sole. Why did I have her? I still do not know. I woke on a morning when she was with me; I sat up to ponder her morning physique. No make-up, puffy eyes, crease on her cheek. But her beauty transcended my scrutiny. I saw only perfection in her visage. the end What had seemed inevitable and unchangeable turned out to be good material for an even better version. Here is one more example of a poem which hit home for me, and was hard to change: Your Softness (On missing Marta) You are fading into the past And I’m scared. You are going where memories dim And your face will be clouded by time. And yet I cannot stop you Because you do not hear me. I scream from frustration But softly, because I know it won’t help. And besides, softness reminds me of you. end I was stalled for over two years on the above. Each time I read it, the language was so potent in reviving the feelings that went into the poem, I couldn’t believe it could be improved. So it remained unchanged until... Your Softness (On missing Marta) You are fading from my mind. The process frightens me. You’re withdrawing into the past, Through time’s shroud soon not to be seen. You are going where memories dim; Your face will be clouded by time. And I cannot travel with you - For you are no longer mine. How can I stop you from moving away, Into shrouded clouds of time? I scream your name - its all I can say - Frustration is God’s cruelest crime. I scream softly - soft for three reasons: Deep sorrow dampens my voice; I know you don’t want to hear this; And I know all this was my choice. And besides, softness reminds me of you. The end What was before a terse nine lines has become, with some effort and pencil grease, a well-structured sixteen line poem with a finishing declaration, left unmatched so as not to detract from the feeling of desperate sorrow in the speaker’s voice. I am very happy with the revisions. Working and reworking the lines to get a workable rhythm and rhyme means that the poet must comb over every syllable and carefully choose every word, especially if he has a particular word he wants to use in a given place. This leads to the astounding conscientiousness of every syllable in a well-written poem. Changing one word, even one syllable, can wreak havoc on a finished product. Inversely, the poem may be rough in a spot because it has a single extra syllable, or lacks one, or a word the poet wants to use doesn’t fit. But once this is overcome, the result feels like a law of nature: one feels the poem couldn’t have been otherwise. This repeated editing to get the words to fit the poetic form is certainly responsible for the purposeful and inevitable feel of a good poem. A good poem had to be this way. But the task can be daunting. How does one get started? Getting in the Mode of Poetic Writing I have found a very useful tool that I often use when writing a poem: I read poetry beforehand. Good poetry, almost anything from before the year 1900, and never “free verse”. Reading poem after poem, all with rhyming, rhythmic qualities, gets one’s brain into a mode of thinking that automatically tries to form sentences and phrases with a rhythmic beat, or rhyme. Its like forming a short-term habit, giving your mind the instruction: think like this. The joy and delight I get from writing a good poem, then reading it over and over, is irreplaceable, and the qualities of music are indispensable for this end. Prose as such is simply the organization and presentation of ideas, concepts. Poetry is prose plus music. If you have ever read a line in a poem and thought it didn’t quite work, and read it again, shifting the emphasis or stress on a certain syllable or word that made it conform to the rest of the line or stanza, you have experienced the musical quality of poetry. Note the delightful qualities of music in the following classic poem: Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening Whose woods these are I think I know, His house is in the village though. He will not see me stopping here, To watch his woods fill up with snow. My little horse must think it queer, To stop without a farmhouse near, Between the woods and frozen lake, The darkest evening of the year. He gives his harness bells a shake, To ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound's the sweep, Of easy wind and downy flake. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep. -- Robert Frost Take note of the pattern Frost forces upon your handling of the word ‘promises’. It is not significant in itself, but it demonstrates the delight your mind takes in the musical qualities with which he has infused the poem. This musical quality is like the tongue's delight with sugar, like sex for the sex organs, like a beautiful woman for the eyes - it is pure sensory pleasure, music to the ears. Grammar A note of caution to would-be poets: Don’t break grammar to make a line work. Sure, its been done, even by the greatest poets, but it detracts from the quality of the work. Interrupting grammar in order to make a line correctly rhyme is an interruption of the poem, and has the effect of a speed bump or stop in the wrong place. This is not to say that every line needs to be a complete sentence or thought, but the ideas in the lines must match the beat or rhythm, so that one can keep the beat and still get the idea. Pausing at the end of a line for the next line can cause a loss of the thought if the grammar fails to break in the same way as the poem’s rhythm. An example follows, taken from a poem