Drugs: still wrong

Drugs policy, what a bed of nails. Bill C-15 is stalled (thankfully), now the United Nations seems to argue for shifting drug policy foci from punishing users to more crackdowns on traffickers and more treatment. At the same time, Canada is revealed as a meth warehouse.

Let's state the obvious: you own your body and are free to destroy it as you please. The notion of being slapped on the wrist if you break the law should be just as obvious to proponents of the former, for you can't have one without the other.

Drugs exist and circulate as long as there is a route from producer to consumer, and are susceptible to demand and supply dynamics as any other exchangeable good. Efforts so far have focused on combating trafficking, which should cut supply and drive up prices. In Britain (at least), this resulted in greater cocaine "cutting" instead, with the country still being the cokehead of Europe.

Penalties for trafficking should reach into the highest locally imposable punishments, and I for one applaud the harshness of Colombian, Laotian and Cambodian (among others) justice systems. The Colombian one-year-per-gram is definitely a fantastic deterrent, if only its applications were given more publicity. Consumption, on the other hand, has always been a point of contention.

Boiling the issue down to the transaction itself, buying property obtained through illegal means is illegal in most jurisdictions. Penalties vary, but it lands you with a record. Possession and use of illicit drugs should be, therefore, punishable under that clause. It can be as light as a 1 dollar on-the-spot fine, but unless there is a clear distinction between right and wrong hardly any drug policy will work.

While we may treasure the freedom of taking drugs, we can't dispense with the entire body of law that regulates commerce and exchange. It is wrong to transact with an individual who forwards the proceeds to law-breakers and is not compliant with consumption tax law. On this basis alone the user is eligible for a penalty. I for one believe the offence should be an infraction rather than an indictable crime.

Unless we legalize, regulate and tax the production, import, distribution and safety of illicit substances (a policy I lean toward), possession of them remains abetting a violation of the law. Possession and confirmed use should land you with a fine (however light) and a record expungeable only by reporting to a treatment centre. The most ironic way would be to correlate the fine to local GST and PST, so the State would solely take its due from the transaction.

If I can't buy a stolen bike I won't argue for your right to get high on something that took a dozen broken laws to get in your pocket. But for God's sake don't go with much-trumpeted Bills after the rebel Che-Guevara-shirt-wearing capitalism-bashing daddy's kiddo who keeps a pot plant to delight in the knowledge of giving a finger to Big Brother. That's just potty!

The bitter fruit of theocratic illusion

When the ringmaster of the circus comes out saying a ballot is valid and the opposition should stop protesting, your gut usually reminds you it's rubbish. Over the past week I've heard from many whose knowledge of Iran and regional affairs far exceeds mine, and it's clear that the ballot is stolen and the ayatollahs have dropped their mask and merely made explicit what has been the truth all along: there's no such thing as a theocratic democracy.

My hopes rest on the demonstrators and the combination of courage and resolve I stereotypically associate with anyone Persian. They put the fundamentalists in power in the first place, it's their duty to throw them into the dustbin of history. No foreign power should do it on their behalf, as we've so catastrophically tried and bungled in Iraq.

The buzzword I heard most in the first days after the election was stolen was "shock". The shock horror of being denied the freedom to choose your country's number 2 and denied the regime-approved President you actually wanted. Yet with the political system Iran gave itself, this was simply waiting to happen. From an ignorant's viewpoint, a key lesson of people power was tragically left at the scene of the 1979 Revolution: if you trust yourself to discern right and wrong, you should never yield that power to anyone, let alone an unelected mullah. If you do, expect to be trampled.

Today, Iran is at a crossroads (duh!). Whatever direction it takes, the world in its entirety won't be the same again. With the myth of theocracy-democracy coexisting demolished, mainstream political Islam will look for another model order. What this order shapes up to be will determine the course of the next five decades. If it veers to Mosque-State dialectic rather than fusion the paradigm shift will be comparable to Reformation.

