The original article, originally entitled, “Sarah McCulloch”, has now been edited several times to remove some of the more hysterical content (though the spirit remains). Fortunately, I have a screencap of what it used to look like.

(The comments blacked out are in reference to a specific drug policy organisation and a specific person, who immediately apologised to me and requested that they be removed from the post (and also asked for the post to be taken down). Neither they, nor I, would like to comment further.)

Wow. Wow. Did that just come from the keyboard of the leader of a political party? Like, an actual party, registered with the Electoral Commission? The leader of a political party, in the UK, in 2012, thought it would be a good idea to put little question marks after references to someone’s gender? On his blog? Where everyone in the world can see it? Has that actually just happened?

Wow.

So, the content. Hmm. Obviously, it’s not very nice. Obviously, I dislike having such comments posted about me on the world wide web. And obviously, if Peter Reynolds genuinely had such contempt for my writing, he wouldn’t have bothered to tell the world that I’m not worth listening to, in extensively sexist, homophobic, and transphobic terms that he’s already had to tone down twice.

I think one might largely sum up our respective posts as:

Sarah McCulloch: “Peter Reynolds is a homophobe and a racist, and probably a liar, who has been deleted by several politicians from Facebook when made aware of his published views. Here are referenced screencaps of all the relevant comments, posts and emails to support what I am saying”

Peter Reynolds: “Sarah McCulloch is a genetically confused half-werewolf who has flung lots of abuse at me, the monstrous woman, and so I think everyone should just stop thinking about the points she’s made, because she’s just bitter and twisted, and absorb mine about the fact that I find her unattractive. Evidence? Who needs evidence?”

Regarding these aspersions on my gender and my gender presentation, I do not get up in the morning and think, “Gosh, I wonder what 54 year old men would like to see me wear today?”, and I do not intend to start. I have little to say other than that I stand in total solidarity with all trans people everywhere – I shall dress as I like, present as I please, and identify as I want. And that’s just fine.

I also take issue with Peter Reynolds’ comments that I am “mysandrist”, when the most cursory inspections of my blog would reveal that I am a known and publicly declared supporter of the men’s rights movement, and was even the Treasurer for a Men’s Society two years ago. Please also note that, unlike Peter Reynolds, I have documented on this website most things I have ever written, even prior to my entry to the internet. My earliest publication is from when I was 11 (in a book that you can actually get in print), and I’m only 22 now. One must ask how someone with a 30 year career in journalism that’s older than I am has just a handful of press clippings to show for it.

The most bizarre comment that Peter Reynolds made was that he is a “kind, gentle, and sincere man”:

Yeah, he’s just a really kind guy, just pushed over the edge by my vindictive abusiveness in publishing some screencaps of his own writings. Not to, you know, respond in any kind of considered manner but to state that he thinks I’m sad. Powerful comeback, right there. And there’s no personal insults in that post at alllllll… Well, I think we can add sexist and transphobic to that list. I will of course, be writing an official complaint to the Clear Executive Committee and I will post that letter here. Time to try out their new equal opportunities policy. Did I mention he’s the leader of a political party?

I will say that its not like I haven’t been attacked on the internet before, but this is the first time it has come from the leader of an active political party. The mind boggles to try to comprehend why an aspiring national political figure would choose to make the most petty and vindictive comments about a 22 year old third year theology student in an amazingly public forum, when he’s already had to take his blog down for making such attacks, right when the Mail on Sunday is busy producing a full on “hatchet job” of everything he’s ever done and written. The mind boggles, truly. I’m not even sure what to italicise.

The one upside of this somewhat sordid situation is reading through the unexpectedly complimentary messages being sent to and about me. People I have never heard of or met have said they like my writing and they think I made my arguments well and without rancour. By contrast, most detractors have contented themselves with discussing whether they would like to have sex with me or not (although I must disappoint them by stating they have no chance). So I think I’d rather have my supporters than those of Peter Reynolds. Did I mention he’s the leader of a political party?

I will briefly take up a little more of your time to say just a bit more about the life of Peter Reynolds:

“Does she think I didn’t write [the Home Affair Committee report]? Or that I did it for my own amusement with no purpose? Or that I forged it to deceive people with sad, deluded, heterophobic lives like her? What exactly does she think?”

