02.08.15
Posted in Bombing Paupers, Culture of Lickspittle at 2:33 pm by George Smith
Being one of this country’s national security professionals isn’t much of an accomplishment. It means you exist as a convenience to any of the vast machines — the intelligence community, the arms manufacturers, the Pentagon. Your only purpose is to serve in the furtherance of them.
And it doesn’t matter how disastrous the outcome. It’s obvious being wrong or failure are words which no longer hold any meaning.
Here’s Kenneth M. Pollack in the New York Times this week:
The good news right now is largely on the military front. Iraqi, Kurdish and American forces appear to be turning the tide against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.
American air operations have inflicted heavy losses on the group — killing its fighters, destroying its equipment, disrupting its command and impeding its movements …
American military officials in Iraq tell me they are confident that a smaller, revamped Iraqi Army will be ready to begin big operations to retake Iraq from the Islamic State in the next four to eight months. Kurdish and Iraqi forces have largely secured Baghdad and its environs, made gains in the cities of Baiji and Samarra, cut off the road by which the Islamic State was supporting its garrison in Mosul from its base in Syria, and are encroaching on Mosul itself. In six to 18 months, the Islamic State may be driven out of Iraq altogether.
Sound familiar? It should. Six to eighteen months equals one to three “Friedman units.”
“Kenneth M. Pollack, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, is the author, most recently, of ‘Unthinkable: Iran, the Bomb, and American Strategy,’ ??? reads the Times’ description of the column’s author.
Publishers have done very well by Kenneth M. Pollack of Brookings. Even though he’s been one of the most spectacularly wrong “experts” on the necessity of war with Iraq and on everything else, he suits the needs of the American war machine so nicely, whatever he writes tends to get a lot of publicity.
And it has never mattered that it has little relationship with reality.
The US government, under the Bush administration, made him a best-selling author for “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq,” a book that can accurately be described as an elaborate rationale for war crimes.
Its existence, and continuing books, are also an indicator that the Brookings Institution, once alleged to be a think tank of some repute, is nothing more than a retirement home for circus clowns who, on occasion, are dragged out to be of use to the country’s war-making apparatus.
Here’s Ezra Klein, alleged to be another person of considerable intellect, trotting out ol’ Evergreen Ken as late as 2013:
Pollack comes off much as he did in his original book: curious and questioning. He worries openly about what he got wrong and what he could have done better.
And here’s my take, one that noted The Threatening Storm was then worth a penny a copy on Amazon. Which seemed and seems high.
I said Ken Pollack is a symbol for our time. I wasn’t fulsome enough. He’s a terrific symbol, the best money can buy.
If you ever read The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam’s famous chronicle of the Vietnam War and the Johnson administration, toward the end he frequently writes about the superciliousness and mocking laughter that came out of the press corps when faced with prognostications and estimates on the enemy and how the war would turn the corner in another few months, or a year, or something.
Pollack writes of the “revamped Iraqi army.” It reads just like numerous claims about the ARVN in the mid-Sixties.
Without a spectacular bombing campaign against the usual enemy with no anti-air capability, it would be just as good.
There are big differences between now and then. Vietnam effectively destroyed the Johnson administration. The Democratic Party was taken down by collateral damage.
In the intervening period the US military learned that to conduct “partial war” at any time, it had to remove itself from oversight and make the number of people who would actually wage war only a fraction of the populace.
It was successful in this. It can wage measures of partial war anywhere it wants around the globe with little or no risk of domestic unrest.
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02.02.15
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Ricin Kooks at 2:16 pm by George Smith
Not exactly.
But did I have you going there for a minute?
Blogs are over, I read somewhere, last week. I figured that’s probably true. And I’m just not designed for the instrumentation of the culture of lickspittle social media; that doesn’t work, either.
I had a few things but threw ’em away.
But today, here’s the latest in America’s strange but true and twisted love of ricin:
A New York City pharmacist who admitted to trying to make weapons-grade ricin and other legal toxins has been sentenced to 6 ˝ years in prison.
Jordan Gonzalez was arrested on drug-related charges in 2013. He pleaded guilty in May 2014 to knowingly attempting to develop, produce and possess toxins and to possessing equipment for producing illegal narcotics.