In the meantime, we will have to sit and wait for the turmoil to conclude.

If you want to neuter Iran, now is the time

Maybe, just maybe, Iran really has a gullible and short-sighted majority of the populace. In this case, Ahmadinejad's second term seems no wonder to anyone. We will see in four years' time whether the tide turns.

However, a greater problem looms. The crackpot's re-election ensures four more years of nuclear proliferation. I'm not a fan of the "45-minute notice" rhetoric, but we certainly can't afford to waste any more time. Iran has repeatedly refused Russian offers of enrichment outsourcing and its Natanz plant possesses way more centrifuges than would be required to obtain the fuel-grade 3% purity.

Though I would be wary of an outsourcing deal with the US or another democratic nuclear power, Russia is an unaligned thuggish dictatorship-in-all-but-name. They could be best pals and their reciprocal trust would be cemented by the contempt most of the developed world holds their policies in. Therefore Iran's nuclear ambitions are far from empty words.

Four years is a long political time, over which people can get bored of a news story and come to forgive and forget past wrongs. Margaret Thatcher's Falklands success should serve as a lesson.

Iran has to be neutered of its nuclear capabilities. A swift strike today would leave four years of dust-settling before the next presidential election. While in the short term Ahmadinejad's popularity will skyrocket, in four years' time it willl be business as usual.

This scenario has two possible outcomes. On one hand, Ahmadinejad would be unable to respond violently to the attack, leaving him and his faction permanently embarrassed before his own rhetoric-drunk populace.

Alternatively we may have an attempted nuclear strike against Israel and an invasion of Iraq to channel public resentment. If that were to occur, God help us all.

When did abstention become fashionable?

I've never shunned the ballot box in my life, ever. I voted for the Italian and EU Parliaments, all Italian referendums, my Italian local elections if I was in the country, the Greater London Assembly, Camden Council, the UK Conservative leadership and the London Mayor Conservative primary. So it really irks me to hear several parties calling upon the Italian citizenry not to vote in the upcoming electoral law referendums.

Independently of the merits and demerits of the propositions, in Italy any referendum has to have a turnout of 50%+1 to be valid. When special interest groups know they are a minority but hate the proposed change, a "stay at home" campaign is mounted. This is political mediocrity at its finest.

It may sound obvious, but a vote is a duty. Try to come up with a reasoned opinion on an issue you are indifferent to. If you firmly believe you have no opinion, leave the ballot blank. If everyone disgusts you, spoil it. If you sit on your bum, don't complain when things don't go your way or nutcases win seats in your country. The end.

An announced and expected wipeout

Labour is toast. They have been wiped off the county council map and so far (with many wards still to declare) it has lost 200 of the 450 council seats it was defending.

In Bristol, the minority Labour administration was kicked out earlier, and the city now obtained a Liberal-Democrat majority, with Labour holding on only to two of the ten seats it was defending in this round. The fortresses of Nottinghamshire, Lancashire and Staffordshire have fallen. With 11 wards to declare at the time of writing, the Tories needed only one win to secure a majority on the county council. In Cumbria, usually very Labourite, the Conservatives are the largest party in the council without holding an outright majority.

The Tories also snatched Devon and Somerset from the Liberal Democrats.

Combined with the wave of resignations by junior and senior ministers, Brown's position is rocky indeed. When even the Guardian says there's a problem with Labour and it's time to cut Gordon loose, you know things are bad. The Times also had a series of scathing comments, including "Vote Labour, vote mayhem". Although I cannot retrieve the article, The Sun strongly endorsed the Tories in this round of local and European elections as well.

On Monday the Labour Party caucus will meet after taking the European ballot drubbing. If Gordon Brown is Prime Minister on Tuesday, we will have to conclude that either he is the most tenacious political survivor or the party he leads is spinelessly accepting its fate and delaying the inevitable wipeout. This wouldn't be a problem if a leader with a vision was at the helm. Instead, Britain has a discredited Prime Minister who can't even keep his Cabinet in order. Not good.