I don’t really know, all I can say is that Peter Reynolds can’t have submitted a thirty page report to a Home Affairs Committee inquiry into cannabis laws in 1983, as the report claims, because there wasn’t one. I said that on the post itself which Peter Reynolds apparently only skim read, dismissed, and then insulted me for anyway. I’ve been sent a lot of messages from people pointing out problems with the language (it reads too “modern”), the electronic file (the text is selectable, the edges are a bit funny), and the means by which it was produced (how did a 26 year old copywriter for Mailflow Advertising living in Surrey get hold of a report from the Technical Subcommittee of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs?), but as none of these suggestions have been proven in any way, I chose not to publish them. I await further evidence, shocking as that might seem to people whose idea of journalistic integrity is to make references to werewolves.

I don’t think it really matters, because the point of my post was to demonstrate that trying to prove Peter Reynolds’ own assertions about his past in good faith still uncovers highly misleading statements, or worse, outright lies. For example, I called the Independent to verify Peter Reynolds statement that he was a “regular columnist” for them. They have two articles written by him, dating from 1997, about cycling. Peter Reynolds himself confirmed this and stated in his letter to the Mail on Sunday that there is a third, mistakenly attributed to Paul Reynolds. Ok. But that’s not a “regular column”, is it? George Monbiot has a regular column. Peter Hitchens has a regular column. Three articles about your bike is a regular column? And three blog posts from me about Peter Reynolds is “bickering, abuse, divisiveness and misandry”.

Please, my dear reader, make your own inquiries and make up your own mind. Because personally, I would die. Did I mention he’s the leader of a political party?

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Peter Reynolds and the Rampant Sexism (Aimed at Me) is a post from: SarahMcCulloch.com | Activism, spirituality and opinion

I am and remain baffled that people who know Peter Reynolds have said, “Well, I’ve met him and he’s definitely not homophobic or racist”, as if you have to actively be battering LGBT people with 2x4s before you get your anti-gay card. We have Peter Reynolds’ writings, and they are awful. We have his confirmation on the 2nd January that he stood by his previous comments 100%. We have his total lack of an apology on the Clear website, in which he said,

“I am extremely sorry if any of the articles on my personal website or any comments I have made at any time have offended anyone. The articles in question were written at least two years ago and were intended to be provocative and controversial. Had I known that one day I would be elected a leader of a political party I would have chosen my words much more carefully.”

Not, “I made a mistake publishing words that are discriminatory towards minorities, and I’m sorry”, not “I thought those things a long time ago but I’m over that now, yay gays”, but

“Well, I knew that everything I wrote was homophobic and racist, but I published them anyway because I thought it would be “controversial”, and had no idea that one day I would become the political leader of a party and I would feel the need to reaffirm to the world on the 2nd January, 2 years after the original post and while leader, that homosexuality is a perversion, and I’m not racist, despite my racist writings, because I have a black friend. Who’s really, really black. Jet black, actually. Sorry if you just didn’t get that.”

Nice apology.

I can’t convince anyone who doesn’t believe that saying that gay people are infecting the fashion industry is a problem, but I can demonstrate the political sandstorm that awaits people who express such sentiments. Yesterday I received some very interesting news and screenshots to back them up – someone went through Peter Reynolds’ friends’ list on Facebook this week and contacted every single MP on his list, pointing out the comments on his blog. The result?

12 13 14 15 Members of Parliament have deleted Peter Reynolds from Facebook. These are:

Caroline Lucas, Green MP for Brighton and Hove

Paul Flynn, Labour MP for Newport West

Peter Lilley, Conservative MP for Hitchin and Harpenden

Incidentally, Peter Reynolds posted this a couple of days ago in reference to prohibition:

“There are beacons of light amongst the darkness: Paul Flynn, Molly Meacher, Peter Lilley, Tom Brake. These are people of integrity and principle. We need many more.”

Chloe Smith, Conservative MP for Norwich North

John Baron, Conservative MP for Basildon and Billericay
Tristram Hunt, Labour MP for Stoke-on-Central
Andrew Selous, Conservative MP for Southwest Bedfordshire
David Mundell, Conservative MP for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale
David Burrowes, Conservative MP for Enfield Southgate
Nigel Evans, Conservative MP for Ribble Valley
Stephen Mosley, Conservative MP for Chester
Catherine McKinnell, Labour MP for Newcastle -Upon-Tyne

The image above shows Nigel Evans and Catherine McKinnell as Facebook friends – an update I got a few hours later showed them gone:

The only MP contacted who hasn’t responded is Tom Brake, Liberal Democrat MP for Carshalton and Wallington – and he tried to ban cannabis seeds in 2008.

