It started, like a lot of deadly bad ideas, with politicians. We can thank the Democrats for the inception, but somewhere along the line, the Republicans stepped in to prove they were just as stupid. Woodrow Wilson, who also gave us the Federal Reserve Act, the first draft since the Civil War and rave reviews of the stunningly racist movie Birth of a Nation, helped usher in the age where America turned questionable personal habits into concrete walls and steel gray bars. It was called the Harrison Tax Act of 1914, and it was the result of nearly fifteen years of disinformation and racist propaganda promulgated by Wilson’s associates.

In 1900 the Journal of the American Medical Association published in a report that “Negroes in the South are being addicted to a new form of vice – that of ‘cocaine sniffing’ or the ‘coke habit.’” That was followed up by several newspaper reports that cocaine was causing blacks to rape white women and was improving their pistol marksmanship. Eight years later President Teddy Roosevelt appointed Dr. Hamilton Wright as the first Opium Commissioner for the United States. Among his most notable observations was that “cocaine is often the direct incentive to the crime of rape by Negroes of the south and other sections of the country.” Wright also postulated that “one of the most unfortunate phases of smoking opium in this country is the large number of women who have become involved and are living as common-law wives or cohabitating with Chinese in the Chinatowns of our various cities.”

Let’s see. A bunch of drug crazed horny black men and a growing number of loose white women with no qualms about crossing racial boundaries? Yeah, man, it was time for war, alright; time to break out some fucking law and order.

Charles Bowden and Molly Molloy: Who Is Behind the 25,000 Deaths In Mexico?

No one seems to know, but on the ground it is death. Calderón’s war, assisted by the United States, terrorizes the Mexican people, generates thousands of documented human rights abuses by the police and Mexican Army and inspires lies told by American politicians that violence is spilling across the border (in fact, it has been declining on the US side of the border for years). We are told of a War on Drugs that has no observable effect on drug distribution, price or sales in the United States. We are told the Mexican Army is incorruptible, when the Mexican government’s own human rights office has collected thousands of complaints that the army robs, kidnaps, steals, tortures, rapes and kills innocent citizens. We are told repeatedly that it is a war between cartels or that it is a war by the Mexican government against cartels, yet no evidence is presented to back up these claims. The evidence we do have is that the killings are not investigated, that the military suffers almost no casualties and that thousands of Mexicans have filed affidavits claiming abuse, often lethal, by the Mexican army. Here is the US policy in a nutshell: we pay Mexicans to kill Mexicans, and this slaughter has no effect on drug shipments or prices.

Julian Isherwood: Free Heroin Gives Good Results

A test-run of issuing free heroin to addicts in Copenhagen appears to be successful, with initial results showing reduced crime and prostitution and improved health and life quality for those taking part in the project. Since March this year, some 20 addicts have been part of a programme under which two clinics provide them with heroin each morning and afternoon. The head of the Valmue Clinic in Copenhagen says that his centre has registered both a physical and psychological improvement among the addicts.

“They don’t have to wake up in the morning with how to get money as the first thing they think about. That gives them a surplus that means that we can talk to them about their housing situation, how we can help them apply for a disability pension if they need that, or perhaps about the child they have lost contact with,” says Valmue Clinic Head Torben Ballegaard. At the same time, Ballegaard says that addicts say that they commit fewer crimes, have stopped prostitution and have improved health. Several have put on weight because apart from heroin, they are provided breakfast and a hot meal during the day. Daily contact with a nurse also means that infections, boils and illnesses are discovered earlier, according to Senior Nurse Vivian Kjær at the KABS institution.

Problem, problem, solution.  End prohibition.  Thousands will die – thousands fewer than die from prohibition.

Barry A. Hazle Jr. served a year in prison on a drug charge. After he got out, his parole agent sent him back for being an atheist. Now, the 41-year-old Redding computer technician has won a ruling from a Sacramento federal judge against the state and stands to collect damages for having his constitutional rights violated. Even before U.S. District Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr. decided in his favor last week, California corrections officials had issued a new policy protecting the rights of atheist parolees. “This has been a long and painful process for me,” Hazle said in a statement through his attorney this week. “The judge’s ruling can’t give me back my lost freedom, but it begins to restore my faith in our judicial system.”

