trade bait

Don't expect, barring a trade, that the Lakers are going to repeat now. Dallas now has a lineup that looks like this
C Haywood +4.5
PF Dirk +14
SF Marion +5.5
SG Butler +4.2
PG Kidd +2.3
----
G Terry +1.6
G Beaubois +1.9
C Dampier +2.9
Basically big enough up front now (plus Butler is bigger and better than Josh Howard) and with some quick guards off the bench to chew up Fisher/Brown/etc. Question will be chemistry, but between Marion, Haywood, and Butler they upgraded their D considerably, and Butler's a better 2nd option scorer than Marion or Howard was.
Lakers look like this
C Bynum +3.3
PF Gasol +8.5
SF Artest +4.0
SG Kobe +15.7
PG Fisher -2.9
F Odom +2.6
G Farmar -2.0
G Brown -5.4
Bench is weak other than Odom, and Fisher/Brown/Farmar is probably the best possible matchup for Kidd to play against as it doesn't expose him the way Chris Paul or Deron Williams or Nash would.
This would be my current idea of the West come playoff time.
1) LA
2) Dallas
3) Denver (needs to get healthy to hold off Utah)
4) Utah
5) Spurs (getting healthy, but old too)
6) Oklahoma (too young, but scary)
7) Houston (depends on what they get for McGrady, could move up. Probably won't)
8) Portland (too many injuries, may not be able to hold off Memphis or Nash and his team of scrubs)
Seems like Phoenix is deciding to throw in the towel for financial reasons, and New Orleans probably will fade the longer Paul is out. Not sure what to make of Memphis, other than that they're not very deep and don't defend as well as these other teams.
East looks pretty irrelevant other than the top 4, in this order
1) Cavs
2) Orlando
3) Atlanta
4) Boston

Charlotte might be sort of wacky/scary depending on the matchup. Nobody else out East is scary at all (those Toronto fans who think they're threatening Boston at all for that division, probably need to shut it, you have the worst defensive team in the league, they still have the best. End of story).

I'm less convinced that the Stoudemire deal to Cleveland will help them out as much as it would appear. Mostly because Amare does not even try to play defense. But he is better, at least at this point, than JJ Hickson. He's not as good, certainly defensively, as Varejao (who is probably one of the top 5 interior defenders in the league). Assuming he'll get Hickson and Ilgauskas's minutes, with Bad Andy getting some of those as well, that's a good move, but not a slam dunk move that will put them over LA or Dallas. Probably should be able to handle Denver and everybody else in the East. The key for the Cavs will be whether Delonte West can stay on the court I think, rather than Anthony Parker and to a lesser extent, Mo Williams. West is a far superior defender at the point they need one the most, outside, than either of those two. Other than LeBron and Varejao, they've got a collection of average role players. That makes for a pretty good team (considering LeBron's a beast). But I'm not convinced after last year's playoff implosion that it gets them past whoever comes out of the West (they can probably beat Denver, if that's any consolation).

winter olympics are on

For a relative sports fanatic... this is one of those things I don't care all that much about. I watch some hockey. Olympic-rules and competition for hockey is on par with the World Cup for soccer, easily the best you're going to get to see on television. I don't care that much about figure skating. Basically the gymnastics event on ice. Otherwise it's a lot of European sports that Americans/Canadians do but no other continent really bothers with. Skiing isn't very global I guess.

I don't mind watching some snowboarding and skiing, but 2 weeks of it with transparent attempts to gin up nationalistic sentiments in an era of hegemonic foreign affairs (lacking that "do you believe in miracles" element of 1980 against the "evil Soviets"), that's pushing it.

that tired, old, people are dying! trick

Perhaps it would help if we understood what we are buying with health insurance: health care. Not "death prevention". Health does not equal mortality improvements directly. If you have a mortal illness or injury, or one that if left untreated may become such, yes it does. But much of health care deals with improvements in health itself. If you ask a doctor, their primary mission is to improve the quality of life by doing things like alleviating suffering. The expansion of our life expectancy is, like GDP or unemployment, one important way to measure the success of that care that they provide. But it becomes absurd to suggest that out of the millions of people who go, even temporarily, without health insurance, that some thousands of them die as a result of that lack. There are some thousands of people WITH health insurance who die every year because of inadequate or inappropriate quality of care (from things as simple as washing your fucking hands). There are some thousands of Americans every year who die of treatable ailments who don't seek care soon enough or who have lifestyles which aggravate or help bring on ailments as well. Again, many of these people have access to health insurance. The problem that underlies all of this is twofold

Firstly, the mythology that doctors and health care providers generally are magicians capable of saving and extending our lives. There isn't, so far as I know, good evidence to suggest that this is the case. Doctors have done a great deal to help propel this mythology, mostly so that their services rendered may be regarded as expensive, but primarily what they do is not help us life longer.