Now, I can almost hear the complaint already that someone made trouble for Peter Reynolds by contacting all the politicians on his list , all the while missing the point – MPs are grown-ups, and actual politicians, and when they are made aware of people stating homophobic and racist reviews, they distance themselves as far and as fast as possible (except Tom Brake, apparently).

Saying that Peter Reynolds isn’t a homophobe because you have personally never seen him tell a gay person to their face that they are perverts, and claiming that no-one cares about what people post on their personal blog, is to have an exceptionally low opinion of the standing of the cannabis campaign and a belief that no-one is listening. But they are, and what they are hearing is that large number of cannabis campaigners are willing to set aside the basic human rights of a greater percentage of the population than themselves in the belief that Peter Reynolds can deliver them a bit of political influence. And I think you should question what impression YOU are giving of cannabis law reform, as well as Peter Reynolds.

Maybe Peter Reynolds is influencing politics, but certainly not in the way we’d all like.

UPDATE: Michael Meacher, Labour MP for Oldham West and Royton has also deleted Peter Reynolds.

UPDATE: Tom Harris, Labour MP for Glasgow South, has also deleted Peter Reynolds.

UPDATE: Tom Watson, Labour MP for West Bromwich East, has also deleted Peter Reynolds.

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Peter Reynolds and the MPs who Weren’t is a post from: SarahMcCulloch.com | Activism, spirituality and opinion

I just read your article regarding the Bones episode which covered the
Kennedy assassination. I am surprised that you have written the episode is
badly written and biased towards the Warren Commission, especially
your comment, “Who the bones belong to is never explained nor why this
exercise is done is never made fully clear.”

The main characters state that there is currently a congressional
commission considering a request to dig up the bones of Kennedy to do
further testing about the assassination. The implication of a number
of federal agents turning up, locking down the facility and claiming
they are from a federal agency that normally handles stationary
supplies is that there is a secret government operation trying to work
out whether the request should be approved or not. They exhume the
bones themselves, and pull in forensic experts to determine whether
the official government statement of events about how Kennedy died is
true or not. They forbid them from leaving any marks or doing any
invasive testing so that they can put the bones back without anyone
knowing that they have been tampered with.

The point of the melons is to establish whether the same gunman could
have shot Governor Connally and JFK within 1.7 seconds using the rifle
that Lee Harvey Oswald used. The anthropologists doubt it was possible
but Booth insists that it is and proceeds to demonstrate (prior to his
service in the FBI he was a trained sniper in the Army). However,
further investigations of the skull fragments suggest that Kennedy’s
head wound came from the inside out – implying that someone else shot
him in addition to Oswald. (I have no idea whether that is the actual
case with JFK’s real skull, but that’s what they put in the episode.)

The reason that the identity of the skeleton is left obscure is
because Dr. Brennan doesn’t want to shatter Booth’s belief system.
Booth has killed over 50 people for the American government, and
relies on his belief that all those people were killed for the good of
America to not go crazy – if it could be proven that the government
lied about the Kennedy assassination, it casts doubt on his entire
career and his self-identity as someone who protects people rather
than acts as a murderer. You say you’ve never seen another episode of
Bones, so allow me to spoil you by pointing out that the fact that
Booth and Brennan are in love and go to ridiculous lengths to protect
each other is a major theme throughout the series – they’ve
subsequently gotten together and are now having a child.

Bones doesn’t want Booth to get upset about his government lying to
him, so she tells him that because of her experiment with the femurs
in the pudding, the person with the skeleton had some kind of
condition I can’t spell and that this condition wasn’t one JFK was
known to have. She therefore says that she can’t conclusively identify
the skeleton as JFK’s, and it is unlikely that it is him. Booth is
obviously relieved. HOWEVER, Cam comes up to her as the end of the
episode and says that JFK did have scarlet fever as a child, an
illness which can cause the condition that Bones found. Bones points
out that this likelihood is less than 1%. Cam thanks her for
protecting Booth. The final scene is of a news report that the
committee has turned down the request to exhume JFK.

