Anarchist Yacht Club

I forgot to post this last week when I was in Cairns. Last week when I was in Cairns one of my roommates was an older man (probably 55-60 yrs old) from Australia. When I told him I was from the US he said "I have to warn you, I've been a big US political knocker for a long time." After talking more with him I learned that he basically thinks our country is ran by Wall Street and that every president we have will bend to the will of big businesses. He also thinks our foreign policies (i.e. being the world police) are terrible and proclaimed George Bush as "the worst man ever." I'll let you decide on where you agree/disagree with him.

Now to the weird part, he told me that he does a lot of yachting around the world. To which I thought to myself "so, why are you staying at a hostel that costs $25 per night?" He said that there is this group of anarchists ex-businessmen (many of which are Americans) that sail yachts around the world and make documentaries exposing governments and corporations of wrongdoings. He said that they don't release the documentaries to the public (he implied that they're kind of a secret) and you have to be specifically invited onto one of their yachts to view them. However, he said many of the documentaries have very strong evidence against the corrupt US gov't and big US businesses. He said the documentaries aren't aimed just at the USA, but all countries.

He said that he's seen several documentaries about the "real reasons" why the USA invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. According to the documentaries, there is "very strong" evidence that we invaded Afghanistan because of the plentiful supply of opium there, claiming that the most powerful people in our country benefit from the illegal drug trade. I said "I highly doubt our government would invade another country to gain access to their illegal drugs." He replied, "Oh, I think you will find that you are very wrong, the opium trade is the biggest in the world and the super rich people in the USA all benefit from it."

I don't really believe anything that guy says but it just goes to show the different (and weird) types of people that I've met during my trip.