He admitted he had been assembling equipment and materials to produce ricin, abrin and other toxins at his apartments in Jersey City and Manhattan. Gonzalez also obtained weapons, ammunition, body armor and survivalist-themed manuals.
The outcome of this case is bizarre, particularly with regards to the sentence and the claims made concerning it.
Therefore, it deserves a bit of backtrack.
In May of this year the Associated Press reported on a raid and arrest on Gonzalez’ apartment that had been conducted half a year earlier, in November 2013:
A New York City pharmacist has admitted in federal court in New Jersey he was trying to make weapons-grade ricin and other lethal toxins.
Jordan Gonzalez pleaded guilty Thursday to knowingly attempting to develop, produce and possess toxins and to possessing equipment for producing illegal narcotics.
Federal prosecutors in New Jersey say the 34-year-old admitted he had been assembling equipment and materials to produce ricin, abrin and other toxins at his apartments in Jersey City and Manhattan. Prosecutors say Gonzalez also obtained weapons, ammunition, body armor and training manuals for violent confrontation.
The pharmacist was initially charged in November with trying to manufacture a controlled substance after authorities discovered he had made purchases through an online auction of materials associated with the hallucinogen known as MDA.
AP continues, quoting from authorities, that Gonzalez “purchased thousands of seeds containing ricin and abrin, and materials to extract and administer those toxins to others, including filtering equipment, respirators, glass vials, a spraying device and projectile weapons …”
Gonzalez had, it said, also stockpiled survivalist “documents” on the “collapse of the social order.” The latter, common stuff in 2015 America.
However, in the only evidence pictures from 2015 news on his plea agreement and sentencing that I could find last week, there is only this.
Top line, far right, boxes containing a bottle of what looks like hydrogen peroxide, an unused chemical flask for concocting, an unopened plastic-bubble of tools (a set of drill bits) and a few other things, in bags, unidentifiable.
What’s in the bags? Thousands of castor seeds? There is no way to tell.
Also on display, handwritten notes on “recipes for narcotics.” Boil morphine with acetic anhydride” to make heroin is outlined by authorities.
Here is another story, in the Bergen County Record, on the Gonzalez arrest in 2013:
Federal Drug Enforcement Administration and FBI agents swarmed into the Jersey City Heights today, arresting a pharmacist on drug production charges and then discovering a large cache of weapons, ammunition and acid at a storage facility at the Tonnelle Circle, officials said.
Jordan Gonzalez, 33, formerly of Jersey City and now of New York, was arrested after law enforcement agents descended on a Bleecker Street building early this morning, New Jersey U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman announced today.
He is charged with attempting to manufacture methylenedioxyamphetamine (MDA) and possession of chemicals and materials to manufacture a controlled substance, officials said.
Later, federal agents moved to the U-Haul on Tonnelle Avenue, where a large amount the weapons, ammunition and acid was found …
“Several sources said that when officials first responded to Bleecker Street, investigators were looking into suspicions involving the chemical or biological warfare agent ricin. Federal officials would not confirm that and said they had no information to release on the matter. The charges do no [sic] reflect the discovery of ricin,” continued the AP.
The Department of Justice’s statement on the matter, another case involving a joint anti-terrorism task force, is here.
“From Sept. 18, 2011, through March 19, 2013, Gonzalez purchased thousands of seeds containing ricin and abrin, and materials to extract and administer those toxins to others, including filtering equipment, respirators and glass vials,” it reads.
It continues to elucidate an armory of what would be Kurt Saxon-approved survivalist materials appropriate for the usual stories about the imminent collapse of US civilization and the need to defend oneself, or to have arms of all kinds at the ready to pre-emptively attack enemies.
“On Nov. 8, 2013, while living in Manhattan, Gonzalez purchased one kilogram of sodium azide …” reads the Department of Justice. It’s a compound which is not only an acute poison, but also explosive.
In news stories from 2013 it was said Gonzalez bought his materials, or most of them, on eBay. While I did not check, I doubt reagent grade sodium azide can be bought through it.
The Justice statement maintains thousands of castor seeds as well as rosary peas (for abrin) were recovered in the raids.
