PG, there sure is a nice supply of people who are pretty good about subtle and not so subtle information dys-semination, as it were. Casting doubt, floating factoids, reproducing sections of the Narrative per the coding provided by the Establishment. Just enough truth mixed in to make the truthiness more credible. People who when called out on obvious factual problems with their stories just move on to the next post, knowing how so few of us try to track and integrate this stuff very much, and waiting the next opportunity to dys-inform or "correct" any dissenters.
There's a lot of other techniques that various parts of US, The Nation, have gotten good at, including be-fog-of-warring, Mysterialization, claims of superior knowledge and desperate skills, rendition, de-stabilization, data mining, compartmentalization, deniability, disappearing people and large amounts of money, all that kind of stuff. Too bad so few of US, The Nation, put their efforts into working on the survival of the species and the stability of the planet.
I'm sure it's all done in good faith, and in good taste, and for our own good. Right?
Correct, Bill. Very astute comment. Too bad "the U.S." did not limit itself, legally or not, to the two items you think were justification for invasion and $4 trillion of war games, getting bin Ladin and that Mullah Fella off the stage. Why didn't "we" leave the various parts of the people living in Afghanistan to sort things out amongst themselves in the first place?
But that is of course not how our machinery works, now is it?
Speaking of parodies... One of those repetitive things I stick at is personification of "nations." "The U.S." is made up of a whole bunch of disparate moving and acting parts, including sets of people who do "Doctors without Borders" and International Red Cross and stuff, and who oppose the crazy clumsy bleeding bureaucracy called the MIC, and the sale of murderous weapons all over the planet, and people who actively push and profit from those same sales. And some of "us" manage the overthrow of, say, Iranian governments for the benefit of British petroleum corporations, and little Central American countries for the benefit of United Fruit and so on.
That US contractors get paid to manage teams of largely indigenous people to risk their lives picking up mines that are in the ground as a result of "our" fixation on playing the Great Game sure doesn't seem like a "good deed" worthy of praise. But that's just me, of course.
Hey, Joe, where you gonna find "competent professionals" to put the withdrawal in the hands of? They got a bunch of those hanging around in "the administration" in DC and Langley and Foggy Bottom? And maybe you could show me where I wrote "the same thing" about withdrawal from Iraq, which hmmm, hasn't actually gone all that well, has it? "Positive political results?" Like what, and for whom? Karzai? the hornet's nest of tribalists and drug lords and arms dealers and contractors and The Hated Taliban and stuff? Reality-based? I guess "whatever happens" is "reality?"
I guess we should once again just have faith that the "competent professionals" will do the right thing? Sorry we descend to the personal attacks... but there's always enough hate and tribalism to go around... How's that for a parody?
"WE" worked really hard to sucker the Soviets into invading Afghanistan, and they brought a lot of mines with them, and we (for a profit, of course) supplied a lot of mines to be used in those parts of the continual bloodshed. And of course in lots of other places where "we" have fomented or taken some part in "conflict."
Don't you DARE to be claiming "moral credit" for the US for picking up our toys over there:
From 1969 to 1992, the United States exported 4.4 million antipersonnel mines, mostly to Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Iraq, Laos, Lebanon, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Rwanda, Somalia, and Vietnam.
U.S.-made or supplied APLs have been found in 32 countries, including Afghanistan.
http://www.uscbl.org/about-landmines/landmine-facts/ There's much more at that site too, like the fact that mines cost about $3 or not much more to make, and cost thousands to remove, and do millions more in physical and psychic damage.
The mine clearing is a for-profit operation, and I have a hard time being more sentimental about mine-clearers getting killed by your possible "the Taliban" than any other person killed or maimed in this whole fool's paradise (possibly excepting Osama bin Ladin):
The US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) has been working to clear landmines from Afghanistan since Operation Enduring Freedom began. The USACE uses a combination of US soldiers and contractors to perform the work. The USACE’s Engineering and Support Center in Huntsville, AL, recently awarded a contract worth up to $60 million to EOD Technology (EODT) in Lenoir City, TN, to clear mines and battlefield areas…
Under the contract announced Feb 1/10, EODT will provide clearance of munitions and explosives of concern, including landmines and unexploded munitions throughout Afghanistan. EODT has provided mine clearing, security services, and expeditionary services in Afghanistan since 2004.
And what do you so very much smarter guys suggest are the policies and tactics to be followed in order not to create a giant sucking sound of some "catastrophic power vacuum" as the last C-117s and Blackhawks hoist their loads and flee, er, "leave"?
The whole "Vietnamization" thing ain't going to work any better here than it did there, but of course we Americans are now happy to deal with those Dirty Commies who "filled that catastrophic power vacuum," to the point of now filling Walmart's shelves and racks with cheap, well-made clothing. And on the "What was that all about?" scale again, now our Navy, having connived at the fraud of the Gulf of Tonkin scam that sucked us into full-chat invasion and war-making without any national interest (other than the kind of false pride limned in Greek tragedies) or support, floats around in the Gulf of Tonkin doing joint maneuvers with the "gooks"??
And about that chasing-bin Ladin-and-Mullah Omar and "acts of war," what's the apologist's justification for a trillion dollars, hundreds of thousands of dead and injured, and you don't seem to care much about the trashed moral standing of the US in the wider world since those stupid, meaningless things that "we've" done Over There get ignored and pushed into the ignorant, uncaring past as just "mission creep?" (And look! now it appears that "we" could have "taken out" bin Ladin years and trillions earlier, if that was in fact the mission, and just how did Mullah Omar pose a trillion dollars' worth of 'threat" to the US, again?
And yes, Virginia, there's war in Afghanistan, armed men (and our women, too) kicking down doors and patrolling to draw fire, too puny to protect our own troops and knowing "we" are unable to force any other change, and what the Frick is the mission, again? "We kill some of them, so they kill some of us, so we kill some of them..."? And WE, or more accurately our Brass and soldiers and contractors and sneaky-petes invaded, just like bin Ladin wanted us to, just like the Soviets did, and with the same freakin' result. Your "justification" and "pre-emption" arguments are nonetheless totally bogus, and I defy you to show even any economic sense in all that's gone down in terms of how much "security" "we" supposedly achieved by sending $4 trillion into Dumbspace for the contractors and native players to feed off of.
Ach, you guys know of course that it's a waste of time to challenge your Narrative, all comfy and smug. You got an answer for everything, all nice and neat and how's that go, "legal?" Too bad your Players have been bleeding all the life out of this nation on their fool's errands and the scams and frauds that go along with it.
Around and around it goes, shedding profit opportunities and endless woes...
Where's the cartoonist to make a telling pair of images, the first of Nguyen Van Thieu, our puppet dictator in the end days of the idiot involvement in Vietnam, and Karzai coming to DC to, among other things, be sure he has the same kind of exit options as Thieu? Who left his Sacred Native Land by US chopper just days before the Commies completed the rolling up of the corrupt rulership of South Vietnam, to go live out a quiet rest of his life in the suburbs of Boston? Both had/have their hands deeply in the pockets of the US taxpayer, and both helped warp the idiot debate and policy momentum that had Our Sacred Native Land involved in grotesquely expensive Wars Against National Interest in places where empires go to die (ask the French how that works.)
And I am just sure that there are huge reams of policy pontifications that justify, in the minds of those who even care about justification as opposed to simple exercise of the doctrines of that other "Hegel," an occasional misspelling you see in all the claptrap over Obama's appointee, having to do with the inherent manifest exceptional policy to do whatever the "will" moves the doers and shakers to do and shake.
As to the effectiveness of fear of legal action as a goad to change behavior: As a former environmental enforcement attorney, it sure seems to me that the folks you call out in your comment have pretty much done all that's necessary to insure themselves against any possible crazy judicial ruling, let alone any enforceable judgment, saying they bear any "legal liability" for mucking up the planet.
We call it "capitalism" out of inertia of habit. That ain't what it is, and "oligarchy" is not big enough to encompass it, even. I kind of prefer "end-stage terminal kleptocracy," myself.
Speaking of "losing in a debate:" Hey, Joe, you ought to examine your own thumb. I said nothing about Iraqis being capable or not of "democracy," though while I'm at it, would you care to grade the US citizenry on its ability to conduct "democracy," however you define it? Same with that thing about "hate the traditional family." Where the heck did you pull that out of? And as to a slight exaggeration of the "mission" of the War on Terror, very slight given all I read, the whole idea is exactly to kill or otherwise render harmless any current, potential or future "terrorist" as our rulers broadly define that term. Otherwise, why the "bases" all over the planet, why the growing fleets of drones, why all the "littoral combat" apparatus, why the procurements of more advanced drones with longer loiter times and more weaponry, and of course the whole Black Ops set of clans that are off doing I-bet-you-know-what? Why an open-ended, impossible-to-win, circular, self-generating set of activities that are claimed to "create security" for those of us who create the wealth that funds all that scurrying and killing and bureacratic mumbo-jumbo that we are regularly dosed with?
Is that the best you got today, by way of impeachment?
But Bob, don'tcha see that "the terrorist threat" can never be eliminated? That's the circumlocutory beauty of the structure the Security State has sold us: No Way Out, and if killing a few "wogs" just encourages other "wogs" to "disrespect our Exceptional Hegemoniacal Sovereignty Over Everything," well there you are!
To pull out one of my favorite 3x5 cards:
A guy is walking through Times Square with an elephant gun under his arm. A cop says "What the heck do you think you are doing, carrying that thing around here?" The guy answers, "I'm keeping the Wild Elephants away!" Cop says, "Buster, there isn't a wild elephant within 8,000 miles of here, and poachers with AKs and RPGS are killing them off to the point of extinction where they do exist!" Says they guy, "See?" says the guy. "My policy is working!"
Oh, but Professor, it is so obvious that the Drone Program (DP) is both Effective and Functional. And in no way counter-productive. Any more than the Phoenix Program or the overthrow and dictatorization of national and even local governments "unfriendly to 'US interests,'" which we are all supposed to just accept as a postulate that drives Our Policy.
And such a perfect fit with the neatly circumscribed notion, or whatchacallit, "doctrine?" that now justifies endless and endlessly larger dumps of cubic dollars into what we are so dishonestly sold as being "necessary to our security," and even on a more grandiose claim, to "international security." The (Other) War That Can Never End.
I'm told by these smarter people that I'm obviously uninformed if I don't see the wisdom in trying to kill every "terrorist" out there before they can do anything bad to us. (Forget that the most effective tool in the War on Terrorists has apparently been plain old gumshoe law enforcement.") Great, if that's what the DP was capable of doing or directed to. I wonder if Hagel sees it that way. That kind of logic wold I guess support going into East LA and killing by Hellfire any potential gang-banger who might be or become involved in the importation and sale of Schedule I drugs, or how about we set the CIA to kill off-script military personnel or to kill those of its employees who do stuff that's, er, "against the national interest?" We got "pre-emptive war," which usually proves stupid for most of us -- why not other kinds of pre-emption?
Maybe, if one steps back and looks at the sets of characteristics that most accurately mark the Likudniks and the rulers of the House of Saud, there are a whole lot more similarities than differences?
After all, even Yasser Arafat was deeply involved in profitable businesses with quite a few nominally Israeli people, what's the word, "soykhern?" "gonif?", nominally his and his people's enemies, to his personal profit and to the detriment of folks who were suckered into admiring and following him. Kuffiyeh and yarmulke -- is nothing sacred, any more? http://www.trixieandpeanut.com/product-46050-Yarmulke-+-Tallis But hey, I can go netshopping and get myself a nice set of American Flag-motif underpants, unisex and edible!
Like, uhhh, who cares? Sure good to see lots of input on this one, Professor.
Question for the Exceptional Apologist Experienced Players:
From this interesting little bit of text,
But in February President Ali Abdallah Saleh was overthrown and his replacement Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi invited the United States to help do the job for him.
,
does/do "the US," or whatever the CIA and other Black Ops players and contractors are who glare that they are "in it to win it" (whatever "it" is), now have "legal cover" to be doing this combination of mercenary murder and imperial techattacking? "[H]elp do the job for him"? Sound at all like "our" relationships to a bunch of other Players who are so much more astute and experienced in the games of Empire and Byzantium than our Really Smart Players seem to be?
And maybe one of you will take a shot at stating what "the national interest" or "US interests" is or are, that warrant this kind of shi_? Especially, though you will of course discount it as mere correlation, it appears that the Sneaky Petes and Compartmentalizationalists might actually be doing nothing useful (except guaranteeing that wonderful continuity of idiocy and wealth transfer that started at the 38th parallel and ran through a bunch of oops! not really dominoes after all and continues with the floating and bulging of the Imperial Blimp as it gets more and more swank and more and more remote from its nominal moorings in "America?"
Because, say the writers up above,
Questions have also been asked about how effective US operations are. Analyst Gregory Johnsen has pointed out that AQAP membership had grown steeply since the US began targeting militants in 2009.
Just asking. Not that anything will ever change, until the last self-directed battle machine finally runs out of gas, or stored electrons...
Is one expression of the sentiment enough, or does a string cite satisfy the challenge? "Chabad rabbi: Jews should kill Arab men, women and children during war":
But Friedman, who today travels the country as a Chabad speaker, showed a less warm and cuddly side when he was asked how he thinks Jews should treat their Arab neighbors.
"The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle)," Friedman wrote in response to the question posed by Moment Magazine for its "Ask the Rabbis" feature.
Friedman argued that if Israel followed this wisdom, there would be "no civilian casualties, no children in the line of fire, no false sense of righteousness, in fact, no war."
"I don't believe in Western morality," he wrote. "Living by Torah values will make us a light unto the nations who suffer defeat because of a disastrous morality of human invention."
Of course the spin doctors have worked to put a nice happy face on all this and bury it in "We would never do such things! (ah,unless we are threatened...)"s.
And that means exactly what, again, with respect to how the current set of Israeli rulers is going about their business of laundering the eths in the area they increasingly inhabit?
What, and take a chance that other nations led by kleptocrats of one stripe or another might be in danger of some kind of concerted action (to be dictated and warped by the various state security apparatuses and policy czars) to nominally make life for the Little People a little less tenuous and painful and impoverished and terrorized than it is at present? What fun would that be? It's all about Apres moi le deluge, isn't it? And dining on hummingbird's tongues and the meat of the last tiger?
If you ask the players on Wall Street and in the "City," well hey, all that climate change is just another kind of volatility out of which the sharper creatures among us can squeeze some really great profit opportunities. So what's the worry?
So maybe these guys (the Ashar'ites, that is) all moved to Texas, where they have settled in comfortably to "fix" the school curriculum, which also apparently is destined -- predestined? -- to kill the distinction between sacred and secular? I guess we the enlightened Westerners are destined, ah, pre-destined? - to meet our Doppelganagers from the reactionary pit of the Arab/Muslim world somewhere in the middle of another "warming-"induced Noah's Flood, there being so much that's blasphemous, per Jerry Falwell and Anal Roberts and Pat Robertson and Tedd "Pataprettyboy'sbottom" Whatsisname, in that, you know, "Science stuff."
For all the folks who want to "feel good about the US" to the point of finding good news in a change in the rate of CO2 emissions and substitution behavior when it comes to what carbonaceous combustible undergirds our planet-killing combusto-consumption lifestyle:
Now isn't that special.
Take a brief step back in time to just before, the DAY before, that 9/11 thing, and read the words of one Donald Rumsfeld, bitsh-slapping his Pentagon cronies for "mislaying' $2.3 trillion over a few years: http://www.defense.gov/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=430. Gee, first of all, how much "security" did the rest of us get for all that wealth and debt? Did we win any wars? And how much better off would the most of us be if the shites who infest the Pentagram, about 50-50 careerists and parasitic contractors, were deprived of free access to the entire cornucopia (now actually almost emptied) that was the resource base of the US of A?
And some tell us that a "green" military, whichever one is first to get to that point, mostly freed from oil-sucking, will dominate the planet. Is that the game? Jesus Lord, I would hope not...
I mean, how stuff like the initiatives and quarterback sneaks and Statue of Liberty plays that Players in the CIA and the rest of Compartmentaldom pull? Things like getting US taxpayer full-faith-and-credit guarantees for the Pope's bank to lend money to the Iraqi dictator to "keep the pressure on Iran" because they dissed the CIA's Chosen Overlord?
These are people with "people skills" of a certain sort, a pretty ugly set on the whole, that are pretty good about executing (pun intended) their plans, but so often that guy Murphy seems to step in, like every time, and "re-direct" all that negative energy that the Shadow Governments inject into the system into, Suprise! Unintended Consequences! that just REQUIRE even more idiot destabilizing but oh so elegant and complicated "intervention."
And then along come the Spinners, once the Limoges is shattered, to either continue the deniability game and escape opprobrium for net failure of the Grand-Plan-as-memo'd-and-sold as one option, or figure out a way to carom the missed shot off the fenders so that they can say "That's really what we wanted to happen all along," thus protecting their little Supra-legal lairs and fiefdoms and snares and delusions from suffering too much attention of the "career-limiting" kind.
Who lost China, again? Who lost Vietnam? Who lost Iraq? Who's losing Notagainistan? What are the next losses over the equatorial horizon? [And in all of that, what the hell were the "national interests" that were supposed to be at stake, again? Other than protecting the bureaucracy of the "decider," and "saving face" by exposing our butts? and, of course, that old unstated root of all evil, Upward Wealth Transfer?
And who suffers the pains and deaths and horrors of those losses, and all the crap that got stirred in by all the Players who think they have all this under such nice control, or at least know they can stupe and stalk around like overweight raptors, stirring up and terrifying the herds of critters who actually do something useful toward maintaining the ecology, even if it's only to churn up the ground for seeds, and adding their dung and eventually their carcasses to the topsoil?
