Buddy, can you paradigm?
Excuse me. The federal government has seen fit to arrest me
for treating my
life-threatening illness and to destroy my income
and creative outlet by attacking my publishing
company.
Could you spare some money for my nonprofit
tax-exempt foundation so that I might
fight the forces of tyranny loose in the land
and to become a productive citizen
again?
And, by the way, that faux fur is simply stunning on you.
"There is an carefully-camouflaged
[sic], exorbitantly-funded [sic], well-heeled, elitist group whose ultimate goal
is to legalize drug use in the United States."
Ever
since I heard Drug Czar McCaffrey give this sworn testimony before Congress in
June 1998, I have searched high and low for this "exorbitantly-funded [sic:
no need for a hyphen after adverb], well-heeled, elitist group." If it
exists (and we know McCaffrey would never mislead us, especially under oath), it
must be very "carefully-camouflaged [same sic]," indeed, for I have
not found it.
.
Here you are, my dear.
Go take this and legalize
some drugs with it.
And there's plenty more
where that came from!
What
I have found is that the drug-reform movement is the most impoverished
civil-rights movement in the United States. I have avoided asking for money
until now because I have always thought there were worthier cases. Now I find
myself a worthy case.
This little piggy has
been taken to market.
Due to federal interference with my
company and my health, my publishing company is bankrupt and I'm not far behind.
My mother's been paying my rent for the past several months, but her savings are
running out, too. Fortunately, the federal government (you) is already paying my
legal fees. I do, however, need money to live, and any extra money will be used
to promote the legalization of medical marijuana.
Whatever
you can give will be appreciated. Donations are to a 501(c)3 nonprofit
organization, The Medical Botanical Foundation, and are tax deductible.
Liberty is expensive.
but costs less than the alternative.
To donate
using VISA or MasterCard, please send an e-mail with the name on the card, the
card number, the expiration date, and the amount you want to donate (or you can
just let me fill in the amount--you can't be expected to do everything). You can
also include whatever message you like, as I read these personally. To make a
donation be e-mail, please click here.
Mmmmmmmmmmmmm.
You have found my erogenous zone
Donate by
check, please make it out to The Medical Botanical Foundation and send it to:
Medical
Botanical Foundation
8148 Mannix Drive
Los Angeles, California 90046
Thank
you!
SO, here is my
latest plan by which you can donate $10 to me, and it will
cost you NOTHING. If you join PayPal, it will give me $5 and you $5. You can
then send your $5 to me (at peter@mcwilliams.com)
and I will have $10, and
it will have cost you nothing.
https://secure.paypal.com/refer/pal=peter%40mcwilliams.com
The catch? No, you do NOT have to give them your Social Security number
(this put a lot of people off joining x.com and giving me $30 about six
months ago). You DO, however, have to give them a VISA or MasterCard number.
It will NEVER be charged for anything, ever. It's just PayPal's way of
knowing you are a "legitimate" citizen, and worthy of forking over $10
to
get your patronage.
Your card number is safe. (Please see article from CNN-fn below; FORBES,
WSJ, FORTUNE and others have covered it--all have quibbles, but none say
it's unsafe. In addition, 25 percent of ALL www.ebay.com
sales are handled
through PayPal.) Everything takes place on a secure server.
PayPal is part of www.x.com, so if you joined
x.com on my behalf (THANK
YOU!), you must use a different e-mail address. (If you need a new e-mail
address, you can get free e-mail addresses in five minutes at
www.hotmail.com)
https://secure.paypal.com/refer/pal=peter%40mcwilliams.com
If you do not have a credit card, joining ANY debit credit-card company (you
get a credit card, but you can't use it until you put money in your account)
will work fine. (www.x.com lets you set up a free
account and will send you
a credit card, all for no money, at least last time I checked.)
You can also join PayPal several times, one per credit card and e-mail
account, and we each get $5 per account. (This is not "cheating."
