"We want you to go, Monsanto...."

U.S. biotech firm Monsanto said on Tuesday it does not plan to sell its genetically modified maize MON810 in France this year, nor after, even though the country's highest court overturned a 3-year ban in November.

"Monsanto considers that favorable conditions for the sale of the MON810 in France in 2012 and beyond are not in place," the company said in a statement, adding that it had told the French authorities about its intentions.

The French government said earlier this month it would uphold its ban on the insect-resistant strain of maize, despite the court's decision to annul the ban after finding that it had not produced enough evidence that Monsanto's MON810 posed a significant risk to health or the environment.

Cry1Ab, a specific type of Bt toxin from genetically modified (GM) crops, has for the first time been detected in human and fetal blood samples. It appears the toxin is quite prevalent, as upon testing 69 pregnant and non-pregnant women who were eating a typical Canadian diet (which included foods such as GM soy, corn and potatoes), researchers found Bt toxin in:

93 percent of maternal blood samples
80 percent of fetal blood samples
69 percent of non-pregnant women blood samples

Writing in the journal Reproductive Toxicology, the researchers noted:

"This is the first study to reveal the presence of circulating PAGMF [pesticides associated with genetically modified foods] in women with and without pregnancy, paving the way for a new field in reproductive toxicology including nutrition and utero-placental toxicities."

This GM insecticide toxin is already showing up in fetal blood, which means it could have an untold impact on future generations.

 Things military in the US...

WAY: seems like the folks on the right are the ones paying most attention to this issue. We'll accept the info however we can get it.





VIDEO: Military Helicopters Conduct Covert Exercises Over U.S. Bank Building

The exercise is yet another in a spate of recent military drills to hit heavily populated areas throughout the country.

Back in April last year, residents of Brickell, Miami witnessed at least three large Black Hawk-like helicopters conducting military exercises over their heads. Some initially believed it was a movie shoot.

The police in the United States have been steadily militarized over the past decade to the point of absurdity, as recently exemplified by police rolling out an armored personnel carrier (APC) to the Occupy Tampa protests.

Benjamin Carlson of The Daily covered one of the more unsettling recent developments in this militarization of police, the Department of Defense’s obscure “1033 program” which has given away almost $500 million in leftover military equipment to law enforcement in the fiscal year of 2011.

This year’s total is more than double the amount of equipment handed out in 2010, which was $212 million worth of military gear, setting a new record for the program.

Interestingly, according to Mr. Nabors, Texas hasn’t flown its drones since a final training flight in August 2010. The drones were constantly having maintenance issues because they weren’t designed to land in a rocky environment like Texas and didn’t fly well in high winds. The supplier, AeroVironment (AV), took a long time to fix the drones so they were often out of service. There also may have been some issues with the frequency used to operate and control the device. Ultimately, according to Mr. Nabors, the drones did not offer Texas significant advantages over the agency’s existing airplanes and helicopters so the agency cancelled its 2010 order for two additional drones. Mr. Nabors said he was not sure patrolling the border was a good use of the small drones or even whether they should be used in the National Airspace. He does believe the FAA should strictly control the use of unmanned aerial systems within the National Airspace. According to Mr. Nabors, he doesn’t see going back to using unmanned systems. Texas' experience should be taken seriously by other law enforcement looking into spending tax dollars to purchase these devices.

Yet, DHS assertions about the success, value and worth of drones in border security operations suffer a widening credibility gap six years after Predator drones first started patrolling the southwest border. UAVs may, as Miller states, be fantastic technology.

The purported achievements fall more into the realm of pure fantasy.

DHS has steadily expanded its drone fleet, and Congress has offered more cheerleading for drones than oversight. Due diligence and accountability are nowhere to be found.

What makes this absence of proper oversight and good management especially shocking is that the waste, inefficiency and strategic blunders of the drone escalation mirror the monumental failures of the SBInet "virtual fence" project - the other major DHS venture into high-tech border security.

 good news, for a change

Supreme Court [Unanimously] Breathes Life into Fourth Amendment

The Supreme Court today decided one of the most important liberty and privacy cases in decades, ruling unanimously that government's installation and use of a GPS tracking device on a defendant's vehicle constitutes a search that presumptively requires a warrant under the Fourth Amendment. The Justice Department had argued that law enforcement has the authority, unsupervised by any court, to install and use GPS technology to monitor and store the movements, 24/7, of whomever it targets, anywhere, anytime, without a warrant. The entire Court disagreed.