The clear implication of this episode is that the bones were JFK, that
he was shot by more than one person, and that Bones has used her
reputation for rigorous statistical analysis to assure Booth that his
belief in the United States government is justified, even though it
isn’t, as the committee turns down the request to exhume the skeleton
because they’ve been informed by the results of this experiment that
the real truth is likely to come out and embarrass the government.
It’s actually a brilliantly constructed episode.

Having never looked into the JFK conspiracy theories, I was incredibly
surprised that Fox, of all channels, had allowed an American
television series to heavily imply that the government is covering up
the story of what really happened – it was while I was trying to work
out whether this conspiracy actually had some truth to it that I found
your blog.

I am a massive Bones fan and I thought that your commentary really
missed the point of the conclusion of the episode, which is not about
JFK or the Warren Commission but about the crisis in Booth’s identity
and Bones’ development of empathy and a willingness to bend the truth
to people she loves for their own good (Bones is often referred to in
interviews with the writers as being quite Aspergic in nature). But
it’s not something you would pick up if you’ve only ever watched one
episode, so I thought I would write to let you know, as you have
comments switched off.

I think, if anything, you should be pleased that Bones covered the
Kennedy assassination in the way that it did, because of all the
long-term Bones fans who now know that there is substantial support
for a second gun-man!

Yours,

Sarah McCulloch

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Letter to George Bailey regarding the Bones episode on the JFK Assassination is a post from: SarahMcCulloch.com | Activism, spirituality and opinion

Peter Reynolds has now announced an intention to sue both myself and Darryl Bickler of the Drug Equality Alliance regarding statements made around his report, “An Unaffordable Prejudice”. As you may know, I took down this article briefly while I established the legal situation. Having now done this, I am leaving this article up until I receive a take-down notice from a lawyer detailing what is actionable about it.

Whilst Peter has brought much energy and creativity into his work, I cannot allow the good points to balance the bad ones as the latter in my view fundamentally interfere with the credibility of Clear. One cannot be a spokesperson for a party or cannabis users whilst concurrently expressing such vehemently held views in my opinion. I have determined to end all communication with Mr Reynolds as a result of his demeanour, threats and offensive communication towards persons who ask critical questions or who find themselves opposed to his views. I consider that he should at the very least stand down from Clear and then put himself forwards for re-election if he is so minded to do so.

I wrote my previous article about Peter Reynolds and homophobia largely because I noticed a link to an article that one of my Facebook friends had posted, and I was shocked that anyone, let alone party political figures could be calling gay people perverts in 2012.

Since then, I have been watching the mounting screencaps piling up about unverifiable claims that Peter has made about himself and the sudden flurry of “Yay Peter’s hed iz exploding yays” articles and reports pouring forth to cover the rising criticism. I am a massive data geek if nothing else, especially about drug policy, and when learning that in July 2011 Peter Reynolds posted on his blog that he had written a 30 page cannabis report for the Home Affairs Committee in 1983 (when he was aged just 26), I thought that was really interesting. Here is the screencap of his blog, saying that he had written it in 1983, not 1978 as he had apparently previously told people.

A very interesting report indeed. Also extremely easy to verify, because Home Affairs Committee Inquiries, unlike a pre-Internet 30 year long journalism career in advertising, are a matter of public record. So I wrote to the Home Affairs Committee and asked them if there had been an inquiry into cannabis legislation in 1983. They got back to me today. Their reply?

“The Committee did not publish a report on drugs during 1983.”

Just to clarify, I then called the Home Affairs Committee and they stated that that definitely, definitely meant there was no Home Affairs Committee inquiry into cannabis laws in 1983.

So Peter Reynolds published this on his personal blog. Ok. Why does this matter to Clear?

Because he published it on the Clear website three days ago in his official capacity as party leader.

