Mumblings on Jim Jones, Afghanistan and Armistead Maupin

I have always been a fan of lunatic American charismatic preachers. Clearly the 'Reverend' Jim Jones is one of my all time favourites, the Kool Aid incident aside http://www.religioustolerance.org/dc_jones.htm . One of the intersting things I find about the whole sordid Peoples Temple business was the sign that was displayed at the front entrance to the peoples temple, it read; "Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it". And all though he slightly misquotes Santayana http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/santayana/, it's something those other religous ideologoues, namely messers Bush, Cheney and Runsfeld may have done well to remember.
I have always found myself in a quandry about Afghanistan, clearly under the Taliban it was a barbaric state and no right thinking person could possibly support it. That said, I was never convinced that any form of intervention in Afghanistan was going to work. If you lookback through the history of Afghanistan you could see it was always going to end in tears. Most of the great empires have tried to conqer the country and in the most part, perhaps with Genghis Khan and the Mongols excepted, they have failed. The great Empires of Britain and the Soviets have failed, so I am not sure how the Bush et al expected their brand of American Exceptionalism http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=3327839006982521557 to succeed.

Perhaps I should leave it up to some one far more inteligent than I to come up with an answer to this.
http://www.wanttoknow.info/brzezinskigrandchessboard

My guess in the short term, we will see Afghanistan fall off the radar slightly, because we are coming up to the winter months there and winters being the way the are over there, no matter what your point of you it's pretty hard to get anything done when you are waist deep in snow. But come summer it will all start again and I am not sure we will be any further towards a solution.

Richard Holbrooke http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7846654.stm has shit load of work in front of him.

On a lighter night, anyone interested in a alternate end to the Jim Jones story might want to check out Further Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin http://www.amazon.com/Further-Tales-City-V/dp/0060924926 /ref=pd_sim_b_3 In fact read the whole series. Written like Dickens or Tom Wolfes' Bonfire of the Vanities i.e; as chapters in a periodical, they are some of the funniest, heartwarming books you could ever read.