Not for lack of trying, just for lack of time to play out the "policies" of our right-wing Cold Warriors and their sick world views.
In Egypt, the British had become so resented for their racist, arrogant ways that by the early 1950s even Winston Churchill, the grand old imperialist who had returned as prime minister in 1951, felt he could resist the tide of nationalism no more. After 1951 the British were confined to the Suez canal zone, harassed by Egyptian irregulars who wanted them out altogether. By June 1956 the last British soldiers had left even the canal zone.
Yet Anglo-Egyptian relations did not improve. Nasser was enraged by America's withdrawal of its offer of loans to help pay for the building of a dam on the Nile at Aswan. This project was central to his ambitions to modernise Egypt. But John Foster Dulles, the American secretary of state, thought the dam would place too much strain on the resources of newly independent Egypt.
For their part, the British, mistrustful of Nasser and feeling the pinch, were also ready to withdraw their loan offer. So, thought Dulles, best to let the Russians take on the dam, as he knew they would if the West backed out. He did not, however, bargain for Nasser's immediate response—the nationalisation of the Suez canal, whose revenues, Nasser argued, Egypt now needed to replace the loans promised by Britain and America for the dam.
See, it's all so complicated, isn't it, as even the rest of this little linked article hints at. All the many stratagems and machinations of the putters-forth of notions of "interest," almost uniformly their own at the expense of the larger world, uninformed by any notion of survival and sustainability, driven by the "values" that always drive Empire, all add up to a bleeding, wailing mess for the most of us, on the other side of that wall of privilege and power that insulates the Experienced Players from those consequences, a "mess" that just "requires intervention" to "rectify."
Gee, and who installed and supported the Shah, by arranging the coup that blew out a democratically elected "liberal?" Who built the SAVAK, the Shah's secret police, which disappeared and tortured and all that stuff? Who armed the Iranian military under the Shah? Who sent Khomeini a Bible and a bunch of missiles and other stuff in exchange for those hostages that became such because of US pot-stirring and "support" of yet another repressive dictatorial convenient REGIME?
I'll give you that the statement you cavil at "cannot be accepted as immutable US policy." About the only clear "policy" that's "immutable" is that "our" militopolitical apparatus will act against what I would characterize as "the national interest" by fomenting trouble, arming the planet, filling the air with way more than our share of noxious gas and trouble, resisting any effort to prolong the life of the species and the planet, stealing or trying to steal any resource "our" corporatocracy takes a fancy to, being so clumsy and stupid as to repeat stupid behaviors and to earn the name "Uncle Sucker" for being minimally competent in the Great Game and supporting, for ideological and monetary reasons, one more skillful set of players after another. And stumbling along the same path as all the other Empires have gone down.
With folks like you, consciously or out of other motivations, to provide text and "context" (emphasis on 'con') and smoke and cover and excuses and deniability for each little bit of the stupidity and idiocy that taken together constitute, I guess, what is called "policy." Which I take to mean "whatever we happen to do, want to do, are stupid enough to do, can get away with doing, or can (or try to) keep others from doing." Which ipso facto, thereby, Q.E.D., is "right" and "good." And of course Exceptional, never exceptionable.
Cancer cells, and many parasites, live "successfully," live very comfortably, live "large" very often, creating a nice environment for themselves and their co-infectors and spawn, in a declining and dying host critter.
As long as "we" continue to think and act according to the large-scale constraints of an idiot game of RISK!(tm), in which personified/reified/hypostatizationalized "nations" and "extra-national world conspiratorial groups" like "al Quaeda" are presumed and therefore become the "actors and players," there will be more impetus for more of the metastasis of unstable, constantly growing, resource eating, all-too-human Great Gamery. Complete with "services" that eat a quarter and more of the world's wealth, re-define the planet into nothing but one huge Battlespace subdivided into "Areas of Responsibility" (formerly "Areas of Operation," until the ugliness of that kind of claim caused a change in the dictionary) and burn huge amounts of combustible fuels (while seeking PR cover and enhanced loiter time in places like Notagainistan by adopting and co-opting "green" technology) and sowing dragons' teeth all over the landscape.
For those who want "us" to pretend that "(You name the mideast or South American or Central American or African post-colonial nation)" is "not Vietnam," might one refer them to the nice recitation of how "we" involved "ourselves" in Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia given by Barbara Tuchman in the last piece of her "The March of Folly." The parallels to subsequent huge-scale idiocies are unarguable -- same players, same earnest or more often faux sentiments and collations of "fears and threats," same insatiable appetite for "enemies" and promotions and profit and private jets and other perks for the Battlespace Managers and their symbiotic "contractors."
Apologists will say that she was "re-writing history." Given that the history written by the "winners," the Pentagram and the MIC and the "right," is so far from what sure seems to be the real world as it happened, re-writing is pretty much mandated, for one seeking honestly for the roots and failings of "policy" that lead "us" from one wasteful and self-propagating idiocy to another.
US replaces departing or departed colonial power, claims "interests" for itself in the new Battlespace, bureaucratic timidity and dishonesty and mini-empire-building undergird self-fulfilling or propaganda-generated "prophecies." Our team creates "enemies," and goes to war to try to thwart changes in other nations' history. Without benefit of a declaration of war, a commitment by OUR nation, a clear statement of "our" interests, other than some looming miasmic "threat" made of propagandic Lycra (tm), elastic enough to cover a whole hemisphere's volume of BS and profitable self-interest and behaviors and "policy" that have not a damn thing to do with anything like real "interests" of the nation at large, particularly the mass of people who end up paying for Schwartzkopf and McChrystal and Petraeus' Game-playing and comfortable post-military "retirements," free of consequences for failed "policies," falsehoods propagated, and a whole lot of death and the furtherance of behaviors and "systems" and "force structures" that inevitably lead to more of the same.
Too bad "we" are by far less committed to the "general welfare" than to the "welfare of the generals."
Yeah, the ChiComs maintain that there's "one China," all subject to Beijing rule. And the Kuomintang, that semi-reformed bunch of corrupt thugs who have "become respectable" by commercial success, maintain that there's "one China" under THEIR rule, that Mao and successors are mere usurpers." And "the US," in a dazzling display of NoSpeak, does what, again?
Even the sentence you selected, "The U.S. recognizes 'that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain that there is but one China and that Taiwan is part of China," read with open eyes, gives the lie to your interpretation; the US play on this situation is to try to keep the Mainlanders from just overtly taking the place as the Kuomintang had done, and to satisfy the right-wingers there who want, like Miami "Cubans" and their US "friends on the 'right'", to retain the hope of eventual "restoration" of a coordinate bunch of kleptocratic reactionaries. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/nov/17/obama-affirms-one-china-policy/ Oh, and of course to provide a long history of profitable "U.S." arms sales to the Kuomintang, requiring a lot of fast dancing to keep various stake-holders happy or at least not actively hostile.
Here's another sentence, from the prior link:
The U.S. “one-China” position acknowledges China’s view on Taiwan, but it does not explicitly recognize China’s sovereignty over Taiwan, and nor does it recognize Taiwan as a sovereign country.
And of course you obscure the historical bit that "Taiwan" used to be, prior to and between a couple of invasions including Chiang's, its own nation with its own indigenous population, markedly self-considered "NOT CHINESE." http://www.taiwannation.com.tw/english.htm
That arch restatement of the "US position" ought not to obscure the complicated and typically ugly reality.
And the "Right" got their knickers in a phony twist over "Who lost China," as a result of their supporting a fellow kleptocrat and his syndicate. Anyone heard of or remember Chiang Kai-Shek and his lovely wife Madame Chiang and the Kuomintang, whose greed and corruption made them vulnerable to "the Communists," who are more of the same, of course -- and anyhow the Chiangs and the Kuomintang got to basically invade and steal a place once called "Formosa," now called Taiwan, dispossessing and apartheiding the inhabitants, http://www.taiwandc.org/228-intr.htm ?
How about Batista? several African dictators? Et Freakin' Cetera?
And I guess the smart people, who become participants in or apologists for "the way things really work, behind the myths and lies and deniability screens," have the "right" idea: support and advance the interests of those who kill big, steal big, and when the heat's on, take it on the lam to some place run by aspiring or implanted kleptocrats, supported very often by US "freedom exporters" from the CIA and "our" corporations and agencies and departments, who will shelter the SOBs from consequences and let them live out their comfortable lives.
I bet ol' al Shalal does better than ok -- his skills are patently portable, and the new crop of oligarchs this Syria business is producing will keep him in beer and skittles until he passes.
And "We the People" are supposed to keep ordering and arranging our beliefs and lives and filling our fearful psyches with visions of Enemies, on the basis of the lies and myths and "USversusTHEMism" (tm) crap we are force- and stealth-fed by these folks. And keep on generating lots of income for the Few to take from us by trick or force, and just go along with the whole state-security faux-Liberty/pseudoFreedom mythology, Forever War and 2-Minute Hate and the whole shebang.
Because, you know, "national interest." Which means exactly WHAT, again?
There's a whole wonderful tradition of "right"-ists who've profited wonderfully from "thinking" and "wishing" and "believing" and "tricking" the rest of us into stupid wars of choice and planet-trashing and people-robbing "economic policies" and compartmentalized destabilization stratagems and game-plays. All fully justified and rationalized and supported by people who hold lots of money and power and therefore, Q.E.D., are sanctified and patently chosen by God Almighty.
Gotta get get in the last word, don't we? Even after comments close on another thread, you drop this here, in flagrant contravention of a "rule" you always contend for, that comments must adhere to what you define as the subject under discussion?
Must be a real burden, always being "right." Too bad all that self-proclaimed genius and pan-erudition ain't applied to some kind of socially useful labor -- supporting the Imperial momentum of our Great Exceptional Juggernaut as it gathers speed toward the cliff (not the apologist fraud called the "fiscal cliff," of course) would not seem to be "socially useful."
Don't we love the way Bill and Joe leap to impeach observations by others here (and elsewhere), wanting everyone else to believe that comments like Swimmer's are "totally uninformed" for not "correctly" identifying the provenance of Syrian government aircraft. Here's a link, for those who care to be suckered by that kind of impeachment smoke, to do a sort of fact check: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_Air_Force (Bill denies Wiki is "correct" on anything, of course).
The substance of Swimmer's observations seem pretty much accurate and on point. Kind of like Super390's, which the Boys of Apologism seem to avoid picking at. Seems pretty clear that the apologistic impeachers want to make sure their version of "history" and the mythical and profitable "rights and wrongs" of the present state of the Great Game are protected against any kind of diminution or disconfabulation or illumination. The stuff these guys apologize for is just More Of The Same: more militarization, more security-state-ism, more corporatization, more obfuscation of efforts to escape the desiccated and deadly oxymorons of "neoliberalism" and protection of the heritage of Dulles and "Wild Bill" Donovan and all that goes with it. Stuff like this, http://www.thenation.com/article/171860/suspicious-minds-timothy-melley#, and of course this, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/21/coming-drone-attack-america
There IS, for example, a world-wide "aerospace industry" of post-national corporations that projects and protects the myths of inter-national conflicts in order to sell product, which they prodigally do, just like the Krupps did back at the beginning of all this, to almost all comers. Hence, the nominal "US" war industry congratulates itself on dominating the majority of the world military market, and US weapons, and often "advisers" and such poisonous dreck, appear on both sides of a whole lot of "conflicts," which they often have triggered and more often exacerbate. And of course there's a lot more to be very reasonably afraid of. Unless you are one of the tapeworms or tumors that feed off the human carcass, or are "uninformed" (or "uniformed") enough to believe the crap that the marketeers of militarization and economic and political oppression have flooded the world with.
Watch out for drive-by, snot-apitting, impeachments by these folks. They hardly, any more than the merde that Lockheed-Martin and Boeing and such-like put out, do a damn thing toward ensuring our national future, let alone the future of the species.
Sure looks like, even from your sectarian "Marxist perfesser" example, there are at least two parts to "value," and your condescending dismissal of the one (labor) in favor of the other (demand) is nicely typical of the dys-simulations that are the diseased rootstock of the "science of economics." That "science" that can neither predict nor account for the complexity of interchange between humans, except by post-hoc force-fitting into the Procurstean beds of the various "disciplines," whether Austrian or Chicagoan or what-ever. That "science" that like the medical arts in service of the Third Reich "proved" the superiority of a fake thing called Aryanism, and dunked prisoners in ice baths to see, again and again, how fast they would die from hypothermia, lacks any soul.
"Economists" are largely shills for the ruling class, producing theories and formulas and grand hypotheses that "justify" and "elevate" the way things are, without a thought about the way things could, should or ought to be when pain and sorrow and other externalities are brought into the "valuing" schema.
Just curious: are you wealthy enough now, or do you have a nice pension for past services to capital or government, that you have no fear of want? So that you no longer have to "labor?" And if you still work for a living, as they say, as opposed to clipping coupons or cashing dividend checks, do you work for nothing? If labor has no value, that would be the logical thing for you to do...
It's hardly a new observation, but I had a history professor observe that "America" is a made-up thing, unlike the identities of other "nations" and large tribes and such with histories and identities forged via ancient migrations and old violence.
So "We the people," coming from all over the place, bringing our own identities that we are supposed to cast into the melting pot, are supposed to draw a ration of jointness back out of that pot and adhere to it. Kind of like the folks in places like The Villages, http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/item_Cc7ZfG20iWexuTKNixQhvO. Which is a truly "manufactured community," a microcosm of the country at large, where adherence to what the developer/ruler considers "Americanism" is written into the rules and regulations and covenants that you have to sign up for. Lots of retired "Warriors" there, many of the officer types that managed our MIC procurements and imperial adventure. The kind of place that if our common myths finally break down and disappear in the face of the real nature of what "We the People" have become, would be a great nucleus of a warlord locale with a ready, if aging, population of believers and battlespace managers.
So it gets to be the uncomfortable, submerged, but nagging awareness and belief that an "American" is a frail thing, subject to many diseases and disorders, like "Commya-nism" and "Sharia Law" and "syndicalism" and all that silliness. Hence the fear of "Creeping" this or that "ism," and the kinds of "public health measures" of quarantine and burning down "infected" structures and "treating the diseased souls" that people who laughably call themselves "The Right," enforce. Like the deed restrictions in The Villages, where hypocrisy and the usual exceptionalism that lets the elevated few (but not the ordinary resident) paint their front doors whatever color they want, and engage in various kinds of extortion and fraud, and hammer their neighbors down into the mold that "protects their values," property and otherwise...
Just one piece, one part, one little reason why things are going to fly apart.
I guess I'm not the only one with a stack of 3x5 cards... Too bad I'm not tech-y enough to turn them into text blocks I can pull up and insert on call. Honestly.
Back to "Leviathan." What a surprise that the endpoint of human development seems to lie somewhere between Baghdad and Islamabad... the "Cradle of Civilization."
I wonder if Joe read the EPA's mandated and massaged "U.S. Greenhouse Gas Inventory Report." I used to work for EPA, still have friends there, and I know how these reports get worked over, slimmed down and"improved" by, e.g., cautious careerists and industry reps. And if he read it, might he agree that his outspoken statements of non-fact regarding the wonderful benefits of burning "natural" gas and supposed reductions of "greenhouse" gas are, well, just wrong.
There is no factual reason to cheer-lead for Our Sacred Land in this arena, any more than in any other area of "bad for the planet and our fellow humans." It is not "Anti-American" to point up the flaws in what our oligarchy and other bits of "leadership" are doing, day to day, to steal food off our plates, steal the roofs over our heads, and bankrupt the REAL economy to protect and enrich themselves.
Hint: The Koch brothers, the CIA and the rest of State Security, the MIC, our Congress and the other branches and local governments, may be using their buggy whips to drive us laboring beasts of burden ever faster toward the big cliff, for ever less food, toting ever larger burdens, with ever less return to us for our "productive labor." But while they may "own" America, they (I hope) are NOT AMERICA, and are as "traitorous" and "un-American" as any Benedict Arnold or Jonathan Pollard.
There's an assumption by Ungar and a whole lot of others, that "growth" equals equals "emissions and other horrific externalities" equals "improving the lives of citizens." That ought to be recognized as yet another idiocy. First, things "improve" in places (those convenient and sick reifications called "nations") like China and India and the sorry states of sub-Saharan Africa, (and of course in our own wonderful nation blessed with gigatons of extractables that the prior inhabitants could not defend and mostly did not use,) most of it, only for a tiny few "citizens" in a world that runs on the kleptocratic mantra that "some animals are more equal than others." "We humans," a pretty few of us, have only in tiny ways started to bend our massive and inertia-bound intellects to the possibility of making the planet more of a garden across its surface, and less of a garbage dump with swank and exotic high-rises cozying a tiny minority of the various national populations. Who actually are "citizens" of their own stinking group of parasites, that "shadow government" that more people are starting to sense, with their peripheral vision at least.
There's a huge momentum, and inertia, to "the way things are." Maybe young people will put their minds to "the way things could be," in a world where everybody knows we are really and truly all in this together, and that we have a mutual vulnerability that just gets worse every day, with every new toxin, every new virus, every new nanomachine, every "advance" in robotics toward that "Terminator" future, every new Counterfeit Funny Munny derivative contract. Sure looks to me like the seductions we all are vulnerable to, sex and money and power and the ability to kill our fellows and/or steal their stuff in big or small ways, are kind of winning, big time, over the notions of commensalism and stability and sustainability that might give us a prayer of surviving as a species, after the coming collapse that we do not know the shape of yet. Not for everyone, but for enough of us. But most of the smart young people are buying into the game that's running, and the others are just, like the rest of us, "productive consumers" to keep the game running. Wal-E, not Wal-mart.