Hazle’s fight with the state over religion began Feb. 27, 2007, when he was paroled from the California Rehabilitation Center, Norco, where he did a year for drug possession. As a condition of his release, Hazle was ordered to attend a 90-day, inpatient drug treatment program. He agreed to the program but even before his release told prison officials he wanted to be sent to a “treatment facility that did not contain religious components,” federal court papers state. Instead, he was assigned to the Empire Recovery Center in Redding, a 12-step program pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous and featuring a strong religious overtone, utilizing references to God and “a higher power.”

When Hazle asked to be moved to a program that was not faith-based, he was told – wrongly, as it turned out – there was none in Northern California. His parole agent, Mitch Crofoot, instructed him that “he should continue to participate in the Empire program or he would be returned to prison,” court papers state. Hazle kept attending but also persisted in objecting to the arrangement, presenting Crofoot with a written appeal on April 3, 2007. Three days later, according to court papers, Empire workers told the parole agent that Hazle had “been disruptive, though in a congenial way.” That same day Crofoot called Hazle out of an Empire treatment class, arrested him on a parole violation for not participating in the very program he was attending, and booked him into the Shasta County jail. Soon thereafter Hazle was returned to prison, where he spent more than three months.

Article continues. It is good that Mr. Hazle has a restored faith in our judicial system.  Articles like this only serve to lessen my faith.  Prohibition has cost the USA more in money and lives than it could have ever saved.  Alcoholics Anonymous is a fine program for those who volunteer for it in the same way that a religious group or a sports team or a community college class or getting out for a walk now and then can be helpful for someone seeking change in their life.  But the State has no business compelling anyone to join AA.  AA does not have consistent evidence that they are any more helpful than other treatments or no treatment at all, and so the State should seek groups that have a better record of positive outcomes.  AA is a religious group, and so the State should not refer people to it.  Mr. Hazle might consider moving to San Francisco, where an appeals court found State-mandated attendance at AA unconstitutional.  Why does the State send people to AA? Because as a volunteer organization, it is free.  So is getting out for a walk now and then, and you don’t have to offer prayers to a serene invisible monster that lives in the sky to get some good out of it.  State-mandated AA is a form of theater that has the appearance of helping people but is actually a fake solution to a fake problem – the fake problem of prohibition.

The United States holds tens of thousands of inmates in long-term solitary confinement. Is this torture? [...] Among our most benign experiments are those with people who voluntarily isolate themselves for extended periods. Long-distance solo sailors, for instance, commit themselves to months at sea. They face all manner of physical terrors: thrashing storms, fifty-foot waves, leaks, illness. Yet, for many, the single most overwhelming difficulty they report is the “soul-destroying loneliness,” as one sailor called it. Astronauts have to be screened for their ability to tolerate long stretches in tightly confined isolation, and they come to depend on radio and video communications for social contact. [...] If prolonged isolation is—as research and experience have confirmed for decades—so objectively horrifying, so intrinsically cruel, how did we end up with a prison system that may subject more of our own citizens to it than any other country in history has? [...] The United States now has five per cent of the world’s population, twenty-five per cent of its prisoners, and probably the vast majority of prisoners who are in long-term solitary confinement.

[...] Is there an alternative? Consider what other countries do. Britain, for example, has had its share of serial killers, homicidal rapists, and prisoners who have taken hostages and repeatedly assaulted staff. The British also fought a seemingly unending war in Northern Ireland, which brought them hundreds of Irish Republican Army prisoners committed to violent resistance. The authorities resorted to a harshly punitive approach to control, including, in the mid-seventies, extensive use of solitary confinement. But the violence in prisons remained unchanged, the costs were phenomenal (in the United States, they reach more than fifty thousand dollars a year per inmate), and the public outcry became intolerable. British authorities therefore looked for another approach. Beginning in the nineteen-eighties, they gradually adopted a strategy that focussed on preventing prison violence rather than on delivering an ever more brutal series of punishments for it. The approach starts with the simple observation that prisoners who are unmanageable in one setting often behave perfectly reasonably in another. This suggested that violence might, to a critical extent, be a function of the conditions of incarceration. The British noticed that problem prisoners were usually people for whom avoiding humiliation and saving face were fundamental and instinctive. When conditions maximized humiliation and confrontation, every interaction escalated into a trial of strength. Violence became a predictable consequence. So the British decided to give their most dangerous prisoners more control, rather than less. They reduced isolation and offered them opportunities for work, education, and special programming to increase social ties and skills. The prisoners were housed in small, stable units of fewer than ten people in individual cells, to avoid conditions of social chaos and unpredictability. In these reformed “Close Supervision Centres,” prisoners could receive mental-health treatment and earn rights for more exercise, more phone calls, “contact visits,” and even access to cooking facilities. They were allowed to air grievances. And the government set up an independent body of inspectors to track the results and enable adjustments based on the data. The results have been impressive. The use of long-term isolation in England is now negligible. In all of England, there are now fewer prisoners in “extreme custody” than there are in the state of Maine. And the other countries of Europe have, with a similar focus on small units and violence prevention, achieved a similar outcome.

