“Says here that the Pentagon is going to start counter-acting against news reports that fail to shed the proper light on the subjects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Enon was reading one of the papers. It was still fresh in the morning, so he spoke with a reasonably clear head. He can come off sounding pretty elegant when he’s not drunk. “They are going to be presenting their own news stories through various creative media outlets. The suggestion is that the stories we hear normally are not the truth, rather lies designed to steer our opinions of the war in the wrong direction.”

“And that direction would be…” I started.

“Left,” he said.

“Of course,” I complied. “But isn’t it a little late in the game to try and turn the upcoming elections?” It seemed to me that that would be the only reason the Pentagon would be even remotely interested in influencing the content of media propaganda, that is to say, aside from what they normally do to generate news stories.

“I don’t think they can do much to spoil the momentum of the election at this point in the game,” he offered, pausing to take a sip from his pint bottle of whiskey, “but what really bothers me about it is that they feel it is necessary to manipulate the news at all. They are implying that we don’t get the correct news, and therefore they have to somehow tweak it in order to give us a different perspective.”

“So…”

“So it becomes a question of who’s truth is the right truth. And at that point the issue becomes less dependent on fact, and more on ideology.” Enon took another sip. He waited for me to respond for while. I was trying to roll a cigarette, but the tobacco was dry and the wind was blowing, so I was having a hard time of it. He finally finished: “So the Pentagon itself becomes its own media outlet because the commercial networks aren’t quite all on the same bus as them.”

“You can see that anywhere,” I finally told him, “about any kind of news. Each individual network has their own ideological versions of what to present to the public. It’s never clear whether they are trying to cater to an existing segment of the population, or if they are in fact trying to sway the population into thinking along their particular lines.”

“I think if you ever listen to A.M. talk radio you’d tend to opt for the recruitment side,” he said. “No sense in preaching to the chorus.”

“Probably,” I said. “But if you really listen, then it means that you are essentially pre-disposed to thinking along the same lines as them anyhow. They are, in fact, catering to a particular segment of society.”

“Then you’re saying that the Pentagon can manipulate the media all they want to, but the only people who will really listen will be the ones who want to believe it. And everybody else will just go ahead and believe whatever they want, because no matter what it is, they can find an outlet that presents it to them the way they like it.”

“In a perfect world…” I said. “But in the real world everybody’s probably going to head lock-step over to the Pentagon Channel just because it’s the Pentagon and not some damned foreigner.”

“And get on board,” Enon added, “because if you don’t we’re going to start tossing terms like patriotism and Christianity around.”

“We’ll be afraid to show our faces in public,” I agreed. “You’re going to have to send a runner for your whiskey from now on, because they’ll recognize you if you go downtown.” He pondered that for a moment as if he was really taking me seriously. The truth of the matter is that he usually has somebody else bring him his whiskey anyhow.

“It’s almost like North Korea, the way they control the media,” he said.

“Next thing that’s gunna’ happen is they’ll seal the borders,” I speculated. We looked at each other and shrugged our shoulders simultaneously. He took another sip from his pint, then passed the bottle over to me.

“Uncovered meat,” quoted Enon, as we were discussing the Australian Muslim cleric who apparently thinks it’s okay to rape women who are not covered in the traditional Moslem attire.

“I guess this isn’t traditional attire,” Kite said, pulling her shirt up and exposing her slender torso. Skute sat up and started to comment but I slapped him across the back of his head and scolded him with my eyes. He scowled at me, shrugged, then laid back down again.

“Oo, lookie this,” said Enon, after another article in the paper caught his attention.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Seems VeePee Cheney let the cat out of the bag about water-boarding as a means of extracting information from terrorists. Seems he thinks it’s okay. Bush had to do quick damage control.”

“You mean we’re still talking about the ducking stool?” asked Kite.

“It would appear that way,” Enon told her. This got Skute’s attention, and while I wanted to hit him again, I opted to let him speak.

“What’s a ducking stool?” he asked. Enon and I rolled our eyes at one another. We are both old enough to remember studying the Puritans back during our early years. I even made a working model of a ducking stool for a class project one time. Enon probably did too. I think all of us did back in those days. It's probably politically incorrect to do those kinds of things in grade-school any more.

“They used to tie a chair onto the end of a long pole,” Kite recited, remembering our discussion about it previously. “They would strap people in the chair and duck them in a lake until they confessed. If they didn’t confess, they got tired of holding their breath and ended up drowning.”

“Confess to what?” asked Skute.

“Being a witch,..” Enon started to tell him, but Kite cut him off.

“Being an idiot,” Kite answered frankly, her arms crossed, looking at Skute smugly.

“You mean they made people confess to being an idiot, and if they didn’t admit it, then they drowned?”