I cannot even begin to fathom why Peter Reynolds would tell people he had written and submitted a thirty page report on cannabis legislation in 1983 to a parliamentary inquiry that doesn’t exist. My guess as to why he chose 1983 is Peter had already told someone that he had written such a report in 1978 and hadn’t realised that the committee was created in 1979:

But anyway, I think this is something for Clear members to take up, rather than me. If you feel that I am a “troll” or that I have “forged” the screencaps, both daft accusations being thrown at anyone who questions what is going on, you are welcome to contact the Home Affairs Committee yourself:

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Peter Reynolds and the Home Affairs Inquiry that Doesn’t Exist is a post from: SarahMcCulloch.com | Activism, spirituality and opinion

The internship system is sorely abused these days.

There is, quite rightly, a growing campaign against the proliferation of unpaid internships. When employers know that they can get grunt-level employees to work for them, for free, almost indefinitely, it is hardly surprising that a lot of them are firing paid staff and replacing them with a rotating selection of young hopefuls. This is storing up all kinds of problems in our society, from creating entire industries open only to the wealthy and well-connected who can support their children while they work for free, to forcing people to rent for longer because they can’t earn enough to buy property.

So, unpaid internships suck, but what is truly amazing is that people are not only happy to work for free, they’re now paying to work:

“When Roz Tuplin graduated in 2010 she thought that a post-graduate degree in English Literature would be good grounding for a job in the media.

She knew she would have to gain work experience, but after a year of trying to get a placement, she has decided to pay employers £65 a day to let her through the door.

Ms Tuplin, 23, from Wirral, will be paying £260 for a four-day work experience placement with a TV production company in London.”

I don’t know what the dream job for Ms Tuplin is, although I hope she realises the oddity of getting a job to earn money to pay for a job which might get her a job to start her chosen career while her youth ticks away. But I can’t see a connection between having a post-graduate degree in English Literature and working in television. I’m not in any way an expert in these matters, but if I ran a production company, I wouldn’t be hiring someone who had an MA and a four day work experience placement to show for their five years of adulthood. I’ve never applied for an internship because I’ve never had time to do one – I’ve been continuously busy with education, volunteering, politics, activism and personal projects since I left school in 2007, and as I hope this website shows, my CV and employment prospects hasn’t suffered for it.

Another article on paying for internships has this horrifying story:

“Sheila Miller, Albuquerque, says her daughter, Amber, couldn’t find the internship she needed to complete her degree in emergency-management planning at a Texas university. To jump-start their daughter’s career, Ms. Miller and her husband dipped into the remainder of Amber’s college fund late last year to send her to Fast Track Internships, a Highland Village, Texas, consultant founded in 2005. For $799, the firm helped her polish Amber’s résumé and cover letter, identify 133 target employers and mail them all letters and résumés. Amber soon received 15 calls from employers and last week took an unpaid internship with a city police department, writing their emergency-response plan.”

And that, I think, is the heart of this strange new trend. If you are choosing to pay someone £500 to write your CV for you and find potential employers for your very specific and high-paying skills (over your own university’s free careers service, which has an active incentive to find you a job that looks nice in their statistics), when there are hundreds of websites that will help you to do the same for free, the problem is possibly not that there’s a tough job market, but that you’re boring. So boring, that not only will employers not pay you, but they don’t want you using up their air either.

Probably as boring as this fish that came up when I looked up images for internships.

I should point out that this is different from just being in a slow job market. Unemployment is rising across the world, and I’m the first to admit (read: bellow at Tories) that “get on your bike” isn’t an option when there’s 2.6 million unemployed and 500,000 job vacancies. But the really competitive internships are designed to get you into a career, not a job. A career that presumably, you want to do. A career that you have further presumably known you’ve wanted to do for some time (certainly to have taken a degree for it). A career that you have a passion for.

Why then, are you not already doing that career, and demonstrating to employers that you will not, as one friend put it “stick your hands together with the Pritt Stick”? I think anyone who has ever looked into making money online will know the emphasis that every single business site puts on blogging as a way of garnering attention for yourself, but that’s not necessary. If Roz Tuplin wants to work in media, why isn’t she making media? If she wants to make television, why isn’t she making television? My friend Jamie does, and sufficiently well they actually got a commission out of it. What looks better, internship or paid work?

