from flickr user marca-pasos

1. Are you the kind of person who won’t buy a T-shirt made in China or tennis shoes sewn in Myanmar? If so, are you also the kind of person who believes you’re “not hurting anyone” when you smoke a joint?
2. Do you believe that “more enforcement” is the answer to our border problems?
3. If the U.S. legalized say, tennis shoes, do you think that would stop all exploitation and suffering associated with their manufacture and sale to Americans? No? Imagine that.
4. Do you like the idea of American soldiers in long-term military action inside a massively corrupt, destabilized nation, with little possibility of long-term success? What if the dead soldiers were only coming home from a few hundred miles away? What if this hypothetical conflict were, say, ten or twenty years in the future, so your kids could participate?

If one consumes mainstream news, one will perhaps build an image of Mexico as a corrupt, backward banana republic forcing its scary illegal immigrants and nasty, nasty drugs on America with no gratitude for our condescending tourism dollars. Much of that is wrong. More importantly, much of it is our fault. Continue reading →

Something horrible: my friend Dan, a government researcher, told me several times of his despair over the fact that people simply do not comprehend large numbers of dollars, especially if they don’t come out of our personal checking accounts. Well, this bailout abomination is perhaps the best example of that, ever. Our bailout (now a multitrillion-dollar stupidicity) is the most expensive thing, EVER¹. Consider this shamelessly ganked pie chart:

Something interesting: the recent discovery of a blond-haired, blue-eyed shaman buried 2,700 years ago in China with nearly a kilo of weed could also be mined for humorous purposes. But it got me thinking: could psychoactive properties be naturally selected in some symbiotic way? That is, if you’re a plant species, the crazymaking² would eventually become a turn-off for certain animals³. However, if humans used the plant for medicinal, recreational, or religious purposes, then they would protect and cultivate the plants. This would provide both natural and directed selection pressure for the species to get more psychoactive over time. I’m sure this comes under the heading of “things someone else already thought of a long time ago.”

Something Alex: I have to admit defeat (or at least detente) in a disagreement with Alex. Apparently, “Worcestershire” — as in sauce⁴ — though usually pronounced as a 3-syllable word (e.g., “wuhstuhshr”), is also sometimes reduced to two syllables (“wuster” or something), and this was historically common.

My wife's secret sideline

1. I’m sure there’s an Imelda Marcos or Donald Trump joke in here, but it’s not going to be funny. [↩]
2. especially in the case of marijuana, which is not very physiologically addictive [↩]
3. Consider this historically accurate dialogue between a stoned gazelle and his buddy: “Hank! It’s a tiger!” “Oh, maaaan, his stripes are, like, sooo, soooo, soooo…” chomp. [↩]
4. What percentage of humanity will ever have occasion to utter that word without also saying “sauce?” Not very many. [↩]

You heard me. We have estimates of the carbon footprint of eating a cheesburger, so let’s figure out how much the drug industry harms the environment. I’m sure someone’s done research on this (and if not, I’ll believe even more in the liberal bias in academia and research). Sure, it might be more urgent to figure out how much the drug industry harms human rights, or political progress, or government corruption, etc., but it would sure be interesting to know how much global warming is being influenced by the drug trade.

Does anyone know?

A couple of nights ago, my friend Brad and I had a discussion. It got me thinking, as I often do, about mi patria (the United States), its role in the world, and its future on the international stage. This morning, while trying to find a citation for homicide rates as (lousy) indicators of overall crime rates, I ran into a 2005 article titled “The next 50 years: Unfolding trends,” in what appears to be a good peer-reviewed academic journal.

The article has a section titled “America’s Retreat.” He predicts the end of U.S. international dominance by about 2050, with clear signs starting a few decades ago, and becoming more apparent very soon. He cites a lot of economic indicators, such as national debt, increasingly weak currency, and huge (and increasing) trade imbalances. He has graphs (pretty ones) and apparently rigorous data analysis. Some nifty excerpts from the article, after the jump. Continue reading →