NATIONAL

- HOWARD THREATENS SMAK TRIALS

John Howard has threatened to use the external affairs power to stop Heroin trials in NSW.  This strategy reminds SPIN of Willie, who blocked Californians from using Pot by threatening to use Federal powers to deregister prescribing doctors.

SPIN is bloody sick of Australian taxes being used to prohibit the drug trade so criminals can make a fortune from addicted Australians.   SPIN has a Libertarian view, believes we should let people be responsible for their own lives.  If people want to shoot up, let them go get a script from a doctor, and purchase the drug from their local chemist for about the same cost as aspirin.  SPIN believes that drug prohibition is an instance of the cure being far worse than the disease.  Prohibition is madness!!

INTERNATIONAL

- INDONESIA

President Wahibe continues to observe an approach that commands respect.  His statement that military personnel will not have immunity from prosecution for war crimes gives the correct message to the PKI and to the victims and the world.  On the one hand it should serve to restrain military excesses in Aceh.  On the other, it is not an outright order to seek and prosecute for vengeance.

The way to peace for Indonesia is tortuous.  With limited resources, President Wahibe is never condoning wrong, but neither does he spend Indonesian treasure gratuitously in the pursuit of revenge. In a country as poor as Indonesia, money is blood, and a lack of money can mean death by starvation, or death by lack of a few cents worth of antibiotic.

- CHECHYNA

The USA bombing of Serbia has come to roost.  If the allegation that Hillary demanded the bombing as a payback, then the cost of Willie's philandering with Monica is climbing very rapidly indeed.  In Serbia it was over 2000 directly, and how many more through bomb induced poverty?  (Do not try to explain that Albanians were saved. Nobody in the Balkans believes that fairy tale.   That story is for US and UK voters.)

Now the cost is rising by the tens of thousands in Chechen blood.  Or do some apologists for Willie still claim that Russian bombing of Chechnya  is not given legitimacy by the US bombing of Serbia?

- MACAO  (dateline 20 December 1999.)

China continued it's nationalistic expansion with the absorbtion of the Portuguese territory of Macao.  SPIN hazards a guess that Hong Kong has not lived up to rosy expectations, despite no admissions from the Chinese Mandarins, although "they wouldn't say that would they" (to paraphrase Mandy).

Next of course must be Taiwan.  It was always so.  Expansion seems to generate an expectation in the minds of the hegemony.  Taiwan might be a little harder to swallow.

From "The Economist" screensaver SPIN learned that the GNP of Taiwan is a little less than a third that of China.  (The CIA figures for GNP are in this case suspect, being subject to political skulduggery.)  So if China does not absorb Taiwan within five years, SPIN predicts that Taiwan will own (by reverse takeover) China within 25 years.  That's the price you pay when you accept guidance from a dictator.
 

This page published 16 & 20 December 1999.

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