Because each individual is driven to a greater or lesser degree by that pleasure principle, throughout their lives, lives which only last a tiny span of all the lives of humans in the parade of time. And stuff gets better or worse at a pace that individuals either don't perceive, or simply don't care about since they are either born or have learned how to be good at predation and parasitism or are struggling just to stay alive. One of my 3x5 cards is for "Apres moi le deluge," of which the best explication I've found is here: http://tradicionclasica.blogspot.com/2006/01/expression-aprs-moi-le-dluge-and-its.html People who don't give a hoot about what happens after they're dead and fully beyond either the pain their their present behaviors cause, or the horrors that will come after they're gone, well, they don't give a hoot and know they are immune to any consequences, if they're rich enough.
The reasons the processes that produce "emissions" are so seductive are because the "profit" to be extracted by extraction and combustion are all from externalities. Too bad you can't "make as much money" from sustainable farming (not the kind the Monsanto and Dupont monsters are forcing on us) and water conservation and working on efficiency and all that stuff that's not sexy and doesn't lead to $200,000 champagne brunches with attractive bon vivants at snotty-ass restaurants in various imperial capitals. Financial or political, though they tend to be the same...
Truth: There is enough of everything that matters to go all the way around the table, to feed all of us and give us the rest of Maslow's first couple of tiers. But not if we keep letting the very few take everything on the plates, and sucker us into thinking that we might be one of them someday, and trick us into fighting over the scraps and crumbs while forgetting who took the best and most of it.
Too bad not enough of us human critters "get it." Anyone paying attention to a wide selection of what the worst of us, and the most of us, are up, to kind of has to come to the conclusion that humans are indeed a self-limiting plague species, and that what we do to please and feed and "advance" ourselves is ultimately fatal to our offspring. Which at smaller scales, our biology was formed to try to protect, if for no other reason than to have a family or tribe to care for us in our old age.
"World of Warcraft," "Call of Duty." A quarter of the world's money spent on aggrandizing the various militaries, which have far more in common with each other than with the populations that "support" them and that they pretend to be "defending."
Gasoline-powered "leaf blowers" to whoosh your yard crap onto the neighbors' lawns and into the public streets and sewers. Pipelines siphon away the "wealth" to the few, and the many are too stupid or desperate to recognize the consequences of drilling a hole into a gasoline-filled 20-inch conduit. And the take of the Few, when hundreds die trying to get "free fuel," is this:
Vandalised 2B pipeline at Arepo in Ogun State have been described by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, as a big set back to the distribution of petroleum products across the country.
According to NNPC spokesperson, the development has cut off its distribution channel to about five petrol depots, thus, necessitating its reliance on bridging of products through trucks which have also been increased to cushion effects of the situation on product availability and distribution.
Responding to Business and Maritime’s enquiry on the current position of petroleum distribution owing to ceaseless scarcity of petrol in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Abuja, the Acting Group General Manager Public Affairs of the corporation, Mr. Fidel Pepple, said the country had before the Arepo incident contended with delicate situations in supplies and distribution of petroleum products.
He said: “The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation has been able to discharge its duties effectively since January when the oil marketing firms stopped importing PMS by making up for the shortfall in supply through increased importation and increased production from our refineries. That was why when people began to spread rumours of fuel scarcity in early August, we came out to inform the public that we had up to 36 to 40 days fuel sufficiency and that people should not engage in panic buying.
“That no one noticed any shortfall in supply until three months ago in August when the unfortunate incident of the Arepo Pipeline fire occurred is a testimony to the proactive measures put in place by the corporation to ensure that Nigerians do not suffer fuel scarcity again.
But the Arepo incident compounded an already fragile situation by cutting off the distribution channel to about five depots. With this situation, we have to rely on bridging by trucks. Obviously, lifting products by trucks across a vast country like Nigeria cannot be as efficient as pumping products through pipelines and that is where the problem really lies.”
Giving an update on the status of work at the Vandalised site, Pepple explained: “Not much has changed about the situation in Arepo. You would recall that we immediately deployed our engineers and technicians to site to effect repairs shortly after the fire incident. They were attacked by suspected product thieves and three of them were killed.
“Others are still receiving treatment for various degrees of gunshot wounds at various hospitals. At this point, we are waiting for the security agencies to give us adequate security cover, the moment we get that we will mobilised to site and fix the pipeline and get it running. It would be irresponsible to mobilised people to Arepo for repair works without guaranteeing their safety under the circumstance.”
One tiny episode in the panorama, a scene that can't honestly even be called "tragic" because there's no larger-than-life protagonist suffering a massive change in circumstances via some act of pride or middle-fingering of the gods. Just a lot of little people "advancing themselves" or just trying to stay alive, a little "advanced" above the many humans who get their daily bread by scavenging the garbage dumps of the world...
Maybe your points are too subtle for me, or maybe there's more subtlety in your post than might first appear from its dispassionate, almost scientific tone.
Are you saying that all the hoopla about intentional (and less frequent accidental) deaths by firearms "needs to be put in perspective," and presumably diluted and toned down by diversion into hoopla about McBurger Deaths and those incidents when a "car goes out of control" and stuff like that?
See how simple it is, Super? Just run the country like Singapore! I bet the NRA and ACLU and even the Brady Bunch might find some common ground in "concern" about that. Any idea how many gun lovers who do stupid stuff with their pistoleros, or morph magically into criminals when they decide to kill their families out of despair over some Banksta-caused job loss and personal economic collapse and maybe even some illegal foreclosure on their home via some nationwide fraud in the RE Bubblespace, might also be a little concerned about actual real, swift, certain punishment for crimes? Any idea how many more formerly criminal acts would, courtesy of those with lots of Funny Munny, be suddenly rendered "not illegal?" Oh, that's right -- that's already happening, and how quick do black people from the south and west sides of Chicago who are charged with a wide variety of crimes find themselves run through the machinery at 26th and California and into Joliet or other supermax prisons? The criminals with the "good shot" tend to wear $5,000 bespoke suits and Lucien Picard watches...
And, NEL, where do you think we are now? The prison industrial complex that lobbies for more criminalizations of more conduct and longer sentences and MORE JAILS AND PRISON "BEDS," a Pennsylvania judge railroading kids into a privatized "treatment jail" for bribes, a police state that funds itself off seizures and forfeitures of property or money in any remote way connected with "drug dealing" and of course is paid by the federal government to arm itself and enforce those Prohibition drug laws that warp our culture and secret drug dealings that fund CIA foolishness and evil, and create or augment failed nation-states like Mexico?
Nice set of hypothetical horribles. I've seen the same and more, listed in other arguments by gun lovers and profiteers elsewhere, who then and now are scrambling for less obvious but still scary reasons why they should be allowed to have and to hold and to carry openly and concealed any damn firearm they have a mind to. In spite of, you know, "Columbine" and "Newtown" and stuff...
And of course Warren, coming up next, is convinced that were he packing heat and on the scene, he would have "taken down" that monstrous kid before more than a few kids and teachers were killed...
/waiting for the apologist(s) to weigh in here, to find some little cavil or rhetorical tic in these posts and comments, to try to impeach what's being said and commented on and illuminated here. Or at least to distract and distort and scare the rest of us into accepting more of the crap that's being pulled "in our names" by the heirs of Wild Bill Donovan and that Bush guy, was it Prescott or George 41?, and all the other lying, self-serving, sneaky, destructive, smug, vile and violent creatures that smirk and steal and defraud and torture their way through the ugly halls and back streets of that "shadow government."
Of course, the most of us prefer to sleep through it, or to get off on it, either real-world or via fiction and sims and crap like that. Seems to me there's a pretty direct, if well-obscured, link between installing Shahs and deposing or assassinating elected leaders and suborning whole governments into crass and profitable illegitimacy maintained by State Terror and State Security, in places like Equatorial Guineau, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-20763938, and other places where people just "disappear," and stuff like Columbine and now that current Ooooh-lookie thing in Connecticut.
Most of us love to hate Michael Moore, because he's (ahem) overweight and a little overbearing, but he and so many others call it exactly the way it is. And know they are just a set of Laocoons and Cassandras. And many people apotheosize Cheney and his kind. Go figure.
Elsewhere in this space, people have mentioned efforts to regulate the capacity of magazines, and the cyclic rate of fire, and calibers and styles and other stuff.
For those who want to try to limit the idiocy of the Gun Lover culture, and the degree to which it has infiltrated everything, take a quick look at these little videos, which display the infinite inventiveness of our species, that inventiveness on which the remaining optimists pin their hopes that we can think and invent and innovate our way out of the Big Die-off:
I'm waiting now for the apologists here for that "it doesn't exist" Great Game set to tell us all how important and beneficent and benign these critters and their misdeeds are, and how the world would be a much less safer, much more threatening place, especially for that Great Undefined, that "everypatrioticbody knows in their bones what it is," thingie called "US Interests."
You wonder how healthy cells feel when they become suddenly aware of malignant tumors metastasizing into their comfy beds of tissue... Especially as the tumors are so successful at tricking the rest of the body into growing huge new arteries into their blackness, sucking more and more of the nutrients and oxygen into making more and bigger tumors throughout the carcass, eventually draining and killing the host (and the tumors, when they've finally ingested and converted into malignancies all the available resources), more's the pity, but hey, they have one hell of a run while they're active and at their peak, and so "successful"...
Of course, the apologists know they can ignore little stuff like both Juan's post and Engelhard's natterings, and the original book, and all the stuff that slowly oozes from under that ugly scab in Langley and the other sites. They've shaped the consciousness of the rest of us so well, we LOVE the tumors and their growth and "success." After all, they share most of our DNA, except for a few little Wild Bill Hairs that escape the restraints of homeostasis, so how can they be our 'enemy?'
Ah, but we lump all those disparate people together under that convenient and misleading label, and then, as Bill puts it, "legally" categorize them as "Unlawful Enema Combatants," and keep buying Hellfires to replenish the arsenal used to blow them up, along with anyone "guilty by proximity," as in "within the lethal range of the detonation."
Because, after all, who knows what those Evil Muslims might have been plotting that would be a Threat to "our" undefined and apparently undefinable "US interests," y'know? And besides, the "Taliban" obviously have nothing in common with our Continental Freedom Fighters of 1776, or of course those same people when Reagan told us they were moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers in their struggle against that other Evil Empire that we used to confront (and have now come to look more and more like) just a decade or two ago.
Makes you just Proud to be a U.S.-an, don't it? "We're Number One! We're Number One!"
Wow, a gunman speaks! If only there were armed teachers and a Hall Monitor Marshall or two in every school, there would be no more of these incidents, right? By the way, a lot of schools actually do have "resource officers" or "Officer Friendlys" on duty in their buildings. There are an infinite number of ways that a "school shooting" can go down, up to and including high explosives and napalm-type weapons. Do you really believe that having teachers, who also occasionally go off the deep end, carry weapons, and administrators, many of whom, any more are right-wing enthusiasts from the cadre of people who want to "correct" the content of our public school curricula to reflect "conservative values," "might save a life or two"? Any more than having every theater and mall and restaurant packed chock full of "trained" concealed-carry parents and single persons would be likely to result in the quick "takedown" of some guy who announces "I am the shooter" and starts emptying 30-round banana clips and 100-round drum magazines into the crowd?
Keep pumping out those "scenarios," though -- I know that gun courses will now be filling people's heads with how to "handle" these situations. The cops will really appreciate the help. Right?
That "1982" thing is BS, pure and simple. The Colt M1911 "hit the market" back in, you guessed it, 1911. Semi-automatic handguns with various capacities of magazines and various calibers have been in existence for decades before that. Large numbers of ex-military semi-auto handguns made their way into the civilian culture via returning GIs from various wars and imperial expeditions to Central and South America and such places. And you could buy these from gun manufacturers and dealers and pawn shops and street vendors for many decades with no licensing or inquiry required.
We love, LOVE, REALLY LOVE our guns! and people who are really into guns, as totems and toys and symbols and such, also really get into all the little details of metallurgy and manufacturing, and gunsmithing for that perfect trigger pull and no-jam fits, and special grips and sights and "tactical gear" like laser pointers and LED lights to screw onto your "Picatinny mount," and and of course there's a whole Dungeons&Dragons-complexity world in the area of loading and re-loading your own ammo, and about all the "factory loads" and which is better, Ford or Chevy? And a whole literature of SWAT this and Black Ops that, with magazines to suit every little taste and perversion. Complete, usually, with lots of pix of scantily or un-clad babes, fondling the hot loads, striking that "babe" pose with a come-on look. The demographics of who buys "S.W.A.T" and "Combat Arms" and "Handgunner" and all the rest (there are dozens) must really be interesting...
And there's a zillion more youtubes of the same sort. And in the real world, "full auto" shooting, and little kids working the triggers of .50-cal Brownings and those really sexy Barrett sniper rifles, and big and little tiny machine guns and assault rifles and like Nancy Reagan's "little silver pistol" that she kept in the nightstand in the Presidential Bedroom.
Power, sex and death. All in one neat little package.
On the other hand, the poachers, many in current or ragged "uniforms" supplied by various Great Game players, find it really handy to unload a full 30 rounds of 7.62 or an RPG into an elephant or rhino, which kills the otherwise valueless-to-them critter pretty instantly. So they don't have to stroll very far to unlimber a battery-powered chain saw to extract the horn and tusk that the fUUUing kleptocrats in the Mid and Far East are more than happy to pay huge dollars for, in order to "get it up and get it on." Myth meets money, and it ain't pretty, is it?
Makes you wonder who the warlord or potentate will be who gets to dose himself with the last few grams of powdered rhino horn, because he believes in all his craven being that it will make him MORE potent-ate. There's not enough free Viagra or Cialis or Levitra to touch the belief structures of these all-too-humans and the people who make a living satisfying their desires. http://www.steadyhealth.com/articles/Levitra_vs_Cialis_vs_Viagra_a281.html
Any questions what it's all about? The marketing types know:
American English is a "living language," so words like "sophisticated," which used to mean something fairly negative, like "adulterated" or "spoiled," now means something really, like, you know, "cool!" Same, in my mind, as the 2d Amendment.
I personally read that text as what I would consider a plain-language statement of how things work in Switzerland, where most males are in some part of the military, active or reserve, and keep their individual shoulder-fired gas-operated selectable-single-burst-full-auto assault rifles at home. Most early Colonists and initial Americans really did not need a firearm for "home defense," and didn't have one. They were expensive, after all. But of course the gun industry and all the other marketing that plays off of it has gone way beyond that interpretation. My S&W 9mm with a 15-round magazine, and no safety, cost just $250 and requires no license. Nor does my own .223 rifle with its 30-round banana clips. Or the short-barreled "home defense" stainless 12-ga pump gun with the reinforced plastic grips.
So now, it's a matter of FAITH (tm), for Jesus' sake! that God, Guts 'n Guns made the US what it is today. "You can take my guns away when you pry them from my cold, dead hands." "Take my wife? Sure! Take my dog? Maybe. Take my guns? NEVER!" People who are into guns have transmogrified that 27-word text into a kind of YWH phrase -- their god is described by caliber, muzzle velocity and cyclic rate of fire, and there can be no limits on what a "citizen" can hold in the way of firearms and other "arms," including cannon of various sizes.
Here's what we have to deal with, those of us who might own some guns but are not "gun lovers" who get off on the whole cock-feed-chamber-lock-fire-extract-eject metallic big bang sex simulation: http://civilliberty.about.com/od/guncontrol/p/2nd_amendment.htm It's a totally losing proposition. The Gun Lovers won a long time ago, and the rest of us now get to worry about shit like what's currently in the news. There's no putting the djinn back in the bottle.
Because hey, right up to the moment that young man came onto school property with guns loaded and locked, he was hey, just another "law-abiding gun owner." After that, magically, he was an armed, crazed criminal. Most of these loose cannon are, right up to the moment they kill their wives and kids or shoot up the church or post office or law office or whatever. Remember this other tenet of the faith: "When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns." Or some idiocy like that.
I can't recall a better, simpler or more complete indictment, maybe all unconscious of the irony inherent in it, of the sickness and weirdness and futility inherent in the net US psyche. Unless it was intended not as an excuse for what is, in support of the gun-man mentality, and I missed the snark tag.
The problem is not so much easy access to firearms as the lack of training, respect, and attitudes of that segment of the public who may be inclined to misuse them.
Just how would "America" go about doing that training, that inculcation of respect, that correction of attitudes on that segment of the public? Given that the "heroes" mentioned here, more often than not, are coming from the Dark Side, as in "Scarface," "The Quick and the Dead," etc. One would think that "the military" would be successful at that training and respect thing, but the stats on gun violence by GIs, outside the approved killing of "the enemy," are pretty appalling too.
I agree wholeheartedly that guns and gun violence are an ineradicable part of our collective identity. Kept there because of the sickness that corporate greed and ancient enmities keep on the simmer-to-boil. One more reason why we are a dead-end imperial culture. Sumus quod sumus...
Pavan, guess what? Crazy guys DO have nuclear weapons. Likud has maybe 400, and if you believed all we were told about the Dirty Commies, the Rooskies were all ready to blow up the whole northern hemisphere (and sundry other places, given how many thousands they had to play with). And of course our Bomber Loonies, who were ready to nuke Korea, nuke Vietnam, nuke the whole northern hemisphere (and sundry other places, given how many thousands they had to play with). There's still about 3,000 on hair-trigger alert, here and there.
