Those of us who are econ geeks will know about the Pelzman Effect. Regulations that supposedly make us safer (say, seatbelts or cycling helmets) don’t actually make us safer as behaviour changes to take account of the new safety. Almost as if there’s what we consider to be an acceptable risk to take and reducing it in one manner just allows us to be silly in another so as to maintain that risk we’re comfortable with. What I didn’t know (but better econ geeks than I might have done already) is that there is a Reverse Pelzman Effect.

Exploiting an interesting natural experiment, the authors of that paper are able to show that we should abolish driving licences. The various States of Mexico found that bribery was impossible to avoid when attempting to gain a licence. So, to varying degrees, they changed their issuance system, some deciding simply not to have them any more. So, of course, death rates from car accidents went up, didn’t they?

Erm, actually, no, they didn’t. Those places that didn’t bother with licences any more, allowing absolutely anyone at all to get in and drive, saw no change in such death rates any different from those that had now (well, hopefully) incorruptible issuance systems.

The date marks the end of one of the periods of roughly 400 years into which the Mayan calendar is divided.

Mexico’s National Institute for Anthropological History has also tried to counter speculation that the Maya predicted a catastrophic event for 2012.

Only two out of 15,000 registered Mayan texts mention the date 2012, according to the Institute, and no Mayan text predicts the end of the world.

“There is no prophecy for 2012. It is a marketing fallacy,” Erik Velasquez, etchings specialist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, told Reuters.

If someone came up with an outlandish plot in which two Iranian agents, acting on behalf of government circles in Tehran, scheme with Mexican drug lords to blow up a Saudi ambassador on American soil, would a California screenwriter buy into it before a Virginia intelligence analyst, or would it be the other way around?

Place your bets.

[. . .]

Iranians are smart. If they weren’t smart, we wouldn’t have to worry about them building bombs. Do smart people come up with stupid plots? Not plausible. And look at the amateur pitch. Here’s a story that not only sounds like a B-movie, but is unveiled at a press conference that looks like a poster for a low-budget diversity flick: An African-American Attorney-General (Holder) flanked by a male Caucasian FBI Director (Robert S. Mueller) and a female Caucasian Assistant Attorney-General for National Security (Lisa Monaco) with a male Asian-American U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (Preet Bharara) hovering in the background. It’s early Hollywood multicultural chic. All that’s missing is the line “Coming to a theatre near you.”

This amuses the intelligence analyst. “The trouble with Hollywood-types,” he says, “is that they’ve manipulated reality for so long, they can’t even recognize it when they see it. Does your friend think Holder and Mueller and Monaco and Bharara are from Central Casting? Hello! They are who they are. Life has caught up with multicultural chic. It imitates art — or at least imitates Hollywood.”

My spook friend goes further. “Yes, it’s a stupid plot and that’s why it rings true to me,” he says. “Most true stories of international intrigue sound like B-movies.”

The United States imports a majority of it’s cocaine from Mexico, which has been embroiled in a brutal war among rival gangs for control of the lucrative trade.

Over 42,000 people have been killed in Mexico as a result of gang violence since President Felipe Calderon took office in 2006. Not a moment too soon, it appears the President is starting to recognize that the current approach to dealing with illicit drugs is not working.

“We must do everything to reduce demand for drugs. But if the consumption of drugs cannot be limited, then decision-makers must seek more solutions — including market alternatives — in order to reduce the astronomical earnings of criminal organizations,” Calderon said in a speech in New York.

Using the term “market alternatives” is a key choice of words. The reason organized crime has so successfully dominated the trade is the blanket prohibition on drugs, forcing the market underground. The same thing happened in the United States when alcohol was made illegal during Prohibition.

The solution to removing the criminal element from the drug trade is the same one that solved the problem with booze: legalize it. Allow drugs to be produced by private industry in a regulated environment. After all, gang violence has become more deadly than the substances they’re peddling. And we don’t see beer companies shooting each other for control of distribution networks.

Congressional investigators examining a gun-trafficking sting investigation known as Operation Fast and Furious have identified 122 weapons linked to the operation that have been recovered at crime scenes in Mexico, according to a report they are expected to release Tuesday.

The report, which offers new details about the operation, lists 48 occasions between November 2009 and February 2011 in which Mexican authorities found one or more such weapons, based on internal e-mails of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, whose Phoenix office set up the operation. It was compiled by the staffs of Representative Darrell Issa of California and Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the two Republicans leading the investigation.

“The faulty design of Operation Fast and Furious led to tragic consequences,” the report concludes. “Countless United States and Mexican citizens suffered as a result.”