MetaFilter, Everything You Bever Wanted to Know About the American Prison-Industrial Complex

“I’ve gone into this in greater detail before, but it is worth remembering that, of our prison population of over 3 million, less than ten percent were convicted by trial before a jury. We’ve filled our prisons not by means of a public and transparent due process, but by backroom and off-record interrogation, by deals brokered in private and under duress.”

Bureau of Labor Statistics, How the Government Measures Unemployment:

Excluded are persons under 16 years of age, all persons confined to institutions such as nursing homes and prisons, and persons on active duty in the Armed Forces.

Christopher Beam, How Do Prisons Deal with Overcrowding?

Tight quarters lead to higher levels of violence between prisoners.

National Prison Rape Elimination Commission, Executive Summary:

More than 7.3 million Americans are confined in U.S. correctional facilities or supervised in the community, at a cost of more than $68 billion annually. [...] Air Force veteran Tom Cahill, who was arrested and detained for just a single night in a San Antonio jail, recalled the lasting effects of being gang-raped and beaten by other inmates. “I’ve been hospitalized more times than I can count and I didn’t pay for those hospitalizations, the tax payers paid. My career as a journalist and photographer was completely derailed. . . . For the past two decades, I’ve received a non-service connected security pension from the Veteran’s Administration at the cost of about $200,000 in connection with the only major trauma I’ve ever suffered, the rape.” [The Bureau of Justice Statistics] conducted the first wave of surveys in 2007 in a random sample of 146 State and Federal prisons and 282 local jails. A total of 63,817 incarcerated individuals completed surveys, providing the most comprehensive snapshot of sexual abuse in prisons and jails to date. Four-and-a-half percent of prisoners surveyed reported experiencing sexual abuse one or more times during the 12 months preceding the survey or over their term of incarceration if they had been confined in that facility for less than 12 months. Extrapolated to the national prison population, an estimated 60,500 State and Federal prisoners were sexually abused during that 12-month period. [...] Sexual abuse is not an inevitable feature of incarceration. Leadership matters because corrections administrators can create a culture within facilities that promotes safety instead of one that tolerates abuse. Certain individuals are more at risk of sexual abuse than others. Corrections administrators must routinely do more to identify those who are vulnerable and protect them in ways that do not leave them isolated and without access to rehabilitative programming. Few correctional facilities are subject to the kind of rigorous internal monitoring and external oversight that would reveal why abuse occurs and how to prevent it. Dramatic reductions in sexual abuse depend on both.

AP, Governor Delays Ohio Execution After Vein Troubles:

The team began working on [Romell] Broom, in a holding cell 17 steps from the execution chamber, at about 2 p.m., four hours after his execution was originally scheduled. That initial delay was due to a final federal appeals request.  After the team spent nearly an hour trying to find a workable vein, Broom tried to help them bring him a quicker death. He turned over on his left side, slid rubber tubing designed to clarify his veins up his left arm, then began moving the arm up and down while flexing and closing and opening his fingers. The execution team was able to access a vein, but it collapsed when technicians tried to insert saline fluid.  Broom then became visibly distressed, turning over on his back and covering his face with both hands. His torso heaved up and down and his feet shook, as he appeared to be crying. He wiped his eyes and was handed a roll of toilet paper, which he used to wipe his brow.  He sat up at the end of the bed and talked with his execution team. The team had been asking Broom whether he wanted a break, but he chose to push ahead, as did the execution staff, prisons director Terry Collins said. Collins then insisted on a break and contacted the governor to let him know about the difficulties.

Broom, who did not have any witnesses present, requested that one of his attorneys, Adele Shank, come to the witness area. She asked to speak with Broom but was told that once the process started, it’s protocol that attorneys can’t have contact with their client.  “I want to know what Romell wants,” Shank told a prison official, who told her that he was being cooperative.  “He’s always cooperative,” responded Shank. “I want to know what he wants me to do.”  At about 3:20, the team tried to insert shunts through veins in Broom’s legs as he sat upright on the table. He looked up several times during the process and appeared to grimace. A member of the execution team reached over and patted him on the back.  Roughly five minutes later, the team returned to Broom’s arms to again try to access a vein and get the saline solution to work. [...] Collins said the team would try to determine, before Broom’s next scheduled execution date, how to resolve the problem with finding suitable veins.  A medical evaluation Monday determined that veins in Broom’s right arm appeared accessible, while those in his left arm were not as visible.

