Woke up really late, and kept reading `Smoke and Mirrors' a fascinating book on the history of the war on drugs in the United States.

I was prompted to read this book after I read the chilling description from John Gilmore on his web page.

After reading the book, there are few things worth mentioning:

• The US begun as a very idealistic country with a set of very idealistic core rights for every citizen that seems to have been dismantled by either political agendas, corporations, lobying and a few individuals in strong positions. Like various ammendments gave people a number of rights that no longer exist, which brings into consideration why would you even keep them if they are not valid.

• That corruption happens everywhere, and that Mexico is not alone here.

• Propaganda is used in a different form in democratic countries, as it needs to improve over the simplistic Orwellian basics (cool Chomski article on the topic here: http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/3761/prop.html. I wish I could find the original link, but I cant right now.

The reading triggered some interesting discussion with Michael Meeks at the office yesterday and we did some looking around the web, there are a number of interesting sites discussing various pros and cons of marijuana and advocating its legalization or its complete banning. NORML is one. There is also some interesting reading here:: http://www.ecstasy.org

reading

I have been reading The Noam Chomski Archive and the Bad News: Noam Chomski web sites.

I also got my hands on an interview with Richard Stallman on Copyrights and Globalization. I have been trying to remember where I got the link to it from, and I can not find the article again, but I will post it here when I have a chance.

dinner

Today Daniel Kornhauser and I cooked mexican dinner at home, and invited a bunch of friends over. We did some meat with adobo which was just absolutely tasty as well as black bean soup and had nice tamarindo water and crepas con cajeta.