The mark of a true thinker is the willingness to allow information that is contrary to their perception of incomplete and unknown situations to become useful in the intellectual mechanism of how they draw their final conclusions.  Ignoring certain events and facts in order to avoid challenging a narrative plausible only when conceived in their absence veers away from the truth.

The recent events involving missile attacks and scores of killings of alleged drug traffickers in international waters is a great example of the intellectual schism confused as a Right- v -Left issue when it is not that at all.  Strip away the narratives, official statements, opinions and take no position other than an investigative one and then consider the facts.

The public is treated to an aerial screen-shot of a high-speed boat, we’re told somewhere in the Caribbean, just too grainy to identify cargo or faces, carrying drugs we’re told, bound for the US.  Seconds later a flash, fireball and smoke are all that is left.  Clearly those on board are killed and whatever was the cargo is destroyed.  As of this writing, this has happened 22-times with 80 dead, according to the US government.

With the intelligence apparatus of the US military, we are told these boats are full of drugs and we obviously know their location, so given the capabilities of our naval powers, why aren’t we interdicting these boats?  The President simply declaring groups “terrorists” does not permit murder on the open sea.  The Caribbean is not a war-zone and the people piloting these boats are low-level actors, perhaps forced into compliance for fear of death or family suffering.  Those we kill might well be innocent victims.  How do we actually know what is on-board these boats?  They tell us drugs, but are we supposed to simply take their word for it?  There is no proof that the boats are in the Caribbean, or that the bombings happen at all.  Is it really so far-fetched to consider that the whole show is just that, a show?  Just to be clear, I don’t actually believe the whole thing is staged, but we ought to be skeptical.  I do believe the US military has carried out these strikes, but I’m making the point that we all see these snippets of violence and death and we react not with any pity for the dead or dying, but almost like we are winning some real-time video game and because we are making the world a better place, it matters little our methods or tactics.

Conservative television outlets continue to show viewers thousands of times these awful images of human death and destruction.  It is meant to harden us, to justify this by repeating the narrative of the number of drug-deaths in the US but again, where is the proof?  Everything and everyone is conveniently blown into oblivion.  And again, I’m not suggesting some extensive conspiracy here I’m well aware of the drug traffic problems, but it seems that this exercise in getting the public to approve of what is really extra-judicial murder is OK when done in order to save American drug-users.

Unfortunately for the government, the blow-up-the-boats imagery of September 2^nd didn’t fit so neatly into the video-game like finish.  After the smoke cleared, it appeared that 2-men were clinging to wreckage.  A second missile strike took care of that but here is where it breaks free from the other neater and more final versions.  Clearly, 2-men were targeted to die and the imagery, formerly akin to a video game became a snuff-film that jolted Americans back to reality.

No one wanted their fingerprints on this one and so conveniently, the US Navy Admiral in charge of this particular section of the world says it was all him and then quickly retires.  The public is promised publication of those videos, but they never come, relying on the strong undercurrents of the news-cycle pressure to sweep it into vague memory.

So with this unprecedented hard-line on alleged drug boats justifying public pay-per-view instant death without proof, force of law or trial, how can we juxtapose Trump’s sudden pardon of former Honduran President Hernandez?  This thug was essentially the King Pin of a narco-state who was arrested, tried and convicted.  His power makes these drug boats inconsequential by comparison yet he walks away from a 45-year prison term, inexplicably, while we slaughter nameless and faceless strangers in the name of justice? Perhaps Trump is using the public execution of all of societies “bad-guys” as a pretext to invade Venezuela, oust President Maduro and exchange our nation-building largess for our own oil supply, justified by the promise to liberate the Venezuelan people from the evils of one man to the evils of another.  This nicely avoids all of the domestic environmental concerns and creates a literal pipe-line of oil to the US, all under the guise of protecting our citizens from drugs, freeing Venezuelans and ousting bad leaders, with the uncomfortable exception of Hernandez, who’s value is entirely entangled in his insider knowledge of the South American drug world, all entangled up in a pretty package of competing interests and the reality of a world in the troughs of an existential crisis of character as the Lord looks upon us and weeps.