Does that mean that we may abandon it with alacrity: went there, tried that; didn't 'work' (for certain valuez of)?

I'd settle for - at very least - a bit of sweet reasonableness in the Land of Home Security: To and From the inhabitants thereof. That is - some replacement for the odious Wars on ___ all kinds of shit Here at Home: the hypocrisy of the 'Drug War' wherein a substance like marijuana is portrayed as ~~ Heroin! (A substance which might.?. have killed a dozen? overall: via some massive Brownie chock-full o' Sinsemilla) WHILE: nicotine delivery systems are.. merely taxed (and exported by the billions to our er 'friends'. We KNOW how many 100 thlousands/year the toll is from the 'lega' drug of choice. Not ONE from M. I am aware of, in recent years (as Doonesbury's last strip pointed out in his interview with Mr. Butts.) It's all so surreal - these 'Wars'.

The fallout from the 'confiscations' for direct funding of CAMP and other thug-like sinecures is: locking up tens of thousands of folk -- for crimes of ingesting into their own bodies, evil Pleasurable substances. Plea-bargaining is a joke, as are the computer-generated 'sentences'. This IS fascist BS and so far.. we are ovinely tolerating it. And WE are gonna instruct the rest of the world about Justice !? as our prig of an AG, methodically spreads the DEA mindset across all Muricans.

Then on to [oil]: a reasonable facsimile of a {Yes! shudder} fucking dialogue about: What We (think we) Want AND.. what Each of us will Pay (in every sense of that versatile word) to Get/Keep It! (and as you say - try to keep our own as long as possible. OK: at what price ??)

But before such an unprecedented thing could occur: we'd have to clean up the mess of soft money so that legislators are not overtly bought yada yada: I mean *Actually*. Dominoes here? An unlikely sequence of events before even,

We Might Talk! er 'reason together' as wily ol Lyndon loved to 'say'.

IMnsfHO: the state of mere communication in Murica has been long-lost, with the supreme Irony of 'the rise of communications' (to steal a prescient observation of Studs Terkel). We are so bombarded by BS from ads, utterly Stupid political slogans and other detritus, so besotted with Self-love, Flag-wrapped and all cloyingly mindless, that -

The several points you raised above in actual stark language - aren't even permissible topics on any major newsfotainment today! You disagree?

We Muricans Love lying to ourselves. We Demand euphemism about any difficult topic, compromise, as - everyone 'knows' is part of coexistence in a non-ideal world. Then we emulate the three monkeys who See no.. Hear no.. Speak no..

Whenever any discussion leads near one of the unpleasantries: invariably the polar opposites come out: If 'you aren't a __' than you must be a __'. Fucking digital logic has apparently replaced the Reasoning Center as surely as.. Windoze has infected the entire planet with mediocre slime.

HTF can we Ever 'take care of business' -?- as long as we tolerate the daily fucking with language, destroying of irreplaceable words (like innovation - tarnished maybe beyond repair, by just *One* pimple-assed autistic brat with megalomania - and We Love Him = He Be Successful\ufffd).

ie None of your points above are even on the daily radar. What does that say about our er 'chances' of realistically facing the Int'l messes we have participated in both helping and fucking up ?? (no matter what we say we meant to do - revised for comfort).


{sheesh}

Ashton