;-)I'm at it again;-( The regional solution is vice asylums. I'm far from a right wing conservative free marketer and I consider myself a liberal on most issues; but my opposition to this ban is visceral. Smoking tobacco by myself or by those surrounding me has diminished my quality and probably quantity of life. When I see someone "hammering a coffin nail," I often wish they would just whip out a 45, put it in their mouth, and shoot; the former is legal and the latter is not, but both are choices people make. Is it right that our choices should be made illegal? "No," says I, "we should have the right to destroy ourselves in the best or the worst ways imaginable." But there need to be safe places to do it. I think there is room downtown and in The North Loop for just such places. Yes, I'm talking about Amsterdam on the Mississippi. The time is now. We need a city that never sleeps smoking that B.C. Bud, dropping the purist acid imaginable, and enjoying everything our paternalistic government chooses to deny us. And having paid the price and taxes for this hell and survived it, we might be better human beings for it knowing our limits having discovered them in this wonderful supermarket of forbidden experience. Or we might be dead. It can be the industry missing from downtown that brings in the bacon we need for everything else and solve some other problems in outlying areas of the Metro by concentrating them in our vice asylums. I propose we kill two birds with one stone and condemn the Star Tribune Buildings on the North side for this noble public purpose (with a statue of Michael Atherton on the plaza), since they will accept the appropriate compensation for the taking as there is no denying all the benefits of these noble institutions. We want vice asylums and we want them now. Power to the vicious.;-) Bill Kahn Prospect Park REMINDERS: 1. Think a member has violated the rules? Email the list manager at [EMAIL PROTECTED] before continuing it on the list. 2. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait.
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