The outlawing of narcotic drugs at the start of the Twentieth Century, the turning of the matter from public health to social control, coincided with American’s imperial Open Door policy and the belief that the government had an obligation to American industrialists to create markets in every nation in the world, whether those nations liked it or not.
For me 2015 began with a suicide. I was on my way to Berlin with an early train just after midnight on 1 January. About 8 am our connecting train from Hamburg stopped approximately 25 kilometres down the line because someone had apparently gotten up early that morning and travelled to a point in the middle of nowhere to jump in front of it. Since our train was approximately 45 minutes late, this person not only had to contemplate his way to the tracks but wait perhaps impatiently for the wheeled engine of his demise to do its work.
Jose Saramago wrote a novel translated as The Stone Raft, published in 1986. It appeared in English in 1994. The story is quite remarkable if simple. One day it appears that the entire Iberian peninsula—for the “geographically challenged”, that is the land mass comprising Spain, Portugal and the British dependency of Gibraltar– ruptures and begins to separate from the rest of the European peninsula. Quite independently several inhabitants of this land mass had premonitions of this bizarre event.
The New York Times is a very good newspaper, except where ideology and party line demands intrude. Unfortunately these intrusions occur often and are of great importance. The Times is the paper of record of an imperial superpower whose leaders have long and regularly flaunted international law and used their great military and economic power recklessly, in good part because they can get away with it. They push and push, eventually starting or provoking a war when their target refuses to surrender (see Gareth Porter’s Perils of Dominance).
Jimmy Carter called a war waged in Vietnam by the United States — a war that killed 60,000 Americans and 4,000,000 Vietnamese, without burning down a single U.S. town or forest — “mutual” damage. Ronald Reagan called it a “noble” and “just cause.” Barack Obama promotes the myth of the widespread mistreatment of returning U.S. veterans, denounces the Vietnamese as “brutal,” and has launched a 13-year, $65 million propaganda program to glorify what the Vietnamese call the American War:
Peter Coyote is speaking from within electronic maze of my 46″ Magnavox flat screen television set. The program is a three part series called “Prohibition”. Public Broadcasting Service. An expose’ of the idiocy behind The Volstead Act which was passed by congress to enforce the eighteenth amendment. Typical government overreach, complete with a large overdose of pandering to special interests. A classic misguided attempt at legislating morality. Ninety-five years later I’m toasting the utter failure of the endeavor with a glass of Lindeman’s bin 50 Southeast Australian Shiraz. $2.99
On November 12, 2014 the American Psychological Association commissioned a study of the organization’s relationship with its own ethics guidelines, the national security establishment’s interrogation practices, and torture. Now released, the report by David H. Hoffman and others1 confirms the APA’s complicity in Department of Defense programs and the APA’s intentional misrepresentation of its role, deluding its membership and the American people.
All right, I know it may be just a tad presumptuous for an unknown writer with little formal education to tackle a job like penning what just might be the most important document in the history of mankind, but somebody needs to do it. Given the likelihood that humans are on the verge of extinction, either by way of World War III or greed-induced climate catastrophe, it is high time for a human from the slave class (99%) to step up to the plate, take the bull by the horns, and make hay while the sun shines. So to speak. Frankly I’ve got nothing better to do, and I’m a little concerned abo
Lately I find that my frustration with the level of idiocy on the part of this planet I call home is so great that writing has become nearly impossible. A recent article by Andrew Vltchek titled “In the USA-I Cannot Write” gave me comfort. I’m not alone. Here in the belly of the beast, among the zombie-fascist, gun-totin’, flag-wavin’ hordes of fellow Americans I spend my days in fearless loathing. Fearless because after living for two-thirds of a century I have little to fear other than a long painful death, being shot full of lead, or a terminal case of disgust.
When the plane was landing in Hanoi, I began to cry tears of joy to finally see my motherland and land of birth again. Later, I would realize that my tears were like the downpour of rain nearly every night that week of summer I was in Hanoi. To be in Hanoi was special to me because it was my grandmother and father’s birth city. During the first part of my journey, “Uncle” Quang (Trần Huy Quang), a Vietnamese writer who had served in the North Vietnamese Army during the U.S. war in Vietnam, took care of me and took me to Sapa, Ha Long Bay, around Hanoi and to Vung Tau.