Because, secondly, what they primarily do is help us life better or at least healthier. The ideal product they provide is something abstract like Quality Adjusted Life Years. That may mean, for example if you have cancer or some other potentially fatal illness or health condition, that they will try to give you years of additional life expectancy as a good patient/client outcome. That's good, and that's what people want when they go into a doctor when they get cancer (or think they have cancer). But that's not what they are selling. Even within modern medicine, a lot of it is things intended to help the quality of life, almost in a heuristic way. Pain management, notions of proper diet and exercise, mending non-fatal wounds and broken bones or ligaments, cleaning our teeth, adjusting prescriptions on glasses, helping clear our arteries or lower our blood pressure. Many of these things don't actually help us live any longer per se, but they most certainly are good outcomes when they succeed (and in many cases, they rely a great deal on patient collaboration more so than doctor skill). To my mind the appropriate idea when purchasing health care, even through the device of insurance paying for it, isn't to ask about how much longer I might live as a result of this procedure or drug, but how well I will live during that time. The medical community as whole I think has bought into the first question too much itself and has often failed to focus on what it is actually capable of delivering and promising in any statistically measurable way: better overall health outcomes for its patients/clients. One such outcome is that people can live longer. I don't object to that. But it's sort of silly to pretend that it's really the most important one.

So the ideal argument to be made about extending health insurance (what I refer to as health financing) to the sick (pre-existing conditions), the elderly, and to the poor more broadly than we have at present most commonly will have very little to do with helping them live longer or preventing needless death. Most commonly the problem is that most of these 20-40 somethings that go un-insured are not very likely to die in the first place from a health problem in any given year, and the 65+ crowd has coverage already through the government. The problem is that the 20-65 crowd that goes uninsured does not consume health care that might be beneficial for their health, the QALY adjustment goes down. They don't treat preventable illnesses because of the expense for example. Some of them, I think we might intuit, die as a result, or at least, might die sooner than they could otherwise. Some of them, based on the overall quality of health care or its inability to treat some illnesses with a consistent standard, might even die sooner. On balance it might make sense to claim that some amount of people die per year because they lack adequate insurance to pay for their health care, merely because mortal diseases are not very easy to treat in the absence of insurance. I can accept that with some logical analysis, but it's not the ultimate goal of health care providers to keep more people "alive" in the first place. We should be aware of what they are actually selling us.

Most of the reason for all these people putting off preventable treatments is less the device of insurance being unavailable itself and more what I refer to as a problem of health care financing. It's because we rely on a fee-for-service model too often rather than as a single function payment. That's not something that will be "fixed" by expanding health insurance either (ie, by increasing the amount of distance between client and provider in the transaction). In other words, to me the appropriate question is not how can we get more people covered with insurance, but rather, how can we get more health care transactions out into the open and still keep sick people with access to improve their health (and possibly live longer). Why aren't we asking what we are really paying for or why aren't we somehow equally angry that some thousands of people die needlessly IN the medical care of professionals (and not merely because they lack access to that care). Maybe because we don't see and pay for the bill?

I am not unsympathetic to the suffering of poverty, such the illnesses caused by poor diet or difficult and unhealthy living conditions (such as pollutants or drug/tobacco consumption rates), and despite my usual hostility toward the elderly and the infirmities of age, I think it is only natural that most people will wish to see their aging parents or grandparents attended to for as long as we can reasonably do so. But since those groups of people already have paid for health care at taxpayer expense, I'm not that worried (at least directly). What should be at question is how the rest of us will attend to our health care needs and what will we be getting in exchange for our money (and how will we pay). As with any question, one thing that needs to be asked is always what is unknown or unseen in the variables involved, in this case, things like the relative health habits and incentives of people with and without health insurance as examples. We cannot account for everything, so it can be assumed that people who don't have health insurance and the access it provides might have less healthy lives (and therefore be at some risk of premature deaths). There doesn't appear to be substantive evidence to back that intuition up though. So it's not the best argument to be used if you want to sell me on health care reform. Far more interesting would be an idea of how much each QALY costs us with or without insurance or through different methods of payment (and different kinds of insurance). If we can buy more "health" for less, wouldn't that be an ideal outcome which people might be interested in hearing about?

