The CIA is the world's dealer

More on the Afghan heroin thing:

There was no such “accident” in Afghanistan, where the first local drug lords on an international scale – Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Abu Rasul Sayyaf – were in fact launched internationally as a result of massive and ill-advised assistance from the CIA, in conjunction with the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. While other local resistance forces were accorded second-class status, these two clients of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, precisely because they lacked local support, pioneered the use of opium and heroin to build up their fighting power and financial resources. Both, moreover, became agents of salafist extremism, attacking the indigenous Sufi-influenced Islam of Afghanistan. And ultimately both became sponsors of al Qaeda.

CIA involvement in the drug trade hardly began with its involvement in the Soviet-Afghan war. To a certain degree, the CIA’s responsibility for the present dominant role of Afghanistan in the global heroin traffic merely replicated what had happened earlier in Burma, Thailand, and Laos between the late 1940s and the 1970s. These countries also only became factors in the international drug traffic as a result of CIA assistance (after the French, in the case of Laos) to what would otherwise have been only local traffickers.

Thank God for those gracious folks at Langley. Doing their bit for geopolitical stability.

Heroes & heroin

Classic. You actually have to laugh:

KABUL, Afghanistan — The effort to win over Afghans on former Taliban turf in Marja has put American and NATO commanders in the unusual position of arguing against opium eradication, pitting them against some Afghan officials who are pushing to destroy the harvest.

I like the way they call it "opium", by the way, without once mentioning the more emotive word "heroin."

“Marja is a special case right now,” said Cmdr. Jeffrey Eggers, a member of the general’s Strategic Advisory Group, his top advisory body. “We don’t trample the livelihood of those we’re trying to win over.”

Genius. Just like our own domestic growers of weed. Oh, hang on.

United Nations drug officials agree with the Americans, though they acknowledge the conundrum. Pictures of NATO and other allied soldiers “walking next to the opium fields won’t go well with domestic audiences, but the approach of postponing eradicating in this particular case is a sensible one,” said Jean-Luc Lemahieu, who is in charge of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime here.

Yes I'm sure he is. In charge of getting the drugs and committing the crimes.

The argument may strike some as a jarring reversal; in the years right after the 2001 invasion, tensions rose as some Afghan officials vehemently resisted all-out American pressure to stop opium production.

Yes, but that was when America didn't have a claim on any of the poppies, silly.

Afghanistan now produces 90 percent of the world’s opium. And one way or another the opium trade supports an estimated 1.4 million households in the country, which has a population of 25 million to 30 million. It also provides enormous amounts of money to the Taliban, with a recent United Nations study estimating the insurgents had earned as much as $600 million in taxes from farmers and traffickers just from 2005 to 2008.

Well, 90 per cent is quite a lot. Must be pretty lucrative, really. For whoever's, you know, overseeing the racket.

The farmers themselves do not get rich on the harvest.

Not the farmers, then.

We have nothing to lose but our fun

Just read another interview with the incomparable Doug Casey, about "fun."
Now this is a matter which is perhaps closest to my heart, and I think really encapsulates everything else that is going on in the new world order of things.
Alcohol, tobacco, firearms, sex, drugs, rock n roll. Are there any more glorious six terms in the world? It's pretty much the antithesis of Celente's Harvard, Princeton, Yale, bullets, bombs, banks.
It is these things that make life worth living, along with food. And yet they are regulated, taxed, "educated" against, banned or otherwise pushed underground.
It's a big subject, and I admit it's making me angry just writing this. But I'd like to start with smoking.
Because I suspect that it is not bad for your health. And I know for sure that it should not be banned anywhere.

L: What would you say to people who don't want to breathe other people's smoke? Isn't it a violation of their rights when a smoker fills the air with fumes they don't want to breathe?

Doug: It might be, but it might not. It's a matter of property rights. If someone comes into your house and blows smoke in your face, that certainly is a violation of your rights. But if you're in a restaurant or airplane and the owners are okay with smoking, no one is violating your rights. You have the right to leave or fly another airline, but you don't have a right to impose your personal air quality standards on others, in their places. In these types of situations, it's not the smoke that's the problem, it's unclear property rights.

And I like what he says a bit before that:

It seems like all these chimpanzees get a new meme in their heads, and that becomes the new way it is. Fashion totally overrules principle.

So the smoking ban is a way of pushing bar and pub owners around, and generally undermining freedom, like They do, with a pseudo-scientific idea backing it up, that it's bad for you, and bad for those around you.