“The sentence imposed today on Jordan Gonzalez is an appropriate response to his efforts to manufacture and deploy toxins as deadly weapons,??? Paul Fishman, the US attorney in the case, said in the statement. “He was preparing for a violent confrontation that fortunately never occurred …”
Still, the entirety of it and the result, remains unusual.
During the last fifteen years, there have been no fatalities attributed to terrorism (or attempted terrorism, frame-jobs and attention-getting ploys) with ricin in the United States.
From Google, here are the trends in “ricin” used as search over the last decade, tied to headlines, all from results in the United States.
If one pages down, a map of the world, graded by ricin search is shown.
Curiously, Romania is number one.
I was curious about this. Turns out, Romania grows castor and exports the oil for use in organic cosmetics as a premium ingredient, a smoother and skin softener. In Romania, the processing is of “ricin zahar,” or its term for castor oil.
In France, which also lists high in search for ricin, it is known as huile de ricin, where it is also of interest as a beautifying agent.
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01.28.15
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll at 2:35 pm by George Smith
From the archives of the Philadelphia Inquirer, now on-line, a review of the first Dick Destiny album in 1986:
DICK DESTINY AND THE HIGHWAY KINGS Arrogance (Destination Records * * * ): It’s less arrogance than devotion that compels Dick Destiny to sing – his howl nearly drowns out the real reason to listen to this record, i.e., the guitar playing, which for all I know may be done by Dick Destiny (lack of credits on the album jacket there, Dick). Anyway, the lead guitarist knows his way around everything from blues to heavy metal and doesn’t condescend to either genre. If the lyrics have no purpose other than to hymn rock cliches – the road, love and rock-and-roll its own bad self – the music convinces me that someone in this band is in it for the passion, not the potential for stardom.
Rated by Inky pop music critic Ken Tucker over Alice Cooper’s Constrictor (“the songs are mostly dull, hostile twaddle”) and Stacy Q’s Better Than Heaven which generated the world-wide smash, “Two of Hearts,” and nothing else.
“Can the singer whose voice is strong enough to remind you of Madonna’s with voice lessons and the performer of one of the year’s catchiest No. 1 singles (“Two of Hearts”) – the song that brought disco back into pop consciousness – sustain such excellence for a whole album?” asks Tucker. “No.”
Oh, snap!
I got three stars doing it the home-made way. They got two.
What’s that you say? Buy Loud Fold Live?
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01.20.15
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 12:47 pm by George Smith
“I have much to learn from you, Obergruppenfuhrer.” If you’re not a younger fan boy of all things science-fiction or a member of the reviewing web press, that’s the line that sticks with you from the pilot of Amazon Prime TV’s The Man in the High Castle. And it comes in a scene where said Obergruppenfuhrer, an “American Nazi” in full SS regalia, patiently explains to an underling that a bloody and comatose man hanging from hooks is being beaten to death so his corpse will appear to the resistance movement as if he never gave up the goods.
“The Man in the High Castle” is a tv adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s old alternative history sci-fi novel in which Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan win the Second World War and partition the US into three regions — the west going to Japan, the Rockies being a neutral zone, and the east belonging to the Reich.
I read it when I was a teenager and although it won a Hugo Award for Dick in 1962, it’s not one of my favorites among many others of his.
In terms of fortune Hugos didn’t count for much back then and Dick struggled financially up until a very short time before his death in 1982 when money starting coming in due to the sale of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as the basis for the Blade Runner movie.
Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle is beautifully shot, dark and moody. But swastikas everywhere — arm bands on local every government officer, on road signs, even on pay telephones, and Americans dressed in jackboots, Wehrmacht and Waffen SS uniforms couldn’t help but remind me of an old episode of Star Trek, Hogan’s Heroes and Ilsa — She Wolf of the SS.
The plot moves slowly.
All there is to know as backstory is that Hitler is dieing of Parkinson’s disease and when he does, the Reich will end its peace with Imperial Japan, that a resistance is being kept alive by the smuggling of old film news reels entitled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy which show the Allies winning the war, and that a Japanese ambassador in San Francisco knows something very bad is coming because he casts the sticks and reads the I Ching, a Japanese Ouija board.
“Watching our conquered citizenry suffer under a cruel draconian rule that we’ve never had to endure, even if imagined, was still creepily potent,” wrote one very young and enthusiastic reviewer. (No link).
