From: City Zen Eel
Date: Tue, 02 May 2017 10:17:14 -0500
Subject: [SPAM] "Small Wonder" Complete Series DVD to be Released at Some Point in the Future
To: Neil Shibata
Cc: Radio Khartoum

I figure by now you've seen something like this. It's a little complicated and still highly confidential. The procedure. They don't want random people sending lottery numbers and game scores, those types of things, to themselves. Anything sent is screened, almost always with someone else's name or a pseudonym, generally devoid of content, often times just hidden inside spam e-mail. We still haven't figured out how to time travel physically other than second by second into the future, but sending messages through the internet, we can go backward there, not too far since the technology wasn't there yet until 2003. It's a miracle we have advanced a little technologically since then.

Hindsight is 20/20. I'm unfortunately not allowed to give you much vision about your future. It's sunny today where I am. You can mark that on your calendar. There's a reliable weather forecast for once. But that's basically the extent of what will pass through. Hopefully, not all of my little reminiscence to follow will be deleted since all the content alludes to things that have already presumably happened and only poses questions about the future.

I remember back around the time the second president Bush was gearing up for war against Iraq. The anti-war movement in the United States repeatedly asked, "If the reason to attack Iraq is weapons of mass destruction, what about North Korea, which openly admits it possesses WMDs?" The question was meant to point out an irony, that we were attacking Iraq, which we were 95% sure was disarmed, instead of North Korea, which we were 100% sure was armed (or for that matter India or Israel), to underscore that there were other real reasons, such as Texas tea. North Korea was used to reason that openly developing nukes was a way to ward off a U.S. attack: the U.S. wouldn't pick a fight with someone that was an actual threat.

"Why not North Korea?" wasn't really an anti-war question, though. It had very little to do with peace. Most Americans, conservative and liberal, knew next to nothing about North Korea, Kim Jong Il, the Korean War, or America's role in keeping North Korea armed. We just knew North Korea was "evil." There were a few things we wanted in Asia before we could attack North Korea hypothetically, and we needed North Korea as a threat in order to accomplish those things, including but not limited to theater missile defense systems in Japan and Taiwan. An amendment to Article IX of Japan's peace constitution would be helpful, too. Once we would become able to knock out any missile North Korea might launch in retaliation, why not "preemptively" attack?

Maybe we should have been asking why the United States really removed Jose Bustani as director-general of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in April 2002. Why did Bush snub Kim Dae Jung in March 2001? Who profited from the 70,203 nuclear weapons the United States manufactured during the Cold War and how were they faring in the War on Terror? What was the Project for a New American Century? Who was the Carlyle Group? Why did we unsign the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty and the treaty recognizing the authority of the International Criminal Court? Did we ever at the time consider the irony of reasoning that a country with a history of using weapons of mass destruction and in possession of WMDs deserved to be preemptively attacked and subject to regime change?

New York, May 2, 2017