We are sitting in Queenstown Airport and have a long wait for our flight to board, but it was better than sitting in a motel room or again experiencing downtown Queenstown, where they use $20 bills as napkins. It is like Aspen in that regard, or any resort town. They know you are passing through but once, and so have no compunctions about vacuuming your pockets as you leave any establishment. Our first day here last week I paid $38 for two pair of ordinary socks (about $30 U.S.) and was embarrassed to have done so. That was not unusual. A short ride from our motel resort to the airport was $20. $15 U.S.

Internet here at the airport is free and the signal is strong. That’s something. At Novatel, a hotel we stayed at last week on return from Milford Track, I inquired at the desk why our Internet had petered out that morning. They said they we had exceeded usage allowance. We had indeed listened to podcasts and done some email the night before, nothing more. They said we owed an additional $49.50 in addition to the $15 we had paid at the outset. It was taken from our credit card.

“Put it back,” I said.

She then retreated to a back room and emerged with three sheets of paper detailing our every move on the Internet. She said that the allowance was 5Mb or something like that.

“Nobody knows what that means. Nobody,” I said. “Give the money back.”

She retreated again, this time to speak with her supervisor. People here are very nice, so I assume her supervisor was too, and a wimp to boot. He or she did not emerge, and the clerk did and said they would drop the $49.50 charge. ($37.50 U.S.)

As they should. If they don’t warn us about such things, they should back off. But it is interesting. The coffee shop next to the hotel has wifi and it is a strong signal and they allow all customers unlimited usage. It’s a cost of being in business these days, like electricity. I downloaded podcasts there as we drank our coffee so as to avoid more Novatel charges. But broadband is a utility these days. We all use it, need it, expect it. Novatel has got the old capitalist enclosure thing going. Once inside their gate, everything costs extra.

OK. I did ask her if they also charged for electricity delivered to the room. She picked up my sarcasm.

But this is classic rent seeking behavior, to take something that already exists, make no improvements or add any value, and convert it to a profit center. That’s all Verizon or anyone does, rent seeking. They need monopoly-like environs to get away with it, which is why everything in our economy these days is sold by some virtual monopoly somewhere.

If enough assholes like me come through Novatel, they’ll stop doing that. My wife says I should be nicer to clerks and such, and that’s true except that part of their job is to deflect heat from those who make decisions like reaming people’s asses for mere bandwidth. So part of her job to is to endure the heat that rightly belonged to her cowardly supervisor.

The American FCC recently classified Internet service as a utility, which has elicited howls of protest from the stuck pigs of the broadband industry. Their bought legions in Congress will work to overturn that decision. It ain’t over by any stretch. But there is that small victory, like mine.

NBC stays silent, but privately stands behind news anchor Brian Williams

Only in America do they lie about the reasons for a war, the violence committed during the war, including casualties and refugees, torture committed and innocent deaths, but then get after a news reader for embelleshing a story about personal danger while flying to be close to boom booms while he reads his lines.

Bryan Williams is an actor, paid to sound trustworthy as he lies about everything he happens to be reading, probably unknowingly. He’s not that bright. Leave him alone. He’s just doing his job, lying convincingly. He had a bad day. OK? One of the lies got away from him.
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PS: Tom Brokaw, extremely arrogant paid professional liar also capable of writing complete sentences, thinks Williams ought to be fired. The crime, I assume, must be ‘getting caught in a lie.’

We are nestled in for the evening here near Glenorchy, NZ, in a comfortable lodge on the shore of Lake Wakatipu. It is snowing in nearby peaks, and rain has been a constant. The room I am in smells of fireplace. We have a couple of hours before dinner. Tomorrow we hit the trail again, doing a small part of the Routeburn Track. A flat part, I hope.

