Mikheil Saakashvili first popped into the American mind when his little country got into a shooting war with Russia in 2008. A recognizable image of him is Saakashvili eating his tie while on the phone on camera. This fire fight happened unexpectedly and caught the US off-guard. A settlement was reached, but not before the world saw President Bush and Vladimir Putin chatting at the Beijing Olympic games about “something.” Eventually, President Saakashvili lost an election, fled his nation, and is now wanted on criminal charges in his homeland. Where could he flee to after antagonizing Russia and nearly dragging America into something in 2008? Brooklyn.

Among the hipsters, the Hasidim, and Gotham’s gentry, Saakashvili walked the streets, plotting his revenge. He was even given a spot lecturing at Tufts University. If one is confused why such an oddball is given such treatment by the US, look at his early life profile on La Wik. He is a Cathedral-groomed goon. He buddied up with the current president of Ukraine (Poroshenko) while an undergraduate student in newly “free” Ukraine in 1992. He was a humans rights officer, and then received a Muskie Fellowship through the State Department to study at Columbia Law School and George Washington Law School. He even worked at the United Nations. Saakashvili is a decades-long asset cultivated by the USG system. This is just a much more expensive and foreign version of the American university system sucking in red state whites to mold and shape before returning them home as proper Cathedral foot soldiers.

He is also a newly-minted Ukrainian citizen, and wouldn’t you know it, his old college buddy Poroshenko appointed him governor of Odessa. He received his Ukrainian citizenship literally one day before his appointment. Saakashvili, in return for USG favors, drew Georgia closer to US orbit. He also signed his name to an op-ed about Putin’s invasion of Georgia to help the propaganda campaign against Putin in the latest Ukraine brou-ha-ha. At face value, anyone should point out the ludicrous nature of America safekeeping a wanted criminal, granting him a job, and then returning him to a position of power in a war-torn nation to do its will.

And he is a reliable asset for the USG system. This is not too different from the CIA’s use of General Hifter in Libya. Hifter was a Libyan general who spent decades living in Virginia with mysterious financial backing, only to return to Libya in 2011 to get rid of Gaddafi and rebuild Libya. These are USG pawns and assets, yet there is no outcry.

These are easy pieces to expose and put together: Saakashvili, Hifter, CIA, the New York Times, State Department, and the American university system. This is the system. This is the empire we deny having. The universities can suck them in and train them. It is up to the rest of the pieces of the polygon to use them as they see fit. A man like Saakashvili is proof of our Empire’s existence and dominance. Ukraine uses him (and other foreigners) in high places to affect policy that magically tracks along the US-EU framework. No protests. No international outcry. Hardly any coverage in America’s media.

America can deny it is an empire, but it has the pieces, the mechanisms, the janissaries, and the chewed and spit out refuse of its wars on the fringes. Those Somali immigrants sucked into Minnesota and Maine did not just get there by accident, and neither did the Vietnamese and Cambodians before them. Saakashvili is the USG’s janissary, their man on the inside, and it matters not his nationality, just that he hates Putin and pushes the globalist line. Twenty-first century Janissaries do not grow beards and carry swords. They just browse boutique shops in Brooklyn. On second thought, they will grow beards.

The post The Empire’s Man in Brooklyn appeared first on Social Matter.

A small city in Ohio had a weekend of overdoses. Not one or two, but when it was all said and done, over ten with three dead. Subsequent reports in the following week put the overdose number at twenty-seven. This is a city under 40,000 in population, so the numbers look terrible for one weekend, and especially for one twenty-four hour period. Despite Marion’s longstanding problems with heroin, the week long spike in overdoses is related to a new product. This heroin is laced with fentanyl, which is 15-20x stronger than heroin. This caught the heroin users by surprise. Now law enforcement is racing against the clock to track where that fentanyl-laced heroin may have spread.

A slight tangent, but the fentanyl lacing is not as odd as it sounds. This bad batch of heroin is supposedly just laced with heroin. It comes from Detroit, which had a fentaynl laced heroin rash of deaths earlier this year. Mexican drug units found a way to synthesize fentanyl, and since it is so potent, they would cut the fentanyl with any white powdery substance for a “drug” that looked like fine China heroin, but might not be actual heroin.

