This is for all my well-wishers out there who’ve taken the time to poke this blog to see if it’s dead or merely comatose.

I’m  here. I’m alive. I just got tired of the off-line harassment  –  snooping on my private life through illegal surveillance of my home, my family and friends, private  conversations, and email correspondence…. that’s in addition to the online stuff.

I’ve talked about it before.

So that’s how the game is played in the US of A, in these early years of the 21st century.

Of course,  I have no interest in becoming a pawn sacrifice  nor in wasting my life keeping track of a chess-game I didn’t ask to play.

That’s the background.

The foreground is my personal life, which has kept me occupied quite well.

I’ve been traveling again. It helps with perspective.

The US is a mess of controlled media and staged terror. But other countries are as bad…. or much worse.

The whole globe is awash in the same inane, idiot-making advertising of the neo-liberal marketplace and the global war on terror.

Meanwhile, tectonic shifts are taking place, not just in Iran, China, or Pakistan (check out the spate of earthquakes in those regions), but in the economies and polities of any state so unwise as to join the Global War on Terror either as friend or foe.

In India, the so-called national paper, The Hindu, has been taken over in a kind of publishing coup and in flagrant violation of Indian law, by a US citizen, Siddharth Varadarajan. Siddharth is the left-leaning brother of the Wall Street Journal editor, Tunku Varadarajan, a right-leaning advocate of the War on Terror.

The paper today is one long hard-sell of overpriced property.

Whole pages are also devoted to gold ornaments, a known outlet for speculative profits.

Building colleges through trusts that enjoy favorable tax status is also a favorite way of laundering money in India (see also this article). The government-builder mafia is often behind the plethora of new institutions springing up everywhere.

Where I am, down in the sunny South, such unwisdom is poisoning not just the media, but just about everything…from the banking system to technology to transport ….

(more later)

Note: Links on some of these posts I’ve referenced have vanished. This keeps happening to certain posts, whether for technical reasons or for others…

Bear with me. I’ll add them back when I get a moment.