The Narco State Rag
This feature was written July 13, 2010. The situation in Afghanistan is little better. If we leave, the country falls into chaos. If we stay, we spend money we don’t have. It is a bitch.
Some people euphemize bitch by saying that something is a bear. Across the frontier from Afghanistan, the Russian bear is dealing with a heroin epidemic. Some say the United States suckered the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan in 1979. The disastrous war that followed led to the fall of the Soviet Union. We are still dealing with the karma.
Tom Dispatch has an audio feature about Afghanistan, and the many unanswered questions about our war there. We invaded Afghanistan to get revenge for 911, and looked for a reason later.
At the 3:06 mark on the tape, when Tom makes a comment Afghanistan being a narco state. PG had a flash of understanding about the reason behind this war. This may even have been powerful enough to ignore the reports about a terror strike in September 2001, and let 911 happen.
The rumors of CIA involvement in drug trafficking are wide spread and long term. When planes went to Central America in the eighties to bring arms to the contras, they came back to the United States loaded with cocaine. There are stories of collusion with the government in Cuba. There are many, many more stories about connections between the US government and the drug trade.
When the Taliban took over Afghanistan, they cracked down on the poppy farmers. Much of the raw opium for heroin/morphine/opium is grown in Afghanistan. This was not a pleasing for the CIA.
Could it be that the real reason for our involvement in Afghanistan is to ensure the flow of narcotics into the hungry world? This would be a big cash cow for the CIA, although not enough to justify the amounts of money being spent on the conflict.
Pictures are from “The Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library”.
Al Pieda
These days, PG is up at 5:30 am., He hits the road at 7:45. On this Thursday, he was downloading files from “The Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library”. Some of their fine images accompany this report. While his eyes and fingers were busy, his ears were listening to Glenn Loury and John McWhorter, a.k.a. the black guys on Bloggingheads.tv.
The problem with multi tasking with tbgobh is when you hear something that requires a sound clip. You have to interrupt your downloading to create a dingalink. Doctors Loury and McWhorter like to talk about the quandary of being a proud black man, and what role to let it play in your life. To them, many people are more concerned about their race than they are other parts of life, to their detriment. Not everyone is pleased by what they have to say.
PG has mixed feelings. He doesn’t think much about things in terms of being a white person. Is this the way it is, or is it white privilege? Life can be confusing.
At some point, the conversation turned to Wayne Williams. He was convicted of killing two of the missing and murdered children in 1982. PG had heard, somewhere, that DNA testing was going to be done on Mr. Williams. Then nothing more was heard. What would Mr. Google say about this? It seems as though DNA testing “strengthens” the case against Mr. Williams.
This is part of the problem of working on the internet. You have access to amazing collections. You are also tempted every minute. There are millions of ways to kill time online. If you don’t stay focused, you will never get very much done.
After the Wayne Williams search… or maybe before … PG thought of a conversation he had the day before. Someone said that Ann Coulter had been attacked onstage, and her body guards pulled the attackers away. There were supposed to be videos available.
A youtube search of “Ann Coulter attacked” brought up the embedded video. This was the work of Al Pieda. “… an international terrorist group consisting entirely of pastry chefs. The organization consists of clandestine cells known as “bakeries,” which are believed to operate mostly within Estonia, Albania, and the less-interesting parts of Iowa but mostly in the Wigan area. Al Pieda has claimed responsibility for several heinous crimes, including the assassination of Betty Crocker in 1996,”
The Silly Remarks Of The President
Tuesday was the sesquicentennial of the Gettysburg Address. This is seven and a half score years ago, which is not as poetic as four score and seven. The famous speech was written on White House stationary, not the back of an envelope. The train ride to the battlefield was too bumpy to write on, so it was written elsewhere. No one is sure what happened to the original.
The text was published in newspapers, and became famous. Relatively few people heard the actual speech. Not everyone was impressed. The Harrisburg Patriot & Union said “We pass over the silly remarks of the President. For the credit of the nation we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them and that they shall be no more repeated or thought of.” The descendent of this paper, The Patriot-News, printed a retraction a few days ago. Better late than never.
Other contemporaries were critical. Presidents are politicians, with allies and enemies, and are not often beloved in their own time. The New York World accused Lincoln of “gross ignorance or willful misstatement” with his declaration of “four score and seven years ago.” The Democratic Chicago Times called the address “a perversion of history so flagrant that the extended charity cannot regard it as otherwise than willful.”
