Live-Writing the Presidential Debate #2

Below are my transcribed notes of the Presidential Debate conducted on October 7, 2008.

It goes on a for a bit…and I fell asleep near the end [hence the illegible….suiggly…transcription]

[Oh, and I thought both did well.  I though Obama had the best line…

“Senator McCain’s campaign announced last week that they plan to ‘turn the page’ on the discussion about our economy and spend the final weeks of this election attacking me instead. He and Governor Palin are out there saying all kinds of stuff,” he said in a not so subtle nod to Palin’s recent comments that Obama associates with “terrorists.” “I can take four more weeks of John McCain’s attacks, but the American people can’t take four more years of John McCain’s George Bush policies.”

McCain doesn’t like it, and Palin doesn’t get it, but George W. Bush was a Republican.  And so were his policies.  McCain and Palin, for all their mavricky rhetoric, are also Republican, and have the policies to prove it.]

I scored the debate: 14 to 5 for Obama [note: my scoring is like the electoral college, one winner a question, no partial credit]

UPDATE: Here’s Obama backstage before and after the debate.

See detailed analysis below.

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What You Doing With My Opium, Willis?!

A crop of 7,700 tonnes will produce around 1,100 tonnes of heroin – it basically works on a 7:1 ratio.The mystery is that the global demand for heroin is less than half that. In other words, Afghanistan only needs to produce 3,500 tonnes to satisfy every known heroin user on the planet.

Opium Production

Look at the graph, though.

For the past three years, production has been running at almost twice the level of global demand.The numbers just don’t add up.

There are two credible theories.

via BBC NEWS | The Reporters | Mark Easton’s UK.

Go peep the article for the thoeries.  I’m for the stockpiling one.  When times are good, go like gangbusters(bangers) and extract what you can.  But you don’t want to flood the market with product, as that would hurt prices.  OPEC knows this, so I would expect their neighbors in Afghanistan propably peep it as well.

BTW, Afghanistan is, strangely, the place where the War on Terror and the War on Drugs have become the exact same thing….but only as far as Heroin in concerned.  If we were to focus that Terror war back to Afghanistan (vs. Iraq) and that drug war to Afghanistan (vs. here in the U.S) and then we might be able to actually win them both.

And we would know that we have done so by looking that that graph above, and how it changes in the future.

“No Horse, No Revolution.”