As far as American dystopia’s go, what’s shown in The Man in the High Castle is bullishly average, particularly against other recent tv series like Fringe and The Strain, the latter which also has a Nazi Obergruppenfuhrer. Besides, it’s not a stretch to think of Americans giving up and tolerating rule by dictatorship as long as they have jobs, cars and get to be on the security force carrying guns, now, is it?
There’s another unintentionally funny part, too. As armed to the teeth as this country is, there’s a conspicuous absence of the tools of “2nd Amendment remedies” in this version of 1962 America. The couple of freedom-fighters, main characters, we see just aren’t of the types that are convincing.
Yes, that’s a bit of nit-picking. But Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle isn’t good. Dick’s book didn’t have much an ending in 1962 and that wasn’t always a liability in many of his stories. However, now the 1962 setting, which was his present, is very dated in the context of American life and that makes The Man in the High Castle look artificial although there’s nothing visibly wrong with the sets. Its America, instead of teeming with people, is abandoned and relatively empty. Even the Nazi-fied period music is poor, more like camp to be precise. “Edelweiss” in NYC or SF in 1962? Please.
There might have been a way to re-imagine Dick’s book but this isn’t it. And considering what’s seen in the pilot, none of it bodes well for this television production, good graphics and Ridley Scott as executive producer or not.
Avoid.
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01.19.15
Posted in Bombing Paupers, Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror, WhiteManistan at 3:41 pm by George Smith
I’m not surprised Clint Eastwood’s movie about Chris Kyle, American Sniper, broke box office records this weekend.
Are you?
Only a minority of Americans have been involved in the forever war. But reverence to the military and service is a deep part of WhiteManistan’s character, I’d say strongly influenced by a universal nagging guilt.
So when a movie on the forever war comes along, particularly one made by Clint Eastwood, it has a great chance of success.
WhiteManistan hasn’t had many war movies to stir a righteous enjoyment in the last decade. I skipped Zero Dark Thirty but did see Lone Survivor which I didn’t think was anything special.
Americans have the military they deserve, one that runs itself with little or no oversight. In payment we’ve been asked to stay out of its way, pretend to like it, swallow the ill will and tragedies that are the consequences years later, give it any resources it needs and keep believing that all of it [fill in the blanks with your favorite myths, received wisdoms and stuff].
Buy me a ticket and I’ll review it here.
It’s 20 dollars in Pasadena.
Good-looking commercial mythology, seen watching football on Sunday.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, The Corporate Bund, WhiteManistan at 3:03 pm by George Smith
I’d still have only eighty dollars.
“President Barack Obama will use his State of the Union address Tuesday night to stake out a populist vision of tax reform and new middle-class benefits [to be paid for by a capital gains tax increase on the wealthy] — and practically dare Republicans to say no,” writes Politico.
Indeed, they have taken that dare & already said “NO!” It’s just theater.
And the President will be booed by half the room, as well he should be, because we voted for the other side a couple months ago and that wasn’t theater. Even though a polling says his popularity is at some kind of high.
So share this song [1] in defense of the swag of wealthy Americans. It never gets old. I even made the lyrics scroll so you can sing along!
1. I know you would never share it. I write it to be irritating. I’m fully aware that me asking someone to share something from here on the Internet is like asking for a new car.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll at 12:56 pm by George Smith
Bigger.
Dateline — Westport, October 1966 and the British invasion! The Yardbirds featuring the not yet super-famous rock guitar gun-slingers Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck had landed in Connecticut!
The Westport Staples High School auditorium was the famous rock group’s first appearance in the United States.
How did it happen?
It’s a remarkable story told in “The Real Rock n Roll High School: True Tales of Legendary Bands That Performed in Westport CT,” compiled by Staples grad Mark Smollin and the students who were there.
In 1966 Staples students Dick Sandhaus and Paul Giambacinni wanted to make their high school days special. And they had a subscription to Billboard magazine. So with the audacity of kids they pitched the idea of bringing the new cutting edge of pop music, rock bands in the charts, to Staples. And the principal bought it! As long as the two could keep the stars to an initial down payment of 750 bucks.
They did.
