Lies lies lies and other random stuff

You ever get the feeling we're just moving deeper and deeper into Orwell's 1984? I can't off hand remember all of the details of the movie and never got around to reading the book but it's looking like we're there when it comes to Orwell's basic premise. We have cameras nearly everywhere. Our phone calls and electronic communications are being monitored. All for our safety they say. It all started long before 911. You remember guys trying to fly to Cuba don't you? That was the beginning of the end of our freedoms. With that became the advent of searches a violation of our 4th amendment by the way (no probable cause). But hey it's for your own safety they said. And now you can't even get a job in this country without someone knowing when you ran a red light 30 years ago. You can only hope that the report once locked in a file and now occupying hard disk space is accurate. They tell us to be on the look out for suspicious activity. Just what am I supposed to be looking for? I know when a group of teens are about to pull a prank, but some radical group? A single bag sits on the carousel at the airport going round and round long after the flight has landed. Eventually an employee will come and pick it up and drag it to lost luggage. Should I be concerned? Nope because I know the odds of any ill happening are higher than being hit by lightning.

Ah but to the lies. Draped in the U.S. flag the powers that be would have you believe that these wars we're fighting are the most important thing since the founding of this country. They'd have you believe that this is about spreading democracy in far off lands. Those people are just primitives who need to be shown how to live. (Do the American Indians come to mind here?) Nope what you're watching here is part of the largest theft in world history. Billions and billions of unfunded tax dollars are being thrown at a problem. And billions more are being siphoned off by corrupt officials on every side. I saw this at the start of the Iraq war when pallets of hard cash disappeared in short order. Only one of our guys was caught dipping his hand in the cookie jar. We're told that the Afghan war is going swimmingly well. Yeah swimmingly well for those lining their pockets with our money. There really is no incentive for this to end. We give no bid contracts to Haliburton. The locals get some scraps to play policeman while the elders and even the Taliban are paid off. There's enough money flowing into Afghanistan at present we could have rebuilt the place twice over, but you see they don't want the gravy train to end and they don't have to because they've been fighting so long that it's become a way of life. This very type of behavior has been going on for centuries if you bothered to read your history.
There's the massive wealth of minerals in that country but I don't see them benefiting from it any time soon. The Taliban and local warlords think too small. At my graduation a high ranking official from our federal government spoke. He said something to the effect that with a high school education you might be able to break into a train car and steal some of its' contents, with a college degree you could steal the whole car and with a higher degree you could steal the entire railroad. How prophetic of him as this was about the time of Watergate. Little did he know that near 30 years later our nation would be going on a robbery spree on global scale.