Today is Apr 20, or "420"--a popular symbol of stoner culture. Of course, the left--in conjunction with the dirty mutant hippie drug subculture, has been working to get marijuana legalized for a number of years now. These diseases passing themselves off as human beings seem to have a response for every argument against the anti-pot laws, so rather than rehashing (no pun intended) the tired diatribes in favor of making marijuana illegal I thought I would try a different tact.

Now as you may well know, I am the founder of the Red, Yellow, and Blue Movement, dedicated to, among other things, rewriting and improving the copyright infringement laws in America. I feel they are too broad and often net the minnows along with the whales. Plagiarism is an odd duck of an offense. It falls under the umbrella of theft, yet unlike taking an automobile or money or a TV, there is no physical evidence of a crime. You can't dust an idea for prints. You can't stash it in a garage or closet or a drawer. You can't stamp your name on it. An idea is nebulous and impossible to hold, to possess. Yet an accusation of stealing one comes with a number of penalties: legal fines, damage to reputation, loss of credibility, suspension from school, expulsion, or termination from one's job. Some universities will retroactively strip a student found of plagiarism of their diploma up to a year after graduation! They don't do that to pot users. "Uh, sir, we have evidence you smoked a joint a year ago. You'll have to come with us."

Do you realize plagiarism is the most difficult crime to prove, yet the easiest accusation to make? Often the person who filed the charge needn't even appear at the hearing. You don't even have to show proof. Often said hearings, particularly at the academic level, are perfunctory and slipshod at best; the accused is presumed guilty even before (s)he comes before the board, and the charges are read with no opportunity given to the accused to make or prepare a defense beforehand. Dropping the p-bomb is about the worst thing to do to a student or newspaper staffer. I wouldn't be surprised if many of the more left-leaning professors or college newspaper editors kept a fake plagiarism charge tucked away just in case a conservative in their course or employ got a little big for their britches, they felt, and needed to be removed. Yes, I wouldn't put it past the left at all.

I'm being ridiculous, you say? Well, consider the case of one Ben Domenech, a conservative blogger who had perhaps the shortest journalism career ever. In 2006 Domenech resigned from the Washington Post's blog after a record three days for plagiarism accusations which were at least six years old. (The question of statute of limitations never came up, I suppose.) Domenech first denied, then reluctantly admitted (though I suspect he or his lawyer was bullied to make that mea culpa) to over three dozen counts of plagiarism--though he added, "Virtually every other alleged instance of plagiarism that I've seen comes from a single semester's worth of pieces that were printed under my name at my college paper, The Flat Hat, when I was 17." University of Tennessee law professor Glenn H. Reynolds suggested that Domenech was railroaded simply "because he was a conservative and he was given real estate at The Washington Post. Their goal was to find something they could use to get rid of him, and they succeeded." In other words, he was too controversial and it made him a lightning rod for liberal wrath. I know the feeling. There is, then, precedent for my concerns.

With this in mind I want to use the 420 crowds' own arguments to try to make the left see that what they are advocating is far more harmful than what I believe.

Users aren't all losers. A lot of famous people smoke pot, and look at how successful they are.

Sure. A lot of famous people have been accused of plagiarism as well. Some notable names:

• Jason Blair, former New York Times columnist
• Joseph Biden, U.S. Vice-President
• Dan Brown, novelist
• Ward Churchill, former University of Columbia professor of Ethics
• Dan Fogerty, singer
• Alex Haley, novelist
• George Harrison, singer
• Helen Keller, author and activist
• J.K. Rowling, author
• Sadam Hussein, former Iraqi President
• Lyle Menendez, accused murderer
• Vladimir Putin, Russian President

So I'm in (more or less) good company.

Using marijuana doesn't automatically make you use harder drugs.

Okay, I'll concede there's no conclusive link between pot smoking and using coke, meth, heroin or other so-called "hard drugs". Most of the evidence is ancecdotal, including my own writing about my brother Tim, a.k.a "Captain Stupid". One liberal informs me that he "smoked marijuana tons" as a teen and never felt the urge to graduate to the hard stuff. (Though I wonder if a message board post like that, if traceable, would be admissible in a court of law?) Okay, fair enough. I was (falsely) accused of plagiarizing one column, and I am now regularly told by the left that I am "immoral", that I deserve to die, and that I "crossed [the line] before" and that I'd do it again if given half a chance. So according to the left, pot is not a ticket to a life in an opium den...but one incident of plagiarism and you're branded as a criminal for life? See how knee-jerk and backwards they are?