And so they booked the Beau Brummels, a California band then climbing
the US charts with a single entitled “Laugh Laugh.” The Staples auditorium was filled to capacity with screaming fans, kicking off what would be a long tradition of big name rock bands appearing there.
Tour promoters and record labels realized Westport’s high school was a great stage, one where the teen fans would show up and bands would get a warm reception.
So along came The Yardbirds, Cream, Sly & the Family Stone, The Doors, The Animals, Pete Seeger, Blues Image and many more.
The illustration in this post, excerpted from the book, is a collage of snapshots taken at the Yardbirds show.
In late summer I copy-edited The Real Rock and Roll High School. It is a good book, one of a kind describing a part of history from the beginnings of classic rock, something that happened nowhere else.
I thought of it as an oral history, a richly illustrated scrap book and fond high school memoir filled with pop art, concert posters, ticket stubs, local newspaper clippings, and many photos taken by students.
It was fun to do and obviously a labor of love.
In the process it also exposed the limitations of ebooks and publish-on-demand at Amazon CreateSpace.
If you read the standard news on do-it-yourself publishing, Amazon is the be-all and end-all, the perfect place for everything: Publishing platform, print-on-demand, ebook distribution and the website where you will build a career and following in front of the largest potential audience.
Not so fast.
Amazon CreateSpace can’t handle books like The Real Rock n Roll High School.
And the reasons are actually pretty simple. Amazon’s technology isn’t up to the challenge of sophisticated and complicated pages loaded with color photos, black and white imagery and text. It cannot make such a volume into an ebook for Kindle, either.
That’s not something you read in Amazon’s fine print. The author of The Real Rock n Roll High School had to find out the hard way that Amazon’s self-publishing couldn’t produce a good quality physical or electronic copy of a color dependent mixed-media volume on good paper, the likes of which you can still find by the hundreds and thousands in old brick-and-mortar stores across the country.
So how do you do it? Old school. The hard way, like book publishers have done for centuries. It turns out there are some things traditional book printing is still much better at.
Is there a digital copy of the book available? Yes, of course. As a .pdf, a form in which it looks very good.
But you don’t really need Amazon for that now, do you?
Here is the ordering page.
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01.17.15
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll at 12:38 pm by George Smith
At RockNYC:
Never speak ill of the dead. And so it has been for Kim Fowley, Hollywood impresario, producer, self-promoter and talent scout for the crass just-for-the-sake-of-it, third or fourth-tier glam rock artist, all of it over the span of half a century. In the obituaries everyone’s come out with praise and fond memories of a life goodly lived.
As organizer/producer of the Runaways alone, that would have been enough. In the last dozen years Fowley was a major character in three movies, two on the Runaways (one, the big famous Hollywood production with Michael Shannon with the vulpine producer, the other the not-so-famous documentary, Edge Play) and one about Rodney Bingenheimer, “Mayor of the Sunset Strip,” If Bingenheimer was the mayor, Fowley, as it appeared, could have certainly been its animal control officer.
“[Fowley] sometimes claimed to have been born in the Philippines in 1942 (many accounts say he was actually born in Los Angeles), which would have placed him there during the vicious Japanese occupation in World War II,” Billboard wrote dryly in a recent obit. So what if it’s fiction?
It’s a good detail and who would care if all the plaster stuffing up the cracks between the facts of Fowley’s art and business is somewhat made up?
The consensus of the death notices is that Fowley relished being thought of as a bad man with a heart-of-gold, that, perhaps, he wished he’d been American tv famous. But you get the idea he kind of knew it would never happen with bands like Venus & the Razor Blades, The Orchids (the Runaways redone), the Quick, the Hollywood Stars and, yes, the Runaways. Not even with enough albums to asphyxiate an elephant, a number of them big sellers in name. Not in Seventies America.
At least that’s what it looked like back in the Rust Belt while paging through Creem, Circus and Rock Scene magazines. Fowley always got great publicity. Heck, it was still great entertainment!
And so you see the print, the concept, the photos, the minor desecrations of American middle class pieties for short, amusing and sometimes almost anthem-like tales of garbage spied in the streets were actually better than the reality.
