In the Washington Post, two police officers make the case that it’s time to legalize and regulate street drugs. Why? To quit squandering tax dollars, to quit filling prisons with people who don’t belong there and to protect neighborhoods and police officers.
Only after years of witnessing the ineffectiveness of drug policies — and the disproportionate impact the drug war has on young black men — have we and other police officers begun to question the system . . . Drug manufacturing and distribution is too dangerous to remain in the hands of unregulated criminals. Drug distribution needs to be the combined responsibility of doctors, the government, and a legal and regulated free market. This simple step would quickly eliminate the greatest threat of violence: street-corner drug dealing.
Here’s the “money” quote:
Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron estimates that ending the drug war would save $44 billion annually, with taxes bringing in an additional $33 billion.
On February 17, 2009, Pamela Olson gave a riveting talk on the details of daily life in the Palestinian West Bank. She gave her talk at a recent session of “TechTalks,” a series of talks sponsored by Google.
Olson graduated from Stanford in 2002 with a major in physics. She lived in Ramallah, West Bank, for a year and a half beginning in the summer of 2004 and worked as a journalist for the Palestine Monitor.
What is startling about this video are the many gorgeous scenes from the West Bank accompanying Olson’s introduction to day-to-day life in the West Bank, something which Americans rarely learn of from the American media. The happiness and charm of the West Bank is covered in the first half of Olson’s talk. But there is more to the West Bank, of course. Behind all of the charm:
looms the conflict, the occupation, and violence. Since September 2000, more than 5,500 Palestinians and 1,100 Israelis have been killed. A series of walls, fences, roadblocks, checkpoints, army bases, and settlements keep the Palestinians in the West Bank under an almost constant state of siege and strangle the economy of many towns and villages, including Bethlehem. Gaza has been turned into an open-air prison whose desperate inmates can only get vital supplies through smuggling tunnels — which also transport weapons that Palestinian militants use to target Israeli civilians.
[Her story is] a fascinating world of beauty and terror, of hospitality and homicide, of the absurd and the sublime constantly together — a microcosmic view of a little-understood human story with global implications.
Olson talks in detail about the numerous checkpoints, the wall and the Israeli settlements. She plainly explains that the occupation, the checkpoints, the wall and the settlements are indisputably illegal pursuant to international law. The wall now runs 70 km., cutting Palestinians off from each other. The wall is a “huge scar on the landscape.” It keeps Palestinians from each other, keeps them from farming, keeps them from their own hospitals and keeps their children from getting to school. Even Palestinian politicians are prevented from having free access to their own people. Entire neighborhoods are being destroyed, to make way for more illegal Israeli settlements. The Palestinians are essentially being herded into an ever-smaller prison. Olson backs up her statements with extensive photography.
Olson’s vivid photos and her calm commentary makes the violence by Palestinians much more understandable. Watching this talk gave me more information than watching dozens of the simplistic stories told by the American Media. Perhaps this unrelenting stream of simplistic media stories is a major cause of America’s unflinching support of Israeli’s harsh policies toward the Palestinians. Sadly, it is a common Palestinian saying that “The silence of the West is worse than the bullets of the Israelis.”
Here is Olson’s talk, which lasts 80 minutes:
For more information on Pamela Olson, you can visit www.pamolson.org
Which country was just named by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff as the most likely after Pakistan to suffer a “rapid and sudden collapse“?
Most of us would guess Iraq. The answer is Mexico. The death toll in Tijuana today is higher than in Baghdad. The story of how this came to happen is the story of this war — and why it will have to end, soon.
When you criminalize a drug for which there is a large market, it doesn’t disappear. The trade is simply transferred from pharmacists and doctors to armed criminal gangs. In order to protect their patch and their supply routes, these gangs tool up — and kill anyone who gets in their way. You can see this any day on the streets of London or Los Angeles, where teenage gangs stab or shoot each other for control of the 3,000 percent profit margins on offer. Now imagine this process on a countrywide scale, and you have Mexico and Afghanistan today.
How bad have things gotten in Mexico?
In 2007, more than 2,000 people were killed. In 2008, it was more than 5,400 people. The victims range from a pregnant woman washing her car to a four year-old child to a family in the “wrong” house watching television. Today, 70 percent of Mexicans say they are frightened to go out because of the cartels.
Writer Christina Gleason sums up some of the carnage here in the U.S.:
According to the Department of Justice, over half of all sentenced federal prisoners are drug offenders. Over 80% of the increase in the federal prison population was due to drug convictions between 1985 and 1995. In addition, a 2006 report claimed that 17% of State prisoners and 18% of Federal prisoners committed their crimes in order to obtain drug money. According to a 2001 report, the average sentence for all offenses was 56.8 months. The average sentence for drug offenses was 75.6 months, while the average sentence for violent offenses was 63.0 months. Someone is arrested for violating a drug law every 17 seconds. Someone is arrested for violating a cannabis law every 38 seconds.
What’s the solution? Hari quotes Terry Nelson a former U.S. drug enforcement officer who has seen the light:
Legalizing and regulating drugs will stop drug market crime and violence by putting major cartels and gangs out of business. It’s the one surefire way to bankrupt them, but when will our leaders talk about it?