And for the whole deterrence thing to work, it was well established that "our leaders" had to be certifiably insane: No sane person would end the whole species and much of the rest of the biosphere in the name of nationalistic pseudo-doctrine, so some wag was wise enough to invent the acronym "MAD", a sick joke, standing for "Mutual Assured Destruction," undergirded by the notion of "Massive Retaliation," where if you poke me in the eye, Leonid, I will kill all your cities and do my damndest to incinerate and neutronize you, personally...
And just how does that make any difference in anything? The Village is only connected to the real world by the conduits that sluice in cubic money from us taxpayers and all, and the one-way mirrors that shine the Great Policy Decisions and the Fabrications That Conceal Them into the dazzled eyes of most of the rest of us.
The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) is an independent agency of the United States government that was created by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) to encourage the continuation and maintenance of voluntary private defined benefit pension plans, provide timely and uninterrupted payment of pension benefits, and keep pension insurance premiums at the lowest level necessary to carry out its operations. Subject to other statutory limitations, the PBGC insurance program pays pension benefits up to the maximum guaranteed benefit set by law to participants who retire at age 65 ($54,000 a year as of 2011).[2] The benefits payable to insured retirees who start their benefits at ages other than 65, or who elect survivor coverage, are adjusted to be equivalent in value.
During fiscal year 2010, the PBGC paid $5.6 billion in benefits to participants of failed pension plans. That year, 147 pension plans failed, and the PBGC's deficit increased 4.5 percent to $23 billion. *The PBGC has a total of $102.5 billion in obligations and $79.5 billion in assets.*
Sort of a hole-y safety net. Gee, where do you suppose the other billions of dollars (and since PBGC payouts to pensioners under most "failed" [read: raped] plans are usually less than the contracted amount the bled-out company agreed to pay, the "deficit" is a lot more than $23 billion as far as impact on the employee goes) got off too?
Where's the outrage? Oh yeah, the TeaBEGGARs are convinced that only those who Galt their way to the top are deserving of all that money. "Pensions" are for lazy mopes who don't want to "work for their money" like guys who get to appoint and oversee the "compensation committees" who approve the theft of all that pension money, money actually earned by actual work that produces something of value. (Not that Twinkies and Ho-Hos and Dum-Dums have a huge value, of course,but they produce the income that the ratty basties at the pinnacle of the pyramid skim off for their pleasure.)
So heck, yeah! STEAL our contractually-defined pensions! STEAL the enforced savings for our old age called Social Security! "There you go again!" It's all good -- some day I might be the one doing the stealing, after all.
In the meantime, the bankstas are still on a roll:
Of course the eventual adoption of our own hallowed, now lip-serviced-mostly, Constitution did have its share of teething problems, Federalist versus Anti-Federalist and such-like, including maybe less violent mobs in the street but maybe more advance notice and participation, and of course a very different society and tradition. And of course *also* in the wings was the "War of Northern Aggression," not too far off-stage.
It's all a matter of time, timing and degree. Good thing us little people have our agencies and instrumentalities keeping close track of US Interests in that part of the world, and doing the necessary...
" The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
And also bad ones, and idiot ones, and the paving stones are greed and self-advancement and tribalism and whatever it is that motivates "our" sneaky-petes to keep exercising their compendious skills at subornation and destabilization. It sure does not look like the "general welfare" or even "protecting (undefined but everybody-knows-what-they-are) US interests."
Is the argument that if anyone is possessed of the "correct" selective criteria, then US intervention, with all that has come to include over a little more than a century of exceptionalist, pro-corporate-interest, JF Dulles tunnel vision, the careerism of the latest crop of pants-down and doctrinally-bankrupt generals and policy lizards, the antics of Wild Bill Donovan and "our" various shills and contractors and all, is A-OK?
It's so hard to follow the logic, which so often is only "we do whatever we feel like at the time, because who is going to stop us, and who cares who gets hurt or killed?"
“He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”
The people who are living rich, fat, luxurious, "exceptional" lives via the skimming of wealth off the dumping of externalities ("Clean Coal?" Really?) and the capture of regulatory power, simply DO NOT CARE, and they know they don't have to.
For the purposes of their own power and pleasure, and maybe out of a systematic lack of empathy among other too-human-isms, they know they will get to live out their lives in immodest comfort, free of fear, spared all consequences.
Water level rising? Hop on the private jet and buzz off to a more copacetic Eden (that you or a crony fortuitously happen to own.) Natives restless? That's what their "security details" of willing club-wielders are for. Governments getting too uppity? Replace 'em, or remind them of what happens to the too-greedy who are not post-national hyper-capitalists and already admitted to the Kleptocracy.
And us little people don't want to think bad thoughts about our fellow creatures, we give them the benefit of the doubt, or fear them, and wait for them to dispose of us and our lives.
Yep. Lying is what we humans do, spectacularly well on occasion. From what I infer from your contributions here, you may be well aware of the behavior in many contexts, and maybe of parts of it that even us cynics don't dream of even in our nightmares, let alone know about.
Maybe the "new" -cons, as in "neo"cons, are really just a wish or a projection or excrescence of the same part of the human brain as whatever the "scary-sounding" Muslim Brotherhood (scarier even than the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, or even the US Chamber of Commerce) comes from, and no different than that same set of Rough Characters that since John Foster Dulles have been leading the formerly great nation down into post-imperial irrationality and irrelevance.
And besides, as stuff like the Milgram and prison experiments show, it's sort of soul-satisfying and kind of fun. Remember the pix we have seen from Abu Ghraib -- the smiling blond lass doing what-everrrr to some "Hajji-or-other."
Save us, Jack Bauer! The Fate of the World lies in your capable hands!
Oh, and to save you or Bill the trouble, let me write it for you: "Just because your are a Vietnam vet, that doesn't mean you know anything about anything," and "Just because you are a nurse, that doesn't mean you give a damn about Kenyans."
Does it help that my son-in-law is Ghanaian? Or does that get discounted too?
Nice mischaracterization. I said no such thing. Alternatives to combustion sure as hell are needed, but how about this time we understand what we are buying into? Does "Fukushima" or "fracking" have any resonances for you? There are externalities that proponents who profit from one technology or another would and already do obscure.
Oh, and as to the lives of Kenyans and "scary stuff," where do you get off implying I don't care about, and as a nurse I actually do something about, the welfare of my fellow humans, here and everywhere?
The cool thing about Olkaria geothermal project is that it's located in an area where there's already lots of seismic activity, as in earthquakes. So there's no likely way of figuring if any of those quakes are as a result of the drilling and pumping that's part of the cycle.
Geothermal has been rejected by a lot of locales, due to the surprising incidence of, you guessed it, earthquakes, nuisance and destructive, occasioned by the projects. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/business/energy-environment/24geotherm.html?pagewanted=all There are several US areas, other than parts of Utah, where the planet has hot zones relatively near the surface, that might like the tar shale of Canada be "profitably" exploited. Query whether the "externalities" that might flow, pardon the pun, from that kind of pricking of Mother Earth's skin, would be accounted for either in the planning and construction, or when "stuff happens" after the fact. Remember Fukushima! How's TEPCO's stock doing these days?
Maybe the people of Utah, including a large number of Mormon believers, might be concerned less about short-term feeding of the fever of Energy Hunger and more about what a place that some geologists suspect might be a place for a great Geo-redefinition, along the lines of past cataclysmic volcanism.
If we don't understand all the possible unanticipated consequences, maybe we ought be a little careful about messing with stuff like this...
Nothing new here, other than Morloch not actively soliciting Petraeus to run a coup to replace the evil Socialist Government. Anyone remember the Business Plot? Of course,. that was all just "alleged" stuff, wasn't it? Wasn't it?
For somebody that knows as much as Bill claims to about stuff all over the world, it's a wonder that he has not heard about Paris Hilton's appearance in Mecca.
Maybe that "whistleblower" definition comes out of the same lexicon as "Unlawful Enema Combatants (UECs)"?
Since it appears that the migration and morphing of the meaning of words and the coining and advent of neologisms like "UECs" is (double-standard) fair play for the apologists for power and the generators of the Narrative and other propaganda? And since so many people consider Manning, who was apparently aware of some of the God-awful hypocritical fraudulent illegal-acts smoke-blowing content of what he is charged with passing along to WikiLeaks and as many have noted, that included a lot of really ugly stuff that blows holes in the Myth Curtain that obscures what's really going on, to be a "whistleblower?" And since the Players don't yet have the ability to "1984"-compel all of us to toe some dogmatic lexical line?
We all know that the Game is supposed to be conducted in a double-blind secret-room partitioned maze, to be sure that the beneficiaries of the "kindnesses" and "protections" granted by the Experienced players to the mopes who slave-labor-fund and cannon-fodderize the Energized Multilevel Paraphasic Networked Playspace do not see the real nature of all the banal and venal and stupid and evil that's done with their wealth and "in their names" and, well, TO them. So that dreck does not get exposed to the light of day and critical thought and comment.
Far as I can see, he performed a necessary service. And is taking far more than his share of lumps for it.
One has to wonder if the Palestinian leadership, of all flavors, will take the moral high ground and exercise some restraint and magnanimity toward the parts of the Israeli polity that have gone down that other road. Or whether, vengeance being as sweet (or maybe bittersweet, or pleasingly toxic) as it is, the seductions of cheap short-term seemingly satisfying actions and reprisals will win out.
It's not like there are any Major Players in the Great Game that actually give a fig about the long term. It's all, always, "What's in it for me or my little group, now!" and "What can I/we get away with?" And given the physical and moral state of the planet and its direction, it's pretty clear that there's no stability or longevity to be derived from any supposed "balance of terror" and libertarian-myth "checks and balances" of mutual greed. And of course every polity has more than its share of spoiler True Believers and absolutists happy to do violence to their own, and everyone else.
Thanks for your opinion on AQAP. One wonders if there is "A" cause that can be assigned as "THE likely cause" for the manifestation of "Unlawful Enemy Combatants" anywhere, though of course findings of causes often tend to reflect the preferences and biases of the analyst.
Too bad that "al Quaeda," and "terrorism" generally including our own home-grown and state-conducted versions that we define out of the category because we are, well, US, are so like cancer and HIV and bacterial infections, in seeming to be a disease that's always with us, that reacts seemingly intelligently to the social/political equivalents of the body's immune system and the various anti-infectives that get deployed. Over-use of which, or inappropriate application of which, just tends to make the patient sicker and susceptible to meaner versions of the bugs and tumors.
Plain old police work, coupled with longer-view political policies, seems to be a whole lot more effective than the bloated bureaucracy bristling with invective and sexy weapons that's the current prescription for the disease.
Still waiting for a plain statement of "national security and US interests" that justifies or effectually deters (let alone stops) all that stuff that we are taught so carefully to fear. And to pour out cubic money to "defeat," which never seems to happen in the GWOT any more than it does in the other idiot's exercise and wealth transfer scam, the "War On Drugs." Where, in both cases, the disease seems to keep getting more virulent and impossible to control, let alone extirpate. Maybe as a result of the nostrums being applied?
Yeah, Bill, that seems so much more, ah, logical. And backed with such strong supporting evidence, too.
Did you even follow the link, much less read his stuff?
But you continue with the assumption that the same doctrine that's bankrupting us, economically and morally, straining at gnats with Cat D-9s with guns and missiles mounted everywhere, the same "policies" that are asymmetrically making fools of our vaunted military that can't seem to "win" anything or define even what "victory" might look like? I'm sure you are offended by all the apparently actually understated negative press about our Generals and their noted incompetence and dissimulations, but you haven't bothered to define what "national security and U.S. interests" are at stake, in your view of the world, and how the present set of behaviors and expenditures and the grotesque bureaucratic "systems-based" overgrowth of the whole MIC/state security apparatus are even "making us all more secure."
"none of these have had the first thing to do with Israel."
Not even the very smidgen of a tiny bit of a first thing? Absolutely sure that there's no weensie meensie cheensie little minuscule bit to do with Israel? Israelis had not even a tiny little bitsy role or involvement in all that stuff? Doesn't help too much to keep all the other potential "powers" that might have been of benefit and interest to the tiny little state of Israel?
I know it's not fair to expect someone to try to prove a negative, but you set the standard of proof with your post. I sure would like to know what you might have that would eliminate from "no first thing to do" possibility the strange notion that Israelis, the ones who play the Great Game over there and here in our hallowed halls of government too, who demonstrably have their fingers in every pie within reach or that might come within reach.
It's just, on a larger scale, what happens at the doors of WalMart at 0600 on Black Friday. Everybody jostling and shoving for a piece of the dream, hoping to come out ahead of the next guy. Families setting up wedge formations, the muscleheads shoving the weaker out of the way or trampling on them, people ripping stuff out of other people's hands, sucker punches and line-bucking, a little residue of decency in pockets among the crowd where the alltoohuman behaviors produce some sentimental reaction, and a "security" apparatus that would like to keep order but is driven at root by profit considerations and its own myths and fears.
And all because of that disease of "MOREism," and the inability of all those humans to accept that if no one is greedy and succumbs to or embraces an insatiable appetite and avarice and covetousness and cupidity, there's enough of everything that matters, among the Maslow fundamentals, to go all the way around the table. Except, of course, for the few who swallow down most of what's on the platters, and have figured out how to get the rest of us fighting each other over the scraps.
Maybe there's a strain of homeostatic motivation in the Egyptian culture to eventually even things out. I would hope so, so would billions of others who have looked to the Arab Spring as a metaphor for their own circumstances, where community and commonality and commensalism and symbiosis looked to be defeating the parasites and predators. Note how some who participate here want to make sure to kill that notion before it gets too well established... even if it's just a myth, hey, the US was BUILT on myths, well-tended myths, that have so far kept us from complete dissolution. And John Carney, who lives to create and foster the instability that creates financialized profits, is among those telling us that "stability is fragility," a more substantial and better camouflaged statement of the old "Greed is Good" thing. http://www.cnbc.com/id/49943069
We are all in this together, except for what the complex stirrings of our limbic systems have us doing to one another... and the Big Box we have, perforce, to live in, is heating up.
GIs who spent much time on the ground in Vietnam, and Our Brave Troops who are currently being used and abused by our political and military leaders, all have much the same kinds of stories to tell. That "fog of war" thing is always smoked up as an excuse and cover for all the crap that really goes on:
And for an overview of how big and pervasive the problem of corruption, that biases and clouds all the activities of our Sacred Military, the one institution that "most Americans still have regard for," lookie here:
Of course that problem is scarcely delimited to the US, now is it, especially where you have Boeing bribing federal officials to disregard or spoil bids for (questionable) military contracts from Foreign Competitors, taking a wrist slap and still "getting the contract."
But of course that's just what we humans do. too bad we pretend we are better than we are, and are credulous and dishonorable enough to actually believe it.
What if all the reasons commonly given for the onset of the current age of terror are wrong? If violence against the innocent is not the product of religious fanaticism, reaction to corrupt governance, or a manifestation of the sheer hopelessness and rage that come with perpetual poverty, then what are the real causes? If the received wisdom about terrorism can be challenged, then there is an obligation to look more deeply into its origins....
But if the foregoing, widely accepted troika of causes of our current age of terror are all false, then what is this violent plague's true origin? In discussions over the past decade, my colleague Robert O'Connell and I have observed that the desire to prey upon the innocent is rooted deeply in human nature. From the earliest times, bush and mountain tribes, horse archers, and sea peoples all perpetrated acts of symbolic violence against hapless victims in order to shock their families, and their protectors, into states of temporary inaction during plunder raids. This violence also served to intimidate the victims into paying tribute, in the hope of being left in peace later on. In one form or another over the centuries, from piracy on the high seas to steppe raiders, and on to the "business model" of numerous modern terrorist factions, the pattern persists: Symbolic violence or the threat of it, aimed at the innocent, has been used to pursue gains -- material and otherwise.
As to terror arising in reaction to government oppression, the Arab Spring provides much evidence -- as do the many "color revolutions" that have come before -- that social uprisings can take the form of, and succeed with, peaceful demonstrations. And on those occasions when armed revolts have erupted, as in Libya and Syria, they have aimed largely at the tyrants and their militaries, not the innocent. If anything, insurrections in the Muslim world seem less prone to the kind of anti-government terrorism that has surfaced from time to time in Europe with such groups as the Red Brigades in Italy and the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany, and in the United States in the form of far-right extremists like Timothy McVeigh....
If O'Connell and I are right, the implications for policy are to: 1) disengage from religious disputations about exactly who has "hijacked Islam"; 2) prioritize the establishment of societal order first in troubled areas, rather than government-in-a-box democracy; and 3) focus on improving the ability to detect and track terrorists in cyberspace. These three straightforward steps are unlikely to be taken, though, absent a willingness to consider the possibility that the true lineage of terror is radically different from the prevailing beliefs that shape the global discourse today.
Yeah, we are far gone into the age of creative fabrication of convenient myths and fables, where "sex sells" just about anything. Abby Martin ain't exactly Axis Sally or one of the many Tokyo Roses (nor in my estimation does she play the Righteous Wronged all that well, with inartful theatrics and even fluffing her lines at points -- she is no Rachel Maddow). But she has her opposite numbers in many Ministries of Truth, including Voice of America as you note, and of course FOXy Blondes, and NPR/PBS where the subtlety of the purveying of the Reactionary Notion of What's To Be Believed has risen, along with the "qualities" of the work product of orifices like "PolitiFacts," to a truly Squealer level of competence. (For those for whom the Squealer reference is obscure, a quick review at http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/animalfarm/characters.html)
As you point out below, Joe, there's a huge, vastly profitable disinformation and DYSinformation industry out there, both NGO and in mufti and right up front like the "Pentagon spokespeople" and various saps that become hapless stooges who've mastered the stay-on-message two-step, like Ron Ziegler or that Gibbs fella, working tirelessly to make the rest of us more ignorant and malleable and enervated and Pissed-Off-With-The-Enemy-Du-Jour-Ou-Moment. And not a tiny bit of assurance that all that effort is doing a goddam thing to make the lot of the common person a tiny whit better, and pretty strong assurances that it's doing just the opposite.