I’ve been reading some of Oglesby as we flew over, and old book from 1976, and some old names batted about that I’ve not thought about in years. Howard Hughes … murdered? Did the Mormons abscond with his fortune? (Oglesby makes no mention of this, a suspicion I pick up on from Mae Brussell.) Meyer Lanksy was the essential key between mafia underworld and so-called legitimate politics? German General Reinhard Gehlen brought in by Allen Dulles along with so many other Nazis after the war because they had essential knowledge about the Soviets that the U.S., newly crowned world champion, lacked? (Oglesby calls Dulles’ capitulation to Gehlen’s demands an essential surrender.) A plane crashed in Chicago in 1972 with 44 innocent people murdered to get one, Dorothy Hunt, wife of CIA/Dallas/Watergate veteran E. Howard Hunt? Three presidents brought down in succession by palace intrigue, JFK, LBJ, RMN?

Of course, there’s Dallas. Oglesby reminds us in 1976 that we really ought to solve that crime (and its less bloody sister, Watergate) if we care at all about democratic governance. Waaaaaay too late for that now. There was even one more palace coup to follow, 1981, but removal of Reagan from power seemed perfunctory as he was not up to the job anyway. He was apparently merely the vehicle to get George H.W. Bush in place.

All of this, and we still seem to function, more or less, as a country. We’ve still got the bombers going, murdering innocents abroad. We still have a president who still gives a SOTU address every year. The office of president still has power even if the occupant is a mere captive, an actor.

But the office matters to a lot of people, and that confuses me. The impotence of the occupant of the White House and the power of the office itself offer an interesting contrast. It is 2015 now, and next year we’ll vote again, and the next occupant of the White House will be shown to us in the coming months. He or she has already been selected. It might be a fresh face, it might be Hillary. It might be some governor, or some aristocrat like Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney. Or someone yet to be revealed.

Obama was selected for office long before 2008. His 2004 convention speech was a non-event, but by power of suggestion we learned it was a just a remarkable speech by an up-and-comer. We then learned that This guy had presidential timbre, again by power of suggestion. Given a few hundred million to pretty him up, by the time he walked on stage in Grant Park in Chicago, we really thought we had something new and different. I thought that too.

He was Bush III, as it turns out, and the brilliance of his strategists’ scheming was this: He was able to carry forward with the Bush agenda because he was black. Democrats were so caught up in the moral superiority game (they had, after all, elected a black president for the first time in history!) that they forgot to pay attention to what the man was actually doing. Any criticism likely brought scrutiny under our hoods – are we harboring racist thoughts? It was simply brilliant.

But again, my confusion. Obama does not matter. He’s just a tool, a puppet on a string, like those before and yet to come. He no more makes policy decisions than I do, nor does he ride herd on cabinet or send out Seals to kill bad guys. He is the point man for a powerful faction. One of many.

And it appears to me that faction also brought us George W. Bush and 9/11, all the new and ongoing wars, and that they’ve been at the reins now for at least fourteen years.

But here is something interesting that may have passed without notice:

Coming out of his silence, the honorary chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, Leslie H. Gelb, sounded the alarm. He said that “the Obama team lacked basic instincts and judgment to lead the national security policy in the next two years.” And he continued, on behalf of the US ruling class as a whole: “President Obama needs to replace his team with strong personalities and experienced strategists. He should also place new people as Senior Advisors to the Secretaries of Defense and State. And he must finally implement regular consultations with Bob Corker, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and John McCain, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

The CFR is a powerful group having far more impact on who holds power in Washington than any election, and Gelb speaking up has to be seen as loss of patience. I want to read good intentions into this move, perhaps frustration at attempts by the current faction in power to trigger a new Cold War or drive the world economy into the ditch via oil prices. Whatever it is, Chicago is stirring, and ramifications will begin to appear in the near future. It bears watching.

Gelb has in mind the following people:

Thomas Pickering (former ambassador to the United Nations), Winston Lord (former assistant to Henry Kissinger), Frank Wisner (unofficially one of the bosses of the CIA and incidentally Nicolas Sarkozy’s stepfather) and Michèle Flournoy (the President of the Center for a New American Security. Then, Republicans Robert Zoellick (former head of the World Bank), Richard Armitage (former assistant to Colin Powell), Robert Kimmitt (probable next boss of the World Bank), and Richard Burt (former negotiator on the reduction of nuclear weapons).

For Secretary of Defense, Mr. Gelb offers Rabbi Dov Zakheim to manage budget cuts, Admiral Mike Mullen (former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) and General Jack Keane (former Chief of Staff of the Army).