Several years back, heroin-fentanyl overdoses were a huge problem in Detroit. Mixes became purely fentanyl cut with any powder from GNC that would mimic the visual signals of real heroin if tested by distributors. There was absolutely no heroin in some batches. In reality, why transport, smuggle, and sell heroin when fentanyl can be synthesized? Detroit is a regional hub for heroin, just like Baltimore, and services this small Ohio town with its outbreaks. There is a price for allowing cities of massive size to shrink, decline and go feral. Detroit being a heroin hub will not make the mainstream media “Detroit is back, baby” fluff pieces.

A weekend of overdoses would scare any small city, and that small city’s media would respond. Like any small media outlet, the locals were hunting for the perfect story to generate sympathy and get more money for them programs. The media needs to massage public opinion so that the folks at home do not see just another overdose or just another dead junkie. They found it in the overdose death of Bailey Witzel. She has a Facebook page still up where you can see her face that looks tired but still has the baby fat of a teenager. She looks younger than 19. She had a toddler, so this is human interest catnip for the press, but they are not going to tell you the whole story.

The blurb by the Marion Star is made up of interviews with users or recovering users who were in Witzel’s life. That is how widespread the heroin community is there. It’s not just you, but your social circle that gravitates towards heroin. The only people a user knows, who are not fellow users, are the members of the criminal justice and social services systems that organize his or her life. I’m just going to pull some lines the outlet wants you to read and generate some sympathetic “feels,” and then discuss the wider story.

- Witzel’s mother: “She did get to spend Mother’s Day with her daughter, her wish.”

- “(Faith) was the one thing she was trying very hard to get clean for,” said Jessica Davis, a friend of the family. “But she had a lot of pain and depression.”

- Witzel’s mother: “Bailey loved just hanging out and being with her daughter, being with her nephew,” Blanton said. “Bailey loved life in general, loved her daughter more than anything. … She loved her daughter more than life itself.”

- Marion County Children Services had removed Faith from Bailey’s care. Her brother said she was working to get clean and regain custody.

- Her friend: “But I just don’t think that she had the resources, and I don’t think she knew how. She was so young.”

- Her brother: “She went to Foundations (Recovery Center), she was going to meetings and everything she could.”

- “When she did get the opportunity to go to treatment, she gave it her all,” her friend Davis said. “She really did. And she was focused on coming out of there a better person, a better mother.”

This post is not meant to poke fun at these people. The spread of heroin is serious stuff, and has worked its way into every little town in America. Imagine if the flood of heroin that started in 2002 had the distribution network of marijuana in 2002? There would be needles everywhere and a million dead. With +20K overdoses a year out of maybe 1 million users tops, the die-off rate is rather high now. We will never fix this problem, though, if our human interest stories are going to romanticize choices individuals make. This is not too different from the media’s use of the housing crisis to paint human interest stories for whatever political changes they wanted. Let’s look further.

1. She loved being a mom, she was an awesome mom, she was a great auntie. No mom can ever be criticized. Look above at the quotes; Witzel loved her daughter more than anything, was a “good mom,” and wanted to be a great mom. Note that Marion County Children Services had stripped Bailey of her daughter. They took her kid away because she was a heroin addict. This isn’t a Hall of Fame mom. Good moms don’t have their toddlers taken from them.

2. The opportunity for treatment, going to meetings, doing everything she could. She was ordered by the legal system to go into treatment this winter. The Ohio Drug Courts are special courts for drug offenders, and get people to go to treatment by giving them the option of treatment and probation or jail and probation. Go ahead and call Foundations (her rehab center) right now. Ask if she stayed for the entire treatment period or if she left treatment early. She left early. That’s how she spent Mother’s Day with her child. Even though she left treatment and had the opportunity to be with her child, she felt a greater pull to use heroin.

3. While you are on the phone with Foundations, ask them who spent time talking her into leaving. If you have drug urinalysis equipment, why not take a urine sample from Witzel’s mom, Bobbi Blanton, and tell me what shows up? If you get her mom alone for an interview, ask her if she uses, ask her if she used with her daughter, ask her when, sorry, if she introduced the drug to her daughter at age 11. Maybe you could ask a reporter who was at the vigil for Witzel what dear old mom said about shooting up, and what he said he would not put in any story. The public does not need to know everything–only what the reporter deems pertinent to generate “feels”.

4. Resources. This “good mom” left treatment and had a warrant out for her arrest for violating the terms of her probation. Authorities looked for her. She could not be found. She spent her time away from treatment getting high and died. She was not giving it everything she could. Forget Foundations, call her probation officer and the Drug Court judge.

