Day: July 22, 2026

Adak, A Ghost Town

A colossal waste!

When my late wife, Sue, was in the Navy she served on an Alaskan island in Adak…..and recently I read an article about the island she served on for awhile….

On an island in the Bering Sea 1,200 miles from Anchorage sits an abandoned house on an abandoned Navy base. There is no furniture, and the wind blows through broken windows. The last people to live here moved away long ago. Yet a bright orange pipe with a black fiber-optic cable inside runs from the outer wall down into the surrounding soil.

The cable was installed to connect the home to the internet after the base closed. It costs more than $340,000 per year to provide this building and hundreds of others — all but a few of them empty — with internet access no one says they use.

The money being wasted is yours.

It comes from a fee added to nearly every American’s phone bill as part of a Federal Communications Commission subsidy program intended to bring fast, affordable internet to remote towns.

Reporting this year by the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica has found that the multibillion-dollar Universal Service Fund pays for what often amounts to slow internet access for customers who actually no longer use it.

The FCC keeps the money flowing to telecom companies regardless of their owners’ track records. It kept paying a Fairbanks company to provide internet service while its owner served federal prison time for tax evasion. The government kept paying Alaska’s largest telecom, GCI, even after it signed a settlement for alleged fraud related to the subsidy. (The settlement said it was neither an admission of guilt by GCI nor a concession by the Justice Department that the claims were not well founded.)

On This Nearly Deserted Alaska Island, You Pay to Keep Hundreds of Empty Buildings Wired for Internet

Just another story of how the US government wastes countless dollars and yet cannot seem to help people with their problems.

Time for a change of government….we need help….and we need it now.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

The Ghost Of Gramsci

This is my continuing series on the success that the DSA has recently had at the polls and the meltdown that the Right is having dealing with this success…..passing out propaganda like candy to a 6 year old and it is working…..

Gramsci?  If you are not familiar with the workings of socialism then the name means little to Americans and yet the Washington Times invoked his name.

Before I go any further a quick lesson on Gramsci….

Key points:

  1. Historical materialism reworked
  • Society is shaped by material conditions but mediated by culture, institutions, and political practice.
  • Emphasis on how social forces, ideas and institutions interact over time to produce historical change.
  1. Hegemony
  • Core concept: ruling classes secure consent for their rule by shaping common-sense beliefs, moral frameworks, and cultural norms.
  • Hegemony = domination through a combination of coercion (state apparatuses, police, law) and consent (civil society: schools, churches, media, unions, cultural institutions).
  • Hegemony is never absolute; it requires continual work to maintain and is always contested.
  1. Civil society vs. political society
  • Distinction between political society (state, law, coercive institutions) and civil society (associations, culture, education, media).
  • Civil society is the terrain where hegemony is produced and reproduced; control of civil society is crucial for long-term stability of a social order.

Very basic but if you want more…..https://theconversation.com/antonio-gramsci-his-philosophy-explained-286341

That out of the way this is the bullshit article that made me go to this rant….

 

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/jul/14/democrats-embrace-gramscis-marxist-playbook-america/

 

Just another MAGA rag that spread manure like it was real…..

Personally I think Gramsci was an excellent thinker and some of his ideas deserve a second look….but think about this MAGA and the GOP have been using his concepts for many decades….so is he all that wrong?

Questions?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Are We Containing The Wrong Country?

Our worthless wars for the last several decades have been about containing this country or that…..our present conflict is about containing Iran and its influence in the Middle East….but is it possible we are containing the wrong country?

An excellent point comes out of the small country of Oman on the boot of the Arabian peninsula and at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz…..

Omani Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi penned an op-ed for the French outlet Le Monde on Tuesday. The article was a call for a new political and security architecture in the Gulf region, and served as a clear indictment not only for the current, disastrous war of choice that the United States and Israel initiated against Iran, but of forty-seven years of Western policy in the Gulf region.

The attention-grabbing statement comes when al-Busaidi notes the fundamental flaw of international policy in the Gulf was that it treated Iran as an existential threat to the security of the gulf region. In fact, he argues, the real threat comes from “decisions that are made in Tel Aviv.”

Unfortunately, although al-Busaidi is correct in his assertion, he merely states it as fact. He does nothing to support that point. That is a sorely missed opportunity.

Al-Busaidi has some genuine cache in diplomatic circles. He was the negotiator who managed to win a deal between the U.S. and Iran in February that would have significantly limited Iran’s nuclear program and allow for intrusive inspections. Donald Trump chose to blow that deal up by attacking Iran instead, at the behest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

If al-Busaidi had decided to use some of that credibility to elaborate on why Israel is the threat to Gulf stability rather than Iran, it would have been impactful.

Oman’s Foreign Minister to the West: You’ve been containing the wrong country

Finally someone publishing what many of us have been saying for 50+ years.

I totally agree with the foreign minister’s analysis and if you look at the history of the Middle East then a smart person will agree as well.

Israel has been the cause of more civilian deaths than any other country in the region…..they have attacked and destroyed in the name of security, which is a false narrative.

Sadly Israel will always have a free hand as long as the US is controlled by AIPAC money and a lame religious dogma.

I wish to thank al-Busaidi for speaking the truth.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”