We Who Do Right

     The mind, malleable to the extent that reasonable and/or good people can and often do hold moral positions antithetical to decency, rules as defender of one's actions, protecting itself and its user against disagreement and persuasion.
     A prominent politician commanding a world-gripping military force, operates from a set of well-established viewpoints: security maintenance, force projection, interpretation of Constitutional law not benefitting the powerless, Orwellian speech designed to mask true actions and intentions, furtherance of corporate power coupled with state power (i.e. fascism), control and monitoring of communications, pretending amiability to the public while practicing one of the darkest of jobs.
     When Blaise Compaoré, dictator of Burkina Faso from 1987 to 2014, was knocked out of power by a coup and popular uprising, the United States and Taiwan lost an African ally.  After just two days of street protests (compare what happened in Syria three years earlier), Compaoré and his wife left the country.  He had about a quarter of a billion dollars, so we shouldn't be overly concerned about them.  During his tenure, the Bush administration in 2007 began inserting a small number of U.S. military "advisors" in Burkina Faso.  By 2009, Obama had transformed that U.S. military parasite into a drone base, a command hub from which armed drones fly, able to cover the whole of Africa.
     Obama, like many politicians, uses a term that never fails to bother me: "violent extremists."
     Is violence itself not an extreme behavior?  When he and others use the term, he's of course referring to ISIS and other non-state enemies of the United States and its allies.  Using a Hellfire missile to kill Yemeni civilians is, I guess, from Obama's standpoint, not "extreme," though it is violent.  If the United States uses violence, it's fine, like when Joshua is instructed by God to slaughter Canaanites.  The controlled, clean, calm way of a man like Obama ordering death from a distance is regarded by some with admiration, his assassination of Osama bin Laden, for example, spoken of in the press as smugly as a football fan bragging about a quarterback's five touchdown passes in a single game.
     Last January, Obama met in the Oval Office with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, two millionaires smiling at each other and affirming their countries' mutual goal to destroy ISIS, to combat "violent extremists."  Turnbull said, "Archaic and barbaric though they [ISIS] may be, their use regrettably of the internet is very sophisticated.  And so I'm pleased that we're going to be working on even closer collaboration there."
     Wow, those barbarians really know their way with a computer.
     Does it seem as if Turnbull's mainly concerned about ISIS's computer geeks, as opposed to their fighters?  One thing standing out to me now is that Iraqi and Kurdish forces (real men and women armed with weapons from elsewhere) move against ISIS forces (real men armed with weaponry from elsewhere) in and around Mosul.  We're all people of this world; a barbarian means someone from the outside.  Modern communications connect people with information and ideas, cultures and contacts, globally.  The close collaboration between Australia and the U.S. that Turnbull speaks of when referring to the internet hints at ECHELON, the surveillance program operated by those two nations, plus Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.  Typical of a multi-tentacled espionage entity, ECHELON likely practices the kinds of Orwellian shenanigans employed by the NSA.  Obama and Turnbull, as guardians of this insane horseshit, in which we can imagine teenagers' text messages stolen and stored along with the occasional down-with-U.S.A. threat, want really to gain control of the infosphere.  With such control, some information against the state of things can be suppressed while other information, what the leaders of the free world want us to think, can be emphasized, even if it's propaganda.  War on terrorists, like those ISIS propagandists, thus means the actual underhanded attempt by first world states to gain control of internet freedom, meaning ISIS serves Obama's (and soon, Hillary Clinton's) purposes.
     To an alarming degree, the mainstream news media already cooperates with the corporate government (the fascists) by underreporting news from around the world.  Why doesn't MSNBC do a forty-five minute story, without bias, about Burkina Faso and its drone base with Africa-spanning reach?  Why do Obama and the Pentagon strategists want to menace that continent with such technology?  Did the al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) terror attack that happened on January 15 of this year in Burkina Faso's capital Ouagadougou have something to do with the nearby drone base and what it represents (as a hindrance to "violent extremism")?
     It's more important, I guess, to air uninterrupted, as MSNBC did yesterday, Donald Trump's content-free speech as he continues to go down like a listing ocean freighter.
     My sense of Hillary Clinton is that she'll be as bad for human rights in the Arab World and other abused regions of the planet as is her predecessor.

                                                                              Vic Neptune