H.L. Mencken had a few unkind things to say about the affair. “But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination—”that government of the people, by the people, for the people,” should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in that battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. “
As the rest of the linked essay points out, one motivation for the Confederates desire for self determination is to maintain the ability to own other human beings. Pictures are from The Library of Congress. These are Union Soldiers from the War Between the States.
The Burning Of Atlanta
Around this time 147 years ago, Atlanta was on fire. General Sherman was preparing for his March to the sea, and wanted to destroy anything of value in the city. The fire is reported as being on 11-15 of November, depending on what source you use.
The November fire was the second great fire in Atlanta that year. On September 2, the city was conquered by the Union Army. The fleeing Confederates blew up a munitions depot, and set a large part of the city on fire. This is the fire the Scarlet O’Hara flees in “Gone With The Wind”.
After a series of bloody battles, the city was shelled by Yankee forces for forty days. There were many civilian casualties. General Sherman was tired of the war, angry at Atlanta, and ready for action. This is despite the fact that many in Atlanta were opposed to secession.
Click here to hear a lecture by Marc Wortman at the Atlanta History Center. Mr Wortman is the author of “The Bonfire: The Siege and Burning of Atlanta”. The hour of talk is fascinating. The pictures, with one exception, are from Shorpy. (Shorpy got them from The Library of Congress ) The 1864 map is from a collection of images at Georgia State University. This is a repost.
The Last World War One Veteran
Tomorrow is veteran’s day. It began as Armistice Day. On this day in 1918, World War I ended. On the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month, the cease fire took effect.
World War I was a ghastly bloodbath. Millions of people died. No one is quite sure what it was about. The effects of “The Great War” are with us today.
It is said that the German Kaiser was horrible, and had to be defeated. He was replaced by communism and the third reich. In the middle east, the Ottoman empire collapsed, and the British and French took over the territories. The British drew boundaries between Iran and Iraq, and administered a mandate over Palestine. The French tried to get revenge on the Germans. The Germans then had to get back at the French. World War II was the result. (This is vastly over simplified.)
Apparently, there is one United States veteran of World War I who is still alive. Frank Buckles lives in Charles Town, WV. On February 1, 2010, he celebrated his 109th birthday.
Mr. Buckles lied about his age to join the army. He was an ambulance driver in France, and after the Armistice escorted German POWs home. In 1942, he worked for an American shipping company in Manila, and was captured by the Japanese. He spent the next three years as a prisoner. Mr. Buckles was married in 1953, and bought a farm in West Virginia. “I never got in a hurry.”
Frank Buckles died February 27, 2011. This is a repost. The picture of Mr. Buckles is from Wikipedia. All other pictures are from The Library of Congress. This was written like Kurt Vonnegut. Mr. Vonnegut was born November 11, 1922.
Thirty Trayvons
The names in these pictures are children. They lived in Pakistan. They were killed by the United States. Unmanned aircraft routinely fly over Pakistan and kill people. There is no risk to any United States military personnel.
The background pictures are from a neighborhood fall festival. This is life in the United States. Some say that the children in Pakistan are killed to preserve this way of life. Kill them over there before they come kill us here.
Last year, a young man was killed in a Florida town. An enormous outcry was heard about this death. Pictures of the deceased were on every television set in America. Every one of the names in this feature is a young person, killed by an American citizen. Pictures of these children will not be seen on American television. If the POTUS had a son, he would not look like one of these children.
Road Rage Again
A slack blogger was driving down Button Gwinnett Drive, minding his own business. When he got to the light at Best Friend Road, an SUV pulled up in the neighboring lane. “You need to drive faster. The speed limit is forty, not thirty. Yea, go ahead and smile, I’ll kick your fucking teeth in.”
Button Gwinnett was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Less than a year later, he was in a dispute with Lachlan McIntosh. The gentlemen decided to settle the matter with dueling pistols, with fatal consequences for Mr. Gwinnett. PG was wondering if modern life was going to imitate history. The light turned green, and the SUV went forward, at an undetermined rate of speed.