Unfortunately, our summer debate on health care managed to effectively kill off that discussion. By screaming about "death panels" and irate fears that our grandmothers would be killed off to have their organs harvested or some such nonsense, those people effectively stopped any sensible inquiry as to what health care dollars actually purchase and why. They may have succeeded, for now, in helping kill a bill putatively reforming health insurance as an industry (and not much else about the health care system), but I'm very worried that they managed to help kill off something more important: the way we talk about and approach health care itself in this country. It looks more like the ideas we have about death and mortality because of health care has become ever more entrenched instead because the response to it was to talk about people dying already under the current system. You don't have to sell me on the current system being broken and ineffectual. I'm not the average Joe, but I am the guy who you are going to have to sell on whether or not your proposed system would work better somehow, enough so to make it worth whatever price it will cost or tax it will enact. And using rather mythological beliefs about life and death being the pre-eminent concerns of health care is not the way to do it. Move on to something with more established statistics and economics behind it if you please.

An everyday greeting

When you look through a mirror
Everything looks backwards
When you look through the water
Everything looks askew
When you look through the window
Everything looks clear

A life spent in the looking glass
Bound to be a little warped?
A question, sincerely asking
can only be answered by
the things left unsaid
and a repeated trite politely nodded

I'm tired of this person

But apparently not enough of the rest of you are.

I'm amused by the latest scandals produced by Palin's inane antics. Complain about the wise teleprompter that governs the nation, but write my talking points down on my hand. Yes. That will go over well to win some of my critics and fence-sitters to my side. Complain about a noted profane liberal in the White House using a sometime cryptic term that refers, in its direct terminology, to the mentally disabled such as her new child, but in the common lexicon of frustration and comedy, to people who you disagree with who are acting mentally disabled, and who used it privately to refer to political allies (ie, other "liberals"), but glaze over a noted profane conservative doing the same thing in his accusations of liberals. Again, this will go over well to win over a populace that claims to want something like post-partisanship again and again as evidenced by the convincing elections of people who promise it.

Nevertheless, I would prefer it if she would have just faded away and become a money making machine on the private market, perhaps occasionally making an offhanded and not fact-checked remark about death panels rather than sticking herself back into the political machinations directly by speaking for the behest of a group of self-styled and carefully groomed populists attempting to steer a herd of populist rage into delivering political victories for their chosen brand of politics (all the while tacitly supporting most of the things that populist rage was so adamantly against). I don't particularly care if she does these things, because people will pay for the supposed privilege of her performances, which are, supposedly driven by some evidence of charisma and populist charms that are lost on me. No. The problem is that the media insists on covering these things as though they are significant and will matter, in the same way that they insist on covering American Idol or Paris Hilton, despite repeated evidence that the end result of such things is that nothing significant happens. I think we've created one, maybe two new pop/country music stars after all these seasons of work and millions of fan hours of dedication to the idea of doing so. Likewise, all but the most partisan polls on Palin suggest that she is, at best, an irrelevant and unqualified candidate for political office on the national stage and continues to do nothing to affirm that she will ever work to change this assertion. Even some of her most confident supporters evince a gaping weakness where her grasp on issues and ability to convince detractors of the rightness of cause is concerned (something that the mantle of Reagan's ghost is long going to cast a shadow over the conservative political spectrum). But she is adored by millions and hated by millions, so she becomes "relevant" and a story of some sort. So we must talk about her.

I would like to be able to stop. Because of all the people out there talking about politics, she has the least new information and new proposals out there to start new discussions and discourse on how to resolve things. She is something like Bush squared, with a little bit more of stardom created in a way that Bush never had to earn (being part of a dynastic family tree). But at least Bush had the good political sense to try to select capable advisers to keep his glaring weaknesses down to a flicker during campaigns and hence win elections against modestly capable foes (in my opinion the most "capable" foe Bush ever ran against was in 2000 against McCain v2000 rather than McCain v2008-10). Palin does not do this. It will not end well, politically at least, if she persists in living in a bubble. But it might at least make the non-stop coverage occasionally amusing.