If you’ve got £300 to spend on your own personal development, I suggest you spend it on something that will make you interesting. Buy a camera and tripod, rent an isolated cottage without internet access  until you’ve written that novel, start a charity, start a blog, start a business, join a club, do some volunteering, go woofing, move back in with your parents and refuse to leave until you know who you are and what you want to do. Fail if you need to. But don’t pay someone to let you work for them, it’s an insult to what intelligence you have, and don’t buy advice that’s available for free. If you really, desperately, want to work in a specific field, you should be finding ways to get into it right now, not depending on your work placements to get you a CV worth looking at so you might be able to get into it in the future. And if you don’t care that much, you should be leaving internships to people who do and get yourself a job with someone who is willing to pay you.

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If you’re Paying for an Internship, You’re Probably Not Worth Employing is a post from: SarahMcCulloch.com | Activism, spirituality and opinion

Two and a half years ago, Peter Reynolds published an article on the fashion industry, in which he accused gay people of causing bulimia, “infecting” the fashion industry, and told them to leave it to people “with far better taste”.

Then he posted an article saying that he wasn’t racist or homophobic, because his best friend is Jamaican, and the current controversy is just being whipped up by an anti-prohibitionist drug dealer who wants to keep drugs illegal so they can make more money. Everyone should just ignore that other stuff about how Oriental looking international students are destroying our country.

Several senior Clear members have said that Peter’s comments are awful, but that he is fundamentally not racist or homophobic, that he has just said some unwise things. I think there’s a difference between saying “some unwise things” and then saying that there’s a gay conspiracy undermining the fashion industry two and a half years ago, and then when that gets thrown at you, adding an addendum to the same post *two days ago* stating that gay people are perverts, and then claiming that everyone who thinks this is an outrageous comment is just buying into a campaign run by some big drug dealer.

I have no idea who this drug dealer is about or what he’s getting at there, although to judge by the reaction, others do. I’m not involved in the cannabis activism community, but I am one of those perverts and I am horrified to be called the same epithets I had hoped we had dropped from public discourse back in the 90s. Along with “I don’t care what you do in your bedrooms” – great, but what is Peter going to do when we hold hands in the street or get married outside our bedrooms? What does he think about section 28? Gay rights is not about acceptance of our sex lives, it’s about acceptance of our identities as people who have minority affectional orientations.

These words are not “unwise”, they’re homophobia. On what basis can you say that Peter Reynolds is not homophobic if he says “I stand by it 100%” less than 48 hours ago? What do you define racism to be if Peter Reynolds can say there were too many Chinese people at his son’s graduation and state that international students are destroying Britain and not be a racist? I don’t understand what you believe to be the difference: I find my humanity and the humanity of Chinese students questioned either way.

Could you imagine if an MP of any party had said stuff like that? Oh right, DUP MP Iris Robinson did and 11,000 people signed a petition condemning her. But setting aside the somewhat puritanical politics of Northern Ireland, could you imagine if David Cameron had called gay people perverts? Ed Miliband? Nick Clegg? Caroline Lucas? Nigel Farage? Alex Salmond? They’d all lose their jobs in days. There’s no such thing as personal views when you sit at the top of a party. When the leader of the 450 member Libertarian Party published an anonymous article on his personal blog calling for someone to be stabbed to death he was humiliated on national television when Andrew Neil asked him about it. In fact, I think that one commenter’s take on that particular incident explains well why Peter Reynolds posting about gays being perverts is quite important to Clear members, whatever your views on homosexuality:

The views expressed at [the leader's blog] are heinously offensive, and wilfully so. But it’s a brute fact of politics that personalities matter. If [the leader] wants people to vote for him and his party, people will have an interest in knowing what kind of people form [his party]. A natural place to look is the party leader’s blog. And if journalists go there and find lengthy rants of personalised, pornographic, narcissistic, grievously offensive invective and vitriol – well they are going to report on that. And rightly so, because before people vote for [the party], they should know what sorts of people they’re dealing with. And one of the media’s jobs is to convey information to the electorate.

A quote:

“Homosexuality is a perversion from the norm and gay culture has been allowed virtually to extinguish heterosexual influence in the fashion industry. “

Another:

“The TV footage of dozens of gay demonstrators flaunting their perversions in front of the world’s journalists showed just why so many ordinary people find these creatures so repulsive.”

One was written by the leader of Clear in 2012, one was written by the leader of the BNP in 1999. Surely, you must see that there is something very, very wrong, not with someone’s editorial judgement but his general attitude, when it is possible to make such a comparison.

