With friends like these, who needs enemas?

Information strongly suggests that the brother of Afghanistan President Hamid Kharzai, Ahmed Wali Karzai, is a major player in the Afghan drug trade. Trucks loaded with heroin have been intercepted, only to be released by a phone call from within high levels of government, including a truck being delivered directly to one of Wali's bodyguards, who has not been arrested or questioned. In one case, an informant/accuser was shot down while traveling to his residence.

A different informant, one working with the DEA, "... was arrested a year later on charges of plotting to kill an Afghan vice president in 2002. The Afghan Supreme Court recently ordered him freed for lack of evidence, but he has not been released. Nearly 100 political leaders in his home region protested his continued incarceration last month."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/world/asia/05afghan.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all

We, the United States, fundamentally screwed up in Afghanistan over 20 years ago. When they kicked out the Russians, we abandoned them. For hundreds of years they've relied on the drug trade to fund the people in power, and we didn't do anything to build infrastructure in their country to lift them out of the dark ages/their fourth world country status, so the Taliban took control. The word 'Taliban' is roughly translated as "men who want to brutally control a country and make lots of money in the drug trade under the guise of our flavor of religious purity and fanaticism.'

You can argue that narcotics should be legal, but I don't subscribe to that. I have no problem with marijuana being legal, safety-inspected, taxed, and treated the same as alcohol in terms of DUI and things like that, but not drugs like cocaine or heroin.

Inside General Motor's Wind Tunnel

This is a very cool photo series, I'm impressed by the engineering that goes into this thing. I find one thing a little perplexing: they maintain the air at 72f, I wonder if the flow physics are different at different temperatures, and for that matter, different altitudes? Would they benefit from building a similar complex at Cloudcroft, at 8600' ASL? If only I knew someone with a doctorate in physics who could answer such a question... ;-)

I also am curious about the "Do not run fan 193-207 RPM", I wonder if they have a harmonic issue that could damage the facility, and I thought the use of propylene glycol to be quite interesting.

http://www.wired.com/cars/futuretransport/multimedia/2008/09/gallery_windtunnel?slide=1&slideView=3

New favorite TV show!

Well, not #1 fav, but definite top 10.

Time Warp.

Discovery Channel.

Using cameras that record 5,000 frames a second(!), they do some pretty cool stuff. Last night they had martial artists breaking boards and a huge Mentos/soda geyser run. I heard they dropped a water balloon on a guy's face and the balloon totally conformed to his face before rupturing.

Fun!