The Pessimist

Richard Nixon declared "war on drugs" in 1971, and the war was escalated by every (Republican) president since. So, how's that going, eh?

There were previous wars on drugs, though they weren't called that at the time: Opium was banned in 1880, Alcohol was banned in 1919, Reefer Madness banned marijuana in 1937. But it was Ronald Reagan in the 1980's that really got the hearts and minds of government focussed on abolishing mind altering substances (except alcohol, of course). Nancy Reagan told youth to "just say no", and Bonzo mobilized the full force of the CIA, FBI, Coast Guard, ATF and every other bureaucrat, with or without a gun, to the cause.

The war was equally fought against Columbian drug lords and teenagers possessing a single spliff (or whatever the cool people call a "joint" these days). Crossing the border with a single seed of marijuana landed you in prison for the rest of your life. So, they're winning -- right?

The war has certainly had an effect.

• organized crime is flourishing on the premium profits to be made in contraband.
• addicts are criminals so cannot seek help to fight their addiction and must steal or prostitute themselves to afford their drug of choice.
• al Qaeda was born and remains fully funded by profits made from poppy fields in Afghanistan.
• terrorists and run of the mill criminals can afford the best guns, bombs, forged documents and bribed officials that money can buy.

Good job guys.

This same policy is now being carried out in Afghanistan. Afghanistan supplies 90% of the world's illegal heroin. Agents of the U.S. are roaming the countryside burning or defoliating the poppy crops. These crops are the primary source of income for these ignorant dirt-poor people.
al Qaeda buys the crops and the U.S burns them, leaving them to starve. Do you wonder why the peasants choose to support or at least tolerate al Qaeda?

Now, notice the word "illegal" above. Did you know that there was a world market for "legal" heroin? There is, and most of it comes from Turkey. Turkey got an exemption that allowed them to keep their poppy fields when they lost WWI. Legal heroin is used by the medical world as a pain killer. Dr. Gifford Jones has been campaigning his whole life for the expansion of the use of heroin in palliative care. Heroin is the best pain killer, bar none, by a wide margin. When cancer is eating you alive one organ at a time, and the right-to-lifers are marching to prevent your euthanasia, a shot of heroin would make you care not at all. But, instead, people are required to die in agonizing pain, and doctors don't prescribe heroin for two reasons:

1. the stigma attached to heroin
2. the world wide shortage of legal heroin

If we were to make Afghanistan's poppy fields legal, we would take the guns out of al Qaeda's hands and guaranty a peaceful "twilight sleep" when cancer knocks at our door.

I've been hearing in the news lately that we are losing the war. Three years ago, war was declared -- on SPAM (bet you didn't see that coming). Bill Gates declared that SPAM would be defeated within two years.

And actually, some progress was made. After a couple of years, the quantity of SPAM actually decreased for the first time ever. Shutting down source sites and identifying SPAM mail early and deleting it before it was propagated were two techniques that started to turn the tide.

But the bad guys are ever clever and ever adaptive. They got around being IDed by sending their sputum via stolen PC resources. Instead of originating from a server, which could be shut down, they used viruses and trojans to create a clone army of unwitting PCs to do their bidding. They got around having their messages identified by hiding them in images. The text of the SPAM is now in gif files, which are harder to identify than text messages. And to make them even harder to identify, they vary a few pixels in each image, meaning there is no "fingerprint" to be used to delete the millions of similar messages. They used judo on the spam cops. Like captcha (the image of text characters you are asked to identify when you register for a blog comment or forum site, or whatever --that a human can read but that a robot can't), these image spam are difficult for robo-cops to identify.

So now more SPAM than ever is reaching our in-boxes. Thanks fuckers. The laws need to be changed so that the penalty for making money off of SPAM is made stiffer. Something like:

• forfeiture of all of your worldly possessions
• imprisonment in a gibbet without food or water until dead
• the live streaming video of your death broadcast live over the internet as a message to other SPAMmers.

I think that might work. And to hell with extraterritorial jurisdiction. Make this a world law, enforceable where ever the SPAMmer is based -- offshore, Russia, Nigeria, where ever.

ThePessimist is optimistic that this might actually stop SPAM.

I haven't spent much time worrying about Darfur. It impinges on my consciousness from time-to-time, but generally I view it as just another piece of fucked up Africa. But this week's Macleans cover article Look Away, is hard to ignore.

I had assumed that Darfur was typical black-on-black violence, like Rwanda. In Rawanda, Hutus killed Tutsis, whose main difference, as far as I was able to determine was one "race" was tall and the other was not (can't remember which was which at the moment). But this difference was sufficient to require one to kill -- mostly with machetes -- 800,000 of the other over the period of a couple of months. The civilized world did nothing, because Rawanda has no oil.

Darfur, on the other hand, seems to be quite a different beast. In Darfur, Muslims are killing blacks. They are doing this, basically to steal their land, because desertification means there is now less land to go around. With the full support of the Sudanese government, an evil killing machine called the Janjaweed has, over the last three years killed 250,000 blacks and have displaced over 2 million people. The Janjaweed uses murder, rape, mutilation and scorched earth to remove the blacks form their homes. Again, though this genocide is running in slow motion, the civilized world is doing nothing about it. But unlike Rawanda, Sudan has oil, the difference in this case is Sudan's oil goes to China, and China has blocked all UN Security council motions to sanction Sudan.

Not that the UN has tried to do much, nor could they do much. The region is huge, and an invasion/occupation force would have to be several hundred thousand troops. The UN has none, the U.S has enough but they're all gainfully deployed in Iraq, Canada is fully tapped with 2 thousand deployed in Afghanistan, and Europe -- well, they're still pooped out from WWII.

But, I don't think that it is the white world that should be intervening here. This mess should be cleaned up by the Arab world. They've got the money, it's their corner of the world, and it is Muslim evil-doers who need to be killed. Peace-loving, Koran reading, Allah believing people should step up to right this wrong. If taking one life is like taking all lives, then what is taking a quarter of a million lives like?

There is precedent for this. When Slodoban Milosovic was ethnically cleansing Serbia of its Muslims (and Croats), Nato removed his government, killed his troops and basically put a stop to it. Admittedly it took a fair bit of prompting, but eventually they got off their ass and said "enough". This motion surprised the Muslim world, because here were Christians killing Christians to save Muslims, something that they thought would never happen. (And Serbia didn't even have oil!)

If an Islamic country had tried to intervene in Serbia to protect their fellow Muslims, the western world would probably have panicked, fearing the start of a new Ottoman empire. And this is why the West should not intervene in Darfur, because the Islamic world would suspect their intentions.

So a Muslim task force needs to smack down the Janjaweed. Get off your ass Saudi Arabia. Sudan is just off your border; how can you just stand their and watch genocide happen in your back yard?