Why do most people reject this solution? They are afraid that the people who are already getting drugs will continue getting drugs, I suppose. They are failing to consider the extent of the violence and the fact that the drug war is taking valuable money out of the economy to accomplish next to nothing. If you doubt me, go watch a drug court docket. Talk about meaningless rubber stamping. People with drug records as long as your arm simply revolve through the system. In state court, judges struggle to find ways to keep from filling our prisons with nothing but drug offenders. That is the extent of the problem.
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has written an excellent multidisciplinary work on the meaning of life, entitled The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (2006). I am presently reading Haidt’s book for the second time, paragraph by paragraph. This is clearly one of the books I would take to a desert island if I were [...]
I love basic the concept of Lego. It’s a very clever set of blocks with which you can build almost anything. But going to a Lego store is also a peek into the kind of country America has become. We are a country of warmongers.
I took each of these photos in the [...]
Yes, John McCain. We know quite well who you are, and we don’t want anyone with your ego and your temper to have the power to fire American nuclear weapons.
While we’re on the issue of violence, are you consciously trying to get one of your enraged followers to inflict physical violence on Barack Obama? [...]
I've read Battlefield Earth. A few times. It's a deeply detailed adventure story covering several years and phases of action. Savage turns prisoner becomes military leader becomes political figurehead becomes actual political leader becomes savior of mankind. Granted, the story is one dimensional and loaded with stereotypes and prejudices from earl... »
The Guardian calls the military occupation in Afghanistan "Groundhog Day," indicating that "Afghanistan is a political failure, a fact over which the international community continue to be in denial." http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/04/afghanistan-political-failure-kim-howells »
I've never read any of Hubbard's books, but I have seen the movie version of "Battlefield Earth" with John Travolta as the lead villain. If the film was anywhere true to the story, (and I suspect is was), it wasn't bad in the beginning. It started off by setting up mankind being treated as semi-intelligent beasts of burden by an occupying alien ar... »
Dan,This is probably a matter of taste, but that Hubbard was "engaging page turners, light burners, wage earners. They show a keen grasp of storytelling" is hardly the same as saying he was a good writer---the same can be said of Dan Brown and I think he's little better than a hack.Hubbard was, however, popular in the 30s and part of the 40s, at on... »
I disagree with Mark about L Ron Hubbard's quality of writing. His stories are all engaging page turners, light burners, wage earners. They show a keen grasp of storytelling. They also show a near total ignorance of science and math, and only the faintest grasp of the distinction between magic and technology.In fact, his instinct for storytelling i... »
Rev. Claude needs to read some actual history. The diameter of the Earth was known (within a few percent) hundreds of years before Jesus. This knowledge was not lost to navigators or intellectuals, even if the uneducated public might have missed it. After all, the Bible itself misleads on this point: Inerrant Biblical Geology Falls FlatThe Bible is... »
Rev,Just because Atlanta is depicted in "Gone With The Wind" and there was something called the Civil War, does that change that book from fiction to history?Also, people in ancient Greece knew the world is round, hundreds of years B.C.E. People here and there, from time to time, have lost that knowledge and regained it, usually because someone in... »
Paul: If Congress had given Elizabeth Warren the power to issue subpoenas and enforce them, I might agree with you that she is "partially culpable." But they've tied her hands. Further, it has become increasingly clear that there was not any accounting method in place when the money was doled out. None of this is Ms. Warren's fault. Give her ... »
Mark...Just because you don't believe or understand the good book, doesn't mean it's fiction. A couple of 100 years ago people believed the world was flat, and to say the world was round was considered fiction.Every cities or civilizations mentioned in the good book have been documented to have existed exactly where it said it did. But also, artifa... »
Ms. Warren has been an entertaining figure to see interviewed, and she appears very competent. When, though, will be begin accepting responsibility for her job? It is great to go around the country talking about how you don't know where the money is, and getting a good laugh from the crowd. But... umm..... isn't it her job to figure this stuff o... »
Erich, Much recognition software employs an artificial intelligence programming technique known as a neural net simulation. Neural net simulations run many parallel sub-programs, called nodes, that independently analyze the input and produce a list of possible results. Each node starts with a different list of possible results. Each node votes ... »
one thing I found scary was the mega-dosing on niacin. B vitamins have long been used in detoxification programs for drug and alcohol abuse. Niacin has several effects in moderate to high doses. It temporarily increased blood flow throughout the body, has an anti-inflammatory effect, and in many people causes a "flush", a prickly heat sensation t... »
Erich, there is a basic difference between what any software does, and what it shows a user. Internally, Dragon knows its own confidence level, the sound levels, the sound distinction levels, the frequency distributions of each sound, and the frequency distribution and volume of the background noise.For a consumer dictation program, all it displays... »
On DemocracyNow, Amy Goodman speaks to McClatchy reporter Greg Gordon:In 2006 and 2007, the bank reportedly peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in US housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting. See, Go... »
Dan: That is often not my experience. When I use Dragon, it spits out the closest fit to the words I utter, and they can sometimes be dramatically different than what I utter. It doesn't display any sort of confidence level--Dragon is ALWAYS confident! The exception would be if I were to cough, at which point Dragon doesn't recognize any te... »
Dragon may not yet be perfect in transcription, but it could easily tell when it is having trouble, as in mumbling, indistinct word separations, and overall volume (the causes of "speak up"). »