David Grann, Trial by Fire:

There is a chance that Texas could become the first state to acknowledge officially that, since the advent of the modern judicial system, it had carried out the “execution of a legally and factually innocent person.”

All articles continue at links.  We all have to pick our battles, or die trying to fight on all fronts.  Prison reform isn’t as popular a topic as recycling, global warming, animal rights or same-sex marriage.  But I wish it were more popular.  I wish it was the subject of Michael Moore’s next film.  I wish it was discussed by the next set of candidates running for the Presidency of the USA.  I’ve got my ideas, if anyone is listening.  Start by ending prohibition.  Next release any prisoner with no previous legal troubles who is in prison only due to prohibition.  Then release any prisoner with a prior record but who is in prison expressly due to prohibition.  If I’m reading the statistics right, that would reduce the prison population by twenty percent.  That’s a budget increase of twenty percent to lessen prison rape, offer work opportunities or just about anything else.  I’d ban the death penalty in all states in all cases – there’s a wad of money (and lives) saved that can be put to better use.  I’d negate mandatory sentencing laws and allow judges to act as judges.  I’d see how other countries are handling things and copy what works.  Anybody listening?

My friends, I had not intended to discuss this controversial subject at this particular time. However, I want you to know that I do not shun controversy. On the contrary, I will take a stand on any issue at any time, regardless of how fraught with controversy it might be. You have asked me how I feel about whiskey. All right, here is how I feel about whiskey:

If when you say whiskey you mean the devil’s brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster, that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates misery and poverty, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean the evil drink that topples the Christian man and woman from the pinnacle of righteous, gracious living into the bottomless pit of degradation, and despair, and shame and helplessness, and hopelessness, then certainly I am against it.

But, if when you say whiskey you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the ale that is consumed when good fellows get together, that puts a song in their hearts and laughter on their lips, and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean Christmas cheer; if you mean the stimulating drink that puts the spring in the old gentleman’s step on a frosty, crispy morning; if you mean the drink which enables a man to magnify his joy, and his happiness, and to forget, if only for a little while, life’s great tragedies, and heartaches, and sorrows; if you mean that drink, the sale of which pours into our treasuries untold millions of dollars, which are used to provide tender care for our little crippled children, our blind, our deaf, our dumb, our pitiful aged and infirm; to build highways and hospitals and schools, then certainly I am for it.

This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise.

More here and here.

Sibel Edmonds has a story to tell. She went to work as a Turkish and Farsi translator for the FBI five days after 9/11. Part of her job was to translate and transcribe recordings of conversations between suspected Turkish intelligence agents and their American contacts. She was fired from the FBI in April 2002 after she raised concerns that one of the translators in her section was a member of a Turkish organization that was under investigation for bribing senior government officials and members of Congress, drug trafficking, illegal weapons sales, money laundering, and nuclear proliferation. [...] John Ashcroft’s Justice Department confirmed Edmonds’s veracity in a backhanded way by twice invoking the dubious State Secrets Privilege so she could not tell what she knows. [...] But on Aug. 8, she was finally able to testify under oath in a court case filed in Ohio and agreed to an interview with The American Conservative based on that testimony.

“During my work with the FBI, one of the major operational files that I was transcribing and translating started in late 1996 and continued until 2002, when I left the Bureau. [...] The monitoring of the Turks picked up contacts with [Douglas] Feith, [Paul] Wolfowitz, and [Richard] Perle in the summer of 2001, four months before 9/11. They were discussing with the Turkish ambassador in Washington an arrangement whereby the U.S. would invade Iraq and divide the country. The UK would take the south, the rest would go to the U.S. They were negotiating what Turkey required in exchange for allowing an attack from Turkish soil. The Turks were very supportive, but wanted a three-part division of Iraq to include their own occupation of the Kurdish region. The three Defense Department officials said that would be more than they could agree to, but they continued daily communications to the ambassador and his defense attaché in an attempt to convince them to help. [...]

