The photographs in the New York Times told contrasting stories last week. One showed two Taliban soldiers in civilian clothes and sandals, with their rifles, standing in front of a captured U.N. vehicle. The Taliban forces had taken the northern provincial capital of Kunduz. The other photograph showed Afghan army soldiers fully equipped with modern gear, weapons, and vehicles.

Guess who is winning? An estimated thirty-thousand Taliban soldiers with no air force, navy, or heavy weapons have been holding down ten times more Afghan army and police and over 100,000 U.S. soldiers with the world’s most modern weaponry – for eight years. More

Writing about Antonio Ramos, who was fatally shot while painting a peace mural in Oakland, California, New York Times writer Laura M. Holson saw the killing as interrupting the re-fashioning of Oakland as a sort of west coast Saint Moritz, a glitzy city in the Swiss Alps that my family and I visited in March, which, before the invasion by the wealthy, was a farm community. She calls this makeover of Oakland a "Renewal" (NYTIMES, Oct.3.) Renewal for this writer means that due to a conspiracy involving former Mayor Jerry Brown, developers, the police and criminal banks, thousands of blacks have been driven from the town so that now up-scalers from Marin and San Francisco can dine at 5 star fake French restaurants.

Oakland didn't need any renewal. It was OK as it was. Now it's losing its soul. A sign is the restrictions placed on musicians, dancers and poets who gather at Lake Merritt each Saturday. Now you have to have a permit to play drums. In Holson's hasty attempt to cast Oakland as a backward dump, before cultural missionaries arrived, she failed to explore why people get shot here and in other cities. For starters, Oakland's crime lab is a mess-only one-third of homicides are solved so a shooter knows that they can get away with murder. More

The great danger of faking your ability to do something in the public square is that someone with an actual desire to the job you are pretending to do might come along and show you up. This is what has just happened to the US in Syria with the entrance of Russia into the fight against ISIL. And as is generally the case with posers caught with their pants down, the US policy elites are not happy about it.

You see, the US strategic goal in Syria is not as your faithful mainstream media servants (led by that redoubtable channeler of Neo-Con smokescreens at the NYT Michael Gordon) might have you believe to save the Syrian people from the ravages of the long-standing Assad dictatorship, but rather to heighten the level of internecine conflict in that country to the point where it will not be able to serve as a bulwark against Israeli regional hegemony for at least another generation. More