Americans have been over a decade in Afghanistan, and no one has ever seen anything leave a poppy field and move out of the country to a heroin processing plant. In ten years.

The comment is sardonic, of course. The Taliban had the poppy crop under control before the Americans arrived, and since that invasion in 2001, new records are set on a regular basis. The US claims to be trying to stem the flow, but this is a lie. The US is there to protect the fields, as the drug money is an important part of covert operations for intelligence agencies. It ends up in Wall Street banks, London, you know, with the cocaine snorting set, as opposed to crack users, who often land in jail. War on drugs, you see.

Don’t kid yourself – the US is not involved in a war on drugs. Afghanistan, probably Mexico and Colombia too, are wars for drugs.

That’s your country, folks. That’s what the boys are fighting for.

The phenomenon we are seeing here is not new. The degree of self-delusion (if that is what it is) is impressive, saying “sometimes a year has passed without a single comment.” It’s deliberate isolation, the result of polarization. It’s also arrogance, but I’ve learned in my years of treading this planet that arrogance is a product of insecurity.

I have never wanted to hang out with people who only “discuss” things with people who agree with them. I have always wanted to take the fight to the enemy. In so doing, I’ve learned a lot, and have had changes of heart and mind on many topics:

• I used to believe in a thing called “peak oil,” and was wrong. I read scholarly books on the subject too, reaffirming my rightness on the topic before learning how wrong it is.
• I once bought into the notion that the Mob, acting alone, killed JFK. I was wrong. The books I read on that subject, attempting to make that case, combined were over 1200 pages. All they did was assemble selected evidence, ignoring inconvenient stuff.
• I used to think that the underclass is a victim of the upper classes. Yeah, that’s wrong too. Victimhood is overrated, and should not be enabled. (There are victims on this planet who need our help. Instead, we are bombing them, as we speak!)
• I used to have a whole lot more respect for feminists than I do now. Speaking of professional victims.
• I am looking cross-eyed at Chomsky these days, thinking perhaps I’ve stumbled on a fatal flaw. Long story, I’ll have to face that one of these mornings and write a long dreary essay on it. But my view of him is evolving.
• I find myself wondering if global warming, climate change and all of that is just another hoax. That’s why I never write about it. One, the science is beyond me, and two, it could be mere power of suggestion. I am susceptible to that, just like everyone.

These kind of attitudinal changes can only come about when people who disagree with each other stand toe-to-toe and have it out. We are all equipped with an automatic avoidance mechanism (seen above). We instead need to bore into those topics about which we have firm beliefs and not enough evidence to support them. Often enough the people with whom I disagree are right, and I am wrong.

But so what?!! Who among us gets to go through life being right all the time?

Oh yeah – Rob Natelson. He was always right, every word he wrote, and then he went into hiding. Big Swede – when the going gets tough, when you attempt to press him on a topic, Swede gets going. Out the door. And James Conner. He’s hiding. He’s afraid. He’s wrong about stuff. A lot of stuff. Like all of us. And he cannot face it. That is sad.
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PS: I do not know what kind of comments Conner has been getting that so upset him, but for the record, none have been from me. I have made no attempts to penetrate his fortress.

(I see this mentioned here and there, but wonder if it has gained any currency in mainstream US media. Cuba and Russia have agreed to reopen a sensitive electronic eavesdropping base on the island, a response to the US poking its nose into every telephone conversation on earth. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.)
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The TV series Mad Men is such a beautiful metaphor for American life. On the surface it is about advertising, the seediest of professions, the one where people try to mislead us with emotional symbols into making poor decisions. Second, it is about Don Draper, and I cannot imagine this is not intentional: He is running from himself. He grew up in a whore house.

There comes a time in our growing up process where we confront reality, if we grow up at all. I think Don Draper is going to do that in the final half-season, and hope that he becomes a complete human, full of faults and favors, but more aware of himself and his surroundings.
Continue reading “Madmen” →

See Footnotes
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To: NPR Ombudsman
From: Mark Tokarski
Regarding: Weekend Edition, Sunday, July 20, 2014

On your Weekend Edition this morning … the host was interviewing someone at the crash site of the airliner in Eastern Ukraine, and made two inferences: 1) Rebels are stealing bodies, and 2) (and this was so clever), he repeated an accusation by Kiev that rebels were altering the crash site. The on-site person said yes, indeed, people had said that wreckage seen the day before was not present the following day.

Got that? Here’s what we know: A reporter gave second-hand knowledge of missing debris. The host allowed the Kiev accusation through without a rebel response to the accusation. The inference of the news report: Rebels have altered the crash site.

What do we know for certain? Nothing. Agents of CIA, MI6, or Kiev could have as easily removed debris, stolen bodies, altered the crash sites. But NPR only infers rebel activity in the matter.

NPR is subtly inferring the the rebels shot down the airliner.
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(This is not part of the message to the ombudsman): It was apparent, reading between the lines, that the crash site is not secure, so that the investigation is already compromised. Further, NPR reported that official investigative work has not yet started, that the investigators are in Kiev. I think it safe to say that the anti-Kiev rebels are going to get the Lockerbie treatment.
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Score one for the rebels: They have control of the black boxes.

“Aircraft parts looking like black boxes were found at the site of the plane crash. They are currently in Donetsk, in the People’s Republic’s (DPR) government headquarters, under my personal control,” Aleksandr Boroday, the republic’s prime minister, told reporters.

The self-defense forces are ready to hand the data recorders over to international monitors “in case they arrive,” he said.

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JC has some links in the comments below that are quite informative, one of a video put out by the Ukrainian government that asserts evidence that the rebel forces shot down the airliner. The problem with it is that it was, ahem, made before the plane crashed – it is time-stamped, and has been pulled down, but just like Dr. Laura’s nude pictures, gentlemen, once they go out, you cannot get them back.

The other is some mathematical/calculus analysis of the crash, which is above my pay grade.