Ah yes, the science. Now, I'm reluctant to get into this, because even if they released mustard gas the government would have no business banning them. In fact, if they released mustard gas the government would be making a killing selling them to the CIA and the Taliban. They have no business banning anything.

But I'm becoming more and more aware of a gap in any persuasive evidence that smoking causes lung cancer, or any illness. Diet and food, yes. Smoking? Show me the evidence. Given that we spent 100,000 years in the palaeolithic era sucking up cooking fire fumes, and that the most successful of our ancestors did this most often, I have a hard time with a few lit sticks being a big deal.

There is a caveat to this. I suspect that because of the intervention of government with their regulations and so on into the tobacco industry, it has created large conglomerates (discussed here) and perverse incentives which have decreased the quality of the cigarettes. They add ammonia and god knows what else, in order to get tobacco into the blood stream quicker, and make them burn faster. This is why I smoke roll-ups.

Anyway, there's a great online book by Lauren Colby which is worth a read, and contains a few gems:

There is an Internet News Group devoted to smoking (alt.smokers). Recently, a participant called the Office of Smoking or Health, in an effort to find out how the government arrives at its estimate of 450,000 annual smoking related deaths. After repeated calls to different individuals within the government, it turned out that nobody really knew how the figures are compiled.

Quite frankly, I do not know whether there is a risk to smoking, or not. I do know that "risk" is not the same as causation. Philosophers, from Plato to Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, have been fascinated with the word "cause", and have written many learned treatises on the subject. My great grandfather was working on a bridge construction site in 1927, when a careless driver jostled him. My great-grandfather became startled, lost his balance, and fell through a hole in the bridge. Not being able to swim, he drowned in the river below. Was the cause of death (a) drowning; or (b) the actions of the careless driver; or (c) the loss of balance; or (d) the existence of the hole in the bridge flooring; or (e) not being able to swim?

In this book, I have shown that the case for a smoking/lung cancer connection is by no means proven. Certainly, there is no case whatever for a connection between ETS (second hand smoke) and any disease, nor is there are any case for a connection between cigar and pipe smoking and lung cancer. The case for a connection between cigarette smoking and lung cancer rests on the slim reed of a science called epidemiology. But all epidemiological studies, predicated as they are on statistics, are subject to so many co-factors and confounding factors as to be subject to innumerable different interpretations.

You may want to refer to this page also, which refers to sources that indicate smoking may alleviate or help prevent Parkinson's, TB, skin cancer, breast cancers, Alzheimer's, schizophrenia, and others. I'm not saying these claims are "right" either, just that they are hypotheses just as valid as "smoking is bad for you."

A word on that last hypothesis. As Karl Popper has said, a good hypothesis is one that can be falsified. The above hypothesis has been falsified. Take a look at the list of the ten longest-lived people ever, in the world. The top two smoked for most of their lives. And if more information was available (I don't have time to research them all) you would probably find that 5 or 6 of the others also did.

So this falsifies the theory that smoking is bad for you. Well, some may say that they would have lived longer than that if they had not smoked. But that doesn't really wash, does it? We've had billions of attempts at creating long-lived people, and these are the best we've come up with. End of story.

I wouldn't mind if it were just commonly wrongly assumed that cigarettes were bad for you - because they would then have more of an edgy, sexy image, and that would benefit me. But it's that Big Government thing again, sucking all reason to live from our bones. And, scarily, it's happening all over the world.

Cake returns

From The Daily Mash:

Schools urge government to make drug slightly more expensive and a lot more dangerous
"We're only trying not to help," says National Association of Head Teachers

Pretty much sums up my views on drugs, including the Brass Eye-ish hysteria over mephedrone.

School's Out

From Personal Liberty:

Public schools today are crime-ridden, unhealthful places where children are exposed to sex, drugs and diseases and taught a sanitized version of American history and a loyalty to and dependence on big government, according to James Ostrowski in his book, Government Schools Are Bad For Your Kids.

Actually, I've got nothing against sex or drugs, except that most drugs these days are pale shadows of what they should be (because they're illegal), and I suspect that most kids at school don't get enough sex - the alphas will be getting it all (see Roissy). But the dependence on Big Government is real, and will kill all that is worth preserving in the human spirit.

It ought to be mentioned that it's not just government schools. All schools in this country have to conform to a curriculum. They're all subsidiaries then really, pumping out the same propaganda.

Homeschool your kids. If you love them at all, homeschool them. Find a way.

Smokin'

Nicely-done post from Leg Iron, saying what needs to be said about the smoking ban.