This is why, despite all, I am pro choice

George Tiller, a Kansas doctor who provided abortion services that included potentially illegal late-term abortions, has been gunned down in a drive-by shooting this morning. The police issued a description of the suspect:

a white male in his 50's, balding with gray hair last seen traveling west bound on 13th in a 1993 powder blue Ford Taurus, with tag 2-2-5-B-A-B and possibly a K-State vanity plate.

If what Tiller did was illegal, justice should have caught up with him and shoved him in jail. Shooting from a car is typical of gangsters and terrorists, not civilized human beings. I understand the motivations and reasoning of both camps, and I see both extremes which I equally despise.

As I haven't heard of pro-choicers firebombing churches or murdering ardent pro-lifers, count me in the choice camp until further notice. No further correspondence will be entered into. Suck it up.

Update 1: despicable stumentalization of this tragedy for cheap political points by the Daily Kos.

Update 2: Too little, too late, too obvious. Condemn and discipline those who mislead women, lie, intimidate and cry "holocaust", then I'll believe you have the backbone to face the issue as mature and respectful beings. The ultra-liberals lie and mislead too, that's why I don't buy their rhetoric either.

When they came for the stupid, I said nothing.

There is nothing scarier than a paternalistic government system that believes it knows best. Case-in-point: British social services shattering a family with the complicity of the court system, simply because the mother is deemed literally too stupid to bring the baby up.

The same system that failed Baby P scores of times, the same system whose mention chills law-abiding parents' spines, this system today deprives Rachel of her child and forbids all further contact. Adding insult to injury, she was denied the right to have a lawyer of her choosing represent her during the court hearings. No surprise, then, when the court agreed it was in everyone's interest for the baby to be placed for adoption.

In all honesty, I respect and admire social workers and family courts, most of them at least. Those who do their job properly rescue children from harm and ensure their welfare. What makes me boil is the top-down, box-ticking and target-peddling system they are forced to work in, the assumption of infallibility the government fosters in its employees and the defencelessness of the common man against this onslaught. Every government office in Britain should hang a plaque bearing the inscription "You are the government. F**k off and die."

The family is sacred. Every social worker (however professional), every self-righteous judge, every unelected civil servant must get it into their thick skulls that if there is any way to keep the family whole, government must back out and die. Rachel's family seem perfectly capable of helping out, additional tutoring for the baby could be arranged at the council's expense. Instead we are left with a humiliated mother, a distraught baby, the right to a fair hearing buried and the bitter aftertaste of knowing the mediocrity we've slipped into.

Where's your peace now?

Posturing without any real need to do so can mean only one thing: North Korea is serious about holding the western world to ransom. This outcome has been wholly predicted as far back as 1953 by the leaders of the western intervention force, so we are witnessing yet again a "told you so" moment which history offers us a wide selection of.

The frustration one should legitimately feel is compounded by the obvious misery of knowing we've consistently worked toward this outcome. With our short-sighted policies, naivety and fear of being judged disguised as pragmatism we weaved a chaotic web characterized by giant gaping holes. A temptation hard to resist for many a populist leader, let alone a maniac well past his sell-by date.

Unlike 1953, however, we are faced with an entirely different East Asia. Former nuclear superpower Russia abandoned communism and world domination through brute force. China, at the time atomically unarmed, dictates local geopolitics from the economic and military bully pulpits. Our close allies in the region look to us for help instead of arming themselves in turn. This is a duty the United States cannot afford to dodge.

North Korea's lesson to the world is that multilateralism rarely works. The unpalatable alternative is a world policeman who can wield a whip, crack it and inflict pain if necessary. In the age of globalization, peacekeeping and "Hope and Change" we will be crudely reminded time and time again of the inherent imperfection of human nature. North Korea, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Burma: diplomacy won't work forever on them, if at all. The rule of force, realization of one's own vulnerability and the fear of pain are among the basic instincts we inherited from our common simian ancestor. Today, those instincts are all that stands between us and a potential nuclear attack from North Korea.

