Mike Banning Quotes

The day before alcohol prohibition was introduced, the most popular drink in the United States was beer, but as soon as alcohol was banned, hard liquor soared from 40 percent of all drinks that were sold to 90 percent. People responded to a change in the law by shifting from a milder drink to a stronger drink. This seems puzzling. Why would a change in the law change people’s tastes in alcohol? It turns out it didn’t change their tastes. It changed something else: the range of drinks that were offered to them. The reason is surprisingly simple. One of the best analysts of the drug war, the writer Mike Gray, explains it in his book Drug Crazy. When you are smuggling a substance into a country, and transporting it in secret, “you have to put the maximum bang in the smallest possible package,” he writes.

Eleven people have been killed as a result of violence targeted at abortion providers: four doctors, two clinic employees, a security guard, a police officer, a clinic escort, and two others. Anti-abortion extremists are considered a domestic terrorist threat by the U.S. Department of Justice. Yet violence is not the only threat to abortion clinics. In the past five years, politicians have passed more than 280 laws restricting access to abortion. In 2016, the Supreme Court struck down a Texas law that would have required every abortion clinic to have a surgical suite, and doctors to have admitting privileges at a local hospital in case of complications. For many clinics, these requirements were cost prohibitive and would have forced them to close. Also, since many abortion doctors fly in to do their work, they aren’t able to get admitting privileges at local hospitals. It is worth noting that less than 0.3 percent of women who have an abortion require hospitalization due to complications. In fact colonoscopies, liposuction, vasectomies…and childbirth—all of which are performed outside of surgical suites—have higher risks of death. In Indiana in 2016, Mike Pence signed a law to ban abortion based on fetal disability and required providers to give information about perinatal hospice—keeping the fetus in utero until it dies of natural causes. This same law required aborted fetuses to be cremated or given a formal burial even if the mother did not wish this to happen.

The crossbow has long enjoyed a popular cachet for dastardly cunning and villainy. It was the subject of two papal bans (in 1096 and in 1139). These incurred a penalty of excommunication, excepting for its use against infidels.

These boozy and licentious variety halls thrived on the patronage of civil War soldiers on furlough, prompting moralists to persuade the city to require in 1862 that all theatrical and musical performing spaces be licensed and that the sale of liquor and employment of “waitresses” be banned wherever a curtain separated performers from customers. Entrepreneurs of leisure promptly dove through this loophole by inaugurating nightspots that featured a raised platform in the rear, a piano, and an open dance floor surrounded by tables and chairs.

And among the prissiest. Gilder’s method of raising public standards of taste and morality required the production of bloodless pages. As custodian of genteel culture he sought out the delicate and the refined and stood guard against the vulgar and the vernacular. Walt Whitman, though a personal friend, was banned from the Century’s pages; a bit of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn snuck in, but only after Gilder deleted references to nakedness, blasphemy, and smells and emended all improper phraseology (changing “in a sweat” to “worrying”).

After my appearance on Don’s show, I reached out to other networks to let them know I was available to talk about attempts to whitewash January 6th and dishonor the officers who defended the Capitol. CBS, MSNBC, and a few local affiliates took me up on my offer. I contacted Fox News repeatedly, but their bookers and producers told me I was not welcome on their network. One flat out told me that her bosses had banned anyone whose January 6th experience didn’t conform with Fox’s narrative. “And unfortunately,” she said, “that includes you, specifically, Mike.

ONE OF THE FIRST SEX SCANDALS to rattle twenty-first-century American evangelicalism struck at the heart of evangelical power. In 2006, male escort Mike Jones went public with the news that Colorado Springs megachurch pastor Ted Haggard had been paying him for sex for the past three years—the approximate period during which Haggard had been serving as head of the National Association of Evangelicals. Haggard, the pastor of the muscular-angel-bedecked New Life Church, had at the time been lobbying for Colorado Amendment 43, a ban on same-sex marriage, and it was Haggard’s hypocrisy that prompted Jones to go public.11

Finance Minister Mike de Jong steered government into its fifth straight year of austerity measures and cutbacks. The Liberals had been taking an axe to government spending since 2009, cutting millions. They’d reduced the advertising budget. Banned all but essential travel. Slashed office expenses. Cancelled service contracts. Fired some government employees. Instituted a hiring freeze within the civil service. Cracked down on compensation and bonuses for Crown corporation executives. And sold more than one hundred surplus government properties and assets. Clark would add to that a sweeping “core review” of the entire government, designed to hunt down red tape, eliminate duplication, and remove barriers to economic growth and job creation.

Even though Vasari listed herbs and their properties as one of Leonardo’s areas of interest, this is one of those subjects that has been taboo around Renaissance studies. But the use of herbs for artistic and philosophical purposes was old when the ancient Greeks discovered it two thousand years before. In a rule-breaking and innovative time such as the Florentine Renaissance, inhaling a little canapa might’ve helped with the night’s entertainment, especially if you played the lira and improvised a lot. We know it was around. After all, Pope Innocent VIII had banned the practice as sacrament during mass in 1484. How bad did the practice have to get before the Pope himself had to step in? Perhaps the reason the subject remains untouched is because Leonardo Studies arose with Italian Renaissance Studies in Victorian England, where some subjects were allowed and others weren’t. Cannabis was one. Homosexuality another.