“Yup,” Kite told him, still looking smug, as if she expected him to admit being an idiot without the persuasion of such an elaborate contraption as a ducking stool.

“So they let you go if you say you’re an idiot? That’s easy enough. They wouldn’t even have to put me in the chair for that.”

“No, not exactly,” Kite said, giggling. “They didn’t just let you go, you know, cuz you’re an idiot, and they didn’t like idiots very much. They tied you to a wooden pole and made a bon fire out of you.”

“So if I was an idiot, they’d burn me, and if I wasn’t, they’d drown me? That doesn’t really seem fair.”

“I think they were pretty certain about you being an idiot before they even started,” Enon reasoned.

“Oh,” said Skute. He looked worried. “So when did they do this? Is this like when you guys were kids or something?” He was looking at Enon and myself, since Kite was actually younger than him.

“They still do it,” Kite said, teasing him. “That’s what the article in the paper’s about. In fact, we were thinking of making a ducking stool for you.”

“Can’t,” he said confidently. “We don’t have any lakes here in the desert.”

“We don’t have any decent chairs here either,” Kite pointed out. “So maybe we’ll just tie a rope around your ankles and throw you in the wash the next time it rains.”

“There, see?” Enon said. “For every problem there is a solution.”

I met Tjewe a couple of weeks ago, after seeing her around on South Sixth for the past several months. She was at the bus stop early one morning, crying and sick, after being up all night, presumably working but maybe not. She told me she was a heroin addict, and was at the time going through serious withdrawals. She needed help badly, but was hesitant to commit to any rehab program because she had this little dog that needed to be cared for. I wished I could have done something for her; given her a place to stay, clean her up, get her away from the drugs, that sort of thing. I bought her and her dog some food and drink, tried to encourage her to get some help, then left her there at the bus stop.

I hadn’t seen her since that morning, and wondered if she did in fact get into a program somewhere. To me, she was just too young and pretty to be messing up on the street like that. I was conflicted when I saw her and her dog again finally last night, there on South Sixth, at the same bus stop. I was glad to see her, after kind of missing her for so long, but at the same time I was disappointed that she did not clean up and get away from the street. She’s just too young and pretty for that kind of life. I wish there was something I could do for her.

“Says here that the U.K. is now the number one target for Al-Qaeda attacks,” Enon quoted the paper between puffs of his cigarette and sips of whiskey.

“We must be slipping,” I replied.

“I’m not really sure how that can be,” he said. “We’ve made a mess of everything we’ve touched over in the Middle-East.”

“Kind of an insult, if you ask me,” I said. “I mean we really, really try, don’t we? The Brits don’t want it, and I see them trying their damnedest to avoid any kind of distinction like that. But us, we really try. We want to be number one.”

Enon passed me the bottle, gesturing loudly that he thought I needed a swig. I took the bottle and sipped it twice. Kite had just finished rolling a joint, and showed off the crooked and pregnant looking hand-made cigarette. She was just learning how to do this. Enon gave her a nod of approval, but just enough to suggest that she still needed a little bit of practice. Kite presented the joint to me, indicating I should light it, which I did, then passed it back to her.

“So what are we going to do?” asked Kite. She likes to pretend that she’s actually interested in our discussions about politics and world events. “I mean,” she went on, “how are we going to get them pissed off at us again?”

Enon took another sip of the whiskey then closed his eyes. He appeared to be deep in thought, but he was really only holding his breath after taking a hit off of Kite’s joint.

“I think the British problem is that they tend to do things a little bit more correctly than we do,” Enon finally said after exhaling loudly. “While we only ever fuck everything up, we look like a bunch of clowns over there.”

“So they don’t feel like messing with us because we’re such screw-ups?” Kite asked.

“Sounds about right,” I injected. “They are probably just laughing at us, while they consider the Brits to be a viable threat.”

“Yup,” Enon said, holding in another hit while he passed the joint back to me.

“Seems like we used to be able to get everybody pissed all the time,” Kite reminisced. “We must be slipping.”

“Yeah, I miss the good ol’ days,” I said, laying back and looking up at the stars.

“Yeah, the good ol’ days,” said Kite. She laid back beside me, hissing loudly as he puffed on the joint.

“The good ol’ days,” agreed Enon. He stood, gulped one large swig of whiskey, then rested the bottle on my belly as he rolled over to lay next to Kite. I propped my head high enough to sip the whiskey one last time, then laid back again, closed my eyes and thought of how peaceful thing were.

Chubby Chavez of Venezuela vows to protect the Bolivian government in the event that anything bad happens there in the near future. Chavez reminds me of that crazy Korean Kim. Seems he likes to pump his ego by taking spots in the world news. Though not nearly as bad as North Korea, Venezuela is really just another under-developed shit-hole of a country, and frankly I think Hugo should keep to himself. He is not worthy of any kind of world spotlight.