“So these conversations, between 1997 and 2001, had to do with a Central Asia operation that involved bin Laden. Not once did anybody use the word ‘al-Qaeda.’ It was always ‘mujahideen,’ always ‘bin Laden’ and, in fact, not ‘bin Laden’ but ‘bin Ladens’ plural. There were several bin Ladens who were going on private jets to Azerbaijan and Tajikistan. The Turkish ambassador in Azerbaijan worked with them.  There were bin Ladens, with the help of Pakistanis or Saudis, under our management. Marc Grossman was leading it, 100 percent, bringing people from East Turkestan into Kyrgyzstan, from Kyrgyzstan to Azerbaijan, from Azerbaijan some of them were being channeled to Chechnya, some of them were being channeled to Bosnia. From Turkey, they were putting all these bin Ladens on NATO planes. People and weapons went one way, drugs came back. (Was the U.S. government aware of this circular deal?) 100 percent. A lot of the drugs were going to Belgium with NATO planes. After that, they went to the UK, and a lot came to the U.S. via military planes to distribution centers in Chicago and Paterson, New Jersey. Turkish diplomats who would never be searched were coming with suitcases of heroin.”

Article continues.  More on Sibel Edmonds from her official website, Wikipedia, History Commons, CBS News, Let Sibel Edmonds Speak, and National Security Whistleblowers Coalition.

EsoZone is a mutant unconference, Portland Oregon USA, October 9 and 10 2009.  See you there!

Astronaut Frank Culbertson photographs ground zero on 9/11 while in the International Space Station.  “What a frightening sight this must have been. How many sci-fi shows and movies are there, where the crew of a spaceship watches helplessly as their planet is attacked?” – John in Canada at nasawatch.com.

Gareth Porter, Bush had no plan to catch Bin Laden: New evidence [Oct 1, 2008] from former United States officials reveals that Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders were able to skip Afghanistan for Pakistan unimpeded in the first weeks after September 11, 2001, as the George W Bush administration failed to plan to block their retreat. Top administration officials instead gave priority to planning for war with Iraq, leaving the United States with not nearly enough troops or strategic airlift capacity to close the large number of possible exit routes through the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area where Bin Laden escaped in late 2001.

Bush Covered Up Saudi Involvement in 9/11: The former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee tells Salon that the White House has suppressed convincing evidence that the Saudi royal family supported at least two of the hijackers. As the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman during the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks and the run-up to the Iraq war, Sen. Bob Graham tried to expose what he came to believe were national security coverups and manipulations by the Bush administration. But he discovered that it was hard to reveal a coverup playing by the rules. Much of the evidence the Florida Democrat needed to buttress his arguments was being locked away, he found, under the veil of politically motivated classification. Gerald Posner, The CIA’s Destroyed Interrogation Tapes and the Saudi-Pakistani 9/11 Connection: U.S. intelligence established a so-called “fake flag” operation, in which the wounded Zubaydah was transferred to Afghanistan under the ruse that he had actually been turned over to the Saudis. The Saudis had him on a wanted list, and the Americans believed that Zubaydah, fearful of torture and death at the hands of the Saudis, would start talking when confronted by U.S. agents playing the role of Saudi intelligence officers. Instead, when confronted by his “Saudi” interrogators, Zubaydah showed no fear. Instead, according to the two U.S. intelligence sources that provided me the details, he seemed relieved. The man who had been reluctant to even confirm his identity to his U.S. captors, suddenly talked animatedly. He was happy to see them, he said, because he feared the Americans would kill him. He then asked his interrogators to call a senior member of the Saudi royal family. And Zubaydah provided a private home number and a cell phone number from memory. “He will tell you what to do,” Zubaydah assured them. That man was Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul-Aziz, one of King Fahd’s nephews, and the chairman of the largest Saudi publishing empire. Later, American investigators would determine that Prince Ahmed had been in the U.S. on 9/11.

Verbatim Quotes from Republicans when Clinton was Prez.: “Domestic terrorism is not a cause we have to fight or a project we need to fund. We are not interested in capturing bin Laden. Even though he has been offered to us. We are not the world’s policemen. It’s not our job to clean up other countries messes or arrest it’s bad guys.” Senior Senator Mitch McConnell (R).

Radley Balko, Six Years Later [2007] Bin Laden Still Free, U.S. Mired in Iraq: We have created in Iraq the exact type of scenario Bin Laden was hoping (but failed) to lure us into in Afghanistan [...] our only options are bad and worse.

