Random Nuclear Strikes

The Wall Street Journal is getting cheeky. Today, in a “Notable and Quotable” column next to a puff piece on a resurgent Rick Perry of Texas and an extended analysis of Arlen Specter’s troubles — both heavily salted with discussions of Obamacare’s problems — they print this:

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The maximum amount of marijuana for “personal use” under the new law is 5 grams—the equivalent of about four joints. The limit is a half gram for cocaine, the equivalent of about 4 “lines.” For other drugs, the limits are 50 milligrams of heroin, 40 milligrams for methamphetamine and 0.015 milligrams for LSD.

Now that this is all suddenly legal in Mexico, I suspect we’ll be seeing a ballot measure doing the same here in Cali within a few years. (We’ve already decriminaized pot.) And it will probably pass, too. Par-ty!

Look, seriously, the “war on Drugs” has been the agent for some of the most pernicious assaults on our liberties, not least because they occur at the local level. The sooner it goes away, the better. And no, I don’t do drugs, so there.

Ran across these lines this morning. Hadn’t read ’em before:

In the corner – not a vision – but a sign for coming days,
Stand a box of ammunition and a rifle in green baize.
And in this, the living present, let the word go through the land,
Every tradesman, clerk and peasant should have these two things at hand. — Henry Lawson