She Tweeted Against the Mexican Cartels. They Tweeted Her Murder

Dishonesty? Being dishonest is having the attitude like your position isn't directly creating armies/cartels to be more powerful and concentrated. Which is a bigger problem to you, 'dishonesty' about medical marijuana or active cartel creation? According to your logic, the violence/mafias of the prohibition era were caused by the people wanting a drink and to have fun. There was nothing wrong with that if done safely, it was made unsafe by policy and created more problems than it solved and a bigger problem than the initial problem.

Yes the medical marijuana thing is mostly people wanting to smoke weed but there is also actual patients of it. If you were in immense pain everyday and didn't want to eat or smile... sorry, @paulhauggis doesn't want you to smoke a joint grandma because you are being 'dishonest' about it. Grandma just wanted to be happy but I guess she has to be in pain first.

The first person to buy marijuana in Washington was a 60+ year old lady -- a grandma -- she said it made her happy (http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2024022679_storesopen...). The first person in Colorado was a soldier back from Iraq who had PTSD (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/01/sean-azzariti-marij...). I guess they are both 'dishonest'.

I didn't want to get into this but, a large majority of Americans have smoked marijuana. As our police and oversight get better or more militarized and everything is tracked, we are going to have to man up and remove laws that are silly and harmful. We don't want to ruin college kids lives or take grandma's plants from her and throw her in jail.

In prohibition you had to get alcohol from an illegal bar or from the mafia, was that a better situation? That is what we have now with weed that grandma and possibly your kids in college want to smoke and nothing you do will stop them, not even force/laws/shaming. But you can make it safer where people slip up. What we need is to man up and deal with that reality and create structures to help people, and most importantly, reduce the concentration of funds going to cartels. Even if legal and the cartels turn into corporations that is better than black market/highly armed operations to fight the War against them.

Your xenophobia about the 'dishonesty' of it is the problem creating a war south of the border. It will continue as your attitude is prevalent as the US sees black and white not gray which it really is.

In what possible scenario could we ever hope to learn the full extent of their crimes? Intelligence agencies burn their records when they are threatened. The Stasi had to destroy paper records, which they failed to do rapidly enough to prevent the public from physically seizing them. The CIA watched this happen. They learned from those mistakes. And this time, only encryption keys need to be shredded to put those documents beyond our reach.

So, in Alice's case, she gets kidnapped. The attackers are aware that she might have a duress code. They tell her that if she enters the duress code, her entire family will be murdered. If Alice lives in an area where authorities are in bed with and inseparable from the criminal element, is she going to take the risk that the authorities are alerted?

If we are talking about a panic code which erases all information on the phone, do you not think that the same bargain can be applied? In fact, such a system might get innocent people murdered and needlessly tortured since, if someone is suspected of having sensitive information - but actually don't - the attacker might get the idea that a duress or panic code was entered which deleted said information.

In any case, it doesn't seem like encryption is going to save people from real harm.

You have the cause and effect inverted. Everyone has a price. The reason there is so much corruption in Mexico is that we've made corruption so profitable.

> If I were the cartels, I would continue selling my product, this time legal (similar to how companies are outsourcing to China..drug companies will outsource to Mexico). My power would continue or increase, because I could just buy off any cop and/or government official and the violence would continue (ruling by fear).

If drugs were legalized then competition would increase and drive down margins. Meanwhile the government would collect taxes, preventing the lower margins from actually lowering prices and increasing demand. All of which means less money for the cartels.

> It will be taxed and regulated, which means much higher prices. Many people won't want to pay those higher prices and there will still be a demand for a black market (just like software and music piracy).

Tax evasion is a felony. The cost of continually having your employees arrested and assets seized can easily exceed the cost of just paying the taxes (which is kind of the idea).

The sensible thing to do with drugs is to make possession legal but impose high taxes and then significant fines and mandatory rehab for using drugs or being high in any public place. Meanwhile use 100% of the money from the taxes and fines for anti-drug campaigns and free rehab for anyone who wants it and otherwise doing whatever possible to encourage people to voluntarily give up drug use.

Yes - UN peacekeepers do have a positive effect. They just don't hit the news much because they're not dramatically beating their chests about it and bragging about how big their guns are. They're not perfect, but they're certainly better than just leaving things be.

Have a poke around here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_Nations_peac...