And what is with all the nominally rational, uniformly male commenters here going on and on about how "hot" the RT spokesbroad is? Does Truth always come out of the mouths of "babes?" Faux aggressiveness is not a becoming trait all the time, especially when if you listen carefully, you hear echoes of Glenn Beck and that horse's giant ass, Limbaugh -- says the Hot Babe, "this is an opinion show, and I am entitled to my opinion!!!!" (Or at least entitled, with the backing of one of many propaganda apparati, to spew her lines effectively via the kind of media exposure the lady enjoys.)
Our only protection against being taught or suckered into the belief that "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others," is a critical faculty honed to an Ockham's-Razor edge by anger at being suckered and lied to and screwed over again and again by the Mephistophelian Machiavellists among us. [Note the tragic horror of Mephistopheles' existence, written out briefly here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mephistopheles
Ask Al Gore how those checks and balances are working. In a nation where the state security structure is all about an Imperial presidency (now don't say it ain't so), and capturing lifetime appointments of SupCt justices for "conservatives," and gee, there is so much that could be said about Congress, that World's Greatest Deliberative Body, the best laws and delegated regulatory functions that money can buy.
So sad that everything gets reduced to little sound bites and talking points. "Sharia hitting the fan"? I guess that's kind of cute... Any idea what "Sharia" is, other than a cute little catch phrase deployed like a stream of ink from a squid's posterior to distinguish obviously good "US" from obviously evil THEM?
I happen to like the Professor's pointed paralleling of people who on the one hand are zombie-ing around in their consumptive People Of The Mall haze, unaware of the degree to which their "rights" and "freedom" are being "Matrix"ed away from them, comfortably swallowing comfortable assurances that there is no reason to be afraid, at least nothing to fear from The Government or the Powers That Be, (not waterboarding, or eavesdropping, or bases and stratagems being played all across the planet, or trillions of their wealth being stolen and transferred to Wallstreet and LockheedMartin and various "security contractors") -- as opposed to THEM-- as long as you are not doing anything wrong, right?
And on the other hand, people, our fellow humans, who are working in a very different kind of climate, still feeling the pain of despotism and kleptocracy and going through that confused horror of power-grabbing by the usual types that see their opportunities to advance themselves and their set in times of upset.
(The cool part, though there is a finite temporal limit, is that Egypt will indeed be "moving forward" along the jagged track of its destiny, whether ruled by kleptocracy or governed by Solons.)
All, of course, because we humans don't have a clue how to go about regulating and governing ourselves, sustainably and decently, for the greater good (as opposed to pretending to do so, behind a convenient set of myths and deceptions, and depending on the vast inertia and high pain tolerance of the crowd to generate taxable wealth and provide labor and cannon fodder) except very locally, when we have to look each other in the eyes, and over pretty short bits of time.
But they don't really fail. The dictators and kleptocrats get not only very rich, they have a nice run causing pain and horror to a lot of other humans. there's always a few of us in every population who are wired with the programming on how to accumulate and wield absolute power. Just like each of us generates some active cancer cells somewhere in our bodies, every day, and if we are lucky, our immune systems will catch and recycle them before they get a real foothold.
Let us remember how so many of the kleptodictator class, including a whole lot of Nazis, and Bourbons, and guys like Batista, and geez, how many others, accumulate a lot of portable wealth and then split for Happy Trails Retirement Spas before the crowds get to them. And a lot of their "people" do pretty well off the scamming and stealing, too, and also seem pretty adept at stepping off the train before it crashes into the gorge...
But I read some of the Israeli newspapers and blog comments, and you have one hard row to hoe claiming any moral high ground on any substantive basis when it comes to rancid racism. Too many "kill all the Arabs" and "push them into the sea" and "they are not even human" out of the fertile vocabularies of Israeli writers and netizens to count...
And of course all the other stuff that Professor Cole and others have pointed out about how Israelis have been doing it to the Palestinians. And just a little way down the page, there's the argument that Israel must keep the Palestinians down, because after all someday, those smelly distant relatives whose water and gas and arable land many Israelis covet and have already taken much of might some day ALSO have nuclear weapons and an overwhelming air, navy and land force that they might use to do to the Israelis what is being done to them. Unassailable logic, all right.
And humans being what they are, those of us who have a little experience of bloodshed can be pretty certain that there will be a lot more. It's just what us self-justifying tribal vicious humans do. Behind all kinds of pretences to moral righteousness. All equally putrid. But so wonderfully seductive, and so soul-satisfying when your Enemy lies hacked and bloodless at your feet.
As you know, this is all complicated stuff, worse than trying to figure out the Krebs/citric acid cycle in Biology 101 and without disinterested scientists working to make it all clear.
Ask yourself another question (there are many more, of course): What's the value of the natural gas reserves found off the Gaza coast in an area that for anyone else would clearly be 'national interest' territory, but which the Israeli government acts as if they already own it (apparently by "right of conquest.") http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2012-11-20/war-gaza-war-over-natural-gas
And of course as with Apartheid South Africa, keeping the Palestinians down and out both aims at providing a cheap, expendable labor pool for Israeli businesses, and if the Likudniks are right, eventually a gradual disappearance or extermination of people with claims to land and resources at least as cognizable as the ones they make. If the Ls are wrong, and as has often happened in our human tragicomedy desperation reaches that critical mass before the "Arabs" expire from starvation, there will be hell to pay for the comfortable Israelis who support and facilitate all this. And there's no Nelson Mandela to tamp down the chain reaction here.
Maybe the mouse is not plotting some huge PR coup against that implacable asymmetric tiger of an adversary as much as simply, once again, acting from pent-up anger and desperation. Not all the world is made up of "rational actors" and Masters of the Great Game.
Any information, Professor, on the provenance of the Hamas rockets, particularly whether there is a "leadership" in the sort of unitary sense that Cervantes seems to assume? And do the Hamas "leaders" really warrant contempt in the same way the bully-boys with the huge arsenal Uncle Sucker has helped to fill might attract negative emotions from others in the world? Or is that post just another example of that "false equivalence" thing?
Barbara Tuchman has a whole interesting book on what she calls "The March of Folly," the constant, unvarying (except in local intensity) refrain in human "governance" of leaders and rulers acting so very clearly against what one might think was the "general welfare" and so often even their own survival interests, establishing and pursuing "policies" of self-defeat in the face of many better options, and despite clear advice on ugly and inevitable consequences. Like the Trojans pulling that horse inside the walls, without even poking it with spears. And the 14th-century Popes, pursuing worldly glory by destroying the Church. And the Bourbon monarchy. And the US in imperial adventures like Vietnam and Iragafanipakistan.
Wonder what the triggers for the Israeli Defense Force keepers of those 400 nuclear warheads are, under their version of the Single Integrated Operational Plan, and what their targeting maps look like... It would be interesting to know if any "US interests" have little rings of fire drawn around them.
There's a lot of characteristics that various proponents claim to set us apart from the rest of nature -- self-awareness, laughter, that opposable thumb. It sure seems to me that the most telling is the ability consistently and repeatedly to do stupid stuff to ourselves. With huge consequences.
That's the old definition, by the way. It was inconvenient, PR-wise, for the Coalition Provisional Authority and the "Coalition" carrying water for whatever Karzai's mob is (neither are a "constituted government"), and changed, as best I can make out, in a 2003 revision of the DoD Dictionary. It is hardly the only entry that has been revised to support the political bullshit underpinning the War-is-a-Racket.
What's the chances that the US can back away from the cult of the Warrior? "Call of Duty: Black Ops", the wonderfully exciting "simulation" that involves a whole lot of killing others, sold $500 million worth of copies on its recent release. And the content of TV and youtube and all the rest of how we learn about the world...
Maybe if the US military brass were smart enough to not "invest" us in wars that make no sense, and where there is no definition of "winning" and no measure of success other than body counts and money spent and really puffy articles inflating the General Reputation of the Brass.
And I have to note that from what I see, the Brass are in no way committed to "protecting AMERICAN lives," not where things like Pat Tillman and so many other friendly-fire (that sick notion) "incidents." And where hundreds of billions are spent on technical approaches to "defeating IEDs" but out in the real world, GIs are still being used as protoplasmic explosives detectors, and they either have ESP or magical powers of perception to spot the tiny clues and tells, or they get blown up, often with US-made bombs and artillery shells.
Just curious -- do you really think that the US military establishment is capable of "protecting civilians" in Afghanistan, to the point needed to allow a legitimate government of all the people (who seem disposed to resist any such thing)? The military can't even define, let alone achieve, "success" or "victory." Let alone a "mission," which in theory ought to be a sort of NATIONAL decision, not one to be delegated to people who get rich and important off continued conflict, right up to an dincluding the Great Global Interoperable Networked Battlespace. But them folks are real good at playing the same game that made them rich through the Cold War and is still working well for them.
One of my little personal 3x5 cards is a scene from an "embedded" moment: A Marine squad leader is confronting a villager among a bunch of others who had moved out of a market town after repeated "insurgent" attacks and threats. The Gyrene tells him he is supposed to move himself and his family and people back into the town, and that the Marines will "protect them." He says that he has orders from the Brass that this village is to be a linchpin of the Rebuilding Doctrine in this valley, so the people just have to move back in, that's all there is to that.
Says the villager (as translated, I don't speak the lingo so who knows if it was accurate) "With all your weapons and your technology, you Americans can't even protect YOURSELVES against the fighters. How do you expect us to believe you are going to protect US?"
insurgency — The organized use of subversion and violence by a group or movement that
seeks to overthrow or force change of a governing authority. Insurgency can also refer
to the group itself. (JP 3-24)
"governing authority" is undefined, but it has come to include our brief proconsular rule of Iraq and presumably "things" like the Karzai mob in Kabul. No reference to "legitimacy" or any of its correlatives anywhere in the DoD Dictionary. Maybe in some other War Department text?
Sure seems to me that like the Vietnam thing, the whole operation is built and based on a fundamental ILlegigitmacy, invasion and occupation.
Given the success of Israeli/Zionic "interests" in the US in warping the public discourse here without firing a shot (as far as I can recall, other than that business about trying to sink the USS Liberty back in '67), one might reply that PR efforts by the Palestinians have been mighty, but totally obscured by their owners and occupiers in the one "market" where over time, doses of the true on-the-ground might have a chance of making a difference.
But you know those awful Palestinians are all Arab Terrrorists, don't you? So they are Our Enemy Too, and the Likudniks are doing us a favor using weapons we mostly supply to push them into the Mediterranean.
Speaking of "do not understand," what a wonderfully obscure bit of writing by whoeveryouare, a person such as you are. I, for one, after reading your takedown of the post, am now just full of questions and doubts about the relative positions and roles of the Likudniks and that fraction of the people in Israel who are all about working out that destiny written way back in the Pentateuch to "slay all them other Nations with the sword take their stuff," on the one hand, and them horrible gigantic world-democracy-crushing Palestinians. With all their nuclear weapons hidden away in the tunnels under what's not been occupied in Gaza.
Too bad this is the best too many of us humans can manage, all the lying and little sneaking around and killing and gathering in all the healthy wealth in the world for their personal pleasure and the aggrandizement of their little tribe.
Maybe that ought to be an invitation to look at the whole realm of Smart Weaponry and military "intelligence" -- look up "military fails" on youtube for a fun assortment of real-world performance of all those high-tech game-changers that aren't. Ever since de Seversky (and that Sun Tzu of animation, Walt Disney, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paY6y87rrpE) peddled the notion of "Victory Through Air Power," the MIC across the planet has been selling sugarplum fairies to gullible taxpayers and kleptocrats. (Yes, Hellfires usually do ignite and blow something up, but watch those youtube "military fail" videos for what very often happens, and do a little research on "friendly fire" deaths -- the myths of competence and effectiveness are hugely overblown.) And we might recall that those expensive "Patriot" missiles actually were not so very successful back in the day of Gulf War I, contrary to Raytheon's and the War Department's hype. There's a long tradition of both fiscal and performance fraud in all those grotesquely expensive procurement programs (sold, not very gracefully, as "jobs programs," like the F-22 and F-35.)
When are we ordinary humans, busily creating real wealth out of real labor and stuff that actually works, going to figure out how thoroughly we are being "had" by the Powers That Be? The constant BS of "We need more money!" from the shites who run the Pentagram needs to be given more exposure and truth-testing.
Or maybe just to an excuse for more of the lead-casting same. Seems the Likudniks have done a better job of winding up the machinery of jingoism and racism this time around. Just check out the local news and front pages in Israel... http://www.haaretz.com/
Maybe one of us out here who is enraged by the multi-layered deceptions and frauds that are hidden behind the Shallow Narrative you apologize for mistook "Paula Pollard" for Jane Harman Kardon, about whom it is said, by sources you would no doubt be happy to impeach, that at the very least, according to one or more sources, spent some time on the phone agreeing to use her considerable clout to have the Justice Department down-charge a couple of AIPAC folks who were, ahem, maybe involved, like Jonathan Pollard and a bunch of other "Americans," in espionage for the Israeli government AGAINST THE INTERESTS OF THE U.S. http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/11/14/jane-harmon-and-israeli-spying/ But of course in your world those interests are sufficiently aligned, in the grander elements of the Great Game, you doubtless don't share this guy's concern: http://www.viewzone.com/dualcitizen.html
For all those Really Smart People who know all there is to know about Afghanistan now and in the future if only the pet policies and institutions they apologize for are carried out and carried along (at great and growing expense), here's maybe one tiny piece of a niggling bit of a smidgen of doubt about Our Allies Who Are Running/Stealing The Country:
Far too many Afghan families have been forced from their homes by some of the very government officials whose job is to protect them.
The Ministry of Urban Development (MUD) says that between 1,000 and 1,500 jirib (roughly equal to an acre) of public land where private families reside, have been stolen or usurped by powerful government officials and warlords each day. The ministry says that in all, more than three and-a-half million jirib of these lands have been stolen, a staggering figure.
Yousaf Pashtoon, who oversees MUD, says that these large-scale land grabs are surprisingly simple to carry out for powerful men with guns. “In the beginning” says Pashtoon, “these men usurped the land and then made counterfeit deeds. Now, they make counterfeit deeds first and then according to those deeds, take the land.”(/blockquote>
There's just a little piece of what Toot-toot-te-roo, WAR really is, when you dig down just a tiny bit past the Narrative.
Would the riposte be that hey, this kind of stuff happens anyway, it's not onaccounta the US Invades Afghanistan WAR? Gee, that's so logical, ain't it?
And Afghanis keep killing NATOists, and some note that maybe the reasons are more complex and disturbing than the stupid ones the Narrative supplies us with (They're ALL TERRORIST AL QUADA UNLAWFUL ENEMA COMBATANT MILITANT INFILTRATORS!!!!!):
The toll keeps rising. By the time this issue of Newsweek went to press, members and civilian employees of Afghanistan’s security forces had killed no fewer than 40 coalition troops this year—at least 10 of the dead, all of them Americans, in the first three weeks of August alone. The count has already passed last year’s total of 35 dead, and it’s reached fully double the figure for all of 2010. But as worried as U.S. commanders are by the growing number of insider attacks—“green-on-blue killings,” they’re sometimes called—Major Hasanzada (as he asks us to call him) says the trend doesn’t surprise him. “I understand why our men are shooting U.S. and NATO soldiers,” the Afghan National Army officer tells Newsweek. “I too have been personally hurt by the way American forces behave towards my soldiers, our villagers, our religion and culture. Too many of them are racist, arrogant, and simply don’t respect us.”
There's the Narrative (that so many buy into, because, not surprisingly given the effort expended to create it, it fits so comfortably and neatly with the Exceptionalist, jingoist world view) and there's the reality. Which is so wonderfully inconsistent with the Narrative, when fortuity lifts little corners of the Big Sand and Spinach Tarp and exposes how it's really being done, in our names and with our money.
And no, all "Arabs" and "Iranians" and all the other folks that some of us are so charmed as to identify as "Unlawful Enemas" are not nice people. But it sure seems that the way the Game is being played simply amplifies the badness, here, there, and everywhere. Of course there are so many dark corners where rats and roaches can do their business that it's impossible to keep it all illuminated so we who are sponsoring the Pretty Narrative can at least see the Actual Reality parts, not the images displayed like Pat Tillman and pre-Pecker-Problems Petraeus and All-Wise McChrystal and Unknown-Unknowns Rummy and Dick the Lesser Cheney, and have half a chance at getting to ask, and even maybe weigh in on the decisions, whether what all those jackals and sneaky-petes and Foggy-Bottomists and Pentagrammers make any sense in our increasingly mutually vulnerable world.
On the other hand, suspension of disbelief is so, ah, comforting. Along with the reassurance that Competent Expert People are "in charge here."
"My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what's really going on to be scared." Plauger, P. J. (Apparently inapplicable to Foreign Policy and Military Doctrine Experts, who are generally personally immune to the hard consequences of their policies and doctrines. Getting canned for getting caught with your pants down, and maybe other unspecified but wonderfully speculatable-about misdemeanors and felonies, is not a hard consequence.)
"An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field."
Niels Bohr
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/words/ex/expert162875.html#l3thoBqg991vtuZm.99 (Some of our War Leaders seem to be approaching that limit, but the boundary on the right side of the graph is quite asymptotic... Good thing for them -- and more so for the rest of us -- that so far, there's been enough resilience in our living system to spare us from any really hugely mortal consequences and outcomes.)
