Email I sent to Super 8 Motels:

I elected not to stay in your Sheridan unit. I almost made the reservation but then learned that you no longer allow cancellations. You merely keep the money.

For that reason, we booked our entire trip in other motels. And we will never stay with you again.

This greed stuff is getting out of hand. Ya think?

Actually, it isn’t just Super 8. Even little Alamo Motel in Sheridan has adopted the no-cancellation policy. It’s a bit like the airlines – where there is no real competition, those few remaining players can act in concert to pick our pockets. We ended up booking with another chain that also, coincidentally, now has a ‘no-cancellation’ policy. We had no real choice.

Airlines decided to charge extra for checked baggage. They all fell in line. Soon they will charge for carry-ons. Once one does it, the rest will too. There is just not enough competition. If one of the players were to see an advantage in underselling the others that exceeds the profit of going along, he would do so. But in a non-competitive environment, that advantage is not there.

Anyway, as you make your motel reservations in the future, check the fine print. And if you find yourself in a no-cancellation corner and must change your travel plans, do not tell them you won’t be showing up! That will only allow them to both keep your money and re-sell the room for that night.

Instead, let it sit empty. That’s the only market power we have.

PS: Here is Super 8’s cancellation policy:

Cancellation Policy: There will be no credit or refund for early departures, cancellations, no shows, or changes in your reservation for any reason. Guests will not receive any refund or credit.

The owner of the Alamo Motel in Sheridan claims that his cancellation policy remains unchanged, and I have stayed there many times over the years and he is a nice and sincere man. What happened is this: He signed on to a centralized reservation system for independent motels. They tell people that their clients do not allow cancellation. He did not know this about them.

In the United States we have a massive “news” operation whose primary purpose is to shield us from stuff that is true. Here are a few examples:

Bradley Manning: Pfc. Bradley Manning leaked a film of U.S. soldiers massacring civilians below from a helicopter above. But this story really goes way, way back, to Vietnam. Many on the right blame “the media” for our “loss” in Vietnam. In a sense they are right, but it wasn’t an organized media conspiracy that led to wide public disenchantment with that war. It was pictures. They simply did not understand their impact. Even as Walter Cronkite was reading a submissive narrative on how the U.S. was achieving its objectives, as was his job, the pictures that accompanied his words were telling a different story.

After Vietnam, the U.S. had to gently ease us back into war-making. The war in Afghanistan in the 1980’s had to be done out of sight, and Nicaragua and El Salvador had to be fought by proxy.

Grenada (October 25, 1983) was the first test case for the new strategy for news management in war. In that attack, all of the reporters were put on a ship and spoon fed bullshit about what was going on. Only later, after the conflict, were they allowed to view the damage.

The strategy was successful, but required a compliant news corps. There were renegades who refused to buckled under the new guidelines, like Peter Arnett of Associated Press, and later CNN.

He and his breed are long gone now, and news reporting of war is done mostly stateside, and by reporters who seemingly are in the war zone, but are in fact embedded within the shadow of Pentagon brass, and being fed bullshit. On-the-ground reporters are embedded with American soldiers, where they tend to bond and view events in a sympathetic manner. Otherwise, they would never be allowed near battle zones.

Images are tightly controlled. We are not even allowed to view the coffins of dead soldiers. Major U.S. news outlets cooperate with this regime, and do not show the grisly aftermath of bombing or the effects of our violence on ordinary people. It’s all part of thought control – images tell stories, while words are mere sound.

Bradley Manning, under the new regime, has committed a “crime.” He leaked some truth to us in the form of images which tell a story that completely negates years of intense propaganda.

For this, he might be imprisoned for up to 52 years. In earlier times he might be called a “hero.” Under the current regime, he will waste away, and will serve as an example to any others who are so impudent as to think they can countermand orders to keep the American public in the dark. The full weight of military justice will come to bear on him.

Meanwhile, the helicopter pilots who murdered twelve people that day in the film that Manning leaked … no action. Not guilty!

