other startling revelations...

You know, there are days when it seems there's no one human in cyberspace.... You look around the blogs and there is a sprinkling of commentary, but really no engagement. The news seems to be coming in sideways and everything has an unearthly sort of cast to it... no air... no essence. You get this feeling of vague unease or alienation there doesn't seem to be any real explanation for.... Maybe you're the last person in the world.... Maybe time froze around your house.... Maybe the space aliens finally got control of all the broadband switching stations... or the electromagnetic field around your computer finally penetrated your skull and the stupid rays are beginning to do their work on you for real....

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C-SPAN radio rebroadcast of Hillary and Barack one-on-one starts at 7pm Pacific... for any who care to join me in my thirtieth attempt to pay full attention to what these already-wholly-unacceptable candidates are saying....

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I made it! Significantly less agonizing than in the past, but I wish one or the other of them didn't directly contradict themselves every couple minutes. This means, of course you know, they are both lying. They aren't, maybe, any more aware of the fact that they are lying than your basic walking around human, but... breathe... they are both lying. How do voters keep falling for this shtick? Why weren't they booed off the stage fifteen "debates" ago?

So, well, anyway, I found myself discerning who was lying less and more, and whose lies were more egregious on balance. Obama pissed me off with his PC blather on immigration -- where he stepped all over his own "position" with each fresh utterance of disingenuous pandering -- and Hillary was at least willing to concede the, so-called, high ground enough to admit unequivocally that the masses of illegal aliens are driving wages down and taking good jobs from citizens. That counts for a lot with me.

But, that's really the only place where the lying thing broke in favor of Hillary. Obama and Edwards, as far as I'm concerned, put her to bed with the special interests money thing, and she can't recover from that, can't rehabilitate her self on that score... or the vote for the use of military force in Iraq... or the dirty tricks she's been pulling with Bill in the last few weeks....

Thank you for your solidarity in this my time of need.

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While they were debating:


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Well, so, maybe it will be my downfall, but I left the link to C-SPAN radio open and listened to senators grilling witnesses about the scene in Afghanistan. It had two conflicting influences on my frayed nerves. The droning of the participants is the ideal napping soundtrack, but the psychedelicization of listening to them drone about total fictions flying in from every quadrant of the mindscape has the effect of rendering one sleepless.

Okay. Okay. Let us just cede for the moment the monumental fiction of the official 9/11 story. Let them not be psychotic for invading Afghanistan in response to that. That's impossible, but just hang in here a sec. They kept yammering about the imperative of getting border security between Afghanistan and Pakistan! I shit you not! Men who've been there! They're psychotic! [If you're at all lost here, scroll down and catch Imran Khan talking with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! the other day.] So, leaving off the hundreds of quibbles over all the other goofy head trips, just that ONE aspect is enough to crispify your synapses. Then you let back in the actuality about the 9/11 stuff and mushroom clouds bloom from your ears in short order....

Beside having been an avid reader of travel books, with ready access to walls full of really good ones, for most of my adult life, I happen to own a copy of Idries Shah's Kara Kush, which is a fictionalized non-fiction about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and in it are some intimate descriptions of the impossibility of "border security" between those two countries, particularly, as we all should know by heart by now, in the eastern half of that border.
[click map for pictures of border areas]
Do you realize that I may be more qualified to deal with the issues discussed in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chambers yesterday than the senators and the witnesses who were there helping decide the fate of the whole population of Afghanistan? Are you terrified yet? If that little bit of information doesn't turn you to a life of frantic activism, nothing will!

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Oh, pfeh... I guess I should mention that there were some other encouraging bits in there. These men were trying to get to grips with the needs of the Afghani citizenry at all, and that was to be thankful for. I've mentioned before that I wouldn't have been opposed to invading Afghanistan for the purpose of halting the huge humanitarian crisis that had developed under the Taliban, especially if we'd kept our promises about seeing to it the population had access to FOOD while we were about it... but, no. So it's nice that our efforts to make things safe for American capitalists to thrive there have the huge benefit of making the place safe for the people, and even if these jerks are only using the security of the Afghani people as their excuse, that would not be entirely awful right about now.

The trouble comes with the making things safe for the drug lords and the heroin traffic that flows from there, through Iran, to Turkey... maybe I should start using "Türkiye" instead? Lots of Iranians are dying in the effort to stop that traffic, and, if you have been paying attention to Sibel Edmonds, that traffic, or a great deal of it, is traveling under our patronage. That really pissed off the Taliban too. But you can't cut off that traffic without creating monster hardship for the Afghani people! It's their only means of sustenance.

This is the short version. I'm leaving you universes of things to ponder for yourself.

It's inexpressible how insufficient to the tasks at hand our leadership really is, and what kind of damn masterpieces of cognitive dissonance we have to dream up to go to the voting booths at all....