I seem to have no hobbies. I am by nature very serious. This blog is work for me, at least when I feel I am doing it well; pain is normally required for me to feel I am giving a topic its true due diligence.
But I do have one habit that comes close: listening to stories from strangers. My God, bars are places to learn about humanity, about what people really think and how at least some section of them really live. This is a source of endless interest for me. I listen to stories from everyone.
Tonight I heard a war story, from a Canadian Combat Engineer recently back from Afghanistan. A young girl, perhaps 10, stops a patrol begging for food. They stop, and pull some food from their packs. The next trip by, the same girl–or one the same age who looked just like her–is wired with a bomb, and someone just in the range of vision triggers her when the patrol stops, killing her (of course) and injuring several members of his patrol. He saw this with his own eyes.
I talk with people often, some soldiers, and a consistent pattern is that the realities of the EVIL of our enemies are consistently underplayed in the media. Somehow, they want to believe that cultural Others are somehow noble, and our aggressive, intrusive forces intrinsically malevolent. This is nothing close to the actual truth of the matter: we try harder to do the right thing, in my view, than ANY military force in human history. I say this as a student of history.
In my view the Afghan people are goat-fuckers who in large measure deserve nothing but studied indifference. To the extent we should be there, it should be to prevent a repeat of the terror training camps that flourished under the Taliban.
And to be clear, can we really connect the dots, in terms of unwashed sister-fuckers doing the monkey bars, and the attacks of 9/11? Their pilot training was in the US. Their tactics were primitive and needed little in terms of training. What, precisely, are the threats emanating from Afghanistan?
I have argued before, and will repeat here, that in my view 4 planes were clearly hijacked by extremists, who were mainly Saudis. They were crashed into the Pentagon, World Trade Center Towers 1 and 2, and a field in Pennsylvania. Uniquely, to my knowledge, I have argued that United 93 was headed for WTC 7.
This thesis is plausible if you accept that flames do not cause the collapse of skyscrapers specifically designed to resist the effects of flames, in such a way that they LOOK as if they were blown intentionally.
In turn, if we consider that if Muslim terrorists were responsible for blowing–planting and then detonating explosives–three skyscrapers, then it is HIGHLY curious that they have not been able to do more since 9/11. Terror is easy. Logistically, a group capable of planting covert explosives would be capable of a LOT.
This in turn led to my unprovable supposition that the Russians were behind 9/11. I simply can’t believe Bush was, or the CIA, or Mossad. Once we deduct them, put dunce caps on the Islamic homicidophiles, and see who is left, that is the conclusion.
Put all this together, and in my view we should draw down 2/3rd’s of our troops in Afghanistan, and only send them back if the residual is in danger of being overrun. We should then focus on Human Intelligence, and the people selling America as an ideal spread the world over, that I have often called for.
My two and half cents.