Virdea

Neo-Marxism is the academic theory that poverty and inequality breed societal problems, as opposed to Marxism which is a form of government that purports at its center to solve the ills inequality.
 
For example, Neo-Marxism predicts that any societal activity that leads to advancement will be moderated by the socio-economic class of the person involved.  To test this take a thing and see if socio-economics is a factor.  In this way it is a tool.
 
Marxism is a normative tool that say a priori this is how to make the world work.  A political system.
 
Marxism has never worked.  Neo-Marxism is like a screw driver - works nice except everyone wants to use it to turn a nut or hammer a nail.
 
Oh, we call Neo-Marxism the Chicago school in the US to avoid mistakes.  I don't because a lot of people I work with are international.

You actually ran across the big problem with most Neo-Marxist research.  Fajnzylber claims to have solved his causation issues, but his foundation on Becker is flawed.  Heck, plug in that freak who invented the Southernness index and you will find out that living in a southern city makes you a criminal.  I have a correlation between temperature in a city, rain fall, and crime rate.  However, there is no causation.  The causation is that bad guys rob people in clear weather because they do not like to get rained on or cold.  
 
The main killer for the theory that poverty breeds crimes as a significant causal factor is the US, past 20 years.  Falling crime rate is correlated .6 something (a HUGE correlation) rising unemployment and greater social inequality multiplier.  For a theory to work it has to predict something, then that something has to happen.  The opposite happened.  Thus the theory must be revisited.
 
Interesting correlation that Chicago school Neo-Marxists should look into is that the number of hours you are read to by your parents before age 8, the more successful you will be.  Piaget says this causes improved brain function and better socialization - so you have a testable causal factor.  

Because it is my human rights that have to be spent to get the guy who robbed a bank (or even sold heroin) out of jail.  Personally, if I have to pay to have someone warehoused under threat of their committing violence on me, then it has to be done under my terms.  And my terms are - commit a violent act for any reason, earn a stay at a welfare center which I choose to call a jail.  I will accept no other terms since they are my rights, I possess them already, and it takes extraordinary acts to remove them.
 
Pablo Fajnzylber, working under a Neo-Marxist assumption set, reverses causality as a matter of course in the article - which is why I teach my students to tread carefully when employing a tool like Neo-Marxism.  Now I am the last person to throw Gary Becker and the Chicago mafia under the bus here, their work is valid and their discovery connecting racial bias with economic disfavor are ground breaking and important.  But their work can, should, and is questionable with regards to crime.  Messier found no connection between economics and crime.  Blau squared found a connection, but also a blizzard of caveats.  All this work pre-exists the article you provide but the author - a world bank employee, choose to only use Becker as a foundation.  About like someone arguing against germ theory but failing to cite John Snow.  
 
Now to personal experience.  I never in five years arrested anyone who stole because they needed money to feed themselves or house their family.  You could argue they did not have a yacht, but neither do I.  And the theory you present cannot be used to predict the chance of someone being a criminal.  

I agree with this.  The 11mm limit for smart projectiles is in part based on the surface area of the maneuver surfaces - you simply cannot bend wind any more.

That's bullshit, though. Criminals don't think "I'm gonna get back at the Koch brothers" before they commit crimes. The most unequal parts of the US don't correlate with the most crime-ridden ones.
I know it's progressive dogma that equality is the bestest thing and will solve all our problems, but inequality is at best only one minor source of crime. Twenty years ago, it was the progressive party line that poverty and desperation caused crime, but that's a harder pill to swallow now that we have criminal welfare families making 50K a year. In fact, crime happens for a wide variety of causes and reasons, and the best way to allow crime to happen is to recommend some panacea cure like "equality" to fix it.

Jesus everloving titfuck, correlation does not imply causation.

I doubt this will actually happen.  Terminal graphing is a very useful exercise, and zero intercept generation a tool no leader should misunderstand, but my stats professor said that taken to far you will actually believe that in the year 2101 the entire world will live in Kenya, have a last name of Chang, and be Hindu.
 
