If feels good to live after death. It feels good to not be dead. It feels so good to find myself alive and flying home. The music plays in my ears and I float further and further away from war. Fucking Baghdad.

Oh, don't let him pull that 'Pearl Harbor I'm going off to war' stuff on you.

The simple and terrifying reality, forbidden from discussion in America, was that despite spending $600 billion a year on the military, despite having the best fighting force the world had ever known, they were getting their asses kicked by illiterate peasants who made bombs out of manure and wood.

Gore Vidal, Glenn Greenwald, Noam Chomsky, all these guys talk about how the United States became a national security state after World War II. I agree with that thesis. Essentially there's this bipartisan foreign policy elite who've been calling the shots for the last few decades and they're clearly still in control regardless of how clownish or absurd or stupid they demonstrate themselves to be. There's no shaking their orthodoxy.

And there's this talk that we're asking soldiers to make the greatest sacrifice, but the reality is that civilians bear the burden of war more than the combatants. You're much more likely to get accidentally blown up or killed by a death squad than you are to die in a firefight.

An information operations team was sent to Afghanistan to conduct various psychological operations on the Afghans and Taliban. The team was then asked not to focus on the Taliban but on manipulating senators into giving more funds and troops [to the war].