On the North Korean front, the diplomats have moved from deliberate posturing back down to the typical disagreement over what to do in the manner of punishment for Kim’s alleged testing of a nuclear bomb. The end result is likely to be no result, and the world will continue on as if nothing really happened. But come to think of it, there isn’t really much that anybody can or is prepared to do, even in spite of the fact that we’ve had years of warning about this particular scenario.

“Let’s just wait and see what happens, then we’ll deal with it when it becomes an issue.”

Well, it’s become an issue all of the sudden, and still nobody is willing to deal with it.

“Well, you can have your nuclear bombs, but just don’t light them off in anybody else’s back yard.”

That, sirs, is the only next logical step. Let’s just see what happens next. Just wait.

It still remains to be seen just exactly what this madman wants. I mean you can’t hold somebody hostage without also having some kind of demand. What the hell does Kim want so badly that he has to threaten world peace? He wants direct negotiations with the U.S. But negotiate what? Makes no sense to me.

I run into a fellow from time to time who vocalizes all his internal dialog, which in itself is pretty crazy, but if you heard the disjointed thoughts going through his head, you would not expect to be able to carry on any kind of rational conversation with him. The guy is a stark raving lunatic. So given that analogy, I would not be inclined to want to open any kind of dialog with Kim the crazy Korean either.

On to Iraq, they want to pass a law that effectively segments the country into different semi-autonomous regions. The Sunni opposition fear that it will fragment Iraq, meaning the Sunni chunk of land will not have as much oil as the Kurdish and Shiite chunks. The Shiite opposition fears it will adversely impact national reconciliation, which means they aren’t though killing all the Sunnis yet. The Kurds, bless them, have been pleasantly quiet.

The British want to pull out of Iraq, claiming their presence in the country is contributing to the insecurity there. It’s a double-edged sword that, if they pull out, it’s exactly what the people presenting the security problems want, so that they will be freer to make more of a mess than things are now.

The conservatives in the U.S. call it cut-and-run. When thing get tough, we all go home. The truth of the matter is that the violence will not stop there until the Iraqis are ready to stop it themselves. It doesn’t matter how many British or American troops there are over there. We clearly aren’t doing anything to help the situation. The Iraqis can blame our presence all they want for the violence, but it really is just Iraqis killing Iraqis, and they will continue to do it whether we are there or not. We certainly aren’t doing anything to stop it. So maybe the British have a point.

And then in Afghanistan, the house speaker there is threatening to resign because of alleged corruption in the government. It is widely know that Afghanistan supplies 90% of the world’s heroin. Now, that’s a lot of dope. It couldn’t happen if the government wasn’t corrupt, at least not on that scale. And President Karzai has the nerve to complain about Pakistan harboring the Taliban on their side of the border, when it is Karzai’s government and the opium crop that funds the Taliban in the first place.

Now who’s stupid here? I guess we are. We don’t know what’s going on. Obviously President Bush doesn’t know what’s going on or he wouldn’t have invited Karzai to visit him in Washington last month. And certainly NATO doesn’t know what’s going on, since their soldiers are too busy fighting the Taliban to notice all the thousands of acres of opium fields across the country. Yup, them Afghans got us all spoofed. I guess I’ll just have to accept the fact that I am dumber than a bucket of rocks.

Lots of good stuff today, somewhat backed up, but we’ll try to get to as much as we can.

Shouldn’t fail to mention that some bonehead crashed an airplane into a building in New York today. Details are still sketchy. Hope everybody in the building is okay. As for the bonehead in the plane, well,…

Kim the crazy Korean continues to dominate the news with his claim to have tested an atomic bomb earlier in the week. It remains to be seen whether it was really an atom bomb, or if it just wasn’t a train load of TNT. Either way, he’s managed to get just about everybody in the civilized part of the world up in some kind of tizzy about it. A lot of diplomatic posturing going on all over the place. We’ll see how this turns out in the coming weeks.

Frankly, I don’t think much will ever come of it. The moron has been claiming to have nuclear bombs for a few years now, and nobody has done anything about that. In my opinion, I think the pudgy little fuck is some kind of egomaniac, and gets his rocks off by seeing his name in the news. He never seems to go more than a week or two without pulling some kind of stupid stunt. He clearly dislikes it when things go on in other parts of the world that distract attention from his little shit-hole of a country. So the question remains, after this, what could *possibly* be next? Now, maybe that’s a little bit scary.

In Iraq, they are claiming that 655,000 civilians have been killed since we invaded. They had it broken down into various categories like bullet wounds, roadside and suicide bombs, assorted other violent and sadistic atrocities. It’s kind of hard to imagine that many dead people. Also hard to imagine that they missed counting that many bodies, I mean they have to be buried somewhere, don’t they? What’s so hard about counting grave sites? Or are there fewer graves than there are supposed dead bodies?