Finally, Mr. Gelb proposes that the national security strategy be developed in consultation with the four “wise men”: Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski and James Baker.

Familiar names all, old wine in old bottles, the ruling class without pretense of new faces and ideas. And, as Thierry Meyssan notes in closing, it’s a fine mix of WASPs and Ashkenazi to replace some blacks who’ve been messing up.

Democrats, get out your moral superiority scripts again. Your house is under attack.

We are in the New Zealand, once part of the old British Empire, and things are quite different here. Quite. It’s a foreign country though Americans don’t think of it that way due to language similarity. There are things I admire about the Brits, of course. They certainly bring gentility to social situations, their voices moderated and words polite at all times. And they seem to be better educated than Americans, or at least have that aura about them.

Of course, the Brits have an aristocracy, and that group has visited more bloodshed and suffering on the world than Stalin ever dreamt of. As a matter of policy, Brits always encouraged the second and third greatest powers around to ally and bring down the first, and then if at all possible sat back and watched the carnival. They spared no limit of other countries’ young men. In the First World War they simply ran out of money, and so had to sucker the Americans into it, JP Morgan assisting, of course. It was as pointless a war as was ever fought, not to conclude until 1945. Brits were behind the rise of Hitler, and the Round Table, known in the USA as the Council in Foreign Relations, operates as a real power behind the scenes in the US to this day. It is, of course, counterbalanced by other power centers, and not omnipotent.

But that is the nature of people and power. It isn’t that there was anything of terrible importance to conquer in the Boar War, for instance (where Brits gave us the concentration camp, interning and maltreating families of rebels to draw them out of the hills), but not to take what is there is to make it available to others. The power game knows no rules other than to prevail. When it became clear to the Brits that they would have to fight Hitler (they merely wanted him to destroy Russia), Churchill sent Stalin Hitler a coded message. He destroyed the French fleet in Tripoli, killing 1,243 of his day-before French allies. The message: “Look, Adolfo, I am every bit the nasty mother you are, and then some.” Indeed.

Dresden was another master stroke – Brits and Americans avoided nearby military targets, and instead concentrated on killing as many civilians as possible. Dresden was a refugee center for people fleeing the advancing Red Army. It was a massive war crime, but one of hundreds. We know about Dresden for some reason, and not about the scores of other cities the Allies attacked. Love them Brits, of course, and Americans are their spawn.

That’s just the way it is. Humans are, unleashed by proper bounds, a ghastly cruel species. Brits bug me more more than other races, however, as they as so genteel at the same time, patting your back and consoling you as they pee down your leg. But that is what we are, us humans, in different forms and manifestations.

All that is OK. that’s the human condition. There are two other things bugging me about the Brits: Eggs Benedict, and putting damned mayonnaise on everything. I curl into a ball at the taste of Hollandaise sauce, and bloody barely cooked runny egg yolks give me goose bumps.

Other than that, I am OK with the Brits. They are just like the rest of us, only more cunning.

Cuban President Raul Castro is demanding closure of Guantanamo and return of land illegally seized as part of the normalization of relations between the two countries.

The Obama administration has said it wants reform of Cuba’s one-party system as a part of the process, making no offer of any reforms in the US one-party system in return.

See link at Daily Mail, a British government-controlled news source.

Queenstown is a small resort town of perhaps 30,000. The heart of the place is a merchant district with shops, restaurants, bars, all very expensive. I needed some socks, as I forgot to pack more than wool hikers, and I will not divulge how much I paid for two pair other than to say that it is comparable to a tank of gas right now in the states.

I also wondered where they buy their toilet paper, and we discovered a grocery store this morning that sells such basics, outside the tourist district. There is a tram up a steep hillside to a restaurant, and hang gliders and a bird refuge up there. It is $45 to take the tram, and an all-day pass to the kiwi reserve is $65 or so. So we are just walking about enjoying the free parks and stuff, waiting to meet our group tonight and head out on Milford tomorrrow. There will be no Internet for five days, always a cleansing experience.

We know nothing of the other 19 people in our group, but have found in the past that hiking groups are generally lively and interesting.