No surprise here: ‘Guru of Ganja’ Found Guilty of Federal Marijuana Charges. (Link from Rational Review.)

Deliberating for a day, the 12-member jury concluded that Rosenthal, the self-described “Guru of Ganja,” was growing more than 1,000 plants, conspiring to cultivate marijuana and maintaining a warehouse for a growing operation. He faces 10 years to life when sentenced June 4.
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Under strict orders from U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer, Rosenthal couldn’t tell the jury he was growing pot as “an officer” for Oakland’s medical marijuana program.
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“There is no such thing as medical marijuana,” said Richard Meyer, a DEA spokesman. “We’re Americans first, Californians second.”

That’s interesting epistemology.

Outside the courtroom, jury foreman Charles Sackett III said jurors suspected Rosenthal was growing medical marijuana, since a host of protesters outside the courthouse held constant demonstrations.

Sackett, however, said the jury followed federal law when it reached its “tough decision.”

“We had no legal wiggle room,” Sackett said. When asked if he hoped the verdicts would be overturned on appeal, Sackett replied: “Personally, yes, I do.”

Does anyone believe an appeal will get anywhere? Every Federal drug law obviously violates the Ninth and Tenth Amendments; but judges practically never enforce either of those quaint clauses. It’s high time for jurors to remember the Nuremberg Principle and resume enforcing the Bill of Rights on their own initiative.

An Un-republican Form of Government

In 1987, the California Sheriffs Association sponsored a bill in the state legislature to ban its electoral competition. Since then, only current or recent members of the law enforcement establishment have been allowed to run for Sheriff in California.
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It is as if prosecutors had banned their main electoral opposition by getting the legislature to pass a law against defense attorneys running for District Attorney, requiring all candidates to be members of the prosecutor’s office. Somebody ought to sue.

That somebody is me.

There is much else of interest.

The copyright clause of the US Constitution says: “Congress shall have power . . . To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”

Other than the Preamble, is this the only passage of the form “to do something general by doing something specific”?

A Coyote at the Dog Show has second thoughts about a discussion we had lo these four months gone. Well, since I understood him then to be making exactly the opposite point from what he now reveals he had in mind, I agree that one of us must have been muddled. I hope this acknowledgement pleases him.

By the way, Swen, things have changed at Blogspot: you now have to take the ‘?’ out of the link.

Dan Kohn writes: “It is shocking that there is not more of an outcry over the unlawful detainment of radioactive ‘dirty bomb’ suspect Jose Padilla.” The old bleat that “the Constitution is not a suicide pact” is brought up, and that’s the hook for my comment.

Lincoln may have said it first; it fits Lincoln’s pattern – a plausible homily which, if examined closely in the light of real history rather than fairytales, proves (if anything) the opposite of the proposition in support of which it was invoked.
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Vin Suprynowicz often complains about decay in the separation of state powers, particularly about public school teachers (and other employees of the executive branch) holding part-time legislative office; today’s column is on that subject, and the link ought to be up any minute now.

Various Anglosphere constitutions specify a threefold division, legislative – judicial – executive; I wonder whether other cultures have a similar concept but a different notion of the natural cleavage. Dan Goodman, though he has since forgotten it, once imagined a culture where institutions are classified by the length of their time-horizon.

For three centuries beginning in 930, the Norse settlers of Iceland enjoyed the literate world’s nearest thing to a stateless society; possibly the largest non-nomadic society ever to lack territorial monopolies in government. Competition between the goðar (customarily and poorly translated as ‘chieftains’) is often blamed for the feuds that led to annexation by Norway in 1262; so why did the evils of anarchy happen only when the system became less competitive?

Roderick Long (cited at Gene Expression) concisely explains what went wrong. As usual, the fatal flaw was a non-competitive element: a church tax, imposed on the households of a territory. Another flaw was a restriction on the number of goðar – analogous to taxi medallions. These two features concentrated wealth and power in a few families.

I think it was indirectly through a link from Long’s essay that I found Sean Gabb’s “How to Destroy the Enemy Class”, a manifesto for the first libertarian Parliament.