Orthodox religions in free societies with open press always look good on paper, but the conversion rate out of the religion is simply too high.  And yes, as soon as Israel falters on its everyone fights rule probably it quits being Israel, but if the army starts to suffer then even the orthodox will be handed swords and called Essenes. 

Kurdistan is one of the entities that I see as a natural for the region.  
 
Israel, despite the crescendo of stupidity on the subject, has a degree of legitimacy - there were Jews living in Palestine for thousands of years.  In 1948 none of the big Arab powers were talking about an independent Palestine, but instead talking about which chunk they could take for themselves.  In 1949 there were 900,000 Jews in displaced person camps and 900,000 Arabs.  Israel resettled its refugees in a decade without a dime of recompensation from the countries who expelled them.  The Arabs are still in their camps to this day.  From 1948 to 1967 no one in the Arab world who controlled the West Bank or Gaza was all hot to form a nation even though they could.  And for two decades the Arabs could have had the West Bank and Gaza back for peace and recognition.  So from an existential point of view I am in favor of the existence of Israel, and think that if you attack someone and get your but handed you repeatedly then loosing a little land is the least you should pay for the pain.  
 
And Eban is right when he said, "The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity."  
 
However, as an American who is a Republican it makes my stomach churn that Israel has stuck its nose in our politics.  Now support for Israel is political, and someday the political football will be in the hands of a quarter back who won't keep VETO of SC resolutions.  Eban also said "If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions."  In that situation do you really want to bait one of your allies?
 
So if we support Israel, then a Kurdistan is a no brainer.  Like the Jewish state there is land which is lived on by Kurds, they have a cultural identity, and they are a despised minority in many countries where that can lead to genocide.  And since Isis or Syria are the alternative government models that we have been shown, I think Kurdistan is a no brainer.

Kurdistan is one of the entities that I see as a natural for the region.  
 
Israel, despite the crescendo of stupidity on the subject, has a degree of legitimacy - there were Jews living in Palestine for thousands of years.  In 1948 none of the big Arab powers were talking about an independent Palestine, but instead talking about which chunk they could take for themselves.  In 1949 there were 900,000 Jews in displaced person camps and 900,000 Arabs.  Israel resettled its refugees in a decade without a dime of recompensation from the countries who expelled them.  The Arabs are still in their camps to this day.  From 1948 to 1967 no one in the Arab world who controlled the West Bank or Gaza was all hot to form a nation even though they could.  And for two decades the Arabs could have had the West Bank and Gaza back for peace and recognition.  So from an existential point of view I am in favor of the existence of Israel, and think that if you attack someone and get your but handed you repeatedly then loosing a little land is the least you should pay for the pain.  
 
And Eban is right when he said, "The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity."  
 
However, as an American who is a Republican it makes my stomach churn that Israel has stuck its nose in our politics.  Now support for Israel is political, and someday the political football will be in the hands of a quarter back who won't keep VETO of SC resolutions.  Eban also said "If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions."  In that situation do you really want to bait one of your allies?
 
So if we support Israel, then a Kurdistan is a no brainer.  Like the Jewish state there is land which is lived on by Kurds, they have a cultural identity, and they are a despised minority in many countries where that can lead to genocide.  And since Isis or Syria are the alternative government models that we have been shown, I think Kurdistan is a no brainer.

Kurdistan is one of the entities that I see as a natural for the region.  
 
Israel, despite the crescendo of stupidity on the subject, has a degree of legitimacy - there were Jews living in Palestine for thousands of years.  In 1948 none of the big Arab powers were talking about an independent Palestine, but instead talking about which chunk they could take for themselves.  In 1949 there were 900,000 Jews in displaced person camps and 900,000 Arabs.  Israel resettled its refugees in a decade without a dime of recompensation from the countries who expelled them.  The Arabs are still in their camps to this day.  From 1948 to 1967 no one in the Arab world who controlled the West Bank or Gaza was all hot to form a nation even though they could.  And for two decades the Arabs could have had the West Bank and Gaza back for peace and recognition.  So from an existential point of view I am in favor of the existence of Israel, and think that if you attack someone and get your but handed you repeatedly then loosing a little land is the least you should pay for the pain.  
 