5. She was young and did not have the resources. She dealt with pain and depression. She was 19. Might be some good questions to ask her mom about that pain; what was Witzel’s childhood was like? As far as resources, who do you think paid for her treatment? For her kid? You, Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer. What do you think her Medicaid status was? Who did she talk to multiple times a week per the terms of her probation? Before her overdose, there was a network of government employees (criminal justice and social services) and taxpayer money that were propping her up and delaying what has come to pass.

6. More resources. Your money pays for worse enabling. Vivtrol blocks the ability to process heroin, and many people arrested for heroin use end up using it if ordered by the courts. That is $1000 a shot. You, of course, pay for that. Narcan is a nasal spray that can help stop an OD from becoming a death. Your local police department and fire station have doses of it. You pay for that. Those medications could not help Witzel, but they saved a life or two in Marion that weekend.

Witzel’s story is a common back story for the younger addicts. Call Foundations, her probation officer, or the Drug Court judge and ask. These young addicts’ social services or criminal justice case files have enough overlap to reveal that a potential heroin addict is out there in your extended circle of friends. If you know an addict of any sort, you could have predicted these unmentioned details. A broken home, parents who are sleazy, government intervention, and no one wanting to admit reality.

The social decay and rot is multigenerational now. There are reasons the show “Intervention” was a reality hit besides human zoo voyeurism of people drunk and high acting crazy on camera. Everyone has known an addict, and the story is the same. There is a trigger, there is a person people love who runs down a dark path, and there is a network of people who want them to change but have difficulty realizing they contribute to the problem.

The news will not mention any of this. Instead we get a reporter asking family members softball questions for boilerplate answers for a puff piece. These types of pieces are a paint-by-numbers routine that no one will ever learn from, but everyone will feel a little sympathy for a dead young mother. “She’s cute like my girl, her family cared for her, like I do; they didn’t want to see her die of an OD, just like me!” This spin, and these answers, are the junkie version of the ghetto “he dindu nuffin, he a good boy, he goin’ to church erry week” post-crime answers to media questions. No one ever wants to admit something that reduces their social status, and no one wants to admit that they are part of the problem.

“Addiction is a disease,” and the word disease is thrown around in that reporter’s article. What disease–heroin or modernity? What was she running from? Why was she escaping reality for hours in a heroin induced abyss? She was 19-years-old with a little baby. Why was the pull of heroin stronger than the joy so many young mothers speak of when discussing their little ones? Why was her kid not enough to stay clean? Why is her town ravaged by a drug that everyone knows is highly addictive and kills? What was so horrible about her town, her friends, her family, and life that she would die just because she had to get high? Why is her social circle littered with heroin addicts?

The system, as in government judicial structures, did not fail this young woman. The system actually tried to set her up for recovery and to get back with her kid. Modern America is an open air asylum and heroin is an escape. The local news does not want to admit it, but they will dutifully report on the bodies found dead in flophouses. The media just enables this farce to continue and reality to be denied.

It is easy to mock your friends on Faceborg with their Potemkin Village family posts, but their lie is a status-securing lie. Your friends are not abandoning their kids to shoot up for hours spent in a heroin induced stupor. Witzel’s family’s lie is much worse because while wanting to be open about her death, they still need to maintain a dangerous lie. Witzel was an addict, with a support network littered with addicts or recovering addicts. Her death, while tragic, is the residue of a broken society. Heroin is not a disease. Heroin has been around for decades, experiencing resurgences. Heroin’s 21st century renaissance is just a symptom of the empty promises of progressive America.

The post The Reality No One Wants To Admit About Heroin Addiction appeared first on Social Matter.

After the coup to oust Mubarak, the Islamists swept to power and the world saw the normal Islamist game. Strict laws went into effect, prosecutions of blasphemers and infidels rose, and the protection that Coptic Christians formerly enjoyed under Mubarak ended. Like in Iraq and Libya, a secular dictator, who granted protections and freedoms that ran counter to Islamist or Sharia ideas, was deposed. Christians in Iraq have been pushed out to near extinction. The USG system should have anticipated another such change similar to what has happened from Iran in 1979 to today.