Robert Scheer, Bush’s Faustian Deal With the Taliban: [Los Angeles Times May 22, 2001] Enslave your girls and women, harbor anti-U.S. terrorists, destroy every vestige of civilization in your homeland, and the Bush administration will embrace you. All that matters is that you line up as an ally in the drug war, the only international cause that this nation still takes seriously. That’s the message sent with the recent gift of $43 million to the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, the most virulent anti-American violators of human rights in the world today. The gift, announced last Thursday by Secretary of State Colin Powell, in addition to other recent aid, makes the U.S. the main sponsor of the Taliban and rewards that “rogue regime” for declaring that opium growing is against the will of God. So, too, by the Taliban’s estimation, are most human activities, but it’s the ban on drugs that catches this administration’s attention. Never mind that Osama bin Laden still operates the leading anti-American terror operation from his base in Afghanistan, from which, among other crimes, he launched two bloody attacks on American embassies in Africa in 1998.

Teetotalers More Likely To Be Depressed Than Moderate Drinkers

The Climate Camp is too self-regarding to be effective: Its critics have levelled many charges whenever it has appeared over the last few years [...] And while some criticisms have a kernel of truth, it remains hard to argue that a movement fighting climate change and promoting social equality is a bad thing. But that is not the question. Rather, Climate Camp should be judged on its own ambitions. How effective is the camp in inspiring change?

It is confronting this issue that lies at the heart of one of the key works on grass-roots organising: Rules for Radicals written by Saul Alinsky who inspired US radicals in the 1960s and 1970s. A revolutionary in outlook who began agitating for social change in the Chicago stockyards in the 1930s, Alinsky’s methodology has proved to have had a greater relevance and longer shelf-life than perhaps he ever expected. In recent history, it not only informed Barack Obama’s early political organising, but its tactics have been adopted by the US Republican right to disrupt Obama’s health policies. So how does the Climate Camp fare judged by his rules?

In some respects, Alinsky, who died in 1972, would have admired the Climate Campers’ dedication. “Liberals protest; radicals rebel,” he wrote. “Liberals become indignant; radicals become fighting mad and go into action.” Alinsky, however, is unlikely to have approved of much of the Climate Campers’ methodology. The problem with the Climate Campers is not a lack of conviction (as some commentators try to argue); it stems, rather, from an obsession with its own structures and its relationship with media and the police.

More seriously, seen from Alinsky’s point of view (he believed in “not rhetoric, but realism”), the Climate Camp suffers from a preoccupation with measuring its achievements in terms of the protests it has undertaken rather than a series of achievable goals that those outside the camp movement can easily identify with.

Alinsky insisted the radical must be able to make a persuasive case for why change is necessary and urgent, a task to which the theatrics of protesting are subsidiary. He taught another crucial lesson, one that has been highly visible in the right’s campaign against Obama’s health reforms, that campaigners should avoid targeting abstracts such as phenomena and institutions; instead, they should single out individual figures to act as the “personification… of a particular evil”. To lever their positions through ridicule and criticism.

Climate change and social equality aside, what appealed to me about this article is the rare mass media mention of the fluid lines between political camps. The goals and tactics of one camp become the goals and tactics of another camp in the next generation. Sometimes the shift happens because the other camp rejects or revises their goals, sometimes because they see tactical success in the other camp. But goals and tactics shift as often as not due to powerful individuals with personal preferences, or as solicitation for mass approval by politicians willing to pinch their noses and roll in all sorts of filth if it maintains and expands their power.

History is not goal-oriented. History does not inevitably build toward a better world based on past successes. Things just happen. The eugenics movement of one generation becomes the family planning movement of the next. The inherently atheist left goes all woo-woo. The children of yesterday’s conservatives can’t have a government too gigantic today. One generation says “the war on want is the war we want” and advocates Europe a Nation, the next fights a “war on want” and lives in an European Union. Advocates of freedom for their sex team up with their opponents to fight sexual freedom. Universal suffrage turns out to not be so universal after all. Temperance becomes the war on drugs. Rarefied French philosophy is later sold as a lowest common denominator consumer product.

Political camps do learn from each other. But they also ape each other because it seems exciting or popular. Political parties and most political groups are package deals. You hopefully get some of what you want among plenty of what you don’t want. But politics itself is not a package deal. The shifting goals and tactics found in history is evidence, but your own complex views are the proof. Politics are maddening but keep on advocating for what is right and true. Political correctness, left and right, be damned.