And Eban is right when he said, "The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity."  
 
However, as an American who is a Republican it makes my stomach churn that Israel has stuck its nose in our politics.  Now support for Israel is political, and someday the political football will be in the hands of a quarter back who won't keep VETO of SC resolutions.  Eban also said "If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions."  In that situation do you really want to bait one of your allies?
 
So if we support Israel, then a Kurdistan is a no brainer.  Like the Jewish state there is land which is lived on by Kurds, they have a cultural identity, and they are a despised minority in many countries where that can lead to genocide.  And since Isis or Syria are the alternative government models that we have been shown, I think Kurdistan is a no brainer.

This is called a pretext prosecution and is based upon selective arrests and a scientific measurement of human behavior known as psychographics.  Done right it is a god send for getting bad guys put away.  Done wrong and it is a racist trap that does little to stop crime.
 
However, just arresting people is not the only answer.  Here is my own story.  Not exciting Miami Vice stuff, undercover is not what you think - it is mostly buying drugs or letting chicken heads come on to you.  You do get a good understanding of the world though.
 
Drive someday into Bluff Estates, a blighted black community in Columbia, South Carolina.  When you drive in there will be three or four school age children not in school near the entrance.  They are the drug lookouts.  Their mothers get 20 bucks a day or so in drugs to rent their kids out to yell about police.  If you are in civilian clothes, and fit a profile, they won't yell, but maybe the old lady two doors down makes a call.
 
You are now on borrowed time.  If they make you as a cop you are safe, except people will stand out and yell at you, and they will have their kids run in front of your car hoping you will hit one.  If not then you are probably buying. 
 
As a drug user you take your life into your hands each day you buy.  You either buy from a friend with low risk but with a jacked up price, or you go to Bluff estates where the stuff is cheap but where you might draw the wrong attention and make someone decide you are better off dead.  
 
The first thing you realize about the neighborhood is - no older men.  You have very old men, and boys, but nothing in between.  
 
To understand why this is so weird you have to drive through an impoverished neighborhood where drugs are not a major issue, and they exist. These communities form around 30-40 year old men who are often veterans and usually hard working and blue collar, who provide cultural glue to the younger men.  Younger men are often unemployed, but take day work.  Criminal activity is part of the southern black experience, but black communities draw pretty serious lines between property crime and outright violence.  Beat your wife and ten guys from the neighborhood will come by and talk with you often lead by the pastor of the church. No one, even in the honest communities, talks to the police, but everything in the community is public knowledge.  Older black women are placed on a high pedestal, and motherhood is the route to respectability.  This is not a white suburban community but it works - and if the issue of educational access and job access would be solved, then these communities easily become middle class.
 
Bluff Estates though has no young men.  In the past decade forty are dead.  Four hundred are in prison, half never to return.  There is no statistics for fathers raising children because none are - most children meet their "baby daddies" when they are themselves first incarcerated.  Unlike the poor black community I described above, this one has most women having babies before they are 15 because literally, their men will be dead or in prison soon afterwards.  And addiction runs 50%.  
 
So I drive to the back of Bluff Estates, to a house where twenty men stand.  Only they are not men.  There are 10 old men - 50 plus, and 20 boys, and maybe two men around 20.  The kids are jumped in at 15 after having worked as lookouts.  Several of the kids will be carriers - they will have the guns - the young men never touch drugs or guns.  You look the kids over closely because the week before you had a kid accidentally shoot himself in the leg with a gun and bleed out.  The month before a kid was proving how fearless he was - on video he racked the slide of a Tec-9 he was told to hold, ejected the magazine to make sure it was empty, and then put the gun under his chin and laughing pulled the trigger.  People called it a "malfunction" of the gun and tried to make a case to sue the company that made the gun, but I argue it did exactly what it was told to do.  The gun was purchased by the girlfriend of a drug dealer - most of the weapons are stolen or are straw purchases but the DA is under pressure from the NRA not to prosecute straw purchase deaths, so it won't be a prosecution.  At the local NRA meeting I argue for a change of policy, but everyone is worried that it may happen to them so no prosecution for the gun buyer.
 
