news: secrecy, aid, AIG, drugs, religion, israel, "two cultures"

[mindstalk]

US politics
* Concern about mixed signals from Obama on state secrecy and executive power.
* New executive orders page.
* Disparities in stimulus aid to schools
* Nate Silver on the AIG "bonuses", and how the meme spread.
* Support for legalizing pot spreads.
* The Economist supports legalization.

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.

Take cocaine: the mark-up between coca field and consumer is more than a hundredfold. Even if dumping weedkiller on the crops of peasant farmers quadruples the local price of coca leaves, this tends to have little impact on the street price, which is set mainly by the risk of getting cocaine into Europe or the United States.

According to the UN's perhaps inflated estimate, the illegal drug industry is worth some $320 billion a year.

Legalisation would not only drive away the gangsters; it would transform drugs from a law-and-order problem into a public-health problem, which is how they ought to be treated.

harsh Sweden and more liberal Norway have precisely the same addiction rates

Random
* The Colosseum lights up to mark death penalty commutations or abolition.
* I'd heard sex crimes had high recidivism rates, especially pedophilia; this disputes that (PDF)
* Avatar whitewashing, take 2
* Liberalism (libertarianism to Americans) complements socialism.
* Russia seeks to lure back its diaspora; the article informs us of Russian Old Believer villages in Uruguay and Brazil.
* Romania considers decriminalizing incest between consenting adults, which would have it join France, Spain, and Portugal.
* Followup on the spiteful sex shop.
* On Snow's Two Cultures

Religion
* Bizarre theology. Is Jesus the wife?
* atheist demographics
* Nigerian Anglican archbishop Akinola proposes that people be jailed for witnessing a gay wedding. But that's okay because "we could not come across any Nigerian with such sexuality."
* Elizabeth Dole's campaign has no regrets
* Islamic bus ad in San Francisco. Perhaps not optimally worded. Then again, it is SF, perhaps it is optimal for the right subgroup...

Israel
* Religious nationalism growing in the army. "we need to fight to expel the non-Jews who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land. This was the main message, and the whole sense many soldiers had in this operation was of a religious war." "a booklet handed out to soldiers was found to contain a rabbinical edict against showing the enemy mercy." "He has also said that the main reason for a Jewish doctor to treat a non-Jew on the Sabbath, when work is prohibited but treating the sick and injured is expected, is to avoid exposing Diaspora Jews to hatred."
* Note orders Israeli soldiers to fire on rescuers. Shooting at Red Cross rescuers mentioned.
* IDF soldier testimony.
* IDF T-shirts. 'shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull's-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, "1 shot, 2 kills."'
* Gideon Levy: not the most moral army