RD LAING: Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.

This is a lovely book...Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata...you pick it up and think 'gosh this small book is hardly anything...so few pages...why should I pay $9 for this?' and you read it, and it stays in your thinking for at least 50 years. This is literature, and this is what literature does.

I see the US is threatening to disengage from the war in Syria...well, that'd be good, if you could trust them, but you can't. You know they won't stop.

I still wonder why international news agencies don't see a link between the downing of the Malaysian passenger plane, M370, and the direct personal gift soon after of $800 million from the Saudi Royal family to the Prime Minister of Malaysia who orchestrated the investigation.

That area of the South China Sea where the plane actually went off the radar and out of the sky is an area with massive US Navy forces testing and perfecting all kinds of advanced technology to knock out and ping China's sea coast defence systems...and amazingly, they didn't see or hear a thing...nope, not one thing...
Soon after Obama arrived in Malaysia to work out a new military aid plan for Malaysia and the Saudi Royal family gave the Prime Minister of Malaysia a personal gift of $800 MILLION US Dollars.
I doubt the US Military MEANT to knock the plane down, but I think they did do it. Then everyone looked everywhere else instead.
As we know, these kind of military errors happen all the time in that kind of dangerous probing provocative theatre.

On Syria, the USA & Russia. The US + UK, +some European Nations, Middle East Nations, and Australia have 3 options in regard to the war in Syria: 1: Stop supporting the rebel forces fighting the Assad Syrian sovereign Government, and go home. Peace and stability would return in time. 2: Continue drip-feeding the rebels with weapons and white phosphorous airstrikes, and prolong the war...endlessly. 3: Declare War on the Syrian Government and its military allies Russia and Iran. There are only these 3 options.The best option is Option 1.

I note the Philippine Government is, from October, having no more military 'games' or 'drills' with the USA in the South China Sea so as not to provoke their neighbour China. They wish to have bi-lateral negotiations with China rather than cause damage to their long relationship with China. The Americans are very unhappy about this...as the whole point of forcing the Phillipines to take the case of the islands to the international sea court was to provoke China...even though it was a court that neither the USA or China recognise as having any right to make judgements about anything. Well done Philippines Government!

Trump, Clinton, CNN, FOX, ABC Australia & SBS, BBC, AL JAZEERA, RT RUSSIA TV, NHK JAPAN & CCTV CHINA

The recent News Fiesta of the American Presidential Race and Debates (Number One) was fascinating in showing just how much News Channels, world wide, private and public, express the need to provide a particular narrative to suit or perhaps sometimes sway their audiences. I think, over all, they just want to provide News that their audiences prefer, rather than seek to sway folk as only the American stations can have a real role in sway-bias.

By saying 'narrative' I do mean 'bias'. Having access to a number of National and International News Services it was interesting to note the narratives and how they played to various biases within communities.

In Australia, the Australian Broadcasting Commission ABC and The Special Broadcasting Service, SBS; both Public News Networks, played the narrative as very Pro-Clinton without being abashed about this at all, as did most of the Australian Commercial Channels, either Free to Air or cable.

CNN USA provided very pro-Clinton views as did the BBC, and as did Al Jazeera from Doha. CNN was particularly anti-Trump.

Fox pushed a very hard Pro-Trump line, as did RT Russian Television.

Both Fox and CNN are important in that the Bulk of Americans, the "Basket of Deplorable & The Bunch of Babies" have direct capacities to influence voters and use this power without any notion regarding to balance or general fairness.

As noted some time back, and reinforced by the Debate smorgasbord, the two international channels NHK Japan and CCTV China did provide very good objective analyses of the event and the general Presidential race. NHK Japan often does provide very good, if simple, analysis of world events (except anything to do with islands under discussion in the South China Sea, and even when discussing these problematic areas, NHK does approach the subject with some sense of decorum. China's CCTV over all provides the best objective news, with a complexity of depth and analysis that is years ahead in terms of accuracy and objectivity than any other channel, world wide.