We should legalize pot in order to cut down on street crime.

See, I never saw the merit in this idea. It's like saying, "Hey, if we legalized incest, there's be less rape." Sure, I suppose a few potheads would stop holding up liquor stores and bashing in ATMs to get cash to feed the monkey, but what about coke fiends, crackheads, meth uses, and horse jockeys? I'm sure they'll step up to fill in the gap. Are we going to legalize those too? And besides, there's always your good old-fashioned revenge killings, with no aid from drugs or booze whatsoever. Who needs it? Sort of hard to plan a decent vendetta when you're baked.

Cigarettes and alcohol kill more people than pot.

Okay, fine. Tobacco and alcohol are, in their own right, terrible vices responsible for many millions of deaths a year combined, including cancer, heart disease, automobile mishaps, and untold millions in health care costs. However, barring long sustained use of either, the body does recover. The liver can regenerate if not too heavily compromised, and so can the lungs. However, brain cells do not replenish. Pot may not be as bad as LSD, but it can remain in the fat cells and bodily fluids for some time after use, far longer than booze or cigarettes. Plagiarism, on the other hand, never killed a single person. A career, perhaps, and certainly a few good names have suffered. I can't say, however, I ever saw a police or medical show in which someone looked at a stiff and said, "He died of plagirism causes."

There's worse crimes out here. The penalties for being caught using marijuana are too strict. Why lock me up for four months for catching me with a dime bag while killers run free?

But you don't have a problem with punishing me for the last twelve years for something I didn't even do? If you're caught with marijuana or marijuana pariphanalia, yes, you go to jail. You deserve to. It could be one night, a few months, or even a year, but you eventually get out. I will never get out. I was "caught", and for it I will pay for my mistake in perpituity. I will foever be a pariah, stripped of my humanity, all my friends forsaking me, never allowed to set foot in their precious little school. There is no release, no parole, no leniency waiting for me. Not as long as this old bat is in power at AS(S)U.

Tell you what: you see fit to relaxing American plagiarism laws, Smokey, and maybe I'll look the other way while you stick that bong in your gob. Sound fair?

Well, the May issue's due out in just under two weeks...so I'd better get cracking and wrap up this arc. At over 60 pages and spanning five months ,"Up the Demi-Jon Staircase" marks the largest BDC story to date, topping previous contender the "SweetTart" arc (May-Jul 2007). Though even that behemoth will soon be overshadowed by "The Case of the Shanghaied Streetwalkers", the longest single issue, at a whopping 72 pages and a $2.98 cover price. I hope pencilling that sucker doesn't kill me. Adios for this week.

So a couple of months ago I was surfing the web looking for information on the new Spectacular Spider-Man cartoon, recently dearly departed from basic cable and now running in that fabled land of satellite TV, and this came to my attention:

It seems that (P)resident Obama and I share two things in common now: we both hail from Chicago and we are both huge fans of the webhead. For a couple of months now I have been spending many late nights downloading the original 1967 Spider-Man cartoon from YouTube and watching it in all its cheesy, recycled animation glory. Now on my ancient copmputer it takes about three hours to download a nine-minute cartoon, and sometimes my feeble connection cuts me off, or won't allow me access to certain videos. Though I watch them in no particular order, here's my list of Spider-goodies by episiode number:

