The One Way Mirror

You can see me, but I can't see me. With hosting based in the UK, it takes a while for my new Name Server information to propagate.
Apparently.
Another change is the old RDF and RSS feeds have bitten the cold, dry dust of the Internet, and autoblography.co.uk is now atomic. Check the autolinks sidebar there at the left for the atom feed.

I've been off work the past couple of days. I came home yesterday lunchtime with shakes and nausea and a one-sided headache. I had spreading blind spots on the subway but they had disappeared by the time I reached the office...then the headache rolled out, and I gave in, came home, and slept for six hours. I'm feeling okay today, but still a little wobbly & fragile.

I'm re-reading Mr. Nice. It's meant to be an autobiography, but it's probably ghostwritten. The tales inside are tall and the 'author' is a confessed stretcher of the facts, but it's a compelling tale of how a boy from the Welsh Valleys went on to become a major global marijuana smuggler. You may know the name: Howard Marks. There's a point in the book just after Marks has finished his first jail sentence when all of his old contacts light up again, only with greater ambitions and more complicated schemes, and the descriptions of Marks' flying schedule, front companies, contacts around the world, different people being busted...all of it crosses my into information overload territory and all I'm being left with is a sagging jaw at the sheer epic amounts being shipped all over the world.
A dope-only smuggler, Marks' biggest consignment was thirty tons, from Pakistan's borderlands into the US through an air-freighting scam which made the cargo look like it had come from Hong Kong and Singapore.

Today, a google news search brings up a story, here, about HMS Cumberland intercepting a speedboat-bourne shipment of twenty tons of cocaine in the Caribbean. This has a street value of £200 million. Assuming that this was bound for the UK - the article doesn't say - that's £3.33 per person in the British Isles, or enough for 1 in every 100 people in Britain to pocket an ounce, which (as far as I can gather) is a fuckload of cocaine, because it's normally sold in fractions of an ounce.

A little closer to (my) home, we have this gem, which details some of the methods used in Staten Island docks - insiders parked containers from South America near fences, where they could be easily broken into at night and their contents distributed. These guys were importing crates marked as Teletubbies toys.

There are other stories in the news about importing cocaine and marijuana into Jamaica in fruit juice cartons and wooden sculptures, flying cocaine over the Mexico-Texas border, and the general indifference of international crime to global governmental crackdowns which are taking place as the world sits up straight so that America can get on with its War On Terror.

Two problems Marks faced in the 80s were setting up secure communications and the movement of money. Static phone lines were tapped left and right, and attempts at roving contact points were so complex they were never bothered with. Money was frequently carted around in suitcases, or packed into the panels of cars. Consdiering the ease with which communications and financial transactions take place today, I wondered what it was like now.

This quote from an MSNBC article caught my eye:

Asked recently how much harder it was to move $50 million secretly now than 10 years ago, a Swiss banker smiled and replied: "The main difference is that now I charge more."

And I thought, bloody hell.