“Punk-a-Rama” and “Dog Food” as in, they ate it in place of cake, by Fowley project Venus & the Razor Blades read and looked great. And then the record arrived. You kept it but after scoring five years later you’d only played it ten times.
Fowley had hits. “Alley Oop,” a novelty by the Hollywood Argyles. “Nutrocker” by B. Bumble & the Stingers. The latter probably earned him the most money when Emerson, Lake & Palmer covered it on a vilified but stentorian live tribute to Mussorgsky sold at a promotional bargain price, “Pictures at an Exhibition.”
Believe me, laugh now, but that moved units in 1971.
As for Fowley’s glam rock trip, “International Heroes,” from 1973, again — looked real good on paper and in early rushes. There he is in gender-bender lipstick and eye-shadow, the poor man’s Ziggy Stardust but perhaps with a disease.
“Kim Fowley’s new album … will place him in the ranks of David, Mott, Alice and Lou in the hearts and palms of the American teenager,” reads Capitol’s press. In the palms? All right!
But you’re going to have to listen to it in the clips before crossing that bridge.
And you can see ’em here, believe me, you’ll want to, they’re short, along with the rest.
Or go to YouTube and type Kim Fowley. There’s no shortage of material. The man was made to be the video platform’s Ed Wood.
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01.10.15
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll, Shoeshine at 12:06 pm by George Smith
Nothing bad ever goes away for good here. Like turds, these things just float back up to the top of the great public punch bowl of life, again and again.
Mitt Romney wants to be President, again.
It’s hard!”
The guy, of which who said it, died.
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01.08.15
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, The Corporate Bund, WhiteManistan at 3:09 pm by George Smith
What you already knew, what I made a sermon and a song about, reported by one of the Culture of Lickspittle’s shoe-shine class poor man’s intellectuals at the Washington Post’s “Wonk blog”:
Most of America’s richest think poor people have it easy in this country, according to a new report released by the Pew Research Center. The center surveyed a nationally representative group of people this past fall, and found that the majority of the country’s most financially secure citizens (54 percent at the very top, and 57 percent just below) believe the “poor have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.”
[And a] quarter of the country … feels that the leading reason for inequality in America is that the poor don’t work hard enough.
Now go listen to the sermon, Jesus of America, and tell me it’s not better than anything you can read on the matter.
“[He] is not the one who fed the poor loaves and fishes. This is not the Jesus who liked lepers. He found the liberty, the land of liberty and freedom; we told him what to do.
Jesus of America says don’t feed the poor; if you do, they’ll come right to your door. They’re gonna wind up like stray cats, around your door on the floor, begging for loads of kibble and rich food. Everyone knows they’re just selfish animals.
That’s what Jesus said.
And remember, it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a poor man to get into the kingdom of Heaven.
Buy a copy of the album, Loud Folk Live, five bucks — cheap. Or review a copy. Or talk about it. Or something. Or not.
The New York Times continues its series, more or less described as Wrestling with the problem of WhiteManistan, in Sunday’s edition entitled, “Is Life Better in America’s Red States?”
The answer is “Yes.” But with a deadly qualifier.
It’s cheaper to live in the neo-Confederacy but it’s based on destructive model that ends in national entropy in the collapsed democracy. The economic success of New Dixie, if you can call it that, depends on continually depressed and compressed labor costs coupled with fossil fuel mining booms.
The latter also threatens quicker ruin from global warming.
The Times contributor recognizes this as a serious problem with national, even global, consequences:
But fracking and sprawling your way to growth aren’t a sustainable national economic strategy.
The allure of cheap growth has handed the red states a distinct political advantage. [The red state] economic system may be outmoded and obsolete, but it is strong enough to blight the future. The Democrats may be able to draw on the country’s growing demographic diversity and the liberal leanings of younger voters to win the presidency from time to time, but the real power dynamic is red.
“Despite their longstanding divisions, red state and blue state economies depend crucially on one another,” writes Richard Florida for the newspaper.
Florida seems to imagine there must be a solution. We must somehow learn to go forward.
But you can’t really speak the truth about WhiteManistan in a big newspaper. It’s too depressing.
There is no way forward in my lifetime. The division is permanent. The present is blight. The question is how fast it worsens in the coming years. And how much money one has to be insulated from the consequences.
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