Ghost Month Starts

Ghost Month started and burning smell is around.

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Since around the time when I returned from Vietnam in late June or when I updated my browser, Firefox, it has been impossible to download update files for the anti-virus program. Today, I was ready to download another anti-virus program and pay for it when I found the reason why it was not possible. A virus. Ha! A virus was affecting and controlling the anti-virus program. Does it mean that the program is not doing its job??

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For a glimpse of what may lie ahead, consider [McGeorge Bundy’s lecture]. Bundy urges that more power be concentrated in the executive branch of the government, now “dangerously weak in relation to its present tasks.” That the powerful executive will act with justice and wisdom – this presumably needs no argument. As an example of the superior executive who should be attracted to government and given still greater power, Bundy cites Robert McNamara. Nothing could reveal more clearly the dangers inherent in the “new society” than the role that McNamara’s Pentagon has played for the past half-dozen years. No doubt McNamara succeeded in doing with utmost efficiency that which should not be done at all… (p. 75, “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship” in “Chomsky on Anarchism”)

And in “Notes (p. 100)”…

To mention just the most recent example: on January 22, 1968, McNamara testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that “the evidence appears overwhelming that beginning in 1966 Communist local and guerrilla forces have sustained substantial attrition. As a result, there has been a drop in combat efficiency and morale….” The Tet offensive was launched within a week of this testimony.

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A rather sad thing is that Chomsky mentioned Honda Katsuichi in “Notes” for this article. Honda’s credibility has already been destroyed irreparably in Japan because of his reportages on, among others, “Killing Competition by two Imperial Army soldiers” and the "Nanking Massacre."