In May 2007, Anthony Harriman, the senior director for Afghanistan at the National Security Council....

you gotta be fucking kidding me.

so, the debate is over whether heroin is entering the united states via the mexican border or via shipping ports.

"these guys don't tell me anything" - ronald reagan, when asked about iran-contra.

latin america is not generally seen as an opiate producer, but is rather known for producing stimulants, most notably cocaine. i'm not exactly privy to any secret knowledge, here. but it would be news to me to hear about poppy fields in columbia.

rather, it's widely understood that virtually all opiates in the united states originate from afghanistan.

it's hard to know how much of the whole thing is disingenuous theatre, but if the president really wants to get to the bottom of where the heroin is coming from, he's going to have to ask some difficult questions to the people around him.

there aren't any harrimans left are there?

so, what am i even doing?

i've been carrying out a 500 gb transfer across external drives, on a usb 1.0 connection. it's been running for almost a week, and is almost done.

in the mean time, i've filed almost every file on my laptop, by year, going back to 1995. yes: i have a few files from 1995 and 1996 that are timestamped properly. most files, however, are dated to after august, 1997. there is going to be a process to weed out duplicates.

i've also started organizing email, and this only goes back to 2003. i had emails going back further at one point, but i lost them in a reformat before i went to bc in may of 2003. i vaguely recall backing them up before i left, but i don't think i've seen them in years. i will need to scour, but i do not think i have anything older than when i got back from bc.

that said, one of the things i'll be doing for the alter-reality us trying to track down usenet posts from roughly 1997-2002. my isp dropped usenet around that time, and i never went back to it.

there is also some possibility of finding archived posts at places like the rhml, but i will need to do some work in finding them....

the copy process made calling difficult, because i'm calling out over gmail. now that it's almost done, i could conceivably make some calls today or tomorrow.

the "rule of law" is a term intended to apply to governments, specifically those that wish to discard the rules for personal gain. it refers to the fact that the government must also follow the law - that they are not above it.

one example of the rule of law would be the requirement of a colonial government to respect the rights of indigenous people on unceded lands, rather than take matters into their own hands. an example of a breach in the rule of law would occur when a colonial court attempts to enforce an injunction in a territory that it has no jurisdiction over, perhaps due to financial kickbacks from an oil and/or gas company.

the "rule of law" does not refer to any kind of authoritarian supremacy of government over the people, but rather the opposite concept: that the government is to be impeded by constitutional principles (written and unwritten) in it's use of force against civilians.

so, when justin trudeau speaks of the "rule of law", is this some kind of orwellian newspeak, some kind of deep irony? i think that this is to give the man far too much credit: it is a misapplied colloquialism rooted in absolute ignorance of the legal system in the country he's in charge of.