The media played ball with Clinton and Blair. I had been living in Russia in previous years, and i had contacts and access to Russian publications. This allowed me to check both sides of the story. When Albright went to Rambouillet and issued her ultimatum it was clear she had convinced Clinton to peddle lies and do whatever it took to start s war. The idea was to show that Clinton would bomb for Muslims somewhere. This in turn was triggered by the coming failure of the Israel-Palestine talks, in which Clinton was taking a pro Israel stance.

So the USA bombed away, the Serbs resisted much more than the stooges in charge anticipated. And the media kept backing Clinton as he went on to order war crimes. It's an interesting story, which I use to point out it sure looks like everybody lies.

The question in my mind is whether we can trust anybody's word on anything. I've always felt the USA media lied a lot (and by extension all other media has to be suspect). I think most Americans are familiar with the Iraq WMD fiasco, but there are many other examples. One I like to mention is the Clinton/Blair claim that genocide was taking place in Kosovo in late 1998 and early 1999.

I usually vote Republican. Lately I haven't been voting. i did vote for Gore, but that was because Bush was his dad's son and I don't like political dinasties. Almost voted for Obama because McCain was old and I knew about Sarah (I got friends in Anchorage and Wasilla, and have visited Alaska quite a few times). Some of us do switch sides quite easily.

I remember watching opposition marches in Caracas in 2002, how well dressed they were, perfumed ladies with matching caps, tight jeans, and those designers sun glasses. At that point I started explaining to Venezuelan friends they had better make plans to leave.

I was aware that Chavez was backed by a very large contingent of Cuban agents, and how Castro had convinced Chavez to allow Cubans to start controlling government agencies. The opposition simply didn't match up to Cuban Bolzheviks and their Venezuelan students.

This may sound controversial, but I'm afraid the USA is in a similar situation, but the role of Cuba's Castro is played by Israel's Netanyahu. Trump seems to be engaging in a deliberate goading of Muslims to incite terror attacks, which will give him the excuse to start an all out genocidal war. This outcome was predicted by Scheuer in "Imperial Hubris". So the issue goes beyond getting rid of Trump. The issue is doing so before he starts WWIII.

Hurricanes do that. Flora did a loop in Cuba and killed one of my cousins. That hurricane was getting blocked, moved slow, and caused a lot of precipitation. This eventually weakened a hill and caused a large landslide, which buried a small village in eastern Cuba.

Durant has poor judgement when it comes to greatest crimes in history.

Let me ask: whose ethical values do we use when we judge history? Mongol tradition taught them it was fine to exterminate whole populations if they dared oppose Mongol rule. They were savages who arrived on the scene at just the right time and place. But the full extent of Mongol depredation, destruction, and extermination, was worse (read René Grousset for a concise history).

There are lots of "crimes of all history". The Mongol invasions seem to be a better candidate.