Email from Afghanistan

I arrived in Bagram Air Force Base (BAF), Afghanistan on Sept. 27th, 2008, and over the course of two days, turned in my ammunition and sat through briefings about vehicle safety, family discord, suicide awareness, and mental health. Collectively, soldiers call them the “don’t-beat-your-wife classes.”

BAF is a sprawling military base full of shipping containers, new construction, gravel fields, military vehicles, hangars, fast food restaurants, Port-A-Johns and strangers in Army, Navy, Marine, Air Force, French, Polish, and Egyptian uniforms, or with Lockheed Martin t-shirts, or Slavic accents and Kellog Brown & Root (a subsidiary of Haliburton) ID tags hanging from their necks. People would salute me and wear reflective belts at night, which, having newly arrived from the highly kinetic Kunar Province, felt ridiculous. (Read more of my essay on the atlantic.com)

What came from the G7 meeting?

Last week, after the G7 met in Washington, the markets rallied (then crashed again). I don’t know what came out of the meeting – ABCNNBCBS reported enthusiastically: “don’t worry, our leaders are fixing the problem.”

A second, less conspicuous wave of headlines about the meeting betrays its meager results:
–On crisis, Europe to US: ‘I told you so’
–Europe to United States: You’re On Your Own!
–Europe to U.S.: You messed up the rescue, too

Haider’s Last Interview

Jörg Haider, a charismatic far-right Austrian politician was killed in a car accident on October 11th. Since then, there has been rampant speculation about foul play, connecting his death to the politician’s outspokenness about holding bankers responsible.

From list last interview:

“Q. Highly-paid managers caused the misery. Is there sufficient cause to prosecute them for their irresponsibility?

HAIDER: Those who thoughtlessly dealt with entrusted money must reap the consequences. We need stricter oversight, a change of the criminal law, and a special courtyard for economic crimes. Those who earned gigantic sums of money are not poor. Their criminal responsibility must be established, then they must be locked up.” (Read more at rumormillnews.com)

Consipracy theories have been rejected by the Austrian police who said he had a blood alcohol level of 1.8.

SEE ALSO:

Haider widow believes death ‘not an accident’
The widow of Joerg Haider believes the far-right Austrian politician’s death in a car crash may not have been an accident and has saved his body from cremation for a second post mortem, a Vienna newspaper has reported. (Read more from telegraph.co.uk)

Gitmo prosecutor consults priest. ‘I am beginning to have grave misgivings about what I am doing.’

“I am beginning to have grave misgivings about what I am doing, and what we are doing as a country,” he wrote in the Aug. 5 e-mail, which the priest shared with The Associated Press on Monday night. “I no longer want to participate in the system, but I lack the courage to quit. I am married, with four children, and not only will they suffer, I’ll lose a lot of friends.” (Read more from MSNBC)

Censoring the Internet

–Verizon shuts down access to Usenet
   “Verizon has announced that they will be stopping access to tens of thousands of Usenet discussion areas including the very popular alt.* groups that have been around since the late 1980s.
   Verizon spokesman Eric Rabe said only a select few newsgroups/discussion groups would be offered to customers going into the future. It appears the decision is in response to political ‘strong-arming’ from New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo who wants strong restrictions on all newsgroups.
   Cuomo added that his office had found child porn on at least 88 newsgroups, although that percentage is tiny compared to the over 90,000 newsgroups that exist.”

–Free Nationwide Wi-Fi Network To Censor Political Websites
   “Two competing parties, M2Z Networks and the FCC, are jockeying for the rights to roll out the network, but both have already stated their intent to install filters that block out pornography and anything else deemed ‘harmful’.
   According to a Daily Tech report, ‘Both proposals stipulate that any free wireless offerings have mandatory content filters, preventing users from viewing any material that ‘would be harmful to teens and adolescents,’ including pornography and anything ‘contemporary community standards� deem as obscene. Free-speech advocates call this condition unconstitutional.'”

I predicted this in my Five Predictions for 2008.

Troops Deploying to America???

“Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT [of 3rd Infantry Division] will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.” (Read more from armytimes.com)

My reaction:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights . . . .

Interventionism, Militarism, and Debt, NOT Capitalism

This is very important. The financial crisis was caused by interventionism, militarism and debt, not capitalism. It will be blamed on capitalism, and government will attempt to seize oppressive new powers, or, even worse, a global government will begin to form based on the lie that our current crisis is a failure of capitalism. It is not. We must win this intellectual argument to protect our freedom.

Video here

McBama has been talking about global solutions to global problems. I fear this is the rhetorical groundwork for global tyranny.