Since the big Latino Show on the White House lawn, and some State Dinner party-crashing, the Tiger missing an easy shot around a fire hydrant, I thought there might be some connections to the War in Afghanistan. Yesterday night after 200 assessments of the situation, President Obama gave Afghanistan his best shot.

A bit of déjà vu like Bush at Annapolis for starters, dragged into a full blown time warp. Not hearing anything new as in the Bush Standard in how to win the War on Terror, I was fidgeting, half expecting Rumsfeld to take the stage and liven things up a bit.

If the war is winnable we've got twin it. When you're down, you raise the stakes--(cell phone rings) Right. And stay the course!

What about cashing out? Turn the whole thing over to the UN? Where was all that electrifying Obama spin on reality? Not there, not even reflected from his audience, respectful and subdued but missing the old Obama. The Obama recap of the war with no fresh insights, disappointing. No one totally sure what happened with all the self-serving justifications of a gung-ho Bush era or why we're still there 8 years later. Where was Obama's easy Latino beat? Easier to throw a party or crash one. Harder to get things done.

OK, if the Taliban ran a hard line Islamic State, like Iran, like Saudi, wasn't that their business? Once upon a time they weren't the bad guys. They were popular in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Started by an idealistic group of Afghan students with the backing of the mujaheddin who fought the Russians, supported then by America. Trying to rebuild a war-torn Afghanistan. Stopped the opium War Lords and banned opium farms. Back then who ever heard of them? Who helped them?

Looks like Americans are fighting the wrong war again. Now another 30,000 soldiers to fight the Taliban. Al Qaeda too, but where are they in such a vast inhospitable wilderness of high mountains, snow and desert? Will 30,000 more Americans find them all? If they are still in Afghanistan? The Taliban though are everywhere and the easy target. They're fighting. Opium is back and so are the War Lords. The Taliban are behind it, is the conventional view. Maybe they are or maybe like the Americans and NATO they're turning a blind eye, while fighting for their lives. There's a war on.

All the Taliban ever did was provide safe-haven for Al Qaeda. According to the Bush Doctrine those who harbor enemies are enemies. So we get them all! Well just what kind of harboring was that? Like Iraqis harboring Saddam, or like harboring a brother the police are after?

Isn't Pakistan doing the same thing? Harboring Al Qaeda and the Taliban? Not officially, but sympathetically and effectively? They're all Muslims after all. Is paying informers, is blood money working? Somewhat.

Should America invade Pakistan then? The logical next step. Obama wouldn't do that but what if the war drags on? Past Obama into Palin territory?

Obama wants the war over by 2011, a colossal job. He's counting on something else besides fighting, a bit of sanity delivered into the mix of his low key speech at West Point. Work towards co-opting the Taliban, in effect get them on our side. Which translates into buying them off. At this stage you can't get their real support as you've been smashing them for 8 years for what exactly? And destroying house by house what's left of their country. Is this a workable plan? Looks modest and very long term, something for another generation of Afghans and Americans. Wasn't Obama elected for leadership? Then why not take a quick and effective approach? Turn over Afghanistan to the UN? There's a good chance it will work, an honorable American exit, honorable for the Taliban too, the war finally over for everyone. Isn't that the UN's job anyway, to keep the peace?

Of course in this war the Taliban will pocket American peace dollars, but what will they do with them? What's Karzai doing with his? Not much progress everyone says. Obama wants more money for the Afghan Army, the Afghan Police. Way more soldiers, way more police. Who's side are they on? Many in it for themselves at least, in a lawless and dangerous land where official corruption and abuse of power is once again a way of life. Of course they need better training. I almost fell off my chair! Are we on the same page, in the same world?

By the same token what's happening in Iraq now? Same sort of thing, Obama's Taliban strategy a leaf from lessons learned in Iraq as it happens. Though it seems to be working in Iraq on the surface at least, except Iraqi infrastructure is a war-torn mess, and very high unemployment undermines what forced American Armed Forces stability there is. Just how much goodwill is there left that Americans truly enjoy, indeed in the entire Middle East? Enough for an end to terror and a real peace?

Little enough as we'll find out once Americans leave. Or will they? Is yes we can now yes maybe we can? The unpleasant reality is two Arab countries wrecked. Who is to blame? Stability in any case remains a dream. If most Iraqis didn't like Saddam, most now don't like Americans either, their lives still in ruins, everywhere the shadow of more terror around the corner. Terrorists and bombs, but also official corruption and abuse, police you can't trust, police you fear, and more and more crime on the streets in the crossfire of war. In Afghanistan it's worse. There was no corrupt regime to begin with. Just a backward-looking Islamic State, not despotic but legitimate, not initially anti-American, just ultra-conservative, looking to revitalize itself.

