The Economist: Stop the war on drugs

How is the war on drugs going, really? According to The Economist, things are not going well.

[T]he war on drugs has been a disaster, creating failed states in the developing world even as addiction has flourished in the rich world. By any sensible measure, this 100-year struggle has been illiberal, murderous and pointless. That is why The Economist continues to believe that the least bad policy is to legalise drugs.

How can one quantify this illiberal, murderous and pointless struggle?

The United States alone spends some $40 billion each year on trying to eliminate the supply of drugs. It arrests 1.5m of its citizens each year for drug offences, locking up half a million of them; tougher drug laws are the main reason why one in five black American men spend some time behind bars. In the developing world blood is being shed at an astonishing rate. In Mexico more than 800 policemen and soldiers have been killed since December 2006 (and the annual overall death toll is running at over 6,000) . . . [F]ar from reducing crime, prohibition has fostered gangsterism on a scale that the world has never seen before.

In this article, The Economist points out that it has maintained this same position for 20 years, and it is more evident than ever that the "drug war" is a disaster.

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Who were the prisoners of Guantanamo?

Who were the prisoners of Guantanamo? Andy Worthington has compiled a four-part series telling us their stories. Here's the disturbing bottom line:

[A]t least 93 percent of the 779 men and boys imprisoned in total — were either completely innocent people, seized as a result of dubious intelligence or sold for bounty payments, or Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or international terrorism.

I don't pretend to know enough to know whether these accounts are totally accurate, but they are filled with details, personal anecdotes, statistics and reports regarding individual court cases. It has a strong ring of authenticity. Further, these individual accounts corroborate general accounts produced elsewhere. I have no reason to disbelieve any part of Andy Worthington's work. He is a well-reputed journalist who has published elsewhere, such as this post at Huffington Post. I am proud to be an American. America does much right in the world and has the potential to do much more that is admirable. This account by Andy Worthington, however, describes America at its shameful worst.

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TIME Magazine’s Insensitive Back Page Essay On the Foreclosure Crisis

In "I Bought An Expensive House. My Bad. Not Yours," Joel Stein compares the current foreclosure crisis to Jim Carrey's career in a flip, insensitive and uneducated opinion piece. Here's a taste of Joel Stein's off-the-cuff, but copy-edited remarks: "A lot of optimistic people bought houses near the historic height of the market, say November 2005, for absurdly high prices, say $1.12 million, in places like the eastern Hollywood Hills section of Los Angeles. These people are very, very sad." Talk about irresponsible journalism. Now let's contrast that with a recent Chicago Tribune article on emerging ghost towns: "The children who live on West Wilcox Street won’t go out at night for fear of 12 vacant graystones that draw criminals to their block. In Rogers Park, a half-empty 39-unit condo building on Farwell Avenue has become a hide-out for squatters and feral cats." Joel Stein is talking about his friends - or wannabe celebrities while the Chicago Tribune deigns to report on the little people. The title of Stein's essay belies his self-involved analysis: “I Bought a Bad House. It's overpriced, and I'm an idiot. That doesn't mean the government should help me.”

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How to humanize and preserve the abandoned underground spaces of New York

How do you humanize and preserve the abandoned underground spaces of New York? If you are artist and urban explorer Miru Kim, here's what you do:

Kim explores industrial ruins underneath New York and then photographs herself in them, nude -- to bring these massive, dangerous, hidden spaces into sharp focus.

Kim was featured at a recent TED talk. I was skeptical when I first read about her concept, but now I'm sold. Ebonmuse previously posted on another artist's urban spelunking, minus the beautiful nude woman. See here.

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Christian Hipster: a new category of belief between Believer and Skeptic

Andrew Sullivan proposes a a new category of belief between Believer and Skeptic. Or at least I first heard the term "Christian Hipster" at the Daily Dish. What kind of people does it describe?

A "Christian Hipster" as described in this article merely describes a person who both believes in Christ anda explores the world for themselves, rather than taking their Pastor/Mother/Father/Dobson's opinion as unquestionable.

Here's a bit more from a prior post by Andrew Sullivan:

Christian hipsters like music, movies, and books that are well-respected by their respective artistic communities—Christian or not. ... They tend to be fans of any number of the following authors: Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Wendell Berry, Thomas Merton, John Howard Yoder, Walter Brueggemann, N.T. Wright, Brennan Manning, Eugene Peterson, Anne Lamott, C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Henri Nouwen, Soren Kierkegaard, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Annie Dillard, Marilynne Robison, Chuck Klosterman, David Sedaris, or anything ancient and/or philosophically important.

Sounds like a modest step in the right direction. Sounds a lot like what Christians used to be before the political right wing (religious and political) redefined "Christians" as self-righteous people who refuse to consider compelling real-life evidence.

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