Sunday verse

Late evening Saturday Learning Series - Geography (Ghana)

Via Geography Now, and its alphabetical tour of the world, today we look at the African nation of Ghana.

And the flag:

Friday Musical Interlude for #ReleaseTheMemo Day (2)

Take A Letter To Maria by R.B. Greaves from 1969 is the closest song to a memo meme I could find. But it's a good song.

Unintended Consequences: Pot > Organic vegetables

If you are a fan of organic vegetables and also pro-marijuana legalization, you may have to choose between the two, as to which you want to support.  In Canada, recreational marijuana is being legalized federally by the ultra-liberal government.  There are of course, unintended consequences.  In this case, you could have seen it coming:

...Greenhouse growers -- already coping with long-standing challenges such as foreign competition and thinning margins -- are facing added pressure from the rise of marijuana as a legal, commercial crop because it creates more competition for horticultural talent and higher profitability expectations for financing.

That leaves indoor farmers increasingly eyeing the more lucrative source of green.

"They're doing the math and saying: 'Hey, if I'm unable to get my prices up on my vegetables, then this marijuana thing and what they're paying for it... might help me average out'," said Joseph Sbrocchi, the general manager of the Ontario Greenhouse Vegetable Growers.

Organic vegetables will increase in price, probably sharply as a result. It's basic supply and demand and that should have been a known consequence, not an unintended one.

How to stop the flow of drugs into America

Allow me to be non-libertarian for a moment (it happens frequently) and I'll try to remember to  justify my position on drugs in another post. 

I was watching the new Netflix documentary Dirty Money.  In one of the episodes dealing with money laundering they pointed out an interesting wrinkle in the flow of drugs from Mexico into America and it gave me an idea of how to stop the flow of drugs into America.

Early on in the episode they point out that there is a vast effort to check vehicles coming into the United States; drug sniffing dogs, vehicle checks, big line ups of traffic. Going into Mexico it's so different you could almost classify the border as a rolling stop - slow down, wave and drive through.  There's little traffic, little spot checking and certainly no dogs.  But but that's how the people who smuggled drugs into America bring back the money from the sale of those drugs.

It occurred to me, why bother trying to stop the flow of drugs in, when it would be just as easy to stop the flow of money out of the country.  If the drug suppliers in Mexico and other countries don't get their payments back, they certainly are not going to continue to sell drugs into America.  If you let the drugs in but not the money back out you have created a disruption in the suppliers' profit and their operations.  

Granted the cartels would develop workarounds for that approach, but 3 kilos of marijuana apparently correlates to hundreds of pounds of bills in what was termed "street money" (i.e. $10s, $20s, $5s).  Even if the money is in $100 bills, and they can solve for the new approach quickly, the point is the disruption itself causes a change.

In addition, figuring out an effective way to detect money instead of drugs may not be so simple.  And proving that the money is dirty presents other challenges.  But these issues can be solved. Simply doing things the way they are being done now, is clearly not working well enough.  It's as though drug cartels have evolved to work around the current counter-measures and despite losses they are clearly making enough money to continue sending product into America.  So you have to change the approach.  And when they adapt to that, you change it again to something else.  It's like a football team only running one play the entire game and not expecting their opponents to figure it out and adjust to stop it.  By constantly changing what you are doing, you keep them off balance and dramatically improve your chances of winning.  

Stopping the money seems like a no-brainer. The money is what matters: no money, no selling.  No selling, no drugs.  The DEA should have more than one play in their playbook and every time they start to slow down on arrests and switch to a focus on one of the other approaches.  

Just saying.

Conservative Insurgent Thursday delayed 1 week because THE MEMO

I had planned on starting my Conservative Insurgent Thursdays segment today, but the THE MEMO is supposed to be coming out today and it's going to overshadow everything, so  - bad timing.  Instead Conservative Insurgent Thursdays will start next week.

Meanwhile, stay tuned for memo news.