Look, the NBA went on its quest to find the next Michael Jordan too in the same way that conservatives seem desperate to find another Reagan. It did not go over well for years and the sport publicly marketed athletes like Kobe Bryant and, finally, LeBron James, all while the most popular player most years (ala Michael) was a surly, hyper competitive little guy with a game straight out of Rucker Park who played in Philly who still managed to get voted on to an All-Star game in his fading days despite not having had any tangible successes on the basketball court to justify his selection as a popular and somehow great player for several years running. Politically speaking, Palin is not even in Allen Iverson territory. Iverson's most ardent detractors mostly focus on his inefficient game, but most of his detractors (other than some stathead number-crunchers) are still willing to submit his resume as one worthy of some recognition of greatness. Reagan is in that category where many of his political enemies speak with grudging respect because of his accomplishments. He's one of several Presidents who probably could have continued to serve past the two term tradition because of his popularity and variety of successes in getting things done and this basically meant we got a weak but modest one term out of his Vice President as a result. Palin is still more like Erick Dampier territory than the AI of the GOP. The type of politician who gets a lot of hype and attention the way 7 footers in basketball drafts and free agency always get overpaid or drafted too early and then turn out to be flops without a record of accomplishment or even clearly defined ambitions and missions to draw upon when people other than her most desperate fans wish to support her. Unlike Dampier, we still have to talk about her until she fails.

things that go uh..what?

So Ron Paul has three challengers in his primary with some sort of farther right, Tea Party type endorsement. Yes... Ron Paul. The guy who is sort of like the lightning rod of grassroots fiscal restraint rebellions against government largess and waste (and antiquated ideas about the central banking system, which forms the core of my major concerns about him but the basis for a lot of his national level support). The apparent basis of these challenges are his opposition to things like the Iraq and Afghan wars and the lack of support for spending of federal relief dollars in the wake of Hurricane Rita (which effected his district I guess).

As I imagined, the Tea Party "movement" such as it is, will disintegrate, fracture, and lose its importance the moment it strays off of fiscal and budgetary matters like the stimulus or bank bailouts and the general ire and concern over the deficit, and into things like foreign policy and the usual concerns of local citizens for more federal importance for their own people in competition with those of those awful people in the next state.

Also amusing: people getting up in arms over someone pointing out the obvious similarities between Christianist extremism in American politics and policies and the jihadist extremism of groups like al Qaeda. Sorry. That's not obviously ridiculous or extremist to point that out. At least to me. That actually seemed like the most obvious development over the past 8 years in politics. A relatively famous movie documenting such things, Jesus Camp, which was favorably looked upon by the people involved, openly states that their object is to radicalize and mobilize the American youth in the precise manner and purpose that Islamic fundamentalists are perceived to be engaged in. If you don't want to watch people worshiping George Bush because of abortion, then fine, just observe the various policies of subjugation that we have influenced or compelled upon other foreign nations (such as the Ugandan death penalty clauses and penalties for homosexuals or the Iraqi Constitution's strict controls over abortion rights) in addition to actual policies that could be written into law as executive order that would have some difficulty passing Congressional and public scrutiny (the Mexico City resolution that was immediately overturned by Obama and Clinton). It does not make sense to state that all religious fundamentalists, both Islamic and Christian, seek to politicize their agendas, radicalize their children, and fundamentally alter the society around them to suit their own goals. Some people are quite reasonable and seek accommodations with others or simply wish to live, or try to, within a stricter interpretation of their messages of faith. But to say that the violence advocated against Islamic radicals by Christian radicals (largely, with some Judeo-Christian crossover) is not equated by the rhetoric of their opposites, or the absurd focus by both groups for cynical political advantages over the Palestinian and Israeli troubles is not some mirror-image effect, and that the strict, integral reading of their faith as a meaningful set of rules and laws that should apply to all peoples is not, for all intents and purposes, an identical proposition reached by both groups, is far more ridiculous a proposition than to state the opposite (that these things are likely true).

Glaring strategic errors

Simple math problem for neoconservatives
If there are 100 terrorists in an area and we kill 99 of them, how many terrorists are there still alive? (As a hint: the answer is not 1).

