As of this writing, of the 343 comments to have been approved by the moderators on FIFA.com’s “Have Your Say” discussion board about today’s controversial US-Slovenia 2-2 draw in World Cup competition, not one of them contains even a passing mention of the main topic of discussion of every article that has been written about the game: the fact that referee Koman Coulibaly disallowed the third US goal for reasons that weren’t (and still aren’t) clear to players, fans, or television announcers.

Other soccer discussion boards, like the Washington Post’s Soccer Insider, were flooded with debate and discussion about the questionable call, which began almost immediately after it happened at about 16:40 GMT (the time zone used by FIFA.com). So were Twitter feeds (although at some point Twitter crashed, as it frequently has during the World Cup). The discussion over the controversy really exploded around the internet after the game ended at 16:51, and before long, USA’s tie with Slovenia already had more Google News blog hits (850) than Serbia’s upset of Germany (701).

But on FIFA.com, the silence about USA-Slovenia has been deafening. The latest comment to appear on the discussion board has a timestamp of 20:04. In the 193-minute span between the game’s end and the latest comment’s time stamp, only 24 squeaky-clean comments have been approved. For instance: “great fightback by the USA”; “this is the right result on the balance of play”; “way to go USA”; “the match was really exciting!”; “slovenia is the best team”; “USA are becoming a real nice team!”; and “Slovenia had a great chance to qualify in the next round!! But in the second half we were too defensive.”

By comparison, in that same span of time—193 minutes—after the end of Germany-Serbia (which ended today at 14:20), there were already 175 comments posted. That’s more than seven times as many.

At one point, a user named Rossus, from South Africa, posted one comment that did, in the most polite possible way, at least hint at the idea that there might have been some controversy. Rather than suggesting any human fault, Rossus’s comment merely used the word “luck”: “I am not a USA supporter but the USA was very unlucky not to win.” But even that comment, after briefly appearing on the match overview page (which streams the latest comments), was later censored, and never made it to the discussion board page itself. The comment is no longer on the site, but I took a screen shot of it during the brief time that it appeared on the overview page, which appears here to the left.

Just to test my theory personally, I also tried posting the following comment: (more…)

Is President Obama keeping the Sinaloa drug cartel in business?

Here’s the news from today, according to the New York Times: 1,200 members of the National Guard have been sent to the border to “combat drug smuggling.” More drug-related violence can only be dealt with through greater enforcement, goes the Bush-McCain-and-now-Obama story. We’ve got to fight the war on drugs; to fight the drug criminals; to save the people from violence.

There’s just one flaw in this story: it’s got the causality going in the wrong direction. US drug policy is the cause of the current epidemic of violence and lawlessness in northern Mexico and along the border, not the cure for it. The more resources we devote to enforcing our drug prohibition, the higher we drive prices, the bigger the incentives to smuggle drugs, the bigger the spoils for the gangs of lawless criminals to whom we redirect the unimaginable profits of several massive, centuries-old industries, and the more these gangs will be willing to fight to the death over pieces of that enormous black-market pie.

By legislating common drugs out of the legal marketplace, we are creating a black market out of thin air. It is not hyperbole to suggest that US law is not just providing a subsidy of billions to the Sinaloa cartel—our laws have actually legislated the cartel, and its rivals, into existence.

Who stands to lose the most if we legalize, tax, and regulate marijuana and cocaine, and open these industries to legitimate companies? The Sinaloa cartel. We devote $11 billion of military and law enforcement resources to eliminating their competition and maintaining their monopoly power—and thus their staggering profits. They are probably the foremost advocates of the current US drug policy. Their worst nightmare would be for the marijuana industry to turn into something like tobacco: low-margin, heavily regulated, taxed, nonviolent, unglamorous, highly competitive, unable to command a risk premium. When was the last time you heard about a tobacco gang shooting?

The effects of US drug policy have never been felt more tragically in northern Mexico, where turf wars between rival drug cartels are fought. Ciudad Juárez, where the murder of innocent civilians is as commonplace as a fender-bender, is now confronting the very real prospect of a lost generation of youth—a generation so scared to walk the streets of its own city that it grows up as if in a coma, with fear the only coherent thread of civic life. In Juárez, beheadings are barely newsworthy. Is it any wonder that some of the civilians caught in this warfare would risk their lives to cross the border into the US?

A rational humanitarian policy would contemplate welcoming residents of Ciudad Juárez into the United States as war refugees. Why don’t we do this? Maybe it’s because admitting there’s a war in Mexico might mean confronting the horrifying truth that this war is ours, our failed war on drugs, and the citizens of Juárez, these would-be refugees, are our collateral damage. Washington now seems comfortable with the idea that we own the violence in Baghdad, yet the idea that we own the violence in Juárez is still Washington taboo. We don’t even believe we’re involved.

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The Times of London reports that Italian Minister of Agriculture Luca Zaia has dissolved the mozzarella di bufala campana consortium after a series of inspections revealed that “25 per cent of the cheese sold as buffalo mozzarella was fake because it contained 30 per cent cow milk.” Mozzarella di bufala, with its wonderfully funky water-buffalo-milk notes, is one of the main ingredients in some versions of margherita DOP pizza (although it’s not, as Alan Richman has wrongly stated, a required ingredient). It’s also frequently served raw as an appetizer, either on its own or with ham.

