How Are the Mexican Drug Cartels Fighting Marijuana Legalization?

In November California voters will decide whether to legalize marijuana (Prop 19). I've wondered for some time how the Mexican cartels who stand to lose in a huge way will fight this; after all, you can't directly give money to an American politician who will then stand in front of cameras and say "We should keep marijuana illegal so international drug-and-gun runners can stay in business."

The California Beer and Beverage Distributors group is getting press recently for their vigorous opposition to marijuana legalization. While they do have their own reasons for opposing legalization, I wonder what we'd find if we followed the money very closely.

China in Africa: Senegal

23-minute documentary on Chinese emigration to Senegal, in the context of Chinese economy activity in Africa. Main criticism: it would have been nice to see more about incentives and coordination to emigration from the Chinese government. If you don't like the little window below it's better to watch on a larger screen.

Incentives in Social Engineering

"If we miss the goals, who is going to punish us?" asked Esther Duflo, a development expert (and Macarthur Fellow, and Clark awardee) at M.I.T. "Nobody is going to come from Mars and say, 'You didn’t reach the goals, so we will invade' — there is no onus." The article addresses accountability problems with the U.N.'s approaches to fighting poverty. Maybe we need an X-Prize for measurable, realistic milestones in development?

Oddly, the types of private institutional giving discussed in the second link above (for example, the Gates Foundation) is proving difficult to get off the ground in the rising Number Two economy, China - not just because Chinese billionaires are cheap, but because the Chinese government doesn't want competition, even if it means faster improvement for its citizens.

Quote of the Day

"...it is not a sign of intolerance for us to notice that some cultures and sub-cultures do a terrible job of producing human lives worth living."

- Sam Harris, talking about his forthcoming book The Moral Landscape

Don't Like Chomsky? Then You WILL Like This

And I like this. Here's a great article about Chomsky's pretensions to political expertise. ("Pretensions!?" you huff, "How dare you!") There is an excellent allusion to the concept of horizontal fame. That is, Henry Ford was good at automating and managing production, which led him to believe he was good at everything else, including (oddly enough) politics.

Chomsky and Ford certainly aren't the first to think that because they can win at one game, they're experts at all of them, but it's up to the rest of us to wring the hero-worship out of what we read and not buy into the cult of fame - which, ironically, Chomsky enjoys decrying.

If you want to see some of old Noam's more ambitious claims even within linguistics punctured, for my money, no one is better than Stephen Pinker.

Rhetoric Check: Nuclear Disarmament Then and Now

The following reads like a "dark" science fiction scenario, as it might be written by a social conservative author:

In September 2011, the Obama administration decided to deactivate the Minuteman II ICBMs. Over the next few years the missiles were removed from the silos and placed in storage for use in launching satellites. In order to assure the Chinese that the silos were being deactivated according to the SALT III treaty each silo was first stripped of useful equipment and then the top 25 feet of the silo was blown apart using 2,800 pounds of explosives. After being left exposed for several months so the Chinese satellites could verify the destruction the remains were filled in and covered to look as much like the surrounding area as possible. Only one silo escaped destruction to become the Minuteman Missile Museum.

Submission to the Reds! Revelation of the President's true Marxist plan! His desire to destroy America! Right?

Hold on: this is the sign at the preserved nuclear missile silo south of Tucson.



When you can get rid of nuclear weapons in your national interest, that's a very good thing to do.

New Painting - Redwoods

Cross-posted to my outdoors and running blog.





This time I actually spent some time mixing paint to get the right hue for redwood. It's a complex color! The second picture of the pair is an attempt to emphasize the three dimensionality of the thick paint in the middle of the trees; I tried to recreate the actual texture of redwoods with my brushwork. This is also the first time I did pre-work of any kind (on my computer) to decide how I would what paint when, and to be sure that I could represent distance using tree size.