If our essential strategy is "yours", that we should go out and fight and kill these hostile peoples in their homes and villages and on the hills and valleys of far flung and otherwise meaningless nation-states with minimal or dubious strategic and security value, then you still need to obey some basic tenets of military strategy in order to communicate that this "tough" approach will deliver military victories rather than indefinite occupations and casualty lists.

The first rule is to have a plan to destroy the enemy. Under a nominal conflict with a nation state a battle that kills, captures, or routs almost all of the enemy's troops committed to the fight is a pretty damned good outcome. This is because a nation-state's ability to conduct wars depends on its ability to equip troops with an expectation that they will prevail in battles and thus be given a pretty good idea that they might survive. But we're not fighting nation-states. We, publicly, have long been given this impression by calling things "the Iraq War" or the "Afghanistan War". Even changing the grammar slightly with "the war in Afghanistan" doesn't really give us a fundamental idea of the opponent and how we might be using military tactics to neutralize their fighting abilities and forces because it doesn't identify who we are fighting. Worse, this nebulous approach then gives ample room to declare virtually anyone who opposes our forces as "agents of terrorism" or the "Taliban" and so on. The over-simplification that so broadly encapsulates our foe is probably as maddening to commanders in the field as it was for the troops sent off to conquer the Old West from the "savage red man". I suppose it's too hard to explain to American citizens the dozens of tribal relationships and sources of internal division or corruption within a complex country like Afghanistan. That's fine. But we could start by more clearly defining publicly who we actually want to be at war with within Afghanistan. It's not "the Taliban", because that's a really broad cross section of the political and tribal forces involved some of which is actively hostile to international terrorist aims. It's not "drug-runners" or "narco-terrorism", because some of that is the people we back and support in their government. And so on.

I had originally used the problem as a lack of focus on the third strategic aim of a war: to suppress the enemy's will to make war and resist whatever aims the war was putatively concerning itself with. While that still exists as a questionable front in our strategic planning (at least so long as we insist on installing or propping up peculiarly unhelpful regimes), it's not clear that we had ever established a military capacity to fulfill the first element of strategic success in military conflicts. That is: to defeat the enemy in the field of battle. It sounds like we've learned and gotten a lot better at it. Because that notion of killing them all and that somehow being defined as a conflict victory has started to go away. That works when you are fighting an enemy equipped with planes and tanks and heavy weapons organised into set pieces and trained at great expense. It does not work at all when you are fighting an enemy lightly equipped, possibly armed only with improved explosives or rifles, and sent out under a plethora of reasons to fight, even to resist, a hostile army. There might be some strategic advantages left to wring out of Afghanistan that we did not have in a place like Vietnam or even Somalia. But I'm highly skeptical that these advantages remain in good standing, and moreover, they are likely countered by any institutional support for a government which is perceived, at turns, as corrupt, inept, or illegitimate.

Couple of things that people ought to calm down about happening

Ending DADT: net effect will be...pretty much nothing will happen. Certainly our soldiers won't go out and start getting body art and drunk. What happened everywhere else in Europe/Israel? Nothing.

Iran: Hyperventilating aside about them and the DRPK's nuclear programs, I'm a lot less worried about Iran than the North Koreans being belligerent and actively using such a weapon. I have a little more faith in rational actors at the nation-state level. The purpose of these leaders is to extract rents for favored bases of support in the economy. That won't happen if they bomb someone with a nuke. MAD doesn't apply and there's no way you'd restrain a country with nuclear arms that showed after the death of a few thousands of its citizens that it was willing to support invasions of two sovereign nations from using them. Money (and life) talks a lot louder than faith in some jihadist ideology for the people in charge.

Most likely outcome may be something stupid like quasi-unilateral sanctions that will be toothless because Russia, most of Europe, and China won't go along with them and will succeed in doing nothing at all over the nuclear energy or any weaponization programs. People pushing that this sort of diplomacy is effective are either 1) being willfully stupid in the examination of any history to the contrary that sanctions have almost never worked (maybe apartheid in South Africa is your one ace in the hole card for this strategy) or 2) willfully aware that it will fail to accomplish anything and that will open the door for more substantial actions, like bombing or invasion. The public in Iran is broadly supportive of a nuclear energy program and not significantly opposed to possessing nuclear weapons in theory and because sanctions have the effect of rallying further support against the hostile, belligerent, and unreasonable Americans who have succeeded in harming the average Iranian and further entrenching the gangster-ized profits of established authorities so there's not much chance that these things wouldn't continue unabated if the Clintonian-neoconservative unholy alliance of "sanctions" gets its way.