1A - The Power of Dr. Octopus

1B - Sub-Zero for Spidey

2A - Where Crawls the Lizard

4A - The Sky Is Falling

* 4B - Captured by J. Jonah Jameson

5A - Never Step on a Scorpion

*6B - The Witching Hour

7A - Kilowatt Kaper

8 - Horn of the Rhino

10A - The Revenge of Dr. Magneto

10B - The Sinister Prime Minister

*11A - The Night of the Villains

*12A - Spider-Man Meets Dr. Noah Boddy

13A - Return of The Flying Dutchman

14A - The Golden Rhino

14B - Blueprint for Crime

15B - The Slippery Dr. Von Schlick

*16A - The Vulture's Prey

*19A - To Catch a Spider

20B - Trick or Treachery

*21 - The Origin of Spider-Man

*22 - King Pinned

38 - Cold Storage

40B - Conner's Reptiles

41A - Trouble with Snow

41B - Spider-Man Vs. Desparado

45B - The Devious Dr. Dumpty

48B - The Madness of Mysterio

*49 - Revolt in the Fifth Dimension

Asterisked episodes are ones my computer cut off while downlaoding, so I only saw part of them. Also, YouTube only offers the last two minutes of "Vulture's Prey", for some stupid reason. Plus the print of "Sinister Prime Minister" I found was incredibly dark and hard to make out.

These are the ones I haven't been able to download:

2B - Electro the Human Lightning Bolt

3 - The Menace of Mysterio

5B - Sands of Crime

6A - Diet of Destruction

7B - The Peril of Parafino

9A - The One-Eyed Idol

11B - Here Comes Trubble

13B - Farewell Performance

15A - The Spider and the Fly

17A - The Terrible Triumph of Dr. Octopus

17B - Magic Malice

18A - Fountain of Terror

19B - Double Identity

20A - Sting of the Scorpion

39 - To Cage a Spider

40A - The Winged Thing

43A - The Vanishing Dr. Vespasian

45A - Knight Must Fall

48A - Rhino

So if anyone can lend a fellow Spidey fan a webbed hand and send along some copies of the ones I haven't seen, or even better prints of the ones I have, they'd be much appreciated.

The "Up the Demi-Jon Staircase" arc draws to an explosive close in April, one issue away from our big golden-anniversary issue #50. So stay tuned, loyal readers.

Adios for this month.

In the true spirit of the holidays, I will forego my usual angry rants against liberals, The AS(S)U Herald, and any criticism of President-select B.H. Obama and instead wish my readers a merry Christmas.

If you wish to read one of my famous editorials, however, then preorder issue #45 of Belch Dimension Comics as a late Christmas present. In it you can read the first two chapters of a powerful three-issue arc, "Up the Demi-Jon Staircase", and my new piece, "Westside and Columbine: 10 Years Later". I offer a weighty, sober discussion of school violence and hopefully take a couple of new angles on the problem. As both a former newspaperman and a college student when, ten years ago this coming March, gunfire rocked a Jonesboro school mere blocks from AS(S)U and killed five, I feel uniquely qualified to offer thoughts on it. You don't want to miss it. That's the January ish, on sale the thirtieth.

Say, remember when you were a kid back in sixth grade and we sang all the bad parodies of famous Christmas carols? Like: It's beginning to look a lot like syphilis, All around your nose.... and Jingle bells/ Batman smells/Robin laid an egg.... Man, good times, good times.

So adios for this week, and adios for the year.

In this blog post I'm going to discuss two things--brothers and bricks--which, on the surface, seem unrelated, but which enjoy a tenebrous tie to one another, so bear with me.

My youngest brother has been having some problems for the last five years or so. He's been an alcoholic, been on and off drugs--including crystal meth--and alcohol, been jailed twice and done a stint in rehab. An unrepentant thief, user, and loser, he just went back into rehab tonight. The whole family, particularly me, has had enough of him and his hollow promises to clean himself up, get a job, and act right. He is an overgrown 23-year-old child. I have perhaps suffered the most under him, physically, emotionally, and financially. He has mocked, threatened, and physically attacked me on numerous occassions. He has repeatedly stolen from me to support his loathsome habits, including swiping my strongbox cthat ontainied all my cash and checks. He didn't even have the decency to try to hide the evidence; the box, its hinges pried off and the lid removed, was among his stuff when he was taken into custody, as if he didn't even care if he were caught. I started getting sick and losing my voice--a well-trained instrument I honed for years--reduced now to wheezy croaks and grating grunts--four years ago, because of the stress and rage I have swallowed in dealing with that disease passing itself off as a human being. I know I should be charitable and hope he gets the help he needs to be a better person, but I can't help but wish he would die and thus spares me, my family, and the world a lot of pain.

