Apologies - stuff, life, more stuff, money, stuff interfering with the blog

Meanwhile I have a new favorite blog, Wartard

Yes, it is a clone of another cynical war blogger who shall not be named here.

But damn, the cynicism just flies off the page and feels my body with venom.

Some choice quotes, in no particular order, on various topics:

When you give the average fucktard on the street a say in how countries get run, bad shit happens for rich people. That's pretty much why there are no real democracies left on the planet anymore. The only time true democracy showed up it was Athens in 461 BC and good old Pericles was initiating a golden age. US style democracy is all about providing the plebs with the illusion that their vote matters whilst the corporate oligarchy feeds them the information on who to vote for whilst also controlling the candidate list. Pretty fucking genius really.

Libya, under Gaddafi, supplied 10% of the Euros oil (the reason why the French and British got concerned for [sic] humanitarian reasons) and one thing about Libyan oil is that it is especially 'sweet'. That means it only costs a dollar to refine a barrel as opposed to most other oils out there (barring Brent North Sea crude) with high sulphur content. Those Canadian tar sands the US is in love with right now are dirty and the pipeline they want to run to Texas means the US is really starting to get jittery about the future of suburban voters. If shit gets too expensive that voting block might finally go 'off reservation' and elect a guy the corporate fucks have not already bought.

Truth is though, I'm pretty skeptical on the efficacy of protest movements in our current sci fi dystopia. I'm talking protest movements that actually achieve their aims. For instance, one million people marched and peacefully waved signs in London against the Iraq war and that changed absolutely nothing. The corporate oligarchy went ahead with their proxy resource war even when a sizable portion of the general public called bullshit on the reasons behind it. Entrenched power structures just don't give a shit what the plebs think anymore.

Back in 2003, we were living in a world where the corporate oligarchy still at least felt a need to come up with a WMD cover story so they could stake a claim in the heart of Mesopotamia's energy reserves. China and Russia hated it but couldn't do anything to oppose that resource grab. Fast forward to Libya in 2011 and the plutocracy didn't even feel the need to bother with costly machinations in popular media and conducted that proxy resource war unmolested by popular dissent.

Then came the financial crisis and the masses were getting restless so they tossed the plebs Obama, a handsome black guy who got the suit job where you live in a nice house in Washington DC and get to read the oligarchy's script while the corporate media snap pictures. "Hope and change". Yeah, right. Being a voter these days is like being some teenage punk kid shopping at Hot Topic, buying the corporate made 'rebel' T-shirt and missing the irony completely. Truth is, there are no voter choices that haven't already been pre approved by the entities that run our 'democracy'.

I swear, every vid I see of one of those happy exuberant guys has them firing off mag after mag of 7.62mm at the sky and not giving a single fuck. For hours. Everyday. And that got me thinking. How cheap is ammo in North Africa these days anyway? I mean, in a proper war, isn't ammo gold? Last time I checked, I can't remember seeing other 'freedom fighters' in other conflicts blasting the sky after victory. I don't recall the VietCong shooting down clouds when they finally captured Saigon in '75. Chechnyan rebels sure weren't gunning down the sun after they held back the mighty Russians for a while in the mid '90s . Maybe it's just an Arab thing to piss away ammo.

The Iranians really would like to up the ante as a regional player in the Middle East. It really pissed them off in April when the Saudis marched into Bahrain with tanks and started slapping around the Shia protestors there because they make up 60% of the population and suddenly wondered why they can't vote. That's a legitimate beef but went largely unreported in Western countries where it pays to keep your mouth shut about the Saudi's incase they tighten the nozzle on the oil wells to remind everyone whose boss. That would hamper the "economic recovery".

What is the nastiest, meanest, most lowdown, bloodthirsty, going medieval on your ass war happening in the world right now that nobody really gives a shit about and isn't in Africa, the home of wars nobody gives a shit about? What major war has racked up 34,000 dead since 2006 and has all kinds of torture deaths and indiscriminate killings of non combatants perpetrated just for the hell of it and for pure media attention designed to make regular people shit bricks? Need a hint? One of the battlefields is a mile south of San Diego.

Yeah, it's the Mexican Drug War.

ure, the Greek brazen bull or the Middle Ages breaking wheel offer up hellish death from the past, but seriously, Mexican drug cartels are offering up all new kinds of horrible today like slow decapitation, death by burning tire necklace and plain old live burial in the desert; so it's hard for the American Idol voting public north of the border to process the whole thing without flipping channels. There is a vague existential unease knowing that shit like that is going down just next door but nothing more TV watching can't fix. What's most disturbing is that the Mexicans south of many a gated air conditioned community in the US, are going medieval on each other in a struggle to provide Americans with sufficient nose candy, vein tar and weed to fill out their weekends with a proper mind altering drug arsenal.

US politicians can never say this because it requires honesty to admit that it is America's appetite for drugs that is the cause of the war south of their border.

The city of Ciudad Juarez was recently designated the second most dangerous city in the world after Mogadishu. Yeah, that's in Somalia, where the US lost two Blackhawks and the crews got hacked up with machetes. Juarez, second best death hole on the planet today, beats out Baghdad and Kabul and adjoins the US city of El Paso. The politicians are too busy in Iraq and Afghanistan, air dumping trillions of dollars for our 'freedom', while here at home Ciudad Juarez is inches south of sovereign US territory and is a war zone? Yeah, go figure that shit.

Go on, read the comments too, some of them are golden:

Let's look at the facts: By any credible estimate, and there are many, mexico is utterly dependent on narcotraffic. Essentially, the 1/3 of the Mexican economy that is as close as we could come to "legitimate" is acting as a giant critical washing machine for the other 2/3 of the economy that is drugs or drug-related. Let's look at that again: the illicit economy is twice as large as the licit economy.

(...)

As the legitimate economy fails to keep up with the growth in the drug economy, expect the violence to increase. In other words, the drug economy will continue to become more public as the comfortable washing machine becomes inadequate. This means more direct government involvement in tacit approval of drug activity, greater military confrontation, and more violence. Also expect this war to move to the US. Other Mexican neighbors cannot absorb the volume of drug money laundering. US banks already do, and the business model will necessarily become distributed financially in the US. Nobody, not the US government, not the Mexican Government, not eh drug lords, will allow the economy to be shrunk by 2/3. By comparison, the Iraqi GDP was reduced by only one third at the height of its decline during the current war.

As an aside, we have spent 330 billion US on new scanners at the airports. The total investment is expected to rise over 2 billion US within a few years for this effort alone. Not one, but several well-supported estimates have indicated that if 330 million US was spent to screen people with CRP tests and stethoscopes listening for heart issues, we would probably save a few thousand lives every year from cardiac failure deaths alone, let alone other causes. This is a few thousands of times more effective than any potential risk reduction from terrorism. This isn't ironic, it's criminal.

I guess that the US government has to be involved in the drug trade. How can it be possible for so many drugs to make it into virtually ALL the cities in there? And how do the hundreds of TONS of dollars make it to Latin America?

If the US government cannot stop shipments of tons of cocaine from getting inside the country, how will they stop terrorist from getting bombs in? They cannot stop illegal immigration, how will they stop actual terrorist from coming in the same way? Why molest its own citizens with TSA checks?

I will tell you why. It is bullshit. They want to keep the citizenry controlled and tame, and at the same time keep the drugs coming in. There´s BIG money to be made.

They do not want to stop the drug trade, and they want to keep fighting the fake war on terror until the US joins the ranks of 3rd world countries. What other explanation exists?

What can I say, we live in interesting times.