About all we're missing now from the "Catch-22" Dumb-theon are Lt.-Col.-Gen. "Everybody March!" Scheisskpof, and ex-PFC Wintergreen and his mimeograph machine. We already got Milo Minderbinder busily and profitably selling out the troops and the nation, in spades...
Or maybe just to recognize that there not only is nothing for us to "fix" in Notagainistan, not even all the tea in China, or all the wealth of our great nation, diverted into that swamp of corruption and tribalism, would be able to "fix" things there to the satisfaction of Our Leaders and the People Who Believe We Are Exceptional.
How many times are "we" going to let the street criminals sucker us with yet another game of Three Card Monte?
Ooh! Ooh! Them Iranians took potshots at one of our Drones! Casus Belli! Casus Belli! Quick! Buy Lockheed-Martin, the company that brags "We know who we're working for:" http://www.cnbc.com/id/49765573
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Bill, Bill, Bill -- I guess all that huge volume of planning and planting of "installations" all across the planet, how many again? justified inter alia as part of The Global War On Terror (a phrase that has been excised from public comments of Our Rulers, but still appears in trade pubs and of course Op Eds from the "conservative" side, http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/03/25/obama-scraps-global-war-terror-overseas-contingency-operation/) and the entire driving concept of the New High Frontier is the Interoperable Networked Global Battlespace, http://www.raytheon.com/capabilities/products/stellent/groups/public/documents/content/networked_battlespc_ds.pdf, where humans are increasingly out of the functional loop and just doing 'decisionmaking' for unmanned systems to Rain Fire, that arrogantly divvies up the whole planet into nine "areas of responsibility" to be Battlespace Managed by those really coolly named commands, is just eyewash and smoke, right? Like what's shown on this DoD map? http://www.defense.gov/home/features/2009/0109_unifiedcommand/
Of course, as usual, Murphy will rule, all the planning will have been for the last war, and all those trillions will be gummed up by the absence of a sensible mission and the ingenuity or luck of The Enemy, or just Brownian motion amongst all the incredibly vulnerable sets of moving parts... http://www.csl.army.mil/usacsl/Publications/infoaspowervol2/IAP2%20-%20Section%20Two%20%28Beim%29.pdf
Wasn't there a really memorable Rogers & Hart song about all this, written way back in 1935? Something like
?
Oh yeah: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DVn6-CURgM
PG, there sure is a nice supply of people who are pretty good about subtle and not so subtle information dys-semination, as it were. Casting doubt, floating factoids, reproducing sections of the Narrative per the coding provided by the Establishment. Just enough truth mixed in to make the truthiness more credible. People who when called out on obvious factual problems with their stories just move on to the next post, knowing how so few of us try to track and integrate this stuff very much, and waiting the next opportunity to dys-inform or "correct" any dissenters.
There's a lot of other techniques that various parts of US, The Nation, have gotten good at, including be-fog-of-warring, Mysterialization, claims of superior knowledge and desperate skills, rendition, de-stabilization, data mining, compartmentalization, deniability, disappearing people and large amounts of money, all that kind of stuff. Too bad so few of US, The Nation, put their efforts into working on the survival of the species and the stability of the planet.
I'm sure it's all done in good faith, and in good taste, and for our own good. Right?
Correct, Bill. Very astute comment. Too bad "the U.S." did not limit itself, legally or not, to the two items you think were justification for invasion and $4 trillion of war games, getting bin Ladin and that Mullah Fella off the stage. Why didn't "we" leave the various parts of the people living in Afghanistan to sort things out amongst themselves in the first place?
But that is of course not how our machinery works, now is it?
Speaking of parodies... One of those repetitive things I stick at is personification of "nations." "The U.S." is made up of a whole bunch of disparate moving and acting parts, including sets of people who do "Doctors without Borders" and International Red Cross and stuff, and who oppose the crazy clumsy bleeding bureaucracy called the MIC, and the sale of murderous weapons all over the planet, and people who actively push and profit from those same sales. And some of "us" manage the overthrow of, say, Iranian governments for the benefit of British petroleum corporations, and little Central American countries for the benefit of United Fruit and so on.
That US contractors get paid to manage teams of largely indigenous people to risk their lives picking up mines that are in the ground as a result of "our" fixation on playing the Great Game sure doesn't seem like a "good deed" worthy of praise. But that's just me, of course.
Hey, Joe, where you gonna find "competent professionals" to put the withdrawal in the hands of? They got a bunch of those hanging around in "the administration" in DC and Langley and Foggy Bottom? And maybe you could show me where I wrote "the same thing" about withdrawal from Iraq, which hmmm, hasn't actually gone all that well, has it? "Positive political results?" Like what, and for whom? Karzai? the hornet's nest of tribalists and drug lords and arms dealers and contractors and The Hated Taliban and stuff? Reality-based? I guess "whatever happens" is "reality?"
I guess we should once again just have faith that the "competent professionals" will do the right thing? Sorry we descend to the personal attacks... but there's always enough hate and tribalism to go around... How's that for a parody?
"WE" worked really hard to sucker the Soviets into invading Afghanistan, and they brought a lot of mines with them, and we (for a profit, of course) supplied a lot of mines to be used in those parts of the continual bloodshed. And of course in lots of other places where "we" have fomented or taken some part in "conflict."
Don't you DARE to be claiming "moral credit" for the US for picking up our toys over there:
http://www.uscbl.org/about-landmines/landmine-facts/ There's much more at that site too, like the fact that mines cost about $3 or not much more to make, and cost thousands to remove, and do millions more in physical and psychic damage.
The mine clearing is a for-profit operation, and I have a hard time being more sentimental about mine-clearers getting killed by your possible "the Taliban" than any other person killed or maimed in this whole fool's paradise (possibly excepting Osama bin Ladin):
http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/Landmines-in-Afghanistan-A-Decades-Old-Danger-06143/ Lookie here, maw! A profit-centric opportunity!
And what do you so very much smarter guys suggest are the policies and tactics to be followed in order not to create a giant sucking sound of some "catastrophic power vacuum" as the last C-117s and Blackhawks hoist their loads and flee, er, "leave"?
The whole "Vietnamization" thing ain't going to work any better here than it did there, but of course we Americans are now happy to deal with those Dirty Commies who "filled that catastrophic power vacuum," to the point of now filling Walmart's shelves and racks with cheap, well-made clothing. And on the "What was that all about?" scale again, now our Navy, having connived at the fraud of the Gulf of Tonkin scam that sucked us into full-chat invasion and war-making without any national interest (other than the kind of false pride limned in Greek tragedies) or support, floats around in the Gulf of Tonkin doing joint maneuvers with the "gooks"??
And about that chasing-bin Ladin-and-Mullah Omar and "acts of war," what's the apologist's justification for a trillion dollars, hundreds of thousands of dead and injured, and you don't seem to care much about the trashed moral standing of the US in the wider world since those stupid, meaningless things that "we've" done Over There get ignored and pushed into the ignorant, uncaring past as just "mission creep?" (And look! now it appears that "we" could have "taken out" bin Ladin years and trillions earlier, if that was in fact the mission, and just how did Mullah Omar pose a trillion dollars' worth of 'threat" to the US, again?
And yes, Virginia, there's war in Afghanistan, armed men (and our women, too) kicking down doors and patrolling to draw fire, too puny to protect our own troops and knowing "we" are unable to force any other change, and what the Frick is the mission, again? "We kill some of them, so they kill some of us, so we kill some of them..."? And WE, or more accurately our Brass and soldiers and contractors and sneaky-petes invaded, just like bin Ladin wanted us to, just like the Soviets did, and with the same freakin' result. Your "justification" and "pre-emption" arguments are nonetheless totally bogus, and I defy you to show even any economic sense in all that's gone down in terms of how much "security" "we" supposedly achieved by sending $4 trillion into Dumbspace for the contractors and native players to feed off of.
Ach, you guys know of course that it's a waste of time to challenge your Narrative, all comfy and smug. You got an answer for everything, all nice and neat and how's that go, "legal?" Too bad your Players have been bleeding all the life out of this nation on their fool's errands and the scams and frauds that go along with it.
Around and around it goes, shedding profit opportunities and endless woes...
Where's the cartoonist to make a telling pair of images, the first of Nguyen Van Thieu, our puppet dictator in the end days of the idiot involvement in Vietnam, and Karzai coming to DC to, among other things, be sure he has the same kind of exit options as Thieu? Who left his Sacred Native Land by US chopper just days before the Commies completed the rolling up of the corrupt rulership of South Vietnam, to go live out a quiet rest of his life in the suburbs of Boston? Both had/have their hands deeply in the pockets of the US taxpayer, and both helped warp the idiot debate and policy momentum that had Our Sacred Native Land involved in grotesquely expensive Wars Against National Interest in places where empires go to die (ask the French how that works.)
And I am just sure that there are huge reams of policy pontifications that justify, in the minds of those who even care about justification as opposed to simple exercise of the doctrines of that other "Hegel," an occasional misspelling you see in all the claptrap over Obama's appointee, having to do with the inherent manifest exceptional policy to do whatever the "will" moves the doers and shakers to do and shake.
Who cares?
As to the effectiveness of fear of legal action as a goad to change behavior: As a former environmental enforcement attorney, it sure seems to me that the folks you call out in your comment have pretty much done all that's necessary to insure themselves against any possible crazy judicial ruling, let alone any enforceable judgment, saying they bear any "legal liability" for mucking up the planet.
Between purchased legislatures, regulatory capture running back three generations now, and packing of the judiciary, not to mention stuff like the next round of get-out-of-jail-free, *Florida Rock* (http://web1c.uct.usm.maine.edu/academics/maine-law-review/pdf/vol47_2/vol47_me_l_rev_501.pdf) perversions of the 5th and 14th Amendments under the Trans-Pacific Free Trade (free of all corporate liability, that is) Thingie that let corporations one-sidedly sue political jurisdictions that try to apply their own laws to corporate invaders, in a very special corporate court. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/27/pacific-free-trade-deal
We call it "capitalism" out of inertia of habit. That ain't what it is, and "oligarchy" is not big enough to encompass it, even. I kind of prefer "end-stage terminal kleptocracy," myself.
Speaking of "losing in a debate:" Hey, Joe, you ought to examine your own thumb. I said nothing about Iraqis being capable or not of "democracy," though while I'm at it, would you care to grade the US citizenry on its ability to conduct "democracy," however you define it? Same with that thing about "hate the traditional family." Where the heck did you pull that out of? And as to a slight exaggeration of the "mission" of the War on Terror, very slight given all I read, the whole idea is exactly to kill or otherwise render harmless any current, potential or future "terrorist" as our rulers broadly define that term. Otherwise, why the "bases" all over the planet, why the growing fleets of drones, why all the "littoral combat" apparatus, why the procurements of more advanced drones with longer loiter times and more weaponry, and of course the whole Black Ops set of clans that are off doing I-bet-you-know-what? Why an open-ended, impossible-to-win, circular, self-generating set of activities that are claimed to "create security" for those of us who create the wealth that funds all that scurrying and killing and bureacratic mumbo-jumbo that we are regularly dosed with?
Is that the best you got today, by way of impeachment?
But Bob, don'tcha see that "the terrorist threat" can never be eliminated? That's the circumlocutory beauty of the structure the Security State has sold us: No Way Out, and if killing a few "wogs" just encourages other "wogs" to "disrespect our Exceptional Hegemoniacal Sovereignty Over Everything," well there you are!
To pull out one of my favorite 3x5 cards:
A guy is walking through Times Square with an elephant gun under his arm. A cop says "What the heck do you think you are doing, carrying that thing around here?" The guy answers, "I'm keeping the Wild Elephants away!" Cop says, "Buster, there isn't a wild elephant within 8,000 miles of here, and poachers with AKs and RPGS are killing them off to the point of extinction where they do exist!" Says they guy, "See?" says the guy. "My policy is working!"
Oh, but Professor, it is so obvious that the Drone Program (DP) is both Effective and Functional. And in no way counter-productive. Any more than the Phoenix Program or the overthrow and dictatorization of national and even local governments "unfriendly to 'US interests,'" which we are all supposed to just accept as a postulate that drives Our Policy.
And such a perfect fit with the neatly circumscribed notion, or whatchacallit, "doctrine?" that now justifies endless and endlessly larger dumps of cubic dollars into what we are so dishonestly sold as being "necessary to our security," and even on a more grandiose claim, to "international security." The (Other) War That Can Never End.
I'm told by these smarter people that I'm obviously uninformed if I don't see the wisdom in trying to kill every "terrorist" out there before they can do anything bad to us. (Forget that the most effective tool in the War on Terrorists has apparently been plain old gumshoe law enforcement.") Great, if that's what the DP was capable of doing or directed to. I wonder if Hagel sees it that way. That kind of logic wold I guess support going into East LA and killing by Hellfire any potential gang-banger who might be or become involved in the importation and sale of Schedule I drugs, or how about we set the CIA to kill off-script military personnel or to kill those of its employees who do stuff that's, er, "against the national interest?" We got "pre-emptive war," which usually proves stupid for most of us -- why not other kinds of pre-emption?
Hey, man -- it's just business, after all...
Maybe, if one steps back and looks at the sets of characteristics that most accurately mark the Likudniks and the rulers of the House of Saud, there are a whole lot more similarities than differences?
After all, even Yasser Arafat was deeply involved in profitable businesses with quite a few nominally Israeli people, what's the word, "soykhern?" "gonif?", nominally his and his people's enemies, to his personal profit and to the detriment of folks who were suckered into admiring and following him. Kuffiyeh and yarmulke -- is nothing sacred, any more? http://www.trixieandpeanut.com/product-46050-Yarmulke-+-Tallis But hey, I can go netshopping and get myself a nice set of American Flag-motif underpants, unisex and edible!
Stupid effing humans.
Which "Lobby?" AIPAC, or the military-industrial-Congressional one? Or both?
Like, uhhh, who cares? Sure good to see lots of input on this one, Professor.
Question for the Exceptional Apologist Experienced Players:
From this interesting little bit of text,
,
does/do "the US," or whatever the CIA and other Black Ops players and contractors are who glare that they are "in it to win it" (whatever "it" is), now have "legal cover" to be doing this combination of mercenary murder and imperial techattacking? "[H]elp do the job for him"? Sound at all like "our" relationships to a bunch of other Players who are so much more astute and experienced in the games of Empire and Byzantium than our Really Smart Players seem to be?
And maybe one of you will take a shot at stating what "the national interest" or "US interests" is or are, that warrant this kind of shi_? Especially, though you will of course discount it as mere correlation, it appears that the Sneaky Petes and Compartmentalizationalists might actually be doing nothing useful (except guaranteeing that wonderful continuity of idiocy and wealth transfer that started at the 38th parallel and ran through a bunch of oops! not really dominoes after all and continues with the floating and bulging of the Imperial Blimp as it gets more and more swank and more and more remote from its nominal moorings in "America?"
Because, say the writers up above,
Just asking. Not that anything will ever change, until the last self-directed battle machine finally runs out of gas, or stored electrons...
First comes this, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOV8mBjHHYg,
"And then I think to myself, what a wonderful world!" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCp3K3XUhvU
Is one expression of the sentiment enough, or does a string cite satisfy the challenge? "Chabad rabbi: Jews should kill Arab men, women and children during war":
http://www.haaretz.com/news/chabad-rabbi-jews-should-kill-arab-men-women-and-children-during-war-1.277616
Of course the spin doctors have worked to put a nice happy face on all this and bury it in "We would never do such things! (ah,unless we are threatened...)"s.
And who has maybe 400 nuclear weapons, and a long tradition of deception and putting other peoples to the sword? Love the tales in Judges: http://www.readbookonline.net/read/16633/42813/
And that means exactly what, again, with respect to how the current set of Israeli rulers is going about their business of laundering the eths in the area they increasingly inhabit?
What, and take a chance that other nations led by kleptocrats of one stripe or another might be in danger of some kind of concerted action (to be dictated and warped by the various state security apparatuses and policy czars) to nominally make life for the Little People a little less tenuous and painful and impoverished and terrorized than it is at present? What fun would that be? It's all about Apres moi le deluge, isn't it? And dining on hummingbird's tongues and the meat of the last tiger?
If you ask the players on Wall Street and in the "City," well hey, all that climate change is just another kind of volatility out of which the sharper creatures among us can squeeze some really great profit opportunities. So what's the worry?
So maybe these guys (the Ashar'ites, that is) all moved to Texas, where they have settled in comfortably to "fix" the school curriculum, which also apparently is destined -- predestined? -- to kill the distinction between sacred and secular? I guess we the enlightened Westerners are destined, ah, pre-destined? - to meet our Doppelganagers from the reactionary pit of the Arab/Muslim world somewhere in the middle of another "warming-"induced Noah's Flood, there being so much that's blasphemous, per Jerry Falwell and Anal Roberts and Pat Robertson and Tedd "Pataprettyboy'sbottom" Whatsisname, in that, you know, "Science stuff."
Wonder what we have to look forward to now, hey?
For all the folks who want to "feel good about the US" to the point of finding good news in a change in the rate of CO2 emissions and substitution behavior when it comes to what carbonaceous combustible undergirds our planet-killing combusto-consumption lifestyle:
Now isn't that special.