When he went to jail earlier this year I had terrible nightmares about seeing him back home. Some of them were awful dreams within dreams, like in Nightmare on Elm Street...awful heart-rending visions that left me in a cold sweat, kicking my legs and pounding on the mattress in terror begging to wake up.

I was a wreck. For several nights running I wasn't sure what was reality and what was the dream. Was I going to walk into the living room and see that stupid troll sacked out on the couch, swilling Mountain Lightning, grinning that smug contemptuous little smile of his? I was assured by my family that he wasn't coming back, that he was to move into his own place. Then, I knew only peace. For four months I lived happy and free for the first time in years. I put together a new book and, at the suggestion of my publisher, decided to put the ms. on a disk. I moved the files--and there were many--over to his computer, reasoning that thing was never coming back, so I was free to borrow his CD burner. I nearly, after many days of arduously resizing some ninety files, had it all set. The files were almost all transferred, and ready to go. Then, on Jul 4, with no warning, he was released from jail. He knuckled-walked right into the house as if he hadn't been away longer than it takes to buy a pack of smokes and spirited away the computer back to his new place--with all my redone files on it. I watched in open-mouthed, impotent horror. There went my work. There went my long-held dream of going back to ASU within a year or less about to come to fruit, now shuffling right out that door in the hands of that ignorant, grinning gargoyle...and I was helpless to stop it. I saw my dream crumbled to dust in my hands. My family never even told me he was getting out that day. It was an ugly surprise. If I'd had time to prepare, I could have at least readied myself psychologically. If nothing else I could have burned my files to CD-ROM and had them in the mail two months ago. My new book, one of several I planned to release over the coming year, would be in galley form right now and on shelves by Christmas. But noooooooooooooo. Captain Stupid swooped right in and undercut me. He selfishly refused to let me use his equipment for fear I would mess it up. I ceased to see him as my brother, but merely as a living roadblock to my personal happiness that I had to knock down. And if that wasn't bad enough, instead of going to his place, he crashed here for the next two months--eating my food, sneaking into my room, stealing my money, sleeping all day, leaving garbage strewn about and never returning dishes and silverware to the kitchen, not looking for a job, doing nothing, contributing nothing. It was as if he was mocking me. Nyah, nyah! I'm here, but my precious, faster computer with the CD burner you need to rebuild your shattered life is miles away, and you can't get to it! Ha, ha, ha! My nightmares had come to vivid life. I spent weeks fighting an old slow computer with its inadeqaute e-mail program. I couldn't even look at the boy. I resented and despised it. I didn't even see it as a human being. It was just an ugly sponging thing that lived in the house, ate, slept, and screamed. It was a fungus. It was a lump of radioactive waste that sickened all who came in contact with it. Not a day went by that I didn't pray for it to die in a flaming car wreck, or choke on a piece of one of my purloined Hot Pockets, or slip in the shower and crack open its worthless head on the floor. I wondered if it was possible to "accidentally" chop someone's head off with an axe...or make it look like someone just "happened " to suffer cranial trauma...37 times in the exact same spot. I mentally went over every good place I know--and as a great explorer of the Armorel woods I know many, friends and neighbors--to dump a body where it wouldn't be found for months.

Iargued a lot with my family over the weeks The Stupid Boy spent with us. I repeatedly declared my intent to return to ASU the first chance I got, if only to get away from it. I would get the money, I said, that's no problem. I just have to figure out a way to get around The Big Five. Pummel them in the court of public opinion. Use my blog, books and website as weapons. Hit them relentlessly. Leave them bloody and broken at my feet. Force them to knuckle under and admit there is no sketch. Get the charges dropped and the flag lifted so I can re-enroll. Then I could move right in and rediscover all those lovely perks: buffets three times daily, a better cable package, faster Internet, and being propositioned nightly over the phone for sex by some of the most beautiful young women in the tri-county area.