By now it should be clear that the Mexican drug cartels have taken over the country. They’ve murdered journalists, politicians, judges, businessmen, police, soldiers and each other, with impunity. Their control is so complete that they’ve set up roadblocks to extort blood money from anyone bold enough to believe they have the right to travel freely. They’ve murdered so many people that they’ve resorted to dumping lifeless bodies into mass graves.

Every single day, there’s a fresh story of murder and mayhem. Today, it’s “Eight Bodies Found in Mountains in Northern Mexico” and “Gunmen Kidnap 7 from Drug Rehab Center in Northern Mexico”. The crime-related casualties number in the tens of thousands. That’s to say nothing of the thousands physically and psychologically maimed by torture, or the millions of Mexican living in fear, denied their basic human rights. The Taliban have nothing on these guys.

In other words, adding a few thousand guns from American sources isn’t even a drop in the bucket as far as Mexico’s real problems are concerned:

The ATF purposely mislead Americans to believe that “90 percent of Mexican cartels guns come from Bob’s Gun Store.” That lie was exposed: 88 percent of guns confiscated by the Mexican authorities and successfully submitted for trace to the ATF came from America. (Not necessarily American gun dealers either, BTW). How many qualifiers can you stick in a stat to make it bark like a dog? More importantly, the total population of guns confiscated by the Mexicans in that stat was 30,000.

Now consider the fact that the Mexican police and military are thoroughly corrupt. In fact, there’s every reason to believe that these two entities have supplied the drug cartels with majority of their box fresh military-grade weapons. Weapons that American and foreign weapons makers sold to the Mexican authorities legally. And that means the Mexican have no reason to confiscate any weapons — other than creating a little security theater and transferring ownership from one cartel to another.

BATFE started Operation Fast and Furious, now better known as Gunrunner, as a sting to catch people smuggling weapons to the narcotraficantes in Mexico. They ran into a problem. Gun dealers in the area involved “made” the straw men buyers and called the BATFE to report these types. ATFE told the gun dealers not to worry and sell the guns. Not ten or twenty times, not a couple of hundred times like a reasonable person would expect. The lowest figure I’ve seen is about 2,500, enough weapons for a small brigade.

Let us clearly summarize this idea, the ATFE ordered law abiding American merchants to arm a brigade of criminals.

In effect ATFE armed an army of murderers, rapists, extortionists, and slavers who financed their actions by smuggling drugs into the US. This has helped destabilize the government of Mexico and led to the terrorizing of the honest working people of that nation. The last time I checked such behavior constitutes an act of war. Either it is the policy of the United States to destabilize the government of friendly nations ( given some of the stunts we’ve pulled this is less unreasonable than it ought to be) or elements of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives abused their police authority in the United States to conduct a filibuster (look up original meeting) against Mexico. Not only that, they did so with the approval and support of Attorney General Eric Holder.

The watchdog noted that Top Gear is “well-known for its irreverent style and sometimes outspoken humour” and that it “frequently uses national stereotypes as a comedic trope and that there were few, if any, nationalities that had not at some point been the subject of the presenters’ mockery”.

Given the audience’s likely familiarity with the presenters’ “mocking, playground-style humour”, Ofcom suggested the majority of viewers “would therefore be likely to have understood that the comments were being made for comic effect”.

The ruling concludes: “Ofcom is not an arbiter of good taste, but rather it must judge whether a broadcaster has applied generally accepted standards by ensuring that members of the public were given adequate protection from offensive material. Humour can frequently cause offence. However, Ofcom considers that to restrict humour only to material which does not cause offence would be an unnecessary restriction of freedom of expression.”

The jokes and the Mexican government’s response were discussed in February.

The BBC has now obliged, with a statement which concedes that while the remarks were “rude” and “mischievous”, there was “no vindictiveness” behind them.

The Corporation continues: “Our own comedians make jokes about the British being terrible cooks and terrible romantics, and we in turn make jokes about the Italians being disorganised and over dramatic, the French being arrogant and the Germans being over-organised.”

It adds that “stereotype-based comedy was allowed within BBC guidelines in programmes where the audience knew they could expect it, as was the case with Top Gear“.

The apology concludes: “Whilst it may appear offensive to those who have not watched the programme or who are unfamiliar with its humour, the executive producer has made it clear to the ambassador that that was absolutely not the show’s intention.”

Indeed, said executive producer apologised personally to señor Medina-Mora Icaza, and we look forward to seeing that meeting on Top Gear in due course, complete with witty commentary from Clarkson, Hammond and May.