The USG cannot claim ignorance with regards to the Muslim Brotherhood as opposed to the “whocoodanode” dance from guilt like in Iraq. The USG has fostered a relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood dating back to the 1950s. This was a bit of a Cold War CIA play whereby the US would make contact with any counter-regime group in a country as possible co-opted opposition to use against the Soviet-friendly dictators. Egypt had Nasser, and a counterweight was the Muslim Brotherhood. The USG somehow did not notice the firey Reformation-style purity of its leader, Sayyid Qutb. Qutb would be the force behind the Brotherhood and an inspiration for al-Qaeda. Qutb was a man who watched American adults slow dance to “Baby It’s Cold Outside” and thought it was degenerate filth. To quote Qutb, the church goers,

“danced to the tunes of the gramophone, and the dance floor was replete with tapping feet, enticing legs, arms wrapped around waists, lips pressed to lips, and chests pressed to chests. The atmosphere was full of desire.”

Qutb also thought every American woman was attempting to seduce him. In his own mind, he was pure and resisted their slutty advances. This was the mind of the leader of the group America kept tight with for decades.

The US imported these men, and they returned to Egypt as scholars and opinion-shapers. Islam itself was reawakened in the face of Western decadence, as well as the massive influx of wealth from oil exporters. This is best seen in the changes in women’s dress witnessed through university student body pictures and in opinion polls asking Muslims Sharia-focused questions. This is now forcing al-Sisi to be cognizant–maybe not of the left or right of the Overton window, but of the Muhammad Window.

The junta rules Egypt, but blasphemy prosecutions are still higher than under Mubarak and little changed from under the Morsi administration. Christians in Egypt are also feeling the stress of a bureaucracy refusing to help them rebuild from the sectarian violence of the last few years. The Coptics, one of the oldest Christian communities in the world, face the logistical trouble of retaining and strengthening their beleagured community without the rallying points of worship and with the fear that denunciations could send them to jail.

The Christians will pine for the days of Mubarak, but no one else will. This is a good warning to the few folks in America who hope for a military coup. National change is not a simple change of the administrators. Who molds minds and who molds the culture?

Americans may just get generals waving rainbow flags. The Egyptian junta that al-Sisi leads is made up of men born after the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and Muslim radicalization. The political-religious revolution in Iran is a blueprint for others to try, but was thirty-five years ago. A generation of middle-aged administrators have grown up absorbing that message and political possibility. Former President Morsi and his followers might be executed. Even if they are not, the window in Egypt has shifted enough for their ideas to be co-opted by the military men from which they formerly overthrew for power. The Muslim Brotherhood may not hold the levers of explicit power, but if the men in control already think like they do, then they have won.

The post Moving The Muhammad Window appeared first on Social Matter.

Anything going on in Thailand? It has been a year since the coup, and not a peep has emerged from Thailand. The pushback on democratic evangelism will start at the edges with Thailand’s coup being an early sign.

Not all coups are the same. This coup does not resemble the Cold War era coups. This coup also had quite the amount of popular support, as the prior regime was becoming increasingly corrupt. The New York Times even reported how the entire class of educated people had become concerned about how one man one vote gave a bit too much power to the easily persuaded poor. Just publishing those evil, anti-democratic thoughts is dangerous for the New York Times’ readership to imbibe. The junta has played the aftermath very well. They are going through what the Western press calls sham trials to target opponents. The junta also has provided security, peace and while economic growth is slower, it still exists. What more could the people of Thailand want?

A Western journalist knows what they want and should do. This euro wants the Thai people to confront the junta, despite a majority wanting the coup and the resulting maintenance of peace and security. He laments how political rallies have been banned and how freedom of expression has been curtailed. What expression exactly? Random Thais expressing political opinions should not affect the political deal-making process and otherwise usually lead to disorder and unrest if they grow. A military controlled council is rewriting the constitution and has pushed back new elections, setting new dates twice now. This euro’s biggest lament:

The long-term consequences of the political situation in Thailand are being ignored in favor of short-term benefits – mainly the maintenance of security and peace. That makes it more difficult to demand civil rights and an end to dictatorship.

Oh, the shame of people getting what they want: peace and security. An indifference curve is the economic idea that people value things in different ways but value different levels of multiple goods equally if they provide the same overall total utility.

In a social way, we all have social indifference curves. The writer has no concept that people may have a social indifference curve, and not everyone is ginned up for the right to march topless in order to protest churches. Some people, many people, value safety, security, and stability over the right for political expression that has no affect on the moves of elites. Of course, Western progressives will favor any protest that pushes the right talking point because that protest can be magnified using the Western media force multiplier. The writer mentions how the opposition forces that may protest will only be restrained if the people fail to realize the military cannot resolve the conflict. Recapping the status of Thailand, what conflict do the mass of people see?

