Stop trying to save the world

EU sees Latvia as the “bridge to Russia” ; pressures Latvian minister to relax citizenship and voting rules for russians… Russification as foreign policy? … Meet the new boss… “

ITAR-TASS
PACE president urges naturalization of Latvian Russians – 2.

21.09.2007, 19.19

RIGA, September 21 (Itar-Tass) — President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) Rene van der Linden has called on Latvian authorities to naturalize local Russians.

He made the statement at the Friday meeting with Latvian Minister for Special Assignments for Society Integration Affairs Oskars Kastens, a source at the Latvian ministry told Itar-Tass.

VicesAreNotCrimes
Vices Are Not Crimes

A Vindication Of Moral Liberty

I.

Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property.

Crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another.

Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property.

In vices, the very essence of crime — that is, the design to injure the person or property of another — is wanting.

It is a maxim of the law that there can be no crime without a criminal intent; that is, without the intent to invade the person or property of another. But no one ever practises a vice with any such criminal intent. He practises his vice for his own happiness solely, and not from any malice toward others.

Unless this clear distinction between vices and crimes be made and recognized by the laws, there can be on earth no such thing as individual right, liberty, or property; no such things as the right of one man to the control of his own person and property, and the corresponding and coequal rights of another man to the control of his own person and property.

For a government to declare a vice to be a crime, and to punish it as such, is an attempt to falsify the very nature of things. It is as absurd as it would be to declare truth to be falsehood, or falsehood truth.

actually, I think this is very obvious to the politicians who are struggling so vehemently to prolong this drug war. but, since when did they start caring about the people? The United States government’s involvement in the illegal drug trade since the days of Air America has been well documented, and there are so many powerful private sector players with a vested interest in the status quo. From Wall Street money launderers to private prisons to security services and gear to police corruption and forfeiture abuse… the amount of money is just staggering… so you needn’t believe in conspiracies to believe that the war on drugs is run by evil and corrupt politicians feeding on ignorance and fear, just as any other war initiated by the US.

Reader Blogs | Stop the Drug War (DRCNet)
Opportunity Costs and Child Molestors
Posted in Reader Blogs by Robert Guest on Thu, 09/20/2007 - 11:48pm

In Economics, the principle of opportunty cost states that the cost of something is the value of other foregone opportunities.

Example-You went to the movies this afternoon. You could have exercised, worked, mowed the lawn etc. Those missed opportunities are opportunity costs.

The War on Drugs has opportunity costs also. Every law enforcement resource wasted on Prohibition can not be used on anything else.

This leads me to the case of Roy Acthinson, a federal prosecutor who was recently arrested for trying to buy the right to have sex with a five year old. Roy specialized in asset forfeiture, or glorified stealing for the government.

All the time Roy and other federal prosecutors spent hunting drug dealers and users were not spent on hunting sicko child sex perverts, like Roy.

Everytime you see another huge drug bust, or another drug dog on the side of the road ask yourself this- Is this drug bust worth not pursuring murderers, rapists, terrorists, or child molestors?

With prohibition that is the choice we are making. The Drug Enforcement Admininstration has 11,000 employees. The Child Molestor Administration and Murder Administration have zero.

Opportunity costs, the price we all pay for failed prohibition.

I have never used in the custom command button reassignment function in Deja Vu X. After having created a macro environment using the command tools available in Dragon NaturallySpeaking, I came across autohotkey, which apparently can do some of the same things. The advantage here is that the macros are available globally, not only in DNS. I have as yet no idea if it is comparable to the intelligent syntax handling of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, so it will be exciting to check that out. In any case, instead of assigning keystrokes to simple functions using the add new command function I do it in autohotkey. wonderful.

Gmail - Drug War Chronicle, Issue #500 (fulltext version)

On the frequent occasions when I am asked why I oppose the drug laws, I face a quandary — where do I start? There are so many important reasons:

* Half a million nonviolent drug offenders clog our prisons and jails. Mandatory minimum sentences, and inflexible sentencing guidelines, condemn numerous low-level offenders to years, even decades behind bars, often based solely on the word of compensated, confidential informants. With two million people behind bars, the US leads the world in incarceration, at a level radically beyond any time in our history before a quarter century ago.

# Prohibition creates a lucrative black market that causes violence and disorder, particularly in our inner cities, and lures young people into lives of crime. Laws criminalizing syringe possession, and the overall milieu of underground drug use and sales, encourage needle sharing and increase the spread of HIV and Hepatitis C. Thousands of Americans die from drug overdoses or poisonings by adulterants every year, most of their deaths preventable through the quality-controlled market that would exist if drugs were legal.
# Our drug war in the Andes fuels a continuing civil war in Colombia, with prohibition-generated illicit drug profits enabling its escalation. Opium growing, and attempts to stop it, both hurt Afghanistan’s attempts at nation building and help our enemies.
# Patients needing medical marijuana, and the people who provide it to them, go without or live in fear of arrest and prosecution. Physicians’ fears of running afoul of law enforcers causes large numbers of Americans who need opiates for chronic pain to go un- or under-treated.
# Profiling assaults the dignity of members of our minority groups, and of the poor, denying them equal justice.
# From drug testing in our schools, to SWAT teams invading our homes, privacy has been gutted.
# Ethics in our criminal justice system are virtually the exception rather than the rule, with perjury, violations of constitutional rights, corruption and general misconduct endemic and largely tolerated — all of it driven by the drug war.
# Frustration over the failure of the drug war, together with the lack of dialogue on prohibition, distorts the policymaking process, leading to ever more intrusive governmental interventions and ever greater dilution of the core American values of freedom, privacy and fairness.

The Post Office in my neighborhood also sells socks and toothbrushes…

Latvian post company now licks stamps for a fee : Business
Riga - Latvian state-owned postal company Latvijas Pasts has launched a new paid service of helping customers to prepare their mail, including licking stamps. As of August, post offices in the small Baltic nation have been charging 0.03 lats (5.8 US cents) for gluing stamps to envelopes.