There is three cars in front of the drug  house in front of me, about normal - the drug sales is like McDonalds and Bluff Estates has only two entrances, so people tend to queue up.  I am buying an eight today which is five old twenty dollar bills.  If they are new from the bank you may get your ass beat - so be careful about that.  I run my twenties through a washing machine after signing them out because that mistake will get you dead.  You are not suppose to buy with a gun on you, but I have a MAS49 in my trunk and a GP 35 under the seat.  That way if I have to defend myself the department can deny they sent me in, because officially I am not cleared for the work, but the crew at Bluff estates knows all the full-timers so a lot of undercover is done with constables and deputies with part-time tickets.
 
An old guy comes up and I hand him $100.  He puts up five fingers, which means five twenties - everyone does it different but you learn how your dealer works.  If he puts up anything else I will get mad because I am a junky after all and if I let him cheat me to easily I will be in trouble.  He does not because if they think he held out on them they will kick his ass.
 
I drive down the street and a kid runs out with two tweens in a zip lock for me.  It is usually yellowish rock.  I smell it - it needs to smell acid.  If it smells base then I will flip my shit because they are treating me like some college kid and I am dressed like a chubby redneck in a wife beater which I have stained with motor oil.  White guys buying direct are either country or college, and I do not look college.  
 
One of those five twenties will go into the pocket of one of the young guys, and we will have PC to get him, usually in a traffic stop.  He will almost always have a small amount of drugs on him, and a gun.  He is the kingpin of Bluff Estates but we end up only getting him on a weapons and a drug charge.  However we get him, ignore the old guys and the kids.

So you could cut your prison population by 20-25% solely by decriminalising trafficking?
 
Depends on what you mean by trafficking.  No one in their right mind is considering decimalizing cocaine.  All of the talk is marijuana and simple possession of other substances.  25% might be high, but it might not.  It would certainly reduce prison populations for people serving under 60 days.
 
 
How many of these crimes are trafficking, possession or similar?
 
Possession and trafficking come out to 75/25 split for convictions.  However these numbers are soft.  Nearly every person we catch with a kilogram of cocaine claims it is for personal use, while a lot of people get caught selling dimes to friends in their frat house because they are congenitally stupid.  Plus a lot of captures are mules.  Plus possession is rarely prosecuted to its fullest while trafficking related to organized crime is prosecuted to its fullest and then some.  So a problem everyone has is finding out what the numbers mean.  
 
One of my students OD and died a few years back and I decided to get his family answers (at their request) that no police agency would.  The kid had purchased drugs from a man in Yakima, who received them from a connection in the local Hispanic gang.  They got the drugs by capturing the children of immigrants in Mexico and torturing them until the men agreed to mule for them, then holding them in camps.  From there I had no way to trace it further but those gangs actually have close connections with South American governments who support trafficking through Central America - that is published and not personal knowledge.  The amount of culpability in the system is variable, some of the people in the main supply have no culpability, but if caught will spend two decades in jail.  
 
Again, it seems like just, you know, not bothering to prosecute or lock people up for having or transporting drugs in the US would cut the total prison population by an enormous amount. Given that this would also make it much cheaper to get high (reducing second-order things like robbery), I can't really see a downside. I mean, it's not like the current approach seems to be doing much to stop people from becoming addicts in the first place.
 
You are right and wrong I think.  We can selectively decriminalize possession of a wide range of narcotics.  I even put forward an idea to the Washington Legislature that addicted people could apply for and receive a card permitted them to purchase and use narcotics, but which would also prevent their ownership of guns, automobiles, living with children under 15, entering a school or park, or holding license for some jobs.  We do something similar with people who are insane, and for nonviolent sex offenders who are under court mandated treatment.
 