Back to Texas

Books that ought to be burned

Not really burned, but nobody should be taking seriously. Textbooks are written by experts in the fields, ideally anyway. That does mean you can take into account potential biases. I myself have a good deal of suspicion of some populist/popular historians (Howard Zinn for example). But it doesn't mean you should get to write in your own instead and insist on them for everyone.

If you want your kids to learn that a bunch of warm hearted people dressed in sheets decided to stop lynching people who merely wanted to vote and that's what the civil rights movement consists of, and not a decades, if not centuries long struggle for relative equality in the eyes of the law involving many acts of terrorism and repression, bravery and sacrifices of people of all races (and a still unceasing struggle for relative tolerance within the eyes of human beings on the basis of meaningless criteria like skin colouration), I guess you are entitled to teach them that. You don't get to teach everybody else that because it is false.

Same thing on evolution. If you want your children to learn the "holes" in Darwin's theory, you are entitled to teach them that. If you've studied microbiology and evolutionary mutation well enough you might even be able to contribute something meaningful to that broader discussion on issues like punctuated equilibrium or the mechanical functions precisely that alter and act upon genes. But even the Supreme Court has basically said that the Creationist model of life has no place in a public school text because of that inconvenient establishment clause that the Constitution has in it. If you insist it must be taught, give me a philosophy class. The Bible is metaphysics and ethics. Not biology.

I can live with stuff like "this was a republic, not a democracy" because my reading of much of the Federalist papers reflects a fear that democracy resembles a mob too often and there seems to be a good deal of historical scholarship reflecting the desire of a ruling elite to maintain a position of power in a new order that would better legitimize such a status. But this is because I don't see how that helps "Republicans" over "Democrats". The Democratic party started out as the Democratic-Republicans, which is probably a more accurate reflection still of what we had/have, and a pretty good indication of why there's so little meaningful difference between the actual policies pursued by Democrats and Republicans while in office as compared to the supposed great rift in their rhetorical positions. It's not like if you are some white Southern conservative you should sit around trashing Thomas Jefferson on the basis that, horrors, he was a Democrat. I can live with people trying to claim McCarthy was pursuing some actual Communists as though they were traitors or dangers to American society (though they really should question the wisdom of his methods)

I can't live with stuff like that being pushed by a dentist however. Or preacher. And not somebody who has academic credentials in the discourse and study of history as a profession rather than a hobby. Nobody would take me seriously either as a historical scholar despite the dozens of history texts sitting on my shelves and dozens more in e-texts of some sort stored on my computer. I recognize the difference between myself and Schlesinger or even compared to the original documents of our history in Madison, Jefferson, Wilson, Paine, and Hamilton's own words on which many historians have based their claims and lives of professional and dedicated study. Bias is a filter. You can start to recognize it, look for facts that oppose it or are ignored to make conclusions but you can't make up your own reality and fact set instead in order to reject their conclusions. That won't fly in a social world with other people in it.

What really offends me though isn't the pushing of a particular worldview. It's that it is accompanied by an attitude like this "This critical-thinking stuff is gobbledygook". Yes obviously thinking and analytical thinking is useless. In a world when you are told everything you need to know and aren't supposed to deviate from it and find out that there are facts left out or ignored. It essentially argues that the entire basis of disagreement of such people isn't based in thinking at all. Which... makes one wonder what it was based on instead.

stop the madness

Reefer madness edition

There's $10 billion you could save right away and wouldn't harm anything in the last three columns. Maybe two or three billion of that could go to the first two columns. But you'd probably make at least that much at least from taxes, regulation/fee compliance of distributors and producers, and a number of legal incomes now subject to taxation rather than evasion and laundering to conceal them.

I admit that ending the drug war is probably going to take a more moderate approach than the swift sharp break I think justice demands. But softening the federal crackdown on marijuana production and "medical" marijuana isn't exactly progress and change you can believe in either when you look at the budget that remains roughly fixed in place for the foreseeable future on interdiction and police/military tactics, search and seizure, forfeiture and the Constitutional and judicial abuses that they spawn, and the amount of money being pissed away to present an appearance of being "tough" on a problem that only gets tougher and worse when you crack down on it.