The case is United States v. Jones, No. 10-1259, affirming the judgment in United States v. Maynardby the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which reversed Mr. Jones conviction "because it was obtained with evidence procured in violation of the Fourth Amendment."

"Today's decision is a victory for privacy in the digital age," said Lisa Wayne, President of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL). "The alternative to protecting a person's privacy interests in the web of his travels and associations would be what the government argued – that the police have some kind of hypothetical right to track anyone and everyone, for as long as they want, for any reason they want, or no reason at all."

A lead co-author of NACDL's joint amicus brief in the case, Susan J. Walsh, of Vladeck, Waldman, Elias & Engelhard, New York City, explained, "As NACDL pointed out in its amicus curiae brief in support of Mr. Jones, and previously in the New York GPS case, People v. Weaver, the aggregation of a person's day-to-day travels over any period of time will reveal highly-personal, but non-criminal, information about a person's private life. In that case, New York's highest court agreed that it takes little imagination to imagine the kinds of personal travels a person would not want to unnecessarily disclose – trips to a psychiatrist's office, a family-planning or AIDS clinic, a strip club, political meetings, a church, a synagogue or mosque."

 the "liberation" of Iraq...

WAY: There is some overlap between the first and last articles posted here, but the repeated details perhaps will sink more completely into our consciousness while the added details clarify reality.

Corruption in Iraq: 'Your son is being tortured. He will die if you don't pay'

She took a taxi with her friend to the agreed meeting point, a mosque on the outskirts of the neighbourhood. The driver went out and handed the money to a man who stood on the corner, a Shia security officer called Rafic.

Yassir was released two days later. Um Hussein didn't know it at the time but a judge had ordered Yassir be released six months earlier. The security men had kept him in detention until his family produced another $2,000 bribe.

Yassir's case is part of a growing body of evidence collected by the Guardian that shows Iraqi state security officers are systematically arresting people on trumped-up charges, torturing them and extorting bribes from their families for their release. Endemic corruption in Iraq has created a new industry in which senior security service officers buy their authority over particular neighbourhoods by bribing politicians, junior officers pay their seniors monthly stipends and everyone gets a return on their investment by extorting money from the families of detainees.

During two trips to the country before and after the US withdrawal from the country on 18 December, the Guardian interviewed 14 detainees and five officers in different branches of the security service in Baghdad. All the detainees said they had had to pay money to be freed, even though most had been acquitted in the courts. Some had been jailed for three days and some, like Yassir, for five years. In three cases, officers changed a detainee's "confession" – often extracted under torture – in return for money. In one case, an officer lost the detainee's documents in return for a bribe and he was released due to lack of evidence. One prisoner we interviewed is still in jail and in the middle of negotiations with officers.

Prosecutors and defense attorneys in the court-martial of Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, accused in the killing of 24 unarmed Iraqis in 2005, announced an agreement Monday to settle the case.

Wuterich will plead guilty to a single count of negligent dereliction of duty. Other charges were dropped. No announcement was made on what kind of discharge Wuterich would receive.

The maximum sentence is three months in the brig. That decision will be made by the judge

Afterwards, the officers called from prison demanding hefty bribes to let him go while telling the family he was being tortured. ... "We had to send [the security men] phone cards so they could call us. They said: 'Your son is being tortured – he will die if you don't pay.' So we paid and paid. What could I do? He is the last I have.

Yassir's case is part of a growing body of evidence collected by the Guardian that shows Iraqi state security officers are systematically arresting people on trumped-up charges, torturing them and extorting bribes from their families for their release. Endemic corruption in Iraq has created a new industry in which senior security service officers buy their authority over particular neighbourhoods by bribing politicians, junior officers pay their seniors monthly stipends and everyone gets a return on their investment by extorting money from the families of detainees. ...

