The US has tried to assert its colonial dominance over the internet, and has acted as though it is its domain since the beginning. That has had a lot of policy implications, and has created a “karma debt” that I think we are only starting to confront.
In Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes [wc] he writes at one point that what the US needed was an intelligence agency, but what it got was a “Department of Dirty Tricks.” [Read more…]
Qasem Soleimani had a “bad guy” nickname; he was “The Shadow Commander.”
When I was in high school, we were assigned to read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and we also watched the movie so we could discuss the relationship between movie versions and books; it was a great class.
It looks to me like the Trump administration thinks it’s going to announce a big peace deal and exit with honor from Afghanistan, just in time for the 2020 election campaign.
MK-ULTRA was one of the CIA’s programs devoted to mind-control. It became part of the whole “mind control” memeosphere related to “manchurian candidates” in the late 1950s/early 1960s.
Anyone who heard about the night raids in Afghanistan should have been worried: it marks a shift from trying to engage an enemy on clear ground to hitting them where they live. As someone who grew up during the war in Vietnam, it’s hard not to think of “Search and Destroy” missions and the Phoenix Program.
It’s not going to take very long, I predict, before the FBI will have the guy who mailed fake bombs to CNN, Obama, Hillary Clinton, and left one at (or was it mailed?) George Soros’ house.
Bob Moore asks me to comment on an article about propaganda and security/intelligence. [article] This is going to be a mixture of opinion and references to facts; I’ll try to be clear which is which.
Fake news. So what? Doesn’t everyone realize that all news is fake to some degree or another? Yet, we are supposed to get excited about it, because it is the reigning popular explanation for the spectacular failure of the American political system.