Since the secrecy requirements of the American soliders of the Vietnam War have expired, new exposure is emerging with stories like this one:

[Military Assistance Command Vietnam-Studies and Observations] encouraged and incentivized prisoner snatching… There were no overarching standard-operating procedures… SOG commandos inspected their prisoner more closely, only to find that it was a woman. In their moment of surprise, the prisoner escaped, jumping from the helicopter to her death.

Why would this POW, aside from lack of standard-operating procedures, jump out of a helicopter to certain death? What exactly does “more closely” mean in terms of inspection being done during a helicopter ride after capture? Such stories deserve more thorough investigation.

More details are in a U.S. Army “The Indigenous Approach” podcast called “MACV-SOG: A Conversation with John Stryker Meyer” ( Part I )( Part II )

Back in 2011 I wrote about cycling being a superior route to transportation equity. I even cited Victorian England since women’s liberation evidently was tied to the advent of modern cycling (could ride to work and be independent of typically male-dominated transit such as horse or carriage).

Now I see a fascinating new report on cycling in Chicago that says police are issuing more tickets against Black riders to prevent them from having mobility on bikes, despite data showing the majority of accidents are white riders.

In Chicago, cyclists in Black neighborhoods are over-policed and under-protected.

A simple solution for transportation equity: bike lanes.

The Smithsonian tells us America’s “founding fathers” promoted and spread early forms of vaccines very widely.

Jefferson had given 200 members of his extended family and neighbors the vaccine by August of 1800

When they didn’t, they experienced a devastation of regret for not having vaccinated more.

Both Jefferson and Franklin had to argue with the early anti-vaccination movement. For Franklin, some of the discussion veered from the scientific into the personal: One of his sons died of smallpox at age 4, six years before Jenner discovered cowpox’s use. Some thought that little Franky had died after his father inoculated him with smallpox. But those were just ugly rumors. Franklin wrote in his autobiography: “In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation.”

A new article makes the strange claim that propaganda networks have “shifted” targeting from drugs to political activism.

New war: How the propaganda network shifted from targeting ‘addicts’ to activists.

The problem with such “new” analysis, any historian could probably show, is that activists historically have been called things like drug addicts to make them targeted more easily (avoid scrutiny of anti-democratic actions).

There is no shift, just recognition a system of heavy-handed criminalization uses encoding to escape proper scrutiny.

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

Today extremist right-wing Americans just overtly say they are going with war with the “left” instead of pretending to care about drugs.