The main objections to all of this come from the basic foundation of the United States legal system.  The first is that people who use narcotics cause a lot of damage in society.  That damage must be paid for either by the person who does the damage (who is a drug user and has no money), by the person who allowed the user to use (suits against the government for the acts of drug users are becoming more common based on failure to prosecute) or by insurance companies.  So any legalization scheme has to figure out how to pay the bill for the drugs.  Marijuana is easy - the bill is small and the users mostly non-violent.  
 
Other drugs are harder because while you say they would become cheap with legalization they might not.  An unlimited supply of some drugs (cocaine and opiates) only increases the addiction rate.  The resting addiction rate for communities that stop enforcement for these drugs is around that of the resting addiction rate for alcohol!  

This is called a pretext prosecution and is based upon selective arrests and a scientific measurement of human behavior known as psychographics.  Done right it is a god send for getting bad guys put away.  Done wrong and it is a racist trap that does little to stop crime.
 
However, just arresting people is not the only answer.  Here is my own story.  Not exciting Miami Vice stuff, undercover is not what you think - it is mostly buying drugs or letting chicken heads come on to you.  You do get a good understanding of the world though.
 
Drive someday into Bluff Estates, a blighted black community in Columbia, South Carolina.  When you drive in there will be three or four school age children not in school near the entrance.  They are the drug lookouts.  Their mothers get 20 bucks a day or so in drugs to rent their kids out to yell about police.  If you are in civilian clothes, and fit a profile, they won't yell, but maybe the old lady two doors down makes a call.
 
You are now on borrowed time.  If they make you as a cop you are safe, except people will stand out and yell at you, and they will have their kids run in front of your car hoping you will hit one.  If not then you are probably buying. 
 
As a drug user you take your life into your hands each day you buy.  You either buy from a friend with low risk but with a jacked up price, or you go to Bluff estates where the stuff is cheap but where you might draw the wrong attention and make someone decide you are better off dead.  
 
The first thing you realize about the neighborhood is - no older men.  You have very old men, and boys, but nothing in between.  
 
To understand why this is so weird you have to drive through an impoverished neighborhood where drugs are not a major issue, and they exist. These communities form around 30-40 year old men who are often veterans and usually hard working and blue collar, who provide cultural glue to the younger men.  Younger men are often unemployed, but take day work.  Criminal activity is part of the southern black experience, but black communities draw pretty serious lines between property crime and outright violence.  Beat your wife and ten guys from the neighborhood will come by and talk with you often lead by the pastor of the church. No one, even in the honest communities, talks to the police, but everything in the community is public knowledge.  Older black women are placed on a high pedestal, and motherhood is the route to respectability.  This is not a white suburban community but it works - and if the issue of educational access and job access would be solved, then these communities easily become middle class.
 
Bluff Estates though has no young men.  In the past decade forty are dead.  Four hundred are in prison, half never to return.  There is no statistics for fathers raising children because none are - most children meet their "baby daddies" when they are themselves first incarcerated.  Unlike the poor black community I described above, this one has most women having babies before they are 15 because literally, their men will be dead or in prison soon afterwards.  And addiction runs 50%.  
 
So I drive to the back of Bluff Estates, to a house where twenty men stand.  Only they are not men.  There are 10 old men - 50 plus, and 20 boys, and maybe two men around 20.  The kids are jumped in at 15 after having worked as lookouts.  Several of the kids will be carriers - they will have the guns - the young men never touch drugs or guns.  You look the kids over closely because the week before you had a kid accidentally shoot himself in the leg with a gun and bleed out.  The month before a kid was proving how fearless he was - on video he racked the slide of a Tec-9 he was told to hold, ejected the magazine to make sure it was empty, and then put the gun under his chin and laughing pulled the trigger.  People called it a "malfunction" of the gun and tried to make a case to sue the company that made the gun, but I argue it did exactly what it was told to do.  The gun was purchased by the girlfriend of a drug dealer - most of the weapons are stolen or are straw purchases but the DA is under pressure from the NRA not to prosecute straw purchase deaths, so it won't be a prosecution.  At the local NRA meeting I argue for a change of policy, but everyone is worried that it may happen to them so no prosecution for the gun buyer.
 