by Emily Dickinson, self-titled “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died”: I willed my keepsakes, signed away What portions of me I Could make assignable, - and then There interposed a fly. In this example, the poem’s beat demands a small pause after “I” in the second line, but the grammar demands that “I” be read with “Could make assignable” and will not permit a break. This causes the stanza to read awkwardly. It is not irredeemable death for this to occur in a poem (note that Dickinson is widely published) but popularity does not mean quality or profundity (note that Hitler was elected to office and Picasso’s paintings sell for millions of dollars). Reading Frost’s “Stopping by Woods” one is not halted for grammar breaks, and there are no half-rhymes like food-good or ran-town. That is what makes it such a classic and pleasurable read. I have heard “Stopping by Woods” derided as “sing-songy” as if the essential musical quality were a detraction, a vice. I believe that the evidence is available for anyone’s ears: good poetry exhibits the qualities of music. The public at large still understand this - just listen to the top 40 some time. This is because the joy of poetry, of rhyming, is a sensory pleasure. One doesn’t need to study some philosopher or attend a lecture on the qualities of good poetry - one can hear it. Note that it is mostly in the universities today that they read e e cummings and James Joyce. This is no coincidence: an appreciation for tempo and melody comes naturally to the human brain. It requires active indoctrination in subjectivism for people to start believing that e e cummings is a real poet even though he has dispensed with poetry. To say that this musical quality, this one essential that is unique to poetry, is not necessary to make a good poem, is to declare that your definition of poetry is not the same as mine. Rhythm, rhyme and meter make poetry what it is. A poem without these is not a poem, by definition. And a poem with them is a most delightful pleasure for the ears and soul. The End Copyright 2006 Brandon Cropper brandonjesse (at) hotmail (dot) com

The following essayspeaks for itself, but I'll just preface: I'm new to this forum and this is my first post. I started chatting on a Libertarian Forum a few weeks ago and quickly found that even the supposedly pro-freedom Libertarians are suckers for all the fallacies that plague the "common" people, that is non-Objectivists. So here I am, looking for a rational groupd with which to discuss stuff and things. BTW, the essay is Copyrighted, please note. An Essay on Illegal Drugs By Brandon Cropper Theme: The illegalization of drugs creates more problems than it solves. Many people say the War on Drugs is an abject failure. With over a million people in jail, drug use is as widespread as it has ever been. If the lives ruined by imprisonment and being marked for life as a felon are counted as casualties, the War on Drugs has had as many casualties as all other wars in American history COMBINED. (Civil War: 500,000, WWI: 120,000, WWII: 300,000, Korea: 57,000, Vietnam: 37,000, total: 1,014,000.) It is my purpose in this essay to show that the government prohibition of drugs causes many more problems than it solves. But this should be kept in mind by the reader: the following examples and arguments are the practical end of the War on Drugs. On the theoretical end it is unjustifiable for the government to regulate drugs because the government exists in order to protect individual rights. Protecting citizens from their own self-destructive behavior is beyond the province of a government of justice, and enters the province of a government of tyrannical and coercive nature. The rights to life, liberty and property alone justify the argument that the government has no business prohibiting drugs. However, many pragmatic Americans today believe that if the government can do some good in society by controlling drugs, it is justified in violating our rights and liberties. This essay is intended to show that government control of drugs does only harm to society. Any educated adult is familiar with the law of supply and demand. It is an elementary truth that for a given commodity in demand, when its supply diminishes, the price goes up. When its supply is copious and plentiful, the price will fall. This basic economic fact has an insidious effect in the Drug Wars: when the government “succeeds” in capturing a shipment, or reducing the supply of drugs, the price goes up. This increases incentive for people to commit ever more dastardly crimes to obtain the drugs which are diminished in quantity but not diminished in demand. As drugs become more expensive, possession of them becomes an ever-greater status symbol. The crime associated with obtaining and distributing drugs is blamed for as much as 75% or more of the American crime rate. That is, if drugs were legal our crime rate would fall by up to 75%! This is often countered with the argument that if drugs were legal and widely available, crime would be even more rampant because “everyone would be high all the time.” Such an argument reveals two things: a blatant ignorance of history, because anyone who knows about Prohibition knows it caused crime to skyrocket, not fall; and a belief that our society is under a permanent, violent siege, an evil scourge of drug use, the effects of which our wise government is so benevolently mitigating. The exact point here is that government control of drugs