This is the system that was installed, financed, armed and maintained at every step by the American invaders. Yassir's ordeal -- and those of thousands like him -- occurred under the American occupation, which only came to its ostensible end a few weeks ago. (Of course, thousands of armed American forces and mercenaries still remain in the raped and broken country.) This is precisely the system that the Americans intended to leave in place. Indeed, it is the very system that the bipartisan American power elite have openly yearned to impose on Iraq since the days following the 1991 Gulf War: a strongman regime, corrupt, brutal, but open for business to Western oil interests and American war profiteers -- Saddamism without Saddam. And that is exactly what they have achieved.

 War of words, war of deeds...

Iran 'definitely' closing Strait of Hormuz over EU oil embargo if...

Tensions in the Gulf could reach a breaking point as a senior Iranian official said Iran would “definitely” close the Strait of Hormuz if an EU oil embargo disrupted the export of crude oil.

Mohammad Kossari, deputy head of parliament's foreign affairs and national security committee, issued the warning in respone to a decision by the European Union on Monday to impose an oil embargo on Iran over the country’s alleged nuclear weapons program.

“The pressure of sanctions is designed to try and make sure that Iran takes seriously our request to come to the table,” EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said.

However, with Washington’s decision to deploy a second carrier strike group in the Gulf, the EU’s attempt to pressure Iran economically could greatly increase the likelihood of all-out war in the region.

The Strait of Hormuz is the vital link between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman.

It is also one of the most strategic chokepoints in the world when it comes to oil transit

This week, the lords of the West took yet another step toward their long-desired war againt Iran. (Open war, that is; their covert war has been going on for decades -- via subversion, terrorism, and proxies like Saddam Hussein.) On Monday, the European Union obediently followed the dictates of its Washington masters by agreeing to impose an embargo on Iranian oil.

The embargo bans all new oil contracts with Iran, and cuts off all existing deals after July. The embargo is accompanied by a freeze on all European assets of the Iranian central bank. In imposing these draconian measures on a country which is not at war with any nation, which has not invaded or attacked another nation in centuries, and which is developing a nuclear energy program that is not only entirely legal under international law but is also subject to the most stringent international inspection regime ever seen, the EU is "targeting the economic lifeline of the regime," as one of its diplomats put it, with admirable candor.

The embargo will have serious, perhaps disastrous effects on many of Europe's sinking economies, which are heavy users of Iranian oil. This is particularly true in Greece, the poster boy for our modern "Shock Doctrine über alles" global economic system. For even as Greece writhes beneath the blows of European bankers determined to bleed the country dry to avoid the consequences of their own knowingly corrupt loan policies, the Iranians have been giving the Greeks substantial discounts on oil, which has helped ease -- at least in some measure -- the economic ruin being imposed on the "birthplace of democracy."

Now this slender lifeline is being cut, leaving Greece -- and other nations under assault by the plutocrats and their political lackeys -- to seek a replacement for discounted Iranian oil in what will be a seller's market, thanks to the shortages caused by the embargo. The result will be higher prices across the board, leading to more economic ruin for all those beyond the golden penumbra of the One Percent.

And of course, the effects will be even more catastrophic for millions of innocent people in Iran. Already the lives of these innocent people -- including all of the dissidents supposedly so cherished by the West -- are being diminished and degraded by the series of sanctions imposed by the United States and its pack of tail-wagging Europuppies. But who cares about that? After all, it is glaringly obvious that our Euro-American elites are more than happy to see their own rabble go down the shock-doctrine toilet; it is inconceivable that the ruin of a bunch of dirty Mooslim furriners would disturb them for even a nano-second

With the inclusion of the Chinese, the Russian Federation and Iran are widely considered to be allies and partners. Together the Russia Federation, the People’s Republic of China, and the Islamic Republic of Iran form a barrier against the United States. The three form this through a triple alliance that is the core of a Eurasian coalition resisting Washington’s encroachment into Eurasia and America’s quest for global hegemony. The Chinese primarily face U.S. encroachment from East Asia and the Pacific, the Iranians primarily face U.S. encroachment in Southwest Asia, and the Russians primarily face U.S. encroachment in Eastern Europe. All three states also face U.S. encroachment in Central Asia and are wary of the U.S. and NATO military presence in Afghanistan.