If Obama follows through on his forced pacification of Afghanistan with some more American troops and dollars to grease the wheels, will it work?

Not unless he knows the Arabs better. These are a passionate people from the Middle Ages. They're nurture their grudges and their pain and fight again. Unless they get honorable terms.

But Obama's plan is better than trying to kill every last American enemy. For every dead martyr as Bush saw, another dozen martyrs rise. Even during World War II, was it the goal of the Allies to eliminate every last German soldier, every last Japanese soldier to win the war? Or eliminate even those who harbored them, their wives, their children?

It might also be useful to find out why a handful of Arab terrorists, largely from Saudi, attacked the US anyway? Even Bin Laden hasn't told us yet.

To stop the war shouldn't we find out why everybody is fighting?

--Alan Gillis

A lot of things come up every week. Though we don't have time for them. Since most of us are media addicts, we also get what's left of our lives second hand from the media. We complain about the programming or say how cool XYZ was on TMZ or did you see last night's game/grope/Gummy Bears? This is where our real life begins after work if we're still working. Don't know how long that will last. We could all be outsourced next week in this economy. So let's get real while there's still time. Have a look back at the week that was.

Too much like work? Right. OK, well it was a lousy week. Even Lou Dobbs quit CNN. And he owns a big chunk of it, but I'm guessing here as no one else will investigate CNN. Probably fired himself because ratings were down on Lou Dobbs Tonight. Like Sarah Palin who also quit her day job, I bet Lou will run for President. Trying to fire illegal alien Obama on his show didn't work. Smuggled in from where Lou? Jersey? Daily reruns of what kind of a democracy have we got? And more gosh darnnit illegal aliens picking our lettuce, taking jobs away from Americans!

Right about the War on the Middle Class though. Bet Lou knows where all the bodies are buried under Wall Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. Years anchoring Moneyline on CNN in another incarnation. And no slouch either. The guy went to Harvard like Obama.

Sure Lou knows we've got bodies everywhere, on the CNN foreign news segments. But Lou blustered on as though he might spill the local beans, on and on through the American outsourcing to death, just sickening, the downsizing of America to what? Subsidized by the same idiot Feds who were too busy ignoring Madoff and Co and and and.

True enough but it didn't catch fire. The economic crash pre-empted all that talk about what's wrong with America. Time to scramble and fix it before everybody goes under. Bush's answer, spend more money, print more money, bail them out. Then Obama to the rescue. Same thing, bail them out before we all crash. But the causes of the crash are still there and pumping more money into them for life support months later, doesn't look like working in the long run. The economy? Some relief for some, but DOA for the middle class, downsized daily into the largest growth industry, the unemployed. So what if there are some scattershot stock market rallies? Is there anything to cheer about?

The middle class is key to any country. They do the work and they pay the taxes. The people with money make more money as they always do. They still get bonuses for that. While we bail them out with a Trillion Dollars. What are they doing for us? Wait, wait and see. Probably nothing.

With world governments behind a sinking economy, my money's on feudalism. Meanwhile some idiots might be gritting their teeth if Lou has any smoking guns lying around. He's still got his radio show. Either he gets more political or he fades out.

--Alan Gillis

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What's in the fridge? Whatever happened to TV? A gigantic crime infestation, that's wot, the Brits on top as the best and nasty nancies, gor. The other day I tried to find something to watch besides CSI. After 9 years of shows and spinoffs, I had to forcibly restrict access with sticky yellow and black CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS tape and shut the damn thing off with a latex glove.

Maybe we need another another CSI: Burbank. Where CSI Tech Forensics hack into Studio Heads to investigate who murdered Prime Time. It has to be somebody. Somebody bludgeoned Entertainment, threw the body into a vault and started cloning CSI Miami, New York, Vegas, what next?

Our relentless pursuit of some kind of life has reached brain-numbing potentials. Are crime and reality TV, disaster movies, what we're all watching? Don't we do anything else? Maybe it all started with the Terminator. After all didn't he take over Hollywood before California? Thanks Arnold but why can't you hold down 2 jobs like the rest of us? Try Fiscal Crisis California. Try USA. Take them out! Make another movie if nothing else works.

In the early days of Tech all you had to do was watch your consumption of movies and TV as pure entertainment. And telephone as a tool, not a chatter line, leaving some space for friends and hobbies. The Internet has changed all that. Anyone connected now can have it all streamed through a PC or iPhone, virtual friends and demons included, like an updated Roman Polanski: No mirrors but we've got screens. Fasten your seatbelt or restraining device and scream, still optional, for your daily Virtual Life Transmission.

