Today is the 75th anniversary of that blessed day in 1933 when Utah became the 36th and deciding state to ratify the 21st amendment, thereby repealing the 18th amendment. This ended the nation's disastrous experiment with alcohol prohibition.

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But let's hope it also serves as a day of reflection. We should consider why our forebears rejoiced at the relegalization of a powerful drug long associated with bountiful pleasure and pain, and consider too the lessons for our time.

Let's End Drug Prohibition - WSJ.com

A FEW YEARS AGO my daughters and I were searching for sand crabs on a white-sand beach near Monterey. A group of sixth graders descended on us, clad in the blue trousers and pressed white shirts of their parochial school. Once lost in the sounds of the surf, away from their teacher’s gaze, they called one another by nicknames and mocked the way one laughed, another walked. Noogies and rib pokes, headlocks and bear hugs caught the unsuspecting off guard. Two boys dangled a girl over the waves. Three girls tugged a boy’s sagging pants down. Dog piles broke out. In a surprise attack, one girl nearly dropped a dead crab down a boy’s pants.

the anatomy of teasing by a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.

In Defense of Teasing - NYTimes.com

A cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe has killed at least 484 people since August, according to the UN.

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Cholera can be treated easily but hospitals lack medicines and staff.

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The BBC's Peter Biles reports from the South African town of Musina, near the border with Zimbabwe, that cholera patients are being treated at an emergency centre on the lawn in front of the hospital.

One cholera victim from Harare told him that on Zimbabwe's side of the border, toilets had not functioned for one month, and people were "defecating everywhere".
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Zimbabwe's government has blamed its crisis on Western sanctions it says are aimed at trying to bring down President Robert Mugabe.

But the sanctions imposed after allegations of electoral fraud and political violence are aimed at Mr Mugabe and his close associates and consist of travel bans and a freeze on their foreign assets.

BBC NEWS | World | Africa | Zimbabwe cholera deaths near 500

On Jan. 18, 2006, Condoleezza Rice delivered a policy address at Georgetown University in which she argued that the fundamental threats now come from weak and failed states, not enemy powers.

In this new world, she continued, it is impossible to draw neat lines between security, democratization and development efforts. She called for a transformational diplomacy, in which State Department employees would do less negotiating and communiqué-writing. Instead, they’d be out in towns and villages doing broad campaign planning with military colleagues, strengthening local governments and implementing development projects.

Over the past year, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has delivered a series of remarkable speeches echoing and advancing Rice’s themes. “In recent years, the lines separating war, peace, diplomacy and development have become more blurred and no longer fit the neat organizational charts of the 20th century,” he said in Washington in July.

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Gates has told West Point cadets that more regime change is unlikely but that they may spend parts of their careers training soldiers in allied nations. He has called for more spending on the State Department, foreign aid and a revitalized U.S. Information Agency. He’s spawned a flow of think-tank reports on how to marry hard and soft pre-emption.

Op-Ed Columnist - Continuity We Can Believe In - NYTimes.com

Right now there’s intense debate about how aggressive the United States government should be in its attempts to turn the economy around. Many economists, myself included, are calling for a very large fiscal expansion to keep the economy from going into free fall. Others, however, worry about the burden that large budget deficits will place on future generations.

Op-Ed Columnist - Deficits and the Future - NYTimes.com

Obama and Clinton are buying into a bottomed-out market vis-à-vis America’s position in the world. It is as if they will be buying stock after the market has crashed, and just at the point when a number of factors are already set in motion for a recovery. For President George W. Bush did not just damage America’s position in the world, he has also, over the past two years, quietly repositioned himself as a realist in foreign policy, and that, coupled with a bold new strategy in Iraq, known as the “surge,” has poised America for a diplomatic rebound, which the next administration will get the credit for carrying out.

I have to say I find that reasoning persuasive, although it is absolute heresy to the left. I wish Obama could have kept Condoleezza Rice on as Secretary of State. In retrospect, I think I think I have more respect for her than anyone else in the Bush Administration. As for having Hillary in that role. Well, hrm, ok, maybe, we'll see...

Obama's Foreign Policy: Buying in at the Bottom - The Atlantic (November 25, 2008)

Voters in Switzerland go to the polls on Sunday to decide whether to make a controversial heroin prescription programme a permanent, nationwide health policy.

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Swiss vote on radical heroin rules

One of the biggest frustrations facing journalists is being unable to get through to people on the phone. But as Mary Harper discovered, contacting the Somali pirates on the Sirius Star turned out to be child's play.

BBC NEWS | Programmes | From Our Own Correspondent | 'Mummy, can I phone the pirates?'

Since we suspect they were Muslims, and since we doubt the Pakistanis can be categorical and convincing enough to thwart Indian demands, we suspect that we will be deep into a crisis within the next few days, very shortly after the situation on the ground clarifies itself.

Pakistan is so god-damned frustrating. Supposed/relative 'good guys' in the central government, elements of the intelligence service aiding terrorists, the father of the Islamic bomb driving nuclear proliferation, large swaths of the country independent and hostile and... there's not a damned thing we can do about it, because pressuring the central government to crack down on terrorism tends to hurt their credibility and threatens to destabilize the entire nation, which has nukes.

Its the country that really matters in the 'war on terror', its the place where the focus would be if this war weren't a total sham, and there's not a god damned thing we can do.

fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck

Red Alert: Possible Geopolitical Consequences of the Mumbai Attacks (Open Access) | Stratfor

Is this the dark side speaking?

A concatenation of puzzling results from an alphabet soup of satellites and experiments has led a growing number of astronomers and physicists to suspect that they are getting signals from a shadow universe of dark matter that makes up a quarter of creation but has eluded direct detection until now.

Maybe.

A Whisper, Perhaps, From the Universe’s Dark Side - NYTimes.com