Iran can be characterized as a geo-strategic pivot. The entire geo-political equation in Eurasia will change on the basis of Iran’s political orbit. Should Iran ally with the United States and become hostile to Beijing and Moscow, it could seriously destabilize Russia and China and wreak havoc on both nations. This would be due to its ethno-cultural, linguistic, economic, religious, and geo-political links to the Caucasus and Central Asia.

From the Western powers’ point of view, Iran is both an elusive prize and a frustrating obstacle. Bringing Iran back into the orbit of Western capitalist control has the added significance of depriving energy and other geopolitical advantages to rival powers, in particular Russia and China. In a strategic review earlier this month, Washington highlighted China as its pre-eminent global competitor in the coming decades. The militarized agenda towards China was also heralded by US President Barack Obama during his Asia-Pacific tour at the end of 2011. China is heavily dependent on Iranian oil. Some 20 per cent of all Iranian crude oil exports are traded with China. The latter has billions of dollars worth of energy investments in Iran, in particular the natural gas sector, which energy analysts view as the primary fuel in forthcoming decades. Washington’s policy of hostility and regime change towards Iran and furthering its hegemony over this vital region is as much about wresting control from its perceived competitors, Russia and China. That factor takes on added importance as America’s economic power wanes.

These issues form the bigger picture that explains the drive for war in the Persian Gulf, which the mainstream media has chosen to carefully ignore. The broader implications of this war are either trivialized or not mentioned. People are led to believe that war is part of a "humanitarian mandate" and that both Iran as well as Iran's allies, namely China and Russia, constitute an unrelenting threat to global security and "Western democracy"

While the most advanced weapons system are used, America's wars are never presented as "killing operations" resulting in extensive civilian casualties. While the incidence of "collateral damage" is acknowledged, US-led wars are heralded as an unquestionable instrument of "peace-making" and "democratization".

The selection of articles below is intended to give readers a condensed overview of the events and issues at stake in the so-called stand-off between the US, its allies, and Iran. We have selected articles with a news emphasis while also providing a historical background.

 disillusionment, anyone?

Massive File on Romney Hits Internet, Likely from 2008 McCain Campaign

If you think you’ve already heard everything there is to know about Mitt Romney, think again. A 200-page document that appears to be Sen. John McCain’s entire 2008 election-year opposition research file on the former Massachusetts governor hit the Internet with a vengeance Tuesday evening. And it’s an eye-opener.

The file explores everything from the assessed value of Romney’s house (“$3.162 million”) to his views on the Boy Scouts’ ban of homosexuals (“publicly opposed … in 1994 and 2002 campaigns”). It was made public Tuesday on the social media website Buzzfeed, although it appears to have been accessible online for two months.

The document, given the name “The Romney Book,” was viewed less than 100 times on the page where it was originally uploaded by its anonymous leaker on November 11.

A pro-Romney group is savaging Newt Gingrich with TV ads and mailers to Iowa Republicans. Gingrich dismisses the attacks as “lies.” We find that some of the claims from Restore Our Future are indeed distorted, false or misleading. But several are also right on target.

A TV spot makes a distorted claim that Gingrich co-sponsored a bill containing money for a United Nations program “supporting China’s brutal one-child policy.” The truth is that bill specifically prohibited the use of funds for “involuntary sterilization or abortion,” or “the coercion of any person to accept family planning services.” The funding in question was a small part of a much larger bill which died before ever coming up for a vote.

The same ad says Gingrich earned “$30,000 an hour” from Freddie Mac — an exaggeration. His firm got between $25,000 and $30,000 a month and Gingrich said he personally spent only about one hour per month meeting with Freddie Mac officials. But his firm had many employees and overhead expenses, too.

On the other hand, the ad is essentially accurate on other points.

It says that when he was speaker of the House, he supported “taxpayer funding of some abortions,” and back then he did express support for the Hyde Amendment, which was largely aimed at prohibiting federal funding of abortions through Medicaid, but which allowed exceptions in cases of rape, incest or a threat to the life of the mother.