However, I got another very nasty surprise last month in the mail--the ASU Alumni newsletter. It informed me that earlier this summer they tore down the Seminole Twin Towers. It seems the building was festooned with mold and filth and thus demed unsafe and uninhabitable. I was hurt. I spent three years there, considered it my second home--as did many generations of male students--and they tell me it's gone as an afterthought in a blurb in some cheaply-produced mass distribution? Perhaps I would have liked to have been on hand when they tore it down. Perhaps I would have liked to have been among the last crop of students to live there before it was condemned and imploded into rubble. But noooooooooooooo. Because of Boss Bonnie and that sycophantic pinhead Roger Lee, I can't even set foot on campus without being arrested.

And that's when I realized that things have changed so much that even if I went back to ASU tomorrow, free and clear, it would never be the ASU I remember. I'm turning 33 in two days. I'm balding, paunchy, weak, and sick. I'd have to compete with men ten years younger and a lot better looking for those hot random girls. I'd have to enroll in a couple of courses, find a part-time job to pay tuition and bills, figure out how to balance work, a courseload, and still put out a monthly comic. Plus now I'd have to find a new place to live, since my old room no longer existed. It's all ghosts and memories--the threadbare carpets, the dim lighting, the stench of drunks' urine and pot hanging in the halls, the barely-legal girls retching their guts out in the bathroom after downing two gallons of Hawaiian Punch and vokda in a sitting. The lounge computers with half their mouse balls missing. the carpet that sumped a ton of water during an especially bad storm when the lobby flooded and that never quite lost that fishy stench, the corner table where a thousand games of cards were played--gone. The convenience store that sold the great chicken strips, the big-screen TV where I watched cartoons every Saturday, the microwave that was so old it had a knob on it, and it was broken ,so you had to insert your student ID sideways into the little slit on the plastic stub where it fell off to turn it--gone. Ghosts. Dust and rubble.

So I hereby announce that I am giving up my dream of going back to ASU. It is not something I do lightly. I have thought about it for days. Iam sorry to let it go. It is a dream which has kept me afloat through some rough times--the frequent beatings my brother gave me, or the nights I lay awake crying while he raged and bellowed and punched holes in the walls and hurled my mom's porcelain figurines across the room while having one of his tantrums, or all the times I went hungry because he'd gobbled up all the food in the fridge and stolen my petty cash so I couldn't go out and buy a sandwich at one of the take-out places. And I know soon enough he's going to get out of rehab, and he'll sob a few crocodile tears and swear up and down he's changed, and my family will forgive him--against my better judgement--and let him back in. Just like they always do. And not two weeks later he'll be acting up again, just as he always does. He'll steal, he'll abuse us, he'll rave and throw fits if he can't have his way, he'll generally treat us like filth. And I will have no choice but to sit, and wait, and wait, and wait it out, and endure, until the nightmare ends with him slipping up and going off to jail or rehab or wherever they send him this time to get clean, and I'll enjoy my brief reprieve before this endless cycle comes around and he's back in my life again. And again. And again. Because thanks to the evil Bonnie Thrasher, there is no escape for me from this hell. There is no Peter Pan-Land for me to run to and hide, because I was away too long, and too much time slipped away. Now I am too old for Neverland. I guess I will have to accept I've grown up and forgotten how to fly.

So I've decided to spend the bit of money I saved up all this time to cover my tuition on a little something that will allow me--if not in person, than in name, to live forever at ASU. I have a chance to buy a commemorative brick that will be laid in a path near one of the campus buildings. I have already written my inscription and submitted it to the committee, and it has been approved. I'm hoping my loyal fans will help cover the $165 cost of this little piece of immortality by buying books and comics from my webstore. And I sincerely hope it is in set in a place where Thrasher has to walk by and look at it every day on her way to work, and every morning she will see my hated name, and that it burns in her black heart like a coal. And who knows? Maybe someday, after the old bat either resigns or drops dead, I can visit ASU without fear of arrest, and see my brick for myself. That will be my new dream.

Adios for this week.

On Aug 29, right before the Labor Day holiday, Republican Presidential hopeful John McCain announced Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate.

The liberal media immediately began its customary hatchet job on the attractive, capable conservative fortysomething, spading up dirt about her voting record, her personal life, her kids, and her qualifications. Here we have the first female Republican and second woman (Geraldine Ferraro being the first) named vice-Presidential nominee...the living embodiment of everything feminism have fought for for decades...and what are they doing? Surprise, surprise! The mustache brigade is griping!