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Perverts in the Fashion Industry and Cannabis Law Reform is a post from: SarahMcCulloch.com | Activism, spirituality and opinion

Success is waking up in the morning, so excited about what you have to do that you literally fly out the door.

It’s getting to work with people you love.

Success is connecting with the world and making people feel.

It’s finding a way to bind together people who have nothing in common but a dream.

It’s falling asleep at night knowing you did the best job you could.

Success is joy and freedom and friendship.

And success is love.

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Happy 2012! – What is Success? is a post from: SarahMcCulloch.com | Activism, spirituality and opinion

Ho.

Ho.

Ho.

Ho.

Now stop being silly and get on with making your day beautiful, wherever you are.

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Is there a War on Christmas? is a post from: SarahMcCulloch.com | Activism, spirituality and opinion

Imagine you’ve gone to a different country, one where people speak your language but the way they live their lives is completely different to how you do it. Any time you ask someone a question, like what sort of currency they use or what public transport is available, they look at you like you’re crazy and tell you that you should already know. Worse, every so often, others will tease you and point you out to other people as someone who doesn’t get the simplest things. Angry, frustrated and confused, you give up asking questions and try to avoid having to speak to anyone about things you don’t understand. You try to work out what’s going on by watching the other people around you and trying to copy what you see for the duration of your stay.

Now imagine that you are autistic, that that country is your society, and the duration of your stay is the rest of your life. This is the reality for autistic people.

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What It Actually Feels Like to be Autistic is a post from: SarahMcCulloch.com | Activism, spirituality and opinion

As medical marijuana laws are passed across the world, it is going to become steadily more obvious that the average pound of cannabis dispensed every day per dispensary is not all for chronic illnesses.

Many cannabis campaigners like to throw around the fact that 15 out of 50 states have medical marijuana laws. However, as a friend pointed out to me, “To me, that simply means that 35 American states don’t have medical marijuana.” It’s not, on the face of it, an incredible statistic except to people who genuinely think cannabis will drive you crazy and the government is mandated to execute people found using it. There’s much more impressive stats out there. Let’s consider the math:

15 states out of 50 have medical marijuana laws.

30% of the United States has medical marijuana laws.

Populations:

Alaska – 710,231
Arizona – 6,392,017
California – 37,253,956
Colorado – 5,029,196
Hawaii – 1,360,301
Maine – 1,328,361
Michigan – 9,883,640
Montana – 989,415
Nevada – 2,700,551
New Jersey – 8,791,894
New Mexico – 2,059,179
Oregon – 3,831,074
Rhode Island – 1,052,567
Vermont – 625,741
Virginia – 8,001,024
Washington – 6,724,540

So, 96,733,687 Americans under medical marijuana laws.

There’s 307,006,550 Americans in total.

Which means 31% of Americans live under medical marijuana laws. Referring to people rather than states is much more useful given the wild variation of population density across America.

Also, that’s 96 million people. 96 MILLION. That’s a lot of people.

Light green: State with legal medical cannabis. Icky green: State with decriminalized cannabis possession laws. Dark Green: State with both medical and decriminalization laws.

But there’s another point that I think cannabis advocates miss. And that is that, as medical marijuana dominates the American politic agenda, states have been quietly decriminalising personal posession for marijuana for the past four decades. 13 states currently have civil penalties or low policing priorities for marijuana possession.

Setting aside states with medical marijuana and decriminalisation (like California), states with just decriminalisation:

Connecticut – 3,574,097
Massachusetts – 6,547,629
Minnesota – 5,303,925
Nebraska – 1,826,341
New York – 19,378,102
North Carolina – 9,535,483
Ohio – 11,536,504

So, that’s 57,702,081 Americans live in states that don’t have marijuana but do have decriminalisation laws for possession.

Adding in the Americans who live in states with medical marijuana, that’s 154,435,768 Americans.

So, 30% of US States have medical marijuana laws, 31% of Americans live in medical marijuana states, but 50.3% Americans live in states where using marijuana is safe enough to be used medicinally or recreationally without criminal penalty. Just over half of ALL Americans have access to cannabis without being criminalised for it.

That’s a much more impressive statistic. I suggest we all use it!

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Are There are More Interesting Statistics Than Medical Marijuana? is a post from: SarahMcCulloch.com | Activism, spirituality and opinion