increases their use and damage. These facts are horrifying in themselves, but a closer look at the nature of crime created by drugs prohibition reveals an even more tragic side of the story. A great deal of crime today goes unreported because of the involvement of drugs. For example, a drug dealer may have his house broken into and ransacked by people looking for drugs. The break-in will likely not be reported because of the dealer’s distaste for officers of the law, whose primary goal is to send him to prison. The robbers are well aware of this fact, and use it to their advantage, stealing anything of value from cd’s to cash to guns to jewelry and so on. The drug dealer who has sustained the loss gets little sympathy from the public, and the police, ostensibly in existence to protect citizen’s rights, cannot be called to the scene for the very reason that they would quickly arrest (violate) the drug dealer. Few people would take such injustice sitting down, and a person inured to the effects of extralegal justice would be likely to seek revenge on his own. The drug dealer then robs, shoots or kills the people who robbed him, with the result that the crime escalates from a mere monetary issue all the way to a violent death for the very simple reason that the cops are as much an enemy as the people who started the cycle by robbing the dealer. This extralegal justice is known as vigilanteism. It is created by the rapacious government law that exists allegedly to protect citizens from crime and violence. By creating a need for vigilante justice, drug laws CREATE crime and escalate its violence. There is yet another disastrous effect of drug prohibition: adulterated substances, or drug purity. It is a universal practice in drug dealing to “cut” or dilute the purity of drugs in order to increase the amount the dealer is able to sell, inflating his profits. The buyer may use the drugs, which are diluted fairly uniformly, without incident for weeks or months. Then a shipment or package comes through which is of higher purity than has been available for months or longer, or perhaps a new and inexperienced dealer sells some stuff without cutting it appropriately, with the result that users who had been accustomed to a certain dose now need much smaller amounts for the same high. But they don’t know that until they try the stuff. The result: inadvertent overdose, leading to hospitalization and often death. Overdose is a danger inherent in using illegal drugs, but it is accompanied by other disturbing effects: when users hear of a death by “OD” rather than being afraid of the currently available substance, they actually desire it, seeking it more ardently because “That’s good stuff, pure man!” The death of a fellow-user attracts them to the source like flies to honey. Another effect of adulteration is that a dealer can actually murder his customers if he sees fit, for example a customer seems to be putting him in danger by visiting too often, or committing crimes too visibly, so he sells the user some extremely pure stuff without telling him. Result: OD. Of course such murderers are immune to prosecution because of drug prohibition. Lastly, when an overdose occurs, the victim is frequently left to die, not out of callousness of other users, but because by bringing him to a hospital or calling an ambulance they place themselves at risk of imprisonment for involvement with the drug racket. The vast majority of “OD Deaths” would not occur if drugs were legal. (Certainly some still would occur, just as occasional deaths from alcohol poisoning occur.) The final and most prevalent effect of drug prohibition is the creation of a status symbol out of otherwise mundane substances. Everyone knows that Coke-A-Cola had cocaine in it originally. Back then, the local pharmacy or apothecary had supplies of the drug in various forms. It is obvious that the drug was not at that time a status symbol. When it becomes illegal, this is no longer the case. Suddenly, the guy with a fat bag of coke is the Man at the party. All the girls want to get with him tonight, all the guys admire him, want to be him. Whatever the cool guy does, others emulate. This effect is highly visible in the drug culture today: although it is known and accepted that a person dealing large quantities will sooner or later be jailed, he is admired and esteemed while “at the top.” Whole styles and fads are based on the possessions of wealthy drug dealers, some present examples being a big Cadillac, lots of “bling” (diamonds and gold), beautiful women hanging on each arm, a chrome pistol, and tattoos. A jail record is also a mark of prestige. Such is the effect of illegalizing drugs. Whole new markets are created out of what was before an inane ingredient in soda pop. Today we put caffeine in soda. If it were illegalized, people would be paying $100 a gram and shooting it into their veins in no time. People would be shot, killed, robbed, raped for the new equivalent of vivarin. It is possible to turn heroin back into the boring drug called Laudanum in the 1800’s. Its possible to put coke back into soda, and get it off the streets and out of the hands of gun-wielding thugs, who are all-too-often our own children. LEGALIZE. For the sake of rights, freedom and justice, legalize all drugs completely. For the sake of our children, for the sake of the good, for the sake of our wallets, for the sake of our liberty, LEGALIZE! The End Copyright 2006, Brandon Cropper brandonjesse (at) hotmail (dot) com