It says he was the “only speaker in history to be reprimanded” and “was fined $300,000 for ethics violations by a Republican Congress.” That’s all true, though Gingrich prefers not to call the $300,000 payment a “fine.”

It says he “teamed up with Nancy Pelosi on global warming,” and he did indeed appear in a TV commercial with Pelosi to urge unspecified federal action to address climate change. He later opposed Pelosi’s cap-and-trade bill, however.

And the ad accurately quotes the conservative National Review saying that Gingrich was a poor speaker because of “his weakness for half-baked (and not especially conservative) ideas.”

Ron Paul wrongly suggests Ronald Reagan reluctantly agreed to a "debt ceiling compromise" in 1987. There was no disagreement over raising the debt ceiling. In fact, Reagan said he had "no objection whatsoever" to raising the debt ceiling. Reagan opposed the main provision of the legislation that threatened to impose deep spending cuts, including to the military, if the president and Congress did not reduce the deficit by a certain amount.

Paul, the populist Texas congressman who is running for the Republican presidential nomination, released a TV ad July 14 that will air in Iowa and New Hampshire. The ad — titled "Conviction, Not Compromise!" — calls on Republican leaders to cut spending, balance the budget and not increase the debt limit.

Rick Santorum claimed that the Obama administration told an abstinence education group that it could “no longer promote marriage” to at-risk youth “as a way of avoiding poverty.” That’s not true, according to the group Santorum mentioned.

At the Republican presidential debate on Jan. 16, Santorum said that Best Friends — an organization that promotes “character education” for girls in schools and promotes abstinence from premarital sex, as well as drugs and alcohol — had been told by the Obama administration that the group could no longer “promote marriage” to at-risk girls. Best Friends’ founder and president is Elayne Bennett, whose husband, Bill Bennett, was Secretary of Education under President Reagan and “drug czar” under President George H.W. Bush. Santorum said that Elayne Bennett had told him this information through Bill. But somewhere along the way, the former Pennsylvania senator got his information wrong.

President Obama’s first 2012 campaign ad misleads on ethics, “clean-energy” jobs and U.S. dependence on oil imports.

The spot uses outdated quotes from groups that said his record on ethics is “unprecedented” and that he “kept a promise to toughen ethics rules.” Those same groups said later that he “has let down millions of Americans who accepted his word” and rated his promise as “broken.”

The 30-second TV spot also trumpets a claim of “2.7 million jobs” in “America’s clean-energy industry.” That mostly counts jobs put in place long before Obama took office.

Finally, it boasts that U.S. dependence on foreign oil has declined to below 50 percent, as a net share of total demand, for the first time in more than a decade. That’s true, and increasing U.S. oil production is a factor (despite Republican criticisms that Obama is anti-drilling). But economists say the chief factor is reduced oil consumption, brought on by the recent economic recession.

 Raising and preparing food, or not...

Vegeculture and the Season of Roots

My mother in law ate a roasted turnip at my house the other day. It was unfamiliar enough to her in that form (she'd had mashed turnips before) that she had to ask me what it was, and it was a reminder of the fact that this time of year truly is the only time that many Americans come in contact with the lesser-known root vegetables. While carrots, potatoes and onions are part of our daily lives, and sweet potatoes and beets are at least intermittenly familiar (if commonly hated), few Americans know celeriac, turnips, parsnips, taro, rutabagas, yams, jerusalem artichokes or many others well enough to pull them out of lineup, much less include them in daily life.

If they do have some familiarity with these foods, it is on the once-a-year thanksgiving table in most cases, rather than as part of daily life, and that's a pity. Most are prolific, cheap if you are buying therm, easy to grow, nutritious, filling and delicious. Moreover, for those in cold climates they will keep a long time in natural cold storage or in a winter garden. Moreover, if we imagine needing to live in part from our gardens, these crops, along with the familar roots, are likely to be central.

In his book African-American Gardens and Yards in the Rural South, Richard Westmacott notes that a good bit of Southern African American agricultural practice derives from West African and Caribbean practices of "vegeculture" as opposed to European style-seed agriculture. The term, coined by D.B. Grigg in his classic Agricultural Systems of the World is based primarily on root crops, including manioc, sweet potatoes, yams, taro, arrowroot, and in cooler climates was adapted to potatoes as well.