There is three cars in front of the drug  house in front of me, about normal - the drug sales is like McDonalds and Bluff Estates has only two entrances, so people tend to queue up.  I am buying an eight today which is five old twenty dollar bills.  If they are new from the bank you may get your ass beat - so be careful about that.  I run my twenties through a washing machine after signing them out because that mistake will get you dead.  You are not suppose to buy with a gun on you, but I have a MAS49 in my trunk and a GP 35 under the seat.  That way if I have to defend myself the department can deny they sent me in, because officially I am not cleared for the work, but the crew at Bluff estates knows all the full-timers so a lot of undercover is done with constables and deputies with part-time tickets.
 
An old guy comes up and I hand him $100.  He puts up five fingers, which means five twenties - everyone does it different but you learn how your dealer works.  If he puts up anything else I will get mad because I am a junky after all and if I let him cheat me to easily I will be in trouble.  He does not because if they think he held out on them they will kick his ass.
 
I drive down the street and a kid runs out with two tweens in a zip lock for me.  It is usually yellowish rock.  I smell it - it needs to smell acid.  If it smells base then I will flip my shit because they are treating me like some college kid and I am dressed like a chubby redneck in a wife beater which I have stained with motor oil.  White guys buying direct are either country or college, and I do not look college.  
 
One of those five twenties will go into the pocket of one of the young guys, and we will have PC to get him, usually in a traffic stop.  He will almost always have a small amount of drugs on him, and a gun.  He is the kingpin of Bluff Estates but we end up only getting him on a weapons and a drug charge.  However we get him, ignore the old guys and the kids.

Part of the problem with marijuana is that we have a lot of highly functional individuals who are able to use it and it doesn't really effect their ability to hold a job or be a grown up human being. Some of my friends smoke pot, hold down higher paying jobs than I'll ever hope to have and are able to manage to get by. Now there are certain unfortunate side effects that I've noticed in their behavior while high (namely they never fucking stop talking about how great pot is and how it's the answer to all of society's ills) but hey, it takes all sorts to make a world. And as I've mentioned, I have no real problem with marijuana possession by grown ups, per say, just so long as they aren't smoking it in public and that they're not doing it in a way that causes them to need society's safety net.
 
But to me there seems to be a bit of projection by individuals who themselves are able to partake of marijuana's benefits and assuming everyone can hold their liquor, so to speak, just like there are highly functioning alcoholics who are able to get along in life in a fairly proficient manner while being constantly drunk.
 
The issue isn't smoking pot. The issue is the criminal activity surrounding the use of pot. Criminals like to smoke pot. Criminals will do all manner of activities in order to get the money necessary to buy or steal pot. And criminals don't want to work a 9 to 5 in order to buy pot, they're going to take the easiest road to do so.
 
Since the legalization of marijuana in Washington state, we have seen a very noticeable uptick in property crimes since the passage of I-502 in November of 2012 and very noticeable changes in neighborhoods where the sort who would smash a car window to steal stuff in order to get high congregate. I'm a local so when I visit Pioneer Square or the International District or Capital Hill and see people who look like extras from the Walking Dead eyeing you up to see what they can get off of you, you know things have changed in your old hometown.
 
So while hipsters and software engineers and rich, old hippies are digging the chance to get high with no consequences, there has been an influx of the criminal element who also are coming to Washington state to steal shit from hipsters, software engineers and old hippies in order to get high with no consequences. 
 
In the old days the standard practice would be a pair of police officers respond to a scene where a criminal complaint takes place. Maybe a pimp has beat up his ho. Maybe someone did a smash and grab. Or whatever. While proving criminal intent of a known badguy and gangmember who has beat up his girlfriend and kids is difficult, the fact that he was in possession of drugs or paraphernalia wasn't when he was frisked by the cops isn't.
 
