Drug "war"

Prison inmate given emergency
surgery to remove hot-sauce
bottle used as sex toy.

Good money after bad, the “war” on drugs rages on the border and the U.S. becomes even more actively involved, now pledging more money, more agents, more everything, except any form of intelligent action. There is a simple solution to this problem, a solution that may not completely end the problem, but one that would certainly go a long way to ending it. We could do the sensible, efficient, reasonable thing and simply legalize drugs. If drugs were legal, controlled and taxed, and left up to the medical profession instead of politicians, most of this terrible problem would soon disappear. Our draconian laws on drugs are nothing more or less than just old-fashioned prohibition that we know doesn’t work and only creates more crime and misery. Steps in this direction have already been taken in the Netherlands and Switzerland and there is no doubt they have reduced crime dramatically. With no market for illicit drugs the drug lords would soon be out of business, those who really need drugs could get them from their doctors, and those who take them for recreation might actually decrease their purchases or abandon them altogether. Drugs never should have been criminalized in the first place and the billions upon billions we have spent fighting the “war” against them is such an obvious and overwhelming failure you might think reason would prevail. But, then, this is the U.S.A. where reason and common sense long since departed in favor of endless dishonesty, hypocrisy, and greed. This “war” on drugs makes no more sense than the “war” on Afghanistan, that makes no sense at all.

Once again I am compelled to comment on what seems to be nothing short of mass hysteria when it comes to Iran. Members of Congress seem to want to outdo each other in coming up with the most vicious, punishing, and extreme sanctions against that country, even though there is no objective reason for this. Iran does not have a nuclear bomb, is not very close to having one, and if it had one would do nothing with it other than use it as a defensive weapon just like all other nuclear states have done. Iran is not a threat to the U.S. or the rest of the world, or even Israel. To indulge in this hysteria is basically to believe that Iranians, unlike all other people in the world, are completely irrational, even deranged. I have no explanation for this other than the fact that Israel constantly insists that Iran is an existential threat, no, not even that, Iran is an immediate and terrible threat to their very existence, only waiting to get a bomb and immediately attack them. This is absolute, utter, and complete nonsense. Obviously Iran wants a voice in the Middle East, after all it’s their backyard, but that does not make them a nation of imbeciles that want to commit immediate suicide by attacking the rest of the world. Israel and the U.S. have the rest of the world acting like a bunch of hysterical schoolgirls rather than responsible national entities engaging in international politics. Really, this unremitting attack on Iran is about the silliest thing I have ever seen in international affairs. President Obama is not stupid, I cannot understand why he goes along with this, unless it is to help pacify Israel long enough to begin serious negotiations for peace in the Middle East.

Yes, I know, Arizona has now come clean about its racism, although they still try to pretend otherwise. The Governor can sign all the amendments she wants saying race cannot be used as a criteria for stopping people and demanding their papers, but it is. And now they have outlawed ethnic studies and even stopped teachers from teaching English if they have an accent. But they want you to believe this is not racism? How much more transparent does it have to be to be considered racist? While this may force the Federal Government to finally take some endlessly delayed action, I bet they won’t like the results. When you have politicians saying they should be micro-chipped or sent back to Mexico because they don’t have American “souls,” you can be pretty sure some will never be satisfied until, like the Palestinians, they can somehow be made to disappear entirely. Disgusting, I think, but true.

Drilling for oil, like robbing banks, seems to be a magical act. It would have worked, except something unexpected happened. I can’t believe Obama is saying we’re still going to drill offshore as soon as we figure out what went wrong this time. What went wrong is that the Oil Companies lie about how safe it is, and no matter how many times something disastrous happens,” if something had not gone wrong it would have worked,” and “next time it’ll be different.” Those who believe in magical explanations do not fare very well.

LKBIQ:
It's not enough to create magic. You have to create a price for magic, too. You have to create rules.
Eric A. Burns

TILT:
There is more than one definition of a “filly.”