Take a brief step back in time to just before, the DAY before, that 9/11 thing, and read the words of one Donald Rumsfeld, bitsh-slapping his Pentagon cronies for "mislaying' $2.3 trillion over a few years: http://www.defense.gov/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=430. Gee, first of all, how much "security" did the rest of us get for all that wealth and debt? Did we win any wars? And how much better off would the most of us be if the shites who infest the Pentagram, about 50-50 careerists and parasitic contractors, were deprived of free access to the entire cornucopia (now actually almost emptied) that was the resource base of the US of A?
And some tell us that a "green" military, whichever one is first to get to that point, mostly freed from oil-sucking, will dominate the planet. Is that the game? Jesus Lord, I would hope not...
Does anybody ever really know?
I mean, how stuff like the initiatives and quarterback sneaks and Statue of Liberty plays that Players in the CIA and the rest of Compartmentaldom pull? Things like getting US taxpayer full-faith-and-credit guarantees for the Pope's bank to lend money to the Iraqi dictator to "keep the pressure on Iran" because they dissed the CIA's Chosen Overlord?
These are people with "people skills" of a certain sort, a pretty ugly set on the whole, that are pretty good about executing (pun intended) their plans, but so often that guy Murphy seems to step in, like every time, and "re-direct" all that negative energy that the Shadow Governments inject into the system into, Suprise! Unintended Consequences! that just REQUIRE even more idiot destabilizing but oh so elegant and complicated "intervention."
And then along come the Spinners, once the Limoges is shattered, to either continue the deniability game and escape opprobrium for net failure of the Grand-Plan-as-memo'd-and-sold as one option, or figure out a way to carom the missed shot off the fenders so that they can say "That's really what we wanted to happen all along," thus protecting their little Supra-legal lairs and fiefdoms and snares and delusions from suffering too much attention of the "career-limiting" kind.
Who lost China, again? Who lost Vietnam? Who lost Iraq? Who's losing Notagainistan? What are the next losses over the equatorial horizon? [And in all of that, what the hell were the "national interests" that were supposed to be at stake, again? Other than protecting the bureaucracy of the "decider," and "saving face" by exposing our butts? and, of course, that old unstated root of all evil, Upward Wealth Transfer?
And who suffers the pains and deaths and horrors of those losses, and all the crap that got stirred in by all the Players who think they have all this under such nice control, or at least know they can stupe and stalk around like overweight raptors, stirring up and terrifying the herds of critters who actually do something useful toward maintaining the ecology, even if it's only to churn up the ground for seeds, and adding their dung and eventually their carcasses to the topsoil?
The missing link: http://www.economist.com/node/7218678
Not for lack of trying, just for lack of time to play out the "policies" of our right-wing Cold Warriors and their sick world views.
See, it's all so complicated, isn't it, as even the rest of this little linked article hints at. All the many stratagems and machinations of the putters-forth of notions of "interest," almost uniformly their own at the expense of the larger world, uninformed by any notion of survival and sustainability, driven by the "values" that always drive Empire, all add up to a bleeding, wailing mess for the most of us, on the other side of that wall of privilege and power that insulates the Experienced Players from those consequences, a "mess" that just "requires intervention" to "rectify."
Gee, and who installed and supported the Shah, by arranging the coup that blew out a democratically elected "liberal?" Who built the SAVAK, the Shah's secret police, which disappeared and tortured and all that stuff? Who armed the Iranian military under the Shah? Who sent Khomeini a Bible and a bunch of missiles and other stuff in exchange for those hostages that became such because of US pot-stirring and "support" of yet another repressive dictatorial convenient REGIME?
I'll give you that the statement you cavil at "cannot be accepted as immutable US policy." About the only clear "policy" that's "immutable" is that "our" militopolitical apparatus will act against what I would characterize as "the national interest" by fomenting trouble, arming the planet, filling the air with way more than our share of noxious gas and trouble, resisting any effort to prolong the life of the species and the planet, stealing or trying to steal any resource "our" corporatocracy takes a fancy to, being so clumsy and stupid as to repeat stupid behaviors and to earn the name "Uncle Sucker" for being minimally competent in the Great Game and supporting, for ideological and monetary reasons, one more skillful set of players after another. And stumbling along the same path as all the other Empires have gone down.
With folks like you, consciously or out of other motivations, to provide text and "context" (emphasis on 'con') and smoke and cover and excuses and deniability for each little bit of the stupidity and idiocy that taken together constitute, I guess, what is called "policy." Which I take to mean "whatever we happen to do, want to do, are stupid enough to do, can get away with doing, or can (or try to) keep others from doing." Which ipso facto, thereby, Q.E.D., is "right" and "good." And of course Exceptional, never exceptionable.
Cancer cells, and many parasites, live "successfully," live very comfortably, live "large" very often, creating a nice environment for themselves and their co-infectors and spawn, in a declining and dying host critter.
As long as "we" continue to think and act according to the large-scale constraints of an idiot game of RISK!(tm), in which personified/reified/hypostatizationalized "nations" and "extra-national world conspiratorial groups" like "al Quaeda" are presumed and therefore become the "actors and players," there will be more impetus for more of the metastasis of unstable, constantly growing, resource eating, all-too-human Great Gamery. Complete with "services" that eat a quarter and more of the world's wealth, re-define the planet into nothing but one huge Battlespace subdivided into "Areas of Responsibility" (formerly "Areas of Operation," until the ugliness of that kind of claim caused a change in the dictionary) and burn huge amounts of combustible fuels (while seeking PR cover and enhanced loiter time in places like Notagainistan by adopting and co-opting "green" technology) and sowing dragons' teeth all over the landscape.
For those who want "us" to pretend that "(You name the mideast or South American or Central American or African post-colonial nation)" is "not Vietnam," might one refer them to the nice recitation of how "we" involved "ourselves" in Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia given by Barbara Tuchman in the last piece of her "The March of Folly." The parallels to subsequent huge-scale idiocies are unarguable -- same players, same earnest or more often faux sentiments and collations of "fears and threats," same insatiable appetite for "enemies" and promotions and profit and private jets and other perks for the Battlespace Managers and their symbiotic "contractors."
Apologists will say that she was "re-writing history." Given that the history written by the "winners," the Pentagram and the MIC and the "right," is so far from what sure seems to be the real world as it happened, re-writing is pretty much mandated, for one seeking honestly for the roots and failings of "policy" that lead "us" from one wasteful and self-propagating idiocy to another.
US replaces departing or departed colonial power, claims "interests" for itself in the new Battlespace, bureaucratic timidity and dishonesty and mini-empire-building undergird self-fulfilling or propaganda-generated "prophecies." Our team creates "enemies," and goes to war to try to thwart changes in other nations' history. Without benefit of a declaration of war, a commitment by OUR nation, a clear statement of "our" interests, other than some looming miasmic "threat" made of propagandic Lycra (tm), elastic enough to cover a whole hemisphere's volume of BS and profitable self-interest and behaviors and "policy" that have not a damn thing to do with anything like real "interests" of the nation at large, particularly the mass of people who end up paying for Schwartzkopf and McChrystal and Petraeus' Game-playing and comfortable post-military "retirements," free of consequences for failed "policies," falsehoods propagated, and a whole lot of death and the furtherance of behaviors and "systems" and "force structures" that inevitably lead to more of the same.
Too bad "we" are by far less committed to the "general welfare" than to the "welfare of the generals."
Yeah, the ChiComs maintain that there's "one China," all subject to Beijing rule. And the Kuomintang, that semi-reformed bunch of corrupt thugs who have "become respectable" by commercial success, maintain that there's "one China" under THEIR rule, that Mao and successors are mere usurpers." And "the US," in a dazzling display of NoSpeak, does what, again?
Even the sentence you selected, "The U.S. recognizes 'that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain that there is but one China and that Taiwan is part of China," read with open eyes, gives the lie to your interpretation; the US play on this situation is to try to keep the Mainlanders from just overtly taking the place as the Kuomintang had done, and to satisfy the right-wingers there who want, like Miami "Cubans" and their US "friends on the 'right'", to retain the hope of eventual "restoration" of a coordinate bunch of kleptocratic reactionaries. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/nov/17/obama-affirms-one-china-policy/ Oh, and of course to provide a long history of profitable "U.S." arms sales to the Kuomintang, requiring a lot of fast dancing to keep various stake-holders happy or at least not actively hostile.
Here's another sentence, from the prior link:
And of course you obscure the historical bit that "Taiwan" used to be, prior to and between a couple of invasions including Chiang's, its own nation with its own indigenous population, markedly self-considered "NOT CHINESE." http://www.taiwannation.com.tw/english.htm
That arch restatement of the "US position" ought not to obscure the complicated and typically ugly reality.
"Defected," as in "changed loyalties," with regrets and apologies and restitution for past bad acts, or just what gregory says?
Interesting how things repeat. The Bourbons (save a few) moved on with a bunch of portable wealth to Austria and such places, continuing to live the high life. The Nazis (save a few) moved on with a bunch of portable wealth to Argentina and Paraguay and such, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2117093/Secret-files-reveal-9-000-Nazi-war-criminals-fled-South-America-WWII.html. Or became part of the US state security apparatus, or got to live out comfy little lives here in the Land of the Free. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/us/14nazis.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
And the "Right" got their knickers in a phony twist over "Who lost China," as a result of their supporting a fellow kleptocrat and his syndicate. Anyone heard of or remember Chiang Kai-Shek and his lovely wife Madame Chiang and the Kuomintang, whose greed and corruption made them vulnerable to "the Communists," who are more of the same, of course -- and anyhow the Chiangs and the Kuomintang got to basically invade and steal a place once called "Formosa," now called Taiwan, dispossessing and apartheiding the inhabitants, http://www.taiwandc.org/228-intr.htm ?
How about Batista? several African dictators? Et Freakin' Cetera?
And I guess the smart people, who become participants in or apologists for "the way things really work, behind the myths and lies and deniability screens," have the "right" idea: support and advance the interests of those who kill big, steal big, and when the heat's on, take it on the lam to some place run by aspiring or implanted kleptocrats, supported very often by US "freedom exporters" from the CIA and "our" corporations and agencies and departments, who will shelter the SOBs from consequences and let them live out their comfortable lives.
I bet ol' al Shalal does better than ok -- his skills are patently portable, and the new crop of oligarchs this Syria business is producing will keep him in beer and skittles until he passes.
And "We the People" are supposed to keep ordering and arranging our beliefs and lives and filling our fearful psyches with visions of Enemies, on the basis of the lies and myths and "USversusTHEMism" (tm) crap we are force- and stealth-fed by these folks. And keep on generating lots of income for the Few to take from us by trick or force, and just go along with the whole state-security faux-Liberty/pseudoFreedom mythology, Forever War and 2-Minute Hate and the whole shebang.
Because, you know, "national interest." Which means exactly WHAT, again?
Best we can do, right?
There's a whole wonderful tradition of "right"-ists who've profited wonderfully from "thinking" and "wishing" and "believing" and "tricking" the rest of us into stupid wars of choice and planet-trashing and people-robbing "economic policies" and compartmentalized destabilization stratagems and game-plays. All fully justified and rationalized and supported by people who hold lots of money and power and therefore, Q.E.D., are sanctified and patently chosen by God Almighty.
Gotta get get in the last word, don't we? Even after comments close on another thread, you drop this here, in flagrant contravention of a "rule" you always contend for, that comments must adhere to what you define as the subject under discussion?
Must be a real burden, always being "right." Too bad all that self-proclaimed genius and pan-erudition ain't applied to some kind of socially useful labor -- supporting the Imperial momentum of our Great Exceptional Juggernaut as it gathers speed toward the cliff (not the apologist fraud called the "fiscal cliff," of course) would not seem to be "socially useful."
But hey, what do I know?
Don't we love the way Bill and Joe leap to impeach observations by others here (and elsewhere), wanting everyone else to believe that comments like Swimmer's are "totally uninformed" for not "correctly" identifying the provenance of Syrian government aircraft. Here's a link, for those who care to be suckered by that kind of impeachment smoke, to do a sort of fact check: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_Air_Force (Bill denies Wiki is "correct" on anything, of course).
The substance of Swimmer's observations seem pretty much accurate and on point. Kind of like Super390's, which the Boys of Apologism seem to avoid picking at. Seems pretty clear that the apologistic impeachers want to make sure their version of "history" and the mythical and profitable "rights and wrongs" of the present state of the Great Game are protected against any kind of diminution or disconfabulation or illumination. The stuff these guys apologize for is just More Of The Same: more militarization, more security-state-ism, more corporatization, more obfuscation of efforts to escape the desiccated and deadly oxymorons of "neoliberalism" and protection of the heritage of Dulles and "Wild Bill" Donovan and all that goes with it. Stuff like this, http://www.thenation.com/article/171860/suspicious-minds-timothy-melley#, and of course this, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/21/coming-drone-attack-america
There IS, for example, a world-wide "aerospace industry" of post-national corporations that projects and protects the myths of inter-national conflicts in order to sell product, which they prodigally do, just like the Krupps did back at the beginning of all this, to almost all comers. Hence, the nominal "US" war industry congratulates itself on dominating the majority of the world military market, and US weapons, and often "advisers" and such poisonous dreck, appear on both sides of a whole lot of "conflicts," which they often have triggered and more often exacerbate. And of course there's a lot more to be very reasonably afraid of. Unless you are one of the tapeworms or tumors that feed off the human carcass, or are "uninformed" (or "uniformed") enough to believe the crap that the marketeers of militarization and economic and political oppression have flooded the world with.
Watch out for drive-by, snot-apitting, impeachments by these folks. They hardly, any more than the merde that Lockheed-Martin and Boeing and such-like put out, do a damn thing toward ensuring our national future, let alone the future of the species.
Sure looks like, even from your sectarian "Marxist perfesser" example, there are at least two parts to "value," and your condescending dismissal of the one (labor) in favor of the other (demand) is nicely typical of the dys-simulations that are the diseased rootstock of the "science of economics." That "science" that can neither predict nor account for the complexity of interchange between humans, except by post-hoc force-fitting into the Procurstean beds of the various "disciplines," whether Austrian or Chicagoan or what-ever. That "science" that like the medical arts in service of the Third Reich "proved" the superiority of a fake thing called Aryanism, and dunked prisoners in ice baths to see, again and again, how fast they would die from hypothermia, lacks any soul.
"Economists" are largely shills for the ruling class, producing theories and formulas and grand hypotheses that "justify" and "elevate" the way things are, without a thought about the way things could, should or ought to be when pain and sorrow and other externalities are brought into the "valuing" schema.
Just curious: are you wealthy enough now, or do you have a nice pension for past services to capital or government, that you have no fear of want? So that you no longer have to "labor?" And if you still work for a living, as they say, as opposed to clipping coupons or cashing dividend checks, do you work for nothing? If labor has no value, that would be the logical thing for you to do...
It's hardly a new observation, but I had a history professor observe that "America" is a made-up thing, unlike the identities of other "nations" and large tribes and such with histories and identities forged via ancient migrations and old violence.
So "We the people," coming from all over the place, bringing our own identities that we are supposed to cast into the melting pot, are supposed to draw a ration of jointness back out of that pot and adhere to it. Kind of like the folks in places like The Villages, http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/item_Cc7ZfG20iWexuTKNixQhvO. Which is a truly "manufactured community," a microcosm of the country at large, where adherence to what the developer/ruler considers "Americanism" is written into the rules and regulations and covenants that you have to sign up for. Lots of retired "Warriors" there, many of the officer types that managed our MIC procurements and imperial adventure. The kind of place that if our common myths finally break down and disappear in the face of the real nature of what "We the People" have become, would be a great nucleus of a warlord locale with a ready, if aging, population of believers and battlespace managers.
So it gets to be the uncomfortable, submerged, but nagging awareness and belief that an "American" is a frail thing, subject to many diseases and disorders, like "Commya-nism" and "Sharia Law" and "syndicalism" and all that silliness. Hence the fear of "Creeping" this or that "ism," and the kinds of "public health measures" of quarantine and burning down "infected" structures and "treating the diseased souls" that people who laughably call themselves "The Right," enforce. Like the deed restrictions in The Villages, where hypocrisy and the usual exceptionalism that lets the elevated few (but not the ordinary resident) paint their front doors whatever color they want, and engage in various kinds of extortion and fraud, and hammer their neighbors down into the mold that "protects their values," property and otherwise...
Just one piece, one part, one little reason why things are going to fly apart.
I guess I'm not the only one with a stack of 3x5 cards... Too bad I'm not tech-y enough to turn them into text blocks I can pull up and insert on call. Honestly.
Back to "Leviathan." What a surprise that the endpoint of human development seems to lie somewhere between Baghdad and Islamabad... the "Cradle of Civilization."
I wonder if Joe read the EPA's mandated and massaged "U.S. Greenhouse Gas Inventory Report." I used to work for EPA, still have friends there, and I know how these reports get worked over, slimmed down and"improved" by, e.g., cautious careerists and industry reps. And if he read it, might he agree that his outspoken statements of non-fact regarding the wonderful benefits of burning "natural" gas and supposed reductions of "greenhouse" gas are, well, just wrong.
There is no factual reason to cheer-lead for Our Sacred Land in this arena, any more than in any other area of "bad for the planet and our fellow humans." It is not "Anti-American" to point up the flaws in what our oligarchy and other bits of "leadership" are doing, day to day, to steal food off our plates, steal the roofs over our heads, and bankrupt the REAL economy to protect and enrich themselves.
Hint: The Koch brothers, the CIA and the rest of State Security, the MIC, our Congress and the other branches and local governments, may be using their buggy whips to drive us laboring beasts of burden ever faster toward the big cliff, for ever less food, toting ever larger burdens, with ever less return to us for our "productive labor." But while they may "own" America, they (I hope) are NOT AMERICA, and are as "traitorous" and "un-American" as any Benedict Arnold or Jonathan Pollard.