What's to be done? Cuetting aid and imposing sanctions will achieve nothing. The country is starved to death anyway and the leadership is uncaring. Kim Jong Il needs to be told in no ambiguous terms that his life is dispensable, the US will have no hesitation in nuking the country to hell and that he has blown his chances. The diplomatic table must be closed, nuclear subs sent to the Korean Sea and Yongbyon blasted to kingdom come without warning or regret. If Mr Kim were to carry out his threat of renouncing the armistice, we need to finish the business started in 1950 and take no prisoners.

Pyongyang is not worth trading for Tianjing or Khabarovsk. Mr Obama, for the good of us all please crack that whip.

Russia postures on the Arctic

Russia beats the war drum over the Arctic, and hardly anyone, me included, can be bothered. First and foremost all the Arctic countries that are not Russia are under the US nuclear umbrella. Ergo, unlike environmentalist nuts like David Suzuki and despite Medvedev's name meaning "bear man", the Russians will never exchange the population of a middle-sized city for a piece of land that's under ice, water, polar bears and a logistical nightmare.

Furthermore, Canada has nothing to fear as Russia will find its friendship convenient for international shipping negotiations in the Northeast and Northwest passages. Sometimes it does pay to have a possessive superpower on your borders, provided you are ready to wave your weapons in return if the neighbor gets a little too friendly and enters your airspace.

There are also rumors of a joint continental shelf submission by Canada, Russia and Denmark. That would save everyone a lot of hassle, but clearly the battle for the Arctic has begun. The damn thing needs to be carved up and stewarded as national territory and property, otherwise it'll be the tragedy of the commons all over again. Russia encircles half of the Arctic already and nothing can stop it destroying the wilderness if it so wished.

So if we want to save the polar bear we have to agree who owns what, and that is better done between five foreign ministers in a room than at the UN. And don't worry about the Russians. When their army isn't made of 18-year-old conscripts, it's underfunded, under-equipped volunteers and rusting nuclear warheads.

The fine line between justified rage and the lynch mob

Behold the sanctimonious preaching of austerity and sacrifice in the name of public service ethics, coming from the pulpit of often overpaid, often overconfident and at times pretentious fact-guzzling agenda-regurgitating coverage-craving media HQ knobs.

The United Kingdom is in a stir, as details of some MPs' lavish expense claims are laid bare by the Daily Telegraph. From elephant lamps to mahogany trouser presses, Christmas lights, chocolate Santas, repairs in riviera houses and fake mortgage payments Labour, Conservative and LibDem members of the Commons have milked the taxpayer-funded second homes allowance for all its worth. Some even refurbished properties at the HoC expense in order to rent them out at a higher price and move on.

It is amusing how MPs took out mortgages on their London properties, assuming perhaps that they'd stay in Westminster for a long time to come. No less amusing is the journalistic feigned outrage, because as Stephen Fry aptly puts it, everyone has fiddled expenses at some point in their lives.

An MP's job (if it's a good MP we are talking about) involves putting up with whip bullying, constituents' nagging, media intrusion, family division, endless committee boredom and being caught in crossfire day after day. Such a job begs for good compensation for London standards or extensive perks, and I would gladly choose the former. Yet the lynchmob mentality the media fuels risks denuding MPs of some reasonable allowance leeway without handing anything in return, in a "take one for the team" mentality brewed in the dim-witted work-shy envious and looting slums of human thought.

Would you accept a 60k taxable wage requiring you to quit your current job as some demand, run your life in two separate places, travel extensively, be often away from your family, take collective blame for your party's failings and putting up with a barrage of opposing requests and expectations satisfying ALL of which is almost a prerequisite for keeping the job in the first place? Neither would I.

The expense system has been abused, and perpetrators should definitely be sanctioned. But David Cameron leading by example should also draw a line in the sand, precisely where what's fair for the public and what's fair for the MP to expect meet.