BANGKOK, Thailand -- When the CIA's most macabre paramilitary officer
Tony "Poe" Poshepny demanded and received the hacked-off ears and
heads of communists in Laos during the Vietnam War, no one predicted
he would become an exhibit in a new museum in Bangkok's red-light
zone.

The Patpong Museum, on Patpong Road, also describes why U.S.
intelligence and military officers, airlines, IBM, and others rented
buildings alongside sleazy bars packed with prostitutes, especially
during the Vietnam War which ended in 1975.

"In 1957, we have the American Chamber of Commerce here. We have the
U.S. Information Service Library here. We have Shell Oil here. Pan Am,
TWA," the museum's founder and curator Michael Messner said in an
interview.

The CIA's clandestine Air America secretly flew troops, casualties,
refugees, ammunition, rice and other supplies in Laos and elsewhere
and staffed an office here until 1972.

On display is a 1963 letter with an Air America logo from 3 Patpong

Epstein came to my attention when I was an investigative journalist for one of Columbus, Ohio's alternative newsweeklies, Columbus Alive. Not many people know that the infamous Jeffrey Epstein spent a lot of time in Columbus in the 1990s and owned the second most valuable house in Franklin County (where Columbus resides), in the plush Stepford suburb known as New Albany. I investigated central Ohio billionaire Les Wexner's and Jeff Epstein’s ties to the intelligence community more than 20 years ago. Much of this is captured in two books – The Fitrakis Files: Spooks, Nukes, and Nazis and The Fitrakis Files: Cops, Coverups, and Corruption (CICJ Books, freepress.org).

Epstein came to my attention when I was an investigative journalist for one of Columbus, Ohio's alternative newsweeklies, Columbus Alive. Not many people know that the infamous Jeffrey Epstein spent a lot of time in Columbus in the 1990s and owned the second most valuable house in Franklin County (where Columbus resides), in the plush Stepford suburb known as New Albany. I investigated central Ohio billionaire Les Wexner's and Jeff Epstein’s ties to the intelligence community more than 20 years ago. Much of this is captured in two books – The Fitrakis Files: Spooks, Nukes, and Nazis and The Fitrakis Files: Cops, Coverups, and Corruption (CICJ Books, freepress.org).

If you can do activism, do it around policies in a principled manner, and steer clear of elections.

If you can do funding, fund principled activist organizations, not political candidates.

If you must divert your energies and money into elections, I have a recommendation for how best to do it (not that you’ll necessarily listen to me, having already ignored my first two paragraphs, but what the heck):

Part of getting better governance out of Washington, D.C., will have to come from shifting power back from the White House to the Congress and putting better people into the Congress.

The coming election for the White House has, as always, an even worse lesser-evilism problem than it had the time before. The lesser evil is a bit too evil for a bit too many people. Some want to pinch their nose and go for it anyway. Others want to try for something better next time by, for once, withholding votes that have certainly not been earned. Others would support lesser-evil voting if not for the fact that so many who engage in lesser-evil voting develop symptoms of lesser-evil thinking and behaving and cheerleading on a long-term basis.