....and every day the quiet clay heavier and heavier grows

...every day the quiet clay, heavier and heavier grows...

Some days when I open the paper I can't believe my eyes. A report in today's local fish wrap described how our current bunch or brainiacs in Washington want to, within the next ten years, place Special Ops Army guys in every country - I presume that it meant to say every country where we think we might have less than a stellar approval rating ( o.k. every country ) - and to support those men and women with more high tech toys of directed mass destruction e.g. unmaned bombers, manned bombers, fancy weapons systems etc. Which make a little sense until you realize the most effective weapon used against us in Iraq has been the "improvised explosive device". Actually it doesn't make sense at all. Didn't England and earlier Rome go broke doing this?

A better idea would be to open a school of reconcilliation and site elements of it on high school and college campuses all over the country - sort of like ROTC but with a different mission. Hell, create a Reconcilliation Merit badge for the Boy Scouts. Here is another idea: disallow business of all kinds from taking profits from countries where the poorest of the poor earn less than the cost of John Edward's haircut. These guys heard the expression "no shame in his game" and ran with it. According to Harpers in January the cost to every man, woman and child of this Iraq war -besides in lives lost or ruined - has risen to 900+ dollars. That is so vulgar. If you feel safer because of this nonsense you are too stupid to have access to a computer!

In the meantime, to help pay for all of this, President Bush is working at reducing expenditures that will benefit the poor, the disabled, the aged and the ill. That is, to say reduce the the meger money (on a per-person basis) that makes up the already ragged social safety net. Attacking once again the people least capable of defending themselves. Our current government is made up of very evil people, very evil people. And, they do not believe that they are.

If I was in charge - this is where blogging gets real silley - I would go after the the manufactures, growers, processors and purvayors of narcotics. I mean go after them! Bomb them, strafe them, assaassinate them, get them out of of the movie!. Not to the exclusion of others such as bin Laden, but without regard to borders, treaties, and political protocols. When that last glass is polished and is put away we don't much respect that stuff anyway. Why am I on such a bandwagon? It seems obvious to me, for the past 30 to 40 years narcotics have been co-opting our most vulnerable, creating corrupting vested interests in our most powerful....by creating a huge law enforcement apparatus that is largly eneffective; by building and staffing prisons, and other institutions, and sending criminalized money out of the coutry -sometimes literally in bales, –which undermines efforts to create good orderly government in the countries where they are needed; and nourishes vested interests that demoralize (as in morality) and otherwise weakening our own country, and on and on. These villians have been allowed to flourish to the point of becoming the tail that wags the dog.

The men and women in prison - as convicts or staff - do not create anything of value. It is a weird symbiotic relationship, and it costs much more than we can afford. And it is wrong headed. The other night I was thinking about a three ton cocaine seizure that I had just read about taking place on the south west coast below California. I thought to my self … three tons is six thousand pounds; sixteen ounces go to make up a pound; and roughly twenty-nine grams make an ounce; and 1000 miligrams make a gram. Now, and one asprin is usually about 350 miligrams. Man, where is all of that shit going? The Coast Guard suggests that this represents one tenth of smuggling activity for that period of time. President Bush the Elder took out Manuel Noriaga, I don't think he asked anyones permission out side of our government -well maybe Barb's -, why don't we put on a full court press and just forget about the trials, the other crap that we have become so hippacritical about anyway, and erase them from the black board. We can figure out someway to take the money we are currently wasting and pony up a fraction to re-establish the worker bees that will be put out of work. Hell, just pay them the same wages for dictating retrospective diaries of what it was like. May actually create an accurate historical record. Push those so inclined, toward some sort of productive, useful, entraprenuarship. The "drug lords" need to go. If you are looking for an enemy, one that most good people anywhere can easily join you in a campaign for their eradication - try those guys. And just like with other parasites you are going to have to scorch the earth and then put down a measurable amount of salt so they don't come back.Take our "drug war " money and use it to produce a drug resistant citizentry...we are finally getting through on tobacco I believe many of those strategies will apply.
posted by Carries Water on the Path
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