I’ve been watching a lot of the History Channel’s Gangland series and Investigation Discovery’s Gang Nation lately. One thing I’ve noticed is that much of the gang violence is due, directly or indirectly, to drugs. Well, no duh.

When Prohibition was enacted, the outlaws had a ready source of easy money. Bootlegging, moonshining, the speakeasies, et al. were extremely profitable to gangsters. The associated violence that the gangsters used was almost a natural side effect; turf wars, robbing each other, fighting law enforcement, etc. were just standard business practices for many criminals. People were willing to pay big money for their illicit hooch. Criminals who were limited to small-time crimes previously found big money bootlegging alcohol. > more <

First, I want to apologize to everyone who has submitted comments to the site for the last few weeks. Something happened with my email system and the notices that comments were made got sent to the spam box. I think so many comments were made in a short amount of time that the system thought it was a legitimate spam bot. I have approved all the comments and they should now be visible for reading, so don’t think I just deleted them because I didn’t like what you said.

I want to mention that I’m moving yet again, this time back to Japan. I lived there once but it wasn’t nearly long enough so now I get to go back and enjoy it some more, especially now that I know what to do and where to go.

My programming book is coming along nicely. I’m nearly done with my editing and conversion. If you are interested, take a look at http://python-ebook.blogspot.com. I hope to have the ebook version posted in a few months. I will also be seeing if I can find a publisher for it, since I’ve had a few people ask about getting a physical copy.

That’s about it for now. Thanks for stopping by.