Vegeculture has several advantages over grain culture. For example, you don't have to till up a lot of ground at once, since these crops are adapted to "patch" culture. They often can be stored in the ground and dug up as needed, and can tolerate being integrated with perennial tree plantings. The tradition of planting in patches and leaving grown fallow to restore fertility in West Africa translated well in slave gardens in the US and Caribbean islands because such gardens often had to be hidden.

Tastes in food are obviously personal, but so are tastes in labor. Just as I'm fascinated by the implicit personal tastes that shape our supposedly objective evaluations of good food, I'm also intrigued by how we feel about certain jobs. Often our perception of what can be done or cannot is based less on objective facts than on our tastes in work.

I thought a great deal about tastes of both kinds as I was reading Jennifer Reese's Make the Bread, Buy the Butter which describes the author's exercise in making from scratch any number of things, and calculating whether the homemade versions are cheaper and/or better. The book is fun and fascinating and wonderfully written and goes beyond just recipes into the author's explorations of goat-rearing, chicken butchering, duck egg collecting and the rest of the mix. It is, as my kind friend Alexandra put it, "A Sharon sort of a book."

The book is laugh-out-loud funny in some places, and also does, I think, a fairly good job of giving industrial convenience food its due - and it does have one. There are real conveniences - and all of us take advantage of them some times, getting others to do things we don't necessarily want to do. Given that our dumpster-diving friend is now providing us with more free industrial food, I have a real appreciation of the industrial apricot cake recipe she provides - moreover, for all my general preference for made-from-scratch-without-sodium-benzoate food, there are a few "greater than the sum of their parts" recipes I love from the days of my childhood - most notably a chocolate pistachio cake involving a green interior made with jello pudding. That's the irony of having grown up in the 1970s and 1980s - the food of my childhood is not the pure natural stuff (although probably more in my family than average), but at lease in part the food of several generations of the recipients of industrial processing.

Reese's attempt to find an empirical measure of whether one should buy or make is fascinating, particularly in the way that it ends up focusing heavily on the question of taste in work and food. Reese makes a laudable attempt to objectively evaluate how much hassle any given job is, and save others the trouble of experimenting - in many cases, I think she does a really good job. It is a buttload of work to make your own wonton wrappers, even though they are much better than the purchased sort. Making mustard is something very few people do, even though it can be done in a trice with minimal effort.

The places where the book puzzles me are places where our tastes in labor or food just don't overlap - for example, she finds making mashed potatoes by hand terribly onerous and hates peeling potatoes. I admit, I actually don't mind zipping my peeler over any vegetable - I find it meditative, and I find hand mashing to be pleasant, satisfying work. Mashed potatoes don't even rank on the list of troubling projects - we eat potato cakes a lot, and my kids love mashed potatoes, so making mashed potatoes falls in the category of "things I don't even think about doing because they are second nature" for me - it is interesting to find that someone else finds them annoying.

On the other hand, Jennifer Reese expresses little distress at the idea of picking maggoty bits out of a bad batch of her camembert, which is not one of the jobs I'm most inclined to do. Making good soft cheese is a bit of work to me - not something I won't do, but very different from quick mashing some potatoes. Her claim that instant potatoes really aren't that bad and that regular mashed are too much work just seems strange to me, while her statement that everyone should make their own camembert is inspiring, creative, but not instinctively true to me. But that's one of those accounting for tastes things - and perhaps I'm being overly nice in my tastes.

Where the question of taste and perception of labor really comes into play is with water bath canning - Reese mentions her memories of her mother standing over a hot canning kettle, and functionally announces that she can't see it as anything other than totally repressive. She writes:

"I remember well and not fondly the black graniteware kettle rattling and steaming on the electric stove, every surface given over to widemouth jars into which, sweating and impatient, my young mother - a math major, one of three women to graduate from her law school class in 1964 - funneled apricots and cherries and plums and tomatoes so I could come home from school and pop open a jar of golden peaches for a snack. They were delicious, but when I think about it now, it seems almost tragic, a sacrifice of time and youth and spirit when we would have grown up just fine eating Del Monte. Everyone I knew who ate Del Monte and Wonder Bread and Skippy and Pringles turned out okay. I see these people around town all the time."