And since police and prosecutors offices don't have the time and money to arrest, indict, prosecute and convict individuals who commit property crime, someone has to come up with a way in order to do so the hard way.

So you could cut your prison population by 20-25% solely by decriminalising trafficking?
 
Depends on what you mean by trafficking.  No one in their right mind is considering decimalizing cocaine.  All of the talk is marijuana and simple possession of other substances.  25% might be high, but it might not.  It would certainly reduce prison populations for people serving under 60 days.
 
 
How many of these crimes are trafficking, possession or similar?
 
Possession and trafficking come out to 75/25 split for convictions.  However these numbers are soft.  Nearly every person we catch with a kilogram of cocaine claims it is for personal use, while a lot of people get caught selling dimes to friends in their frat house because they are congenitally stupid.  Plus a lot of captures are mules.  Plus possession is rarely prosecuted to its fullest while trafficking related to organized crime is prosecuted to its fullest and then some.  So a problem everyone has is finding out what the numbers mean.  
 
One of my students OD and died a few years back and I decided to get his family answers (at their request) that no police agency would.  The kid had purchased drugs from a man in Yakima, who received them from a connection in the local Hispanic gang.  They got the drugs by capturing the children of immigrants in Mexico and torturing them until the men agreed to mule for them, then holding them in camps.  From there I had no way to trace it further but those gangs actually have close connections with South American governments who support trafficking through Central America - that is published and not personal knowledge.  The amount of culpability in the system is variable, some of the people in the main supply have no culpability, but if caught will spend two decades in jail.  
 
Again, it seems like just, you know, not bothering to prosecute or lock people up for having or transporting drugs in the US would cut the total prison population by an enormous amount. Given that this would also make it much cheaper to get high (reducing second-order things like robbery), I can't really see a downside. I mean, it's not like the current approach seems to be doing much to stop people from becoming addicts in the first place.
 
You are right and wrong I think.  We can selectively decriminalize possession of a wide range of narcotics.  I even put forward an idea to the Washington Legislature that addicted people could apply for and receive a card permitted them to purchase and use narcotics, but which would also prevent their ownership of guns, automobiles, living with children under 15, entering a school or park, or holding license for some jobs.  We do something similar with people who are insane, and for nonviolent sex offenders who are under court mandated treatment.
 
The main objections to all of this come from the basic foundation of the United States legal system.  The first is that people who use narcotics cause a lot of damage in society.  That damage must be paid for either by the person who does the damage (who is a drug user and has no money), by the person who allowed the user to use (suits against the government for the acts of drug users are becoming more common based on failure to prosecute) or by insurance companies.  So any legalization scheme has to figure out how to pay the bill for the drugs.  Marijuana is easy - the bill is small and the users mostly non-violent.  
 
Other drugs are harder because while you say they would become cheap with legalization they might not.  An unlimited supply of some drugs (cocaine and opiates) only increases the addiction rate.  The resting addiction rate for communities that stop enforcement for these drugs is around that of the resting addiction rate for alcohol!  

It sounds to me like you're neglecting a lot of trafficking cases that are prosecuted in an effort to lock up actual violent criminals.

I overpaid for it, but I definitely feel like I owe it to the guy. He's given me insane deals on guns and equipment, and he offered me dirt-cheap prices for .303 if I came back. My collection as it stands now (Minus my Argentine Mauser, which is at my parents' house):
 

By the way
 
Archduke Ferdinand did not wear his vest on the day he was shot.  It did not work because it was not on his person.
 
The narrator of that TV show wears Command Sergeant Major rank.

They want our water!!!!

The issue is that the moderate elements in Iran want the deal, but the hardliners do not, so they'll be constantly pulling shit to derail the deal and hopefully discredit the moderate stance of rapproachment with the West. It's the same reason why the US constantly doesn't say anything about the Armenian genocide; despite Turkey being an awful actual ally, they're a mighty fine airbase and it's an airbase we really need so don't piss off and feed the hardliners in Turkey who want to break from the US.

