The Uses of a Blog

I intended to write a blog this morning (it is now three in the afternoon), but everything went wrong: I lost text that was not saved, I haven't been able to make links active. . . . Well, you don't want to know the full horror of it, so I'll not go on.

I have been toying with the idea of trying to do a blog a day. Not doing too well. But here is another effort. This time it will be a quickie on the New Yorker Magazine. I get the mag free from a brother who still thinks it a nifty periodical, which it once was, when he and I were young. I think, as I have written elsewhere, it is now a subtle-but-not-so-subtle-as-all-that piece of American-Zionist propaganda.

In the November 6 issue they have a Talk of the Town item on Julian Assange and his WikiLeaks site, much in the news lately. The piece is by Steven Coll, who comes on as President of the America Foundation, which is a suspiciously uninformative name. You can't exactly say the New Yorker ends up fer Assange, but you also can't say it is totally agin 'im. But Assange is a clear cut case of a guy on the right track, unless you think our government is on the right one and their opponents are all crazy. Coll tries a little psychoanalyzing of Assange but it isn't very impressive; what is impressive is the way the New Yorker succeeds in placing itself on the side of careful citizens who wish not to harm our armed forces but also on the side of our reigning warmongers, who are a bad bunch if I ever saw any, and who are casually causing the deaths not only of our service people but also innumerable other folk on the wrong end of our bullets, bombs, and drones.

I'd have to ask the questions, Who is Steve Coll? and What is the America Foundation?