A listener to this tale made the comment “no G-d no peace, know G-d know peace.” This is the spoken word, so the spelling is a guess. PG had the same reaction to this comment that he did to the angry young SUV speed racer. Say nothing, and avoid complicating discussion. Religion has been a source of misery for PG. Is this because of G-d, or the golden calf religions that man has instituted? Sometimes the best answer is to turn left when the light is green.
Grace
Soldiers from 150 years ago display the grace of silent, still memory. Today, America is thinking about another war. It will not be our men who die. We will direct our high tech weapons to coordinates on a screen. We will not hear the women and children scream. We will not be at risk, except for damage to our national soul. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. They are Union Soldiers from the War Between the States. That war was not fought with unmanned aircraft.
Israel And Syria
There was a feature in the Washington Post, 9 questions about Syria you were too embarrassed to ask. The WP is corporate media through and through. The 9 questions feature had very little to say about Israel. This is curious. Israel is a powerful country that Syria is, technically, at war with. As conspiracy happy as the Middle East is, you would think there is something to say.
PG decided to do a test. The text of the article was copied into a word document. A search was done for Israel. Out of 2900 words in the article, Israel comes up twice.
The Cold War is long over, and most of the region long ago made peace with Israel and the United States; the Assad regime’s once-solid ideological and geopolitical identity is hopelessly outdated. But Bashar al-Assad, who took power in 2000 when his father died, never bothered to update it.
Iran’s thinking in supporting Assad is more straightforward. It perceives Israel and the United States as existential threats and uses Syria to protect itself, shipping arms through Syria to the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah and the Gaza-based militant group Hamas.
As is often the case online, the comments are more revealing than the main article.
You also left out the threat that Iran has made about using nuclear arms against Israel if the US intervenes in Syria. Israel is being used as a pawn in this stupid game of chess.
Regarding the chemical weapon attack, only two options appear to be being considered – that it was the Syrian Regime or the Opposition forces that discharged the weapon. What about the third alternative – that an outside force such as Mossad (Israel) or the Iranians discharged these weapons … to provoke the United Sates into retaliation and involvement.
… the rebels opposing Assad are not all civilians who took up arms; far from it, most of them are former Syrian soldiers who deserted to join the rebels. And seriously, if you think that “most of the region long ago made peace with Israel and the United States”, you lose all credibility in writing about “the region” – you’re blinded by your love for Israel and don’t understand anything about the Arabs ….
Pictures are from “The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”.
America Stay Out Of Syria
Ten and a half years ago, America was about to go to war. Congress had passed the fig leaf authorization. The troops were waiting nearby. Babylon was fixin’ to experience shock and awe.
PG did not think it was a very good idea, and wrote his representatives in Washington to tell them about it. While he did not think it would stop the invasion, it is good to be on the record as being opposed.
On this Labor Day weekend, we are looking at another war. While ground troops are not discussed… yet … the world is expecting us to kill some Arabs. This time, instead of useless letters to useless politicians, PG is going to write a blog post. It might not stop anything, but it is an effort.
The two Senators from Georgia are Republican idiots. PG is not sure who his congressman is. It is either Hank Johnson or Tom Price. The best thing that can be said is that neither is Cynthia McKinney. A copy of this post might go to the four gentleman anyway.
The best case scenario is for America to send in a few high tech missiles, kill a few Arabs, and let the Civil War go on as before. There is little way to know whether it is good guys, or bad guys, that we would be killing. Is anyone fighting in Syria a good guy? Kill them all, let Allah sort them out.
The worst case scenario is too horrible to consider. Nuclear armed Israel is next door, and enjoys killing Arabs. Nuclear armed Russia supports Syria, and enjoys killing just about anyone. The OPEC nations are nearby, and looking for an excuse to jack up the prices. There are so many ways for this to get out of control, and so many who want more chaos.
Maybe, just maybe, this is a time for America to sit one out. Let Israel take care of herself. Why is using chemical weapons so much worse than depleted uranium shells? How is what Syria does worse that what Israel did in Gaza? What about the reports that it was the Syrian rebels who were using chemical weapons? How will we know we are killing the correct people? The time to think about these things is before America starts to kill women and children.
Pictures for today’s entertainment were taken at the 2011 Dragon Con parade. PG was horrified by the overcrowding at the 2011 event, and chose to not attend this year. The costumes are probably very similar to what was on display today. Very few of the playtime soldiers at this parade will participate in any military action in Syria.
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