Can I nominate every alien movie ever? Not Alien or Aliens because they strangely get it close to right, but just movies with aliens as an antagonist period.
 
If we accept that intelligent life is possible, or greater than likely, then there is nothing special about humans whatsoever. They have no reason to care or be interested in us, the realities of space travel makes connecting in fellowship with a strange alien species a wasted endeavor. Earth is not only a terrifing gravity well, but resource extraction cost is huge regardless of how you slice it (or pulverize it). Easier to simply plunder the Oort cloud and Kuiper belt effectively forever.

You would probably enjoy Reefer Madness the Musical.  Among other things, I learned that smoking pot will endow your soul to Satan.  The theological implications are staggering.  
 
(and yes, it's a parody)

Sturgeon. It goes like this.
 
In the 1969 movie Easy Rider, southern rednecks are portrayed as the film's bad guys, showing intolerance and bigotry to the film's protagonists, Wyatt "Captain America" (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper). For those of you not in the know, Easy Rider is probably the first mainstream "counter culture" movie which romanticizes hitch-hiking, drug use, hippy communes and features Jack Nicholson in his break-out role as George Hanson, an ACLU attorney.
 
As the story of the movie goes, Fonda and Hopper who wrote, produced and directed the film had no real set script and much of the movie is ad-libbed and filmed as opportunities arose. One of the more infamous scenes features the trio of Wyatt, Billy and George being harassed by locals in a Louisiana diner for their long hair and unorthodox dress. The extras in the scene were locales hired on the spot and as movie magic motivation, were told to act like the trio were rapists and murderers who just killed a little girl outside of town.
 

 
The scene is portrayed as a classic example of the intolerance of outsiders in the Deep South. 
 
As I always like to say, Easy Rider does have a happy ending.
 

 
The two rednecks driving the pickup truck were local amateurs also hired on the spot.

There is an extremely embarrassing video of me, thankfully taken before Youtube but it received air time on the nightly news.  I was chasing a man through Leesburg Estates that we had a warrant on - he had several weeks before held up the gate guards at Fort Jackson and stole their M16A2 rifles and M9 pistols, along with cellphones, pistol belts, spare magazines, and gameboys. We were suppose to be delicate about the situation because they just wanted the rifles back without any press.  My partner and I saw the goofball on the list with another guy we were after - so I took after one and Gonzales took out after another.  The video shows this guy, whose pants were worn around his thighs, loose his pants and start hip-hoppity-skip jumping to get away from me.  The embarrassing part is he almost did - he put like a hundred meters between me and him (I was probably the world's worst road deputy and still wonder that I survived) before tripping and face planting into a curb.  I ran up and on the video yelled "quit resisting" as I put the handcuffs on and he replies he is not resisting, he swallowed several teeth.
 
Far from being a heroic cop, I looked like I was planning to apply for the Keystone division of RCSD but was lacking in skills had been made a junior member.

There is an extremely embarrassing video of me, thankfully taken before Youtube but it received air time on the nightly news.  I was chasing a man through Leesburg Estates that we had a warrant on - he had several weeks before held up the gate guards at Fort Jackson and stole their M16A2 rifles and M9 pistols, along with cellphones, pistol belts, spare magazines, and gameboys. We were suppose to be delicate about the situation because they just wanted the rifles back without any press.  My partner and I saw the goofball on the list with another guy we were after - so I took after one and Gonzales took out after another.  The video shows this guy, whose pants were worn around his thighs, loose his pants and start hip-hoppity-skip jumping to get away from me.  The embarrassing part is he almost did - he put like a hundred meters between me and him (I was probably the world's worst road deputy and still wonder that I survived) before tripping and face planting into a curb.  I ran up and on the video yelled "quit resisting" as I put the handcuffs on and he replies he is not resisting, he swallowed several teeth.
 
Far from being a heroic cop, I looked like I was planning to apply for the Keystone division of RCSD but was lacking in skills had been made a junior member.