Anyhow, 10,000 dead people per month is quite an astonishing figure. Why isn’t somebody crying genocide? Seems like a culling going on there, if you ask me. Shias and Sunnis culling one-another. To be honest, I don’t really believe the figures. Granted, there are probably an astounding number of dead civilians there, but you are talking about numbers along the lines of Darfur and Rwanda. It doesn’t make sense that this can go on for five years and somebody just now takes notice.

And who can forget the beloved and retired Congressman Foley. This will be known in generations to come as Foley’s Folly. He dominates the news here as much, if not more than the madman Kim of Korea. I personally can’t wait to see the results of this November’s mid-term elections. I won’t go as far as to predict the outcome, because as we all know, most of us Americans are a bunch of under-educated grass-chewing crackers, and it will take a hell of a lot more than one faggot pedophile in the Republican party to deter them from voting the party line. For all we know, half the members of Congress are faggots and child molesters, but we just don’t know about it yet. But like I say, it will be interesting if something like this is what it takes to tip the balance of power back into the Liberal side of the house and senate.

We’ll see how things go.

Skute came trundling into camp last night with a bucket of fried chicken that somebody had given him. We all ate pretty well. That is not to say that any of us ever really go hungry – it’s just that we don’t get buckets of chicken very often, and we appreciated it very much.

Enon pointed out that they don’t call it “Kentucky Fried Chicken” any more, that the name had been shortened to “KFC” at some point in the past. None of us were sure of how long ago that happened. I told them that the reason for the name change was because the State of Kentucky went to court and essentially “trade-marked” their name, then went about filing lawsuits against anybody who was using “Kentucky” in their own business names, demanding royalties from various entities such as everybody’s favorite old Colonel Sanders and his chicken empire.

There was some discussion about this, since nobody really believed me when I had told them what had happened. We all tried to brainstorm other examples of name changes in the aftermath of the Kentucky lawsuits. The only other one we could come up with out of hand was the Kentucky Derby. Its name has been changed to “The Run For The Roses”.

“Ohh,” Kite said, as this all suddenly came to light. “That’s what happened to the horse race.”

Enon was still skeptical about the Kentucky thing, but he decided he would check it out for himself rather than try and argue against it.

“You know,” Kite said, munching on a chicken wing that had been dipped in mashed potatoes and brown gravy, “I used to be an equestrian.”

“No kidding,” replied Skute. “I used to be a Pentecostal. I think I still am, but I haven’t been to chur,…” I thwacked his ear with a flick of my middle finger. It turned bright red very quickly. He held his palm against it and cowered away from me so I was out of easy reach.

“Owww,” he whined.

“Huk”, said Kite. “What kind of animals do Pentecostals ride?”

“You don’t want to know,” Enon told her. She looked at him questioningly with round lips and eyes, then shrugged her shoulders and went back to eating her chicken and potatoes and gravy.

Full of news this week. We’ve had a spate of school killings, which makes me wonder just what in the hell it is that triggers these kinds of events.

There is the Florida Congressman Foley who resigned his post after a scandal about his electronic communication with a 15-year-old boy. Funny how this same guy is the author of legislation meant to protect youths from predatory adults over the internet. Also funny how there are law enforcement agencies who pose as kids on line in efforts to “sting” potential predators. The people who get caught talking nasty to kids wind up in jail, even though they didn’t actually do what they were accused of. It’s kind of like committing a crime by proxy. But somehow this Congressman Foley managed to slide by the law, even going as far as checking himself into a clinic for treatment of alcohol abuse. Seems that nobody but Congressmen and Senators get away with breaking the law.

I was listening to news this morning about an Oklahoma Senator who claims that our global warming problem is a figment of everybody’s imagination. He cited all kinds of scientific studies about it, all of which seemed to conveniently ignore the fact that the polar ice caps are melting at a tremendous rate. Well, he’s a Senator, so we’d better listen to him. He obviously knows more about this stuff than we do. If he said that white was black, I would have to believe him just because of his credentials, forget everything else I know about anything.

And the Palestinians, apparently distraught over the lack of violence coming at them over the border from Israel, have begun fighting amongst themselves. So it seems that many people are just intent to fight and kill, and for a shortage of one enemy, they will find another to fill the void.

Finally, Iraqi leaders are meeting to discuss quelling the sectarian violence between the Shia and Sunni Moslems there. These leaders are all in fact leaders of militia factions and responsible for the vast majority of killing in Baghdad. These guys are also elected officials. What the fuck? Nobody really wants peace over there. The people who are supposed to be responsible for law and order are in fact responsible for sectarian murder on a massive scale. You think these guys will ever face trial for any crimes? Fat fucking chance.