It should ring some alarm bells like 1984. It doesn't yet because we are our own Virtual Managers and that conveniently drains whatever spare time we might have to think a way out of a Virtual Life into a real one. But who has any time left? Not only do we spend it working on learning this and that dumbass software, but to make it work or work better and do things for us we don't need, we wind up debugging it and Windows too. Is this fair or sensible? Everyday we're working for Microsoft or some other conglomerate for free yet and there's no painless MS Anxiety Manager App to download and get us through, unless you pay for Hindi .ddl Support or join a Support Group like Microsoft AA, online of course. Help! Auto Update keeps tyin to install KB967715 a thousand times!!!

There goes the time for hobbies and friends unless you're a gamer too and you've got your own Sims family and friends where you want them. Then OK, who needs a real life, when you have absolute control.

If you're still happy with all that, there's one thing you've probably overlooked. You could be totally alone and alienated. A Web basket case. Welcome to the underlying reality nobody talks about. But you've got options. There's crime TV or gaming to vent unverbalized frustration, that or reality TV if you need to borrow somebody else's reality for awhile. Or if you're a guy, fantasy porno from a thousand willing webcam girls to upgrade your libido. Easier, cheaper and more secure than a 2 Dollar Whore.

Maybe that's where Sarah Palin has an edge. Why else is she everywhere? The simple soccer mom gal who hires someone else to update her Facebook and Twitter friends, avoiding the nerdy dirty for the happy days of '50's push button dreams. A dishwasher I can handle. If you ever catch her lugging a laptop around, you'll know it's the end.

Is this the direction we're taking? Sarah Palin and the end of time? Done deal so far. Not easily uninstallable. With Retro out, what would you reinstall? We've already lost a lot of hardware that we're emulating with fancy software or smaller hardware. Not the same thing going out with friends to the movies and your own home theater setup. Small screen, big screen, your place--your kids--your distractions, lights out--darkness--mystery--magic. Gone.

The big hardware, the theaters are vanishing. With no time to go out, so are real restaurants, real places to hang out, real places to go to meet people and friends. A loner's game at home. With no society, no social skills, more paranoia going out to shop, as we're still shopping but with more antisocial elements like ourselves, the other shoppers.

It's happening at break (your) neck speed. $3.40 for a Starbucks? WiFi extra? At the office it's all computer time and what computers want if you've still got a job. Some big business boxes and towers don't allow talk. Keystrokes only. And they count them. Send an email or text the guy in the next cubicle for perfect company productivity. Dead people work better.

What can we do? Buy life insurance, sounds good at least. Become a hacker, a terrorist, a billionaire like Madoff. Fake it so you've got a private identity somewhere. Don't put it on Facebook unless it's funny or absolutely dumb or you might fall through the giant cracks of comedy into the abyss of a humorless legal system compromised by open-ended conspiracy theories from the KB20010911 Auto Update: Resolves and restores default insecurity codes, and allows temporary implementation of suspect codec bushwacking through a modified firewall algorithm before deletion, overwriting, and final stripping of all bushwacking files in Recycle Bin Bypass serving a modified Cheneydump.

Anyone seen a Hot Fix for this one?

Of course the real hackers and terrorists and stars of popular crime are busy subverting everything because we won't do it ourselves in a fair and nice way. They think we've abandoned civilization and them, except in TV shows and movies where we love'em or hate'em. For criminals with philosophy or religion, it's hard to argue against their baseline assumptions if you're rational and humanistic: Society is sick and dickheads did it.

When real criminals absolutely believe themselves they go in for revenge. And we go after them like Thought Police and nothing changes except we feel better because we're doing something about crime or terrorists like talking about it, or feeling worse like we're becoming the suspects for some real pain, or at least watching some actors doing something that's more real than being chained to a PC, unless we stick out our necks and go into law enforcement or the army.

With enough commitment, but it's too late already, we could have avoided the Fiscal Crisis at least. If the War on Terror wasn't preempted by sanity and Obama, we'd all be fully employed and secure. Plastic please! Homeland Security Check. Civilian and/or Democrat? Terrorist? Maxxed out? Swipe here.

Anyway we got here by ourselves and we're going to a future breakdown we've seen in dozens of disaster movies, Obama or not. The real failure of civilization goes beyond politics and the economy. It's a loss of soul and culture.

Is that it? Can't we just walk out of this show and find something better? No, not yet. A direction has been set by MS and Google Technocrats and us following them. It's a totalitarian history repeating itself. A civilization arises, overextends itself and dwindles into power-groping and decadence or falls into vinyl gear absurdity only to crash and burn. Remember Star Wars?

2012: The only way out. Galactic Alignment? Mayan Cycle? Mountain of Fire? Global Warming? Nothing on TV, already the reality. But try Level 26.

--Alan Gillis