The Italian Ministry of Agriculture has a recent history of operating at the curious intersection of neofascism and culinary purism. Zaia’s “zero-tolerance policy” on food fraud became famous with his 2008 bust-up of cheating Brunello di Monalcino producers, which was hailed as a victory for consumers. But in a less-reported crackdown the following year, Zaia, a member of the extreme-right-wing Lega Nord—the political party that has advocated the seccession of Northern Italy—also instituted, with Berlusconi’s backing, a policy banning new “ethnic” restaurants from opening in certain northern Italian cities, including Lucca and Milan. It was a move that the left-wing newspaper La Stampa called “culinary ethnic cleansing.” Reporting on the policy, the Times of London quoted Lucca city spokesman Massimo Di Grazia as saying that “French restaurants would be allowed”; he was “unsure, though, about Sicilian cuisine. It is influenced by Arab cooking.” Continued the Times: “Asked if he had ever eaten a kebab, Mr Zaia said: ‘No—and I defy anyone to prove the contrary. I prefer the dishes of my native Veneto. I even refuse to eat pineapple.’” This, from the country’s Minister of Agriculture.

Sometime in 2001 or 2002, I recall meeting, and discussing pure-ingredient fervence with, Giorgio Alemanno, who was Italy’s Minister of Agriculture at the time (this was two Ministers ago). The man talked about wine with great passion. And like Zaia, he was also an absolute right-wing zealot. (more…)

Ethics scandals are politico porn. They’re also fertile ground for undeserved scapegoating. But there’s one category in which, across the board, there’s not nearly enough public stoning going on: the world of information intermediaries. On the government side, that means regulatory agencies; in the private sector, it’s the critics, the expert witnesses in capitalism’s de facto justice system.

Information intermediaries, we’re to understand, are society’s check against puffery. They make careers of trustworthiness and accountability. In society’s service, they apply rigor to the claims of corporations and analyze their standards. For this hard work, they’re rewarded by the marketplace and by the United States—sometimes handsomely, sometimes not.

Two bits of recent news bring about two otherwise disparate intermediaries, both preeminent in their niches—Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate, the publication whose critical appraisals are one of the central determinants of a wine’s success or failure on the marketplace, and the Federal Aviation Administration, the agency whose critical appraisals are the primary safety check against America’s airlines—systematically abusing that authority.

Jay Miller: Disfrutando?

Parker’s is one of the few wine publications that don’t accept advertising, for which he deserves praise. And it’s certainly acceptable to take free samples of wine from producers—that’s often the only way to taste new releases before they’ve gone to market. But the recent transgressions of Jay Miller, Robert Parker’s right-hand man, are spectacular indeed. In another classic case of the traditional print media jumping on the bandwagon of a topic that had been exposed quite a bit earlier by an incisive blogger—in this case, Tyler Colman, who goes by “Dr. Vino”—Miller’s series of all-expenses-paid vacation/junkets, financed by wine producers, have finally been reported by the mainstream media in a recent Wall Street Journal article.

Some of rumors about Miller’s behavior in Argentina go quite a bit further in scandalousness (more…)

We’ve mainstreamed the debate over ending the prohibition on marijuana. Why is the debate over legalizing prostitution still a taboo?

Blaming a classifieds web site for the actions of an alleged murderer is almost as absurd as blaming high-school pot smokers for September 11. Nonetheless, Craigslist has decided to remove (or at least rename) the “erotic services” category of the site. This from the New York Times:

“Andrew M. Cuomo, New York’s attorney general, said his office had recently notified Craigslist about an impending prostitution case that involved the erotic services category.

‘Rather than work with this office to prevent further abuses, in the middle of the night, Craigslist took unilateral action which we suspect will prove to be half-baked,’ Mr. Cuomo said in a statement.”

Putting aside the obvious hypocrisy of this particular office’s crackdown on this particular brand of consensual human behavior—and putting aside the disturbing implication that our state’s top law enforcement officer does not subscribe to the principle of innocent until proven guilty—just why is prostitution illegal, anyway?

Prostitution will always be a profession, and it may always be a profession more risky than most. But in justifying the current policy, most prostitution prohibitionists make the same type of correlation-causation mistake that the drug prohibitionists make (more…)

Should we stage a Boston Wine Party, and throw our wine into the Atlantic?

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the bewilderingly diverse wines on display at this week’s FENAVIN, Spain’s national wine fair, is the price range: 2€–5€ is most common, trailed slightly by <2€ (a significant category, with strong representation from La Mancha, the wine fair’s home region) and 5€–10€.

In the 2€–3€ range are a vast assortment of sometimes steely, often aromatic, almost always appropriately acidic whites from Castilla-La Mancha and other lesser-known regions. If you want a 1994 or 1995 Gran Reserva from La Mancha—an eminently mature Tempranillo, Cabernet Sauvignon, or Tempranillo-Cabernet blend—it might cost you up to 6€.

All of this is a prescient reminder of the three-tined gouging of the American wallet—and, by extension, of the American palate—that defines our wine industry.

The first tine is regulatory: the unconscionable customs duties imposed at our borders, and, worse still, the preposterous bureaucratic labeling and testing rules that are imposed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. (Is there anything that more clearly reveals our government’s still-Puritanical view of wine drinking as a vice than this agency’s name?)

The irony of these idiotic rules, (more…)