This is more a conflict for the USG system and its desire to democratize the world and maintain control of the international community. The formerly strong levers and tools the USG has at their disposal have become rusty and unreliable. Like the Egyptian junta that deposed the democratically elected Morsi, Thailand’s junta has also sought friendship and support from Russia and China, while the U.S. is busy elsewhere–friendship which is only amplified by Russian and Chinese defiance in the face of USG geopolitical moves. China publicly saying they would respect a diversity of government forms gives smaller nations like Thailand cover.

This also explains the proggification of the American armed forces in recent years. Progressive elites cannot risk our armed forces, one of the last institutions with widespread public support, to remove from power and punish elites who can win one man, one vote systems, since they can persuade just enough low-information voters to pull the lever for them in November. Thailand is just one nation, but a reliable long time post-World War II ally of the United States.

The domino effect against the shrinking USG system will start on the edges but slowly and surely make its way back to American shores.

The post Thailand: The Coup So Quiet You Could Hear A Pin Drop appeared first on Social Matter.

One of the few items that truly separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom, revealing the human spirit and soul, is art. In our 21st century cultural landscape, art is a degraded idea, made ugly by an intellectual crowd too happy to just be considered cool. Art is far too open to any amateur. The multicultural crowd slides into forms, where audiences are told that the alien-looking is on par with Rembrandt. We live in a society where simple representations of beach babe beauty creates online firestorms and real life bomb threats from feminists.

How do you fight it? Where can you still find art that reaches for the heights of human beauty? Watch ballet.

The beauty comes from the high hurdle to perform in a company in any major city in the West. You are seeing the best of the best express a story through choreography, classical music, costuming and lighting. To get onstage, you must be classically trained. Training starts young, and is grueling. You are not just technically competent, but the endurance required and selection for visual aesthetics, means the best technical and physical specimens are onstage. Maybe you dance well but your pointe work is poor, sorry, next in line?

The drive is to become a lead, so all are competing against one another throughout the company for that shot. The entire corps of the ballet company is stacked with dancers all trying to make it to Swan Queen, and ensemble pieces are synchronized beauty because of that. You cannot be a token and be a lead, and with how many gay men are involved, a woman rarely, if ever, could sleep her way to a lead.

When you see a ballet, you know what you’re going to get. The beauty within ballet is that there is order and tradition, and within that framework the performers breathe a living spirit. The terminology is centuries old and mostly French. All performers must learn and master these movements and positions. One does not hit the spotlight unless one has absorbed the same repetitive lessons of one’s contemporaries and predecessors. Even by being a lead and having solo dances, because of the long tradition of old ballets and classic movements, one becomes part of the historical memory of ballet.

Ballet may be rigid because of this tradition, but it is always reaching for new heights. The order and tradition poses an interesting challenge to choreographers, directors and performers alike. How does one make a production one’s own? Within the limits of order, how does one make this new thing special and creative? Ballet is so tough and so wonderful that one could say modern dance was created as an angry reaction to it by women protesting ballet.

The historical memory matters, and it is not just for ballet itself. Ballet is akin to a cultural ark for Western civilization. The godfather of ballet (one of several) Marius Petipa created many ballet productions still performed today. Working in the creative cauldrons of France and Russia, his work was completed by carefully talking to old masters and choreographers. Petipa researched old stagings, costume design, set design and choreography notes. He did this all to reconstruct old ballets for revivals and to help in creating new ones. His ballets are centered on stories from Europe’s cultural history like Don Quixote, Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker. Swan Lake was revived by Petipa, and still is part of the modern Western memory enough for Hollywood to make Black Swan. Petipa’s work is a cultural ark and a successful one because over 100 years after his death, the productions live on.

Unlike other art forms and other forms of dance, there is no lull in ballet. Spots at the top are so few that there is always an eager new performer climbing for the top. Training techniques have allowed performers to physically dazzle audiences more with movements than in years of old. There have been no new big productions, but the classics never fail to deliver. If anything, the rigidity, tradition and order of the ballet world has helped it persevere compared to other art forms.

It is not a democratic art form, as one must meet the rigorous demands to enter the select realm of professionals.

That makes it all the better. The filtration process from taking Ballet 1 as a child to center stage makes it certain that those onstage will be striving for awe inspiring performances for you the audience. If not for you, the performers labor, sweat and push their bodies for the tradition that is ballet and those who performed before them.

The post The Beauty Of Ballet appeared first on Social Matter.