PayPal
seems to encourage this. Something to do with it stats, I think.)
After joining, simply go online. You will see you have $5. Please send it to
me at peter@mcwilliams.com If you are
inclined to send me more (THANK YOU!),
it will be added to your credit card (no cash-withdrawal fees or other
charges--I get the full amount).
Also, there is NO LIMIT to the number of people who can sign up using my
e-mail reference. So, please, ask your e-mail list, web site visitors,
chat-room cronies, and others, to join.
https://secure.paypal.com/refer/pal=peter%40mcwilliams.com
You can close the whole thing in a week, if you want. But you may not want
to. If you use ebay (or any other online auction), you'll like having
PayPal.
If you'd like to send me money the old fashioned way, my goingpostal address
is
8148 Mannix Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90046
Or, you can e-mail your VISA or MasterCard number (with exp date), and I can
process it.
Thank you.
Enjoy,
Peter
_________________________
From CNN-fn:
E-paying your way
Online payment systems may make paying bills a
breeze
By Jennifer Schu
May 17, 2000: 12:18 p.m. ET
NEW YORK (womenconnect.com) - When freelancer writer
Teresa Glaser
recently lent $10 to a friend during a lunch date, she didn't expect to get
it back that same day -- in her e-mail.
Thanks to an online payment system called PayPal,
Teresa's friend was
able to withdraw the cash from her own account and deposit it directly into
Teresa's that afternoon.
Person-to-person payment systems such as PayPal,
owned by online bank
X.com, are taking off. "I've found it to be a hassle-free timesaver,"
says
L.A.-based writer Paula Ellison.
Online auction buyers and sellers swear by them
-- and have made them
their currency of choice. Small business owners are turning to them as a
faster way to get paid. And corporate colleagues are even using them to
collect for birthday gifts and March Madness basketball pools.
A year ago, both online banking and Internet
currency were supposed to
take the Net by storm. Yet while a few service-oriented Internet banks, such
as NetBank, attracted a loyal following, many others were greeted with an
anemic response.
Person-to-person (known in Internet lingo as
p-to-p) payment systems
are cheaper, faster and easier to use than either online banking or Internet
currency. They include PayPal, Billpoint and PayMe.com. With such services,
consumers can simply and securely request and accept payment from clients,
co-workers, friends and family.
Parents turn to p-to-p payment systems to e-mail
funds to their
college student offspring. Far-flung bridesmaids use them to transfer funds
to the one designated to purchase the fuchsia dresses and dyed-to-match
shoes.
How they work
With p-to-p payment services, the old excuse
"the check's in the mail"
simply won't work anymore.
"Today, consumers can send cash, checks or
money orders through snail
mail -- a process that takes days -- or they can pay Western Union a premium
to transfer money by wire," observes Forrester Research analyst Paul Hagen.
"Sending money through PayPal, however, takes seconds and costs
nothing."
PayPal's customer base has increased from 500,000
to over 1.4 million
in the past few months alone. This surge enabled parent company X.com to
attract an additional $100 million in financing in April.
The main reason p-to-p systems work is that they
utilize e-mail, which
is by far the Internet's most popular feature. All of them function much the
same way. To send money, a user logs into her account and chooses the "send
money" option. (The user must have an account backed by a credit card, and
the funds are drawn from there.) Then she enters the recipient's e-mail
address and a dollar amount. The recipient then will receive an e-mail
informing her of the payment, and must register at PayPal in order to claim
it. She can choose to have it deposited directly into her PayPal account or
mailed to her in check form.
Small business owners and entrepreneurs could
view PayPal and similar
services as a way to conduct financial transactions with other small
office/home office (SOHO) companies. Since most of the latter lack
accounting personnel, it would seem to make such transactions faster and
more convenient.
After several frustrating months using an
expensive, $100-per-month
shopping cart e-commerce program, publishing firm owner Jane Collingwood
discovered the fee-less PayPal. "I've had great luck with them," she
says.