The funny thing (and she does acknowledge this) is that this is a woman who plans to milk goats daily, butchers her own turkeys and makes lamb prosciutto, jobs at least as time consuming as canning. Speaking as someone who fills up her shelves every year and doesn't feel that she has to choose between a life of the mind and canned peaches, I find filling a half-dozen jars with jam and setting them on to boil while I do other things to be a quick, easy job, and don't find myself to be a slave to the kettle at all. Yet I know that Reese's perspective is incredibly common - the assumption is that home preserving is extremely onerous. People who think nothing of spending a weekend refinishing their deck are overwhelmed by the idea of making strawberry jam or pickles, both of which are very easy and much quicker than the deck.

 drug war update...

A Mexican soldier stands near the bodies of two men found slain in Acapulco
in February. Credit: Pedro Pardo / AFP/Getty Images

Grasping at Straws: The Mexican Government’s Latest Spin on Drug Violence

On January 11, the attorney general’s office in Mexico City released the latest casualty figures in the government’s war against the drug cartels. Most people would regard the news as thoroughly depressing. The AGO’s statement confirmed that there had been 47,515 drug-related killings from December 2006—when President Felipe Calderón gave the army the lead role in attacking the cartels—through September 2011. During the first nine months of 2011 alone, 12,903 people died in the violence. That figure compared to 11,583 during the same period in 2010.

So, not only is the carnage taking place at an alarming pace, but the annual toll is getting worse. According to the Mexican government, though, the news is actually somewhat encouraging. Why? Because, as the AGO statement stresses:

It’s the first year (since 2006) that the homicide rate increase has been lower compared to previous years. (Emphasis added.)

In other words, the already-terrible situation may be getting worse, but it is getting worse at a slower pace than in recent years. And that is supposedly good news.

On July 1, 2001, a nationwide law in Portugal took effect that decriminalized all drugs, including cocaine and heroin. Under the new legal framework, all drugs were "decriminalized," not "legalized." Thus, drug possession for personal use and drug usage itself are still legally prohibited, but violations of those prohibitions are deemed to be exclusively administrative violations and are removed completely from the criminal realm. Drug trafficking continues to be prosecuted as a criminal offense.

While other states in the European Union have developed various forms of de facto decriminalization — whereby substances perceived to be less serious (such as cannabis) rarely lead to criminal prosecution — Portugal remains the only EU member state with a law explicitly declaring drugs to be "decriminalized." Because more than seven years have now elapsed since enactment of Portugal's decriminalization system, there are ample data enabling its effects to be assessed.

Notably, decriminalization has become increasingly popular in Portugal since 2001. Except for some far-right politicians, very few domestic political factions are agitating for a repeal of the 2001 law. And while there is a widespread perception that bureaucratic changes need to be made to Portugal's decriminalization framework to make it more efficient and effective, there is no real debate about whether drugs should once again be criminalized. More significantly, none of the nightmare scenarios touted by preenactment decriminalization opponents — from rampant increases in drug usage among the young to the transformation of Lisbon into a haven for "drug tourists" — has occurred.

Regardless of the exact figure, the death toll is incomprehensible and unacceptable. And to this toll must be added the thousands of people disappeared, the hundreds of thousands displaced and the hundreds of thousands of children left orphaned during this same five-year period.

This crisis will only continue unless the U.S. works with Mexico to address the root cause: drug prohibition.

These murders are not drug-related, they are prohibition-related -- committed by cartels that were spawned by drug prohibition, that derive their power from the inflated profits of prohibited but highly demanded commodities, and that operate in an underground economy in which violence is routinely employed to resolve disputes or remove business opponents. It's similar to what occurred in the U.S. during alcohol prohibition, but on a far more horrific scale.

Meanwhile, Mexico's U.S.-backed military response, rather than reducing violence, has resulted in systematic and documented violations of human rights, including rape, extrajudicial killings, disappearances and torture. Abuses have been so grave and widespread that human rights attorneys have asked the International Criminal Court to investigate President Felipe Calderon for crimes against humanity.