See how it works? This is both imperialism and counterinsurgency. Both are easier to ingest if we don’t have to see the images.

RNC Chairman Michale Steele: Mr. Steele is in trouble on a much lower scale, and his punishment will be far less severe, and he is surely no hero, as he was merely doing his job: analyzing the political implications of our latest war within earshot of a microphone.

But he too will pay a price. He’ll have to step down now that he has said something true.

Here’s what he said:

“Keep in mind again, federal candidates, this was a war of Obama’s choosing. This was not something that the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in. But it was the president who was trying to be cute by half by building a script demonizing Iraq, while saying the battle really should be in Afghanistan. Well, if he is such a student of history, has he not understood that you know that’s the one thing you don’t do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan?”

Steele is being lambasted for his “gaffe”, which indeed it is. One must understand our toxic environment, as a “gaffe” is merely a true statement. Obama did indeed “demonize” Iraq, for political purposes. Even though “he” has prosecuted that war in the same manner as Bush before him, our perceptions have been altered. That war is no longer given much coverage, and emphasis is now on Afghanistan. Obama did say he was going emphasize Afghanistan while campaigning. All that indicates that that the policy shift had already taken place within the Pentagon in early 2008.

Obama is no more in charge of war policy than children are of household budgets. All that can be read here is as follows: The Iraq conflict was widely understood to be “won” – the bases and puppets were in place, and the population subdued by massive violence (as exposed by Pfc. Manning above). Virtually all was concealed from us. It was merely time to move on.

In 2001, while George W. Bush was president, the Pentagon launched on an ambitious plan to take control of the Middle East and Central Asia. Afghanistan was but a doorway, with Osama bin Laden the hated face used to justify the attack.

But the real prize was Iraq. Soon after that Iran, Syria and Lebanon were to fall. Afghanistan matters, as a pipeline will run through it, and maybe the resources are important.

One can only guess, but it seems as well that Afghanistan is a parking lot. Plans to topple Iran have stalled, the Russian bear is resurgent, and yet we need to be poised and ready. If an “event”, staged or real, opens up a new front in Iran, I suspect that Afghanistan will once again hit the back burner.

Steele didn’t do anything wrong but offer up for public consumption the inside knowledge that Afghanistan is merely a diversion. Lives and dollars, civilians and poppy plants .. none of it matters. Afghanistan, if Steele is telling us the truth, is merely a place to park troops and tanks as we wait for (or cause) the Middle East to explode again.

Michael Steele is going down, of course. He said something true, and that is not allowed here in the Land of the Free.

Hillary Clinton on Georgia: This has a humor element to it. Secretary of State Clinton criticized Russia for its “occupation” of Georgia, which is considered a “breakaway” state. The Russians are angry that she used the word “occupation,” but mostly just shrugged.

Pictures help here. In the map above, the state of Georgia can be found between the Black Sea and Azerbaijan, and directly north of … Iran. It’s very small and not easy to spot on the map. The location is just a coincidence, I suppose.

But of course what Russia is doing is an “occupation,” just as the U.S. is currently occupying Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia, Panama, and the sovereign state of “just about everywhere else” with our 700+ military bases.

The U.S. wanted to occupy Georgia, but as Russia grows in strength, it is getting harder to make incursions on former Soviet territories. Military bases in that region are a prized asset. The U.S. invested a lot of money in Georgia, undermining their elections and instigating an uprising. But the Russians were surprisingly aggressive, and fought back. For the time being, it appears that military bases in Georgia will have a decided reddish hue to them.

And for that reason, Hillary Clinton is pissed. The Cold War is still going on. It never stopped, really. The Soviet Union imploded, lost much of its territory, most notably the ‘stans’ of Central Asia and the countries on the Balkan Peninsula. But the Bear is back, and is contesting U.S. aggression on a modest scale.

As Russia and China grow stronger, the world will be safer. If they and India ally and form a power bloc to contest the mighty U.S., we might experience a decade or two of peace on Earth.