There's an assumption by Ungar and a whole lot of others, that "growth" equals equals "emissions and other horrific externalities" equals "improving the lives of citizens." That ought to be recognized as yet another idiocy. First, things "improve" in places (those convenient and sick reifications called "nations") like China and India and the sorry states of sub-Saharan Africa, (and of course in our own wonderful nation blessed with gigatons of extractables that the prior inhabitants could not defend and mostly did not use,) most of it, only for a tiny few "citizens" in a world that runs on the kleptocratic mantra that "some animals are more equal than others." "We humans," a pretty few of us, have only in tiny ways started to bend our massive and inertia-bound intellects to the possibility of making the planet more of a garden across its surface, and less of a garbage dump with swank and exotic high-rises cozying a tiny minority of the various national populations. Who actually are "citizens" of their own stinking group of parasites, that "shadow government" that more people are starting to sense, with their peripheral vision at least.
There's a huge momentum, and inertia, to "the way things are." Maybe young people will put their minds to "the way things could be," in a world where everybody knows we are really and truly all in this together, and that we have a mutual vulnerability that just gets worse every day, with every new toxin, every new virus, every new nanomachine, every "advance" in robotics toward that "Terminator" future, every new Counterfeit Funny Munny derivative contract. Sure looks to me like the seductions we all are vulnerable to, sex and money and power and the ability to kill our fellows and/or steal their stuff in big or small ways, are kind of winning, big time, over the notions of commensalism and stability and sustainability that might give us a prayer of surviving as a species, after the coming collapse that we do not know the shape of yet. Not for everyone, but for enough of us. But most of the smart young people are buying into the game that's running, and the others are just, like the rest of us, "productive consumers" to keep the game running. Wal-E, not Wal-mart.
Because each individual is driven to a greater or lesser degree by that pleasure principle, throughout their lives, lives which only last a tiny span of all the lives of humans in the parade of time. And stuff gets better or worse at a pace that individuals either don't perceive, or simply don't care about since they are either born or have learned how to be good at predation and parasitism or are struggling just to stay alive. One of my 3x5 cards is for "Apres moi le deluge," of which the best explication I've found is here: http://tradicionclasica.blogspot.com/2006/01/expression-aprs-moi-le-dluge-and-its.html People who don't give a hoot about what happens after they're dead and fully beyond either the pain their their present behaviors cause, or the horrors that will come after they're gone, well, they don't give a hoot and know they are immune to any consequences, if they're rich enough.
The reasons the processes that produce "emissions" are so seductive are because the "profit" to be extracted by extraction and combustion are all from externalities. Too bad you can't "make as much money" from sustainable farming (not the kind the Monsanto and Dupont monsters are forcing on us) and water conservation and working on efficiency and all that stuff that's not sexy and doesn't lead to $200,000 champagne brunches with attractive bon vivants at snotty-ass restaurants in various imperial capitals. Financial or political, though they tend to be the same...
Truth: There is enough of everything that matters to go all the way around the table, to feed all of us and give us the rest of Maslow's first couple of tiers. But not if we keep letting the very few take everything on the plates, and sucker us into thinking that we might be one of them someday, and trick us into fighting over the scraps and crumbs while forgetting who took the best and most of it.
Too bad not enough of us human critters "get it." Anyone paying attention to a wide selection of what the worst of us, and the most of us, are up, to kind of has to come to the conclusion that humans are indeed a self-limiting plague species, and that what we do to please and feed and "advance" ourselves is ultimately fatal to our offspring. Which at smaller scales, our biology was formed to try to protect, if for no other reason than to have a family or tribe to care for us in our old age.
"World of Warcraft," "Call of Duty." A quarter of the world's money spent on aggrandizing the various militaries, which have far more in common with each other than with the populations that "support" them and that they pretend to be "defending."
Gasoline-powered "leaf blowers" to whoosh your yard crap onto the neighbors' lawns and into the public streets and sewers. Pipelines siphon away the "wealth" to the few, and the many are too stupid or desperate to recognize the consequences of drilling a hole into a gasoline-filled 20-inch conduit. And the take of the Few, when hundreds die trying to get "free fuel," is this:
http://businessandmaritimewestafrica.com/oil-gas/arepo-pipeline-fire-major-set-back-nnpc (Yeah, a "setback:" The vast majority of the pumped oil and fuel profits the usual tiny fraction of Nigeria's ruling oligarchy, leaving the mass to piracy and "accidental" self-immolation.)
One tiny episode in the panorama, a scene that can't honestly even be called "tragic" because there's no larger-than-life protagonist suffering a massive change in circumstances via some act of pride or middle-fingering of the gods. Just a lot of little people "advancing themselves" or just trying to stay alive, a little "advanced" above the many humans who get their daily bread by scavenging the garbage dumps of the world...
Maybe your points are too subtle for me, or maybe there's more subtlety in your post than might first appear from its dispassionate, almost scientific tone.
Are you saying that all the hoopla about intentional (and less frequent accidental) deaths by firearms "needs to be put in perspective," and presumably diluted and toned down by diversion into hoopla about McBurger Deaths and those incidents when a "car goes out of control" and stuff like that?
See how simple it is, Super? Just run the country like Singapore! I bet the NRA and ACLU and even the Brady Bunch might find some common ground in "concern" about that. Any idea how many gun lovers who do stupid stuff with their pistoleros, or morph magically into criminals when they decide to kill their families out of despair over some Banksta-caused job loss and personal economic collapse and maybe even some illegal foreclosure on their home via some nationwide fraud in the RE Bubblespace, might also be a little concerned about actual real, swift, certain punishment for crimes? Any idea how many more formerly criminal acts would, courtesy of those with lots of Funny Munny, be suddenly rendered "not illegal?" Oh, that's right -- that's already happening, and how quick do black people from the south and west sides of Chicago who are charged with a wide variety of crimes find themselves run through the machinery at 26th and California and into Joliet or other supermax prisons? The criminals with the "good shot" tend to wear $5,000 bespoke suits and Lucien Picard watches...
And, NEL, where do you think we are now? The prison industrial complex that lobbies for more criminalizations of more conduct and longer sentences and MORE JAILS AND PRISON "BEDS," a Pennsylvania judge railroading kids into a privatized "treatment jail" for bribes, a police state that funds itself off seizures and forfeitures of property or money in any remote way connected with "drug dealing" and of course is paid by the federal government to arm itself and enforce those Prohibition drug laws that warp our culture and secret drug dealings that fund CIA foolishness and evil, and create or augment failed nation-states like Mexico?
Nice set of hypothetical horribles. I've seen the same and more, listed in other arguments by gun lovers and profiteers elsewhere, who then and now are scrambling for less obvious but still scary reasons why they should be allowed to have and to hold and to carry openly and concealed any damn firearm they have a mind to. In spite of, you know, "Columbine" and "Newtown" and stuff...
And of course Warren, coming up next, is convinced that were he packing heat and on the scene, he would have "taken down" that monstrous kid before more than a few kids and teachers were killed...
"the starting point of all mechanical engineering"? "non-reciprocating" (as in machine gun)?
Was this intended to be irony, or >snark<? One might think so, from the name you give yourself.
If not, back to logic school for you. If that was one of the subjects at whatever engineering school you might have attended.
We do love our guns, don't we?
/waiting for the apologist(s) to weigh in here, to find some little cavil or rhetorical tic in these posts and comments, to try to impeach what's being said and commented on and illuminated here. Or at least to distract and distort and scare the rest of us into accepting more of the crap that's being pulled "in our names" by the heirs of Wild Bill Donovan and that Bush guy, was it Prescott or George 41?, and all the other lying, self-serving, sneaky, destructive, smug, vile and violent creatures that smirk and steal and defraud and torture their way through the ugly halls and back streets of that "shadow government."
Of course, the most of us prefer to sleep through it, or to get off on it, either real-world or via fiction and sims and crap like that. Seems to me there's a pretty direct, if well-obscured, link between installing Shahs and deposing or assassinating elected leaders and suborning whole governments into crass and profitable illegitimacy maintained by State Terror and State Security, in places like Equatorial Guineau, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-20763938, and other places where people just "disappear," and stuff like Columbine and now that current Ooooh-lookie thing in Connecticut.
Most of us love to hate Michael Moore, because he's (ahem) overweight and a little overbearing, but he and so many others call it exactly the way it is. And know they are just a set of Laocoons and Cassandras. And many people apotheosize Cheney and his kind. Go figure.
Elsewhere in this space, people have mentioned efforts to regulate the capacity of magazines, and the cyclic rate of fire, and calibers and styles and other stuff.
For those who want to try to limit the idiocy of the Gun Lover culture, and the degree to which it has infiltrated everything, take a quick look at these little videos, which display the infinite inventiveness of our species, that inventiveness on which the remaining optimists pin their hopes that we can think and invent and innovate our way out of the Big Die-off:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivi0YD75rhA&list=PLF5CA50CB3BBD3479&index=12
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX7vwivR6cE&feature=fvwp&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3htG_a2bYI8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_843179&feature=iv&src_vid=3htG_a2bYI8&v=VNbBYwD472w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAZT6hb8-z0&list=PLF5CA50CB3BBD3479&index=14&oref=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DrAZT6hb8-z0%26list%3DPLF5CA50CB3BBD3479%26index%3D14&has_verified=1
I'm waiting now for the apologists here for that "it doesn't exist" Great Game set to tell us all how important and beneficent and benign these critters and their misdeeds are, and how the world would be a much less safer, much more threatening place, especially for that Great Undefined, that "everypatrioticbody knows in their bones what it is," thingie called "US Interests."
You wonder how healthy cells feel when they become suddenly aware of malignant tumors metastasizing into their comfy beds of tissue... Especially as the tumors are so successful at tricking the rest of the body into growing huge new arteries into their blackness, sucking more and more of the nutrients and oxygen into making more and bigger tumors throughout the carcass, eventually draining and killing the host (and the tumors, when they've finally ingested and converted into malignancies all the available resources), more's the pity, but hey, they have one hell of a run while they're active and at their peak, and so "successful"...
Of course, the apologists know they can ignore little stuff like both Juan's post and Engelhard's natterings, and the original book, and all the stuff that slowly oozes from under that ugly scab in Langley and the other sites. They've shaped the consciousness of the rest of us so well, we LOVE the tumors and their growth and "success." After all, they share most of our DNA, except for a few little Wild Bill Hairs that escape the restraints of homeostasis, so how can they be our 'enemy?'
Ah, but we lump all those disparate people together under that convenient and misleading label, and then, as Bill puts it, "legally" categorize them as "Unlawful Enema Combatants," and keep buying Hellfires to replenish the arsenal used to blow them up, along with anyone "guilty by proximity," as in "within the lethal range of the detonation."
Because, after all, who knows what those Evil Muslims might have been plotting that would be a Threat to "our" undefined and apparently undefinable "US interests," y'know? And besides, the "Taliban" obviously have nothing in common with our Continental Freedom Fighters of 1776, or of course those same people when Reagan told us they were moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers in their struggle against that other Evil Empire that we used to confront (and have now come to look more and more like) just a decade or two ago.
Makes you just Proud to be a U.S.-an, don't it? "We're Number One! We're Number One!"
Wow, a gunman speaks! If only there were armed teachers and a Hall Monitor Marshall or two in every school, there would be no more of these incidents, right? By the way, a lot of schools actually do have "resource officers" or "Officer Friendlys" on duty in their buildings. There are an infinite number of ways that a "school shooting" can go down, up to and including high explosives and napalm-type weapons. Do you really believe that having teachers, who also occasionally go off the deep end, carry weapons, and administrators, many of whom, any more are right-wing enthusiasts from the cadre of people who want to "correct" the content of our public school curricula to reflect "conservative values," "might save a life or two"? Any more than having every theater and mall and restaurant packed chock full of "trained" concealed-carry parents and single persons would be likely to result in the quick "takedown" of some guy who announces "I am the shooter" and starts emptying 30-round banana clips and 100-round drum magazines into the crowd?
Keep pumping out those "scenarios," though -- I know that gun courses will now be filling people's heads with how to "handle" these situations. The cops will really appreciate the help. Right?
That "1982" thing is BS, pure and simple. The Colt M1911 "hit the market" back in, you guessed it, 1911. Semi-automatic handguns with various capacities of magazines and various calibers have been in existence for decades before that. Large numbers of ex-military semi-auto handguns made their way into the civilian culture via returning GIs from various wars and imperial expeditions to Central and South America and such places. And you could buy these from gun manufacturers and dealers and pawn shops and street vendors for many decades with no licensing or inquiry required.
We love, LOVE, REALLY LOVE our guns! and people who are really into guns, as totems and toys and symbols and such, also really get into all the little details of metallurgy and manufacturing, and gunsmithing for that perfect trigger pull and no-jam fits, and special grips and sights and "tactical gear" like laser pointers and LED lights to screw onto your "Picatinny mount," and and of course there's a whole Dungeons&Dragons-complexity world in the area of loading and re-loading your own ammo, and about all the "factory loads" and which is better, Ford or Chevy? And a whole literature of SWAT this and Black Ops that, with magazines to suit every little taste and perversion. Complete, usually, with lots of pix of scantily or un-clad babes, fondling the hot loads, striking that "babe" pose with a come-on look. The demographics of who buys "S.W.A.T" and "Combat Arms" and "Handgunner" and all the rest (there are dozens) must really be interesting...
How will anyone working for gun control ever get past THIS?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=fvwp&v=2cJX8ZilG_E&NR=1
And there's a zillion more youtubes of the same sort. And in the real world, "full auto" shooting, and little kids working the triggers of .50-cal Brownings and those really sexy Barrett sniper rifles, and big and little tiny machine guns and assault rifles and like Nancy Reagan's "little silver pistol" that she kept in the nightstand in the Presidential Bedroom.
Power, sex and death. All in one neat little package.
On the other hand, the poachers, many in current or ragged "uniforms" supplied by various Great Game players, find it really handy to unload a full 30 rounds of 7.62 or an RPG into an elephant or rhino, which kills the otherwise valueless-to-them critter pretty instantly. So they don't have to stroll very far to unlimber a battery-powered chain saw to extract the horn and tusk that the fUUUing kleptocrats in the Mid and Far East are more than happy to pay huge dollars for, in order to "get it up and get it on." Myth meets money, and it ain't pretty, is it?
Makes you wonder who the warlord or potentate will be who gets to dose himself with the last few grams of powdered rhino horn, because he believes in all his craven being that it will make him MORE potent-ate. There's not enough free Viagra or Cialis or Levitra to touch the belief structures of these all-too-humans and the people who make a living satisfying their desires. http://www.steadyhealth.com/articles/Levitra_vs_Cialis_vs_Viagra_a281.html
Any questions what it's all about? The marketing types know:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkvrFtNyfKs
Fentex, here's the text:
And here's a relatively dispassionate discussion of what that language might mean, especially that "A well regulated militia,":
http://civilliberty.about.com/od/guncontrol/p/2nd_amendment.htm
American English is a "living language," so words like "sophisticated," which used to mean something fairly negative, like "adulterated" or "spoiled," now means something really, like, you know, "cool!" Same, in my mind, as the 2d Amendment.
I personally read that text as what I would consider a plain-language statement of how things work in Switzerland, where most males are in some part of the military, active or reserve, and keep their individual shoulder-fired gas-operated selectable-single-burst-full-auto assault rifles at home. Most early Colonists and initial Americans really did not need a firearm for "home defense," and didn't have one. They were expensive, after all. But of course the gun industry and all the other marketing that plays off of it has gone way beyond that interpretation. My S&W 9mm with a 15-round magazine, and no safety, cost just $250 and requires no license. Nor does my own .223 rifle with its 30-round banana clips. Or the short-barreled "home defense" stainless 12-ga pump gun with the reinforced plastic grips.
So now, it's a matter of FAITH (tm), for Jesus' sake! that God, Guts 'n Guns made the US what it is today. "You can take my guns away when you pry them from my cold, dead hands." "Take my wife? Sure! Take my dog? Maybe. Take my guns? NEVER!" People who are into guns have transmogrified that 27-word text into a kind of YWH phrase -- their god is described by caliber, muzzle velocity and cyclic rate of fire, and there can be no limits on what a "citizen" can hold in the way of firearms and other "arms," including cannon of various sizes.
Here's what we have to deal with, those of us who might own some guns but are not "gun lovers" who get off on the whole cock-feed-chamber-lock-fire-extract-eject metallic big bang sex simulation: http://civilliberty.about.com/od/guncontrol/p/2nd_amendment.htm It's a totally losing proposition. The Gun Lovers won a long time ago, and the rest of us now get to worry about shit like what's currently in the news. There's no putting the djinn back in the bottle.
Because hey, right up to the moment that young man came onto school property with guns loaded and locked, he was hey, just another "law-abiding gun owner." After that, magically, he was an armed, crazed criminal. Most of these loose cannon are, right up to the moment they kill their wives and kids or shoot up the church or post office or law office or whatever. Remember this other tenet of the faith: "When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns." Or some idiocy like that.
I can't recall a better, simpler or more complete indictment, maybe all unconscious of the irony inherent in it, of the sickness and weirdness and futility inherent in the net US psyche. Unless it was intended not as an excuse for what is, in support of the gun-man mentality, and I missed the snark tag.
Just how would "America" go about doing that training, that inculcation of respect, that correction of attitudes on that segment of the public? Given that the "heroes" mentioned here, more often than not, are coming from the Dark Side, as in "Scarface," "The Quick and the Dead," etc. One would think that "the military" would be successful at that training and respect thing, but the stats on gun violence by GIs, outside