Why? Dirty little secret, folks: the liberal feminist wing of the Demwit-crat Party despises marriage and motherhood. As I said in my last blog about feminism, the only women the left-wing things want to see in power are flaming Party-line ironbox socialists. The liberal feminists are going to trot out the Party playbook and do everything in their power to smear Palin for not being one of Them.

Their latest gambit has been to attack the Palin family. The slobbering looneytune hate bloggers and jourcoms who make up the modern Democratic Party have made hay with the fact that Bristol Palin, the eldest daughter, is 17 years old, pregnant and unwed. This is a thin Party ploy to appeal to the evangelical crowd--which under normal circumstances the left avoids, because, remember, they don't believe in God, but instead worship Gaia the Earth Spirit--and convince them that Palin is a woman lacking in moral fiber and an irresponsible parent, unable to keep her little girl from going out and getting knocked up. Here's the truth: the left doesn't care that Bristol Palin had sex. If she was a barely-legal brat going out on weekends, blowing anonymous twentysomething guys in frathouses and truck stop bathrooms, the mustache brigade would laud her as a beacon of female empowerment. They don't care that she is an unwed mother. What they are mad about is that she is planning to marry the father! Gasp! Imagine that! Why, if she were the aforementioned girl who slipped up and got pregnant, and then had an abortion, why, they'd put her in for a Nobel Prize!

It gets worse. The leftist rumor mill has actually put forth a supposition that the Down's syndrome child Palin had five months ago was actually Bristol's, and she secretly adopted it to cover up her daughter's shame. Okay. Forget that the math on that is completely screwed up for a moment (obviously these morons went to the sort of outcome-based education mill that teaches you 2+2=blue--which is where most of the journalists in America went, or at least the ones I knew)...but, cripes, that little conspiracy theory was ripped off a story arc on Desperate Housewives! I suppose next you'll tell me Sara Palin complained about her gay neighbors' tacky fountain and her kids burned down the pizza parlor down the street, but her husband got the blame? Hey, why don't you fartknockers plagiarize a couple of theories off Private Practice next? They could use the ratings.

Sarah Palin is a brillant choice for Repub veep. She's a smart, accomplished lady who has proven herself to have strength and integrity. Her nomination will also serve to showcase the hypocricy and utter frothing-at-the-mouth craziness of the kook fringe left-wing things that have taken over the Democratic Party. Some, even a few misguided souls right here in our tent, have publically decried it as a mistake, citing Harriet Myers, even Dan Quayle. They say Palin should smile and politely refuse the nomination and let McCain take a mulligan on this one. I would be crushed if she did that. It would be a blow not just to true feminism, but to conservatives as a whole. We Republicans cannot get sidetracked and start arguing amongst ourselves, otherwise we run the risk of becoming what the enemy has said conservatism is all along: a disturbed, hateful little anomoly of a way of thought, a temporary blip of history to be corrected with a vote for Fartknock-O-Rama in '08. We mus tstand together against our detractors. We may have Trojan Horsed in the perfect candidate: one whose nomination will anger the Party so much that it cracks in two, fighting amongst itself, degenerating into the ugly, venom-spewing mess of snakes we all pretty much know it is anyhow. We may finally see liberalism consigned to the dustbin of history within four to eight years. Sarah Palin may be that final nail in the left's coffin I have dreamed of for so long.

I apologize for taking so long between blogs, and I hope to explain better why with my next post, which should be within days. I will tell you now that, with the "The Cobra's Last Strike!" arc of Belch Dimension, finished (it start with the May issue and wrapped up this month), we're getting into the last three issues of 2008. In October, a suspicious new couple moves in next door to the Sweet clan, and with that, there go the "Neighbor Hoods!" In November we kick off the election season with a special edition of our perennial feature, "Gort's Guide to...", in which our Flungarian friend decides to run for office! And the Christmas issue features deleted scenes from the first three seasons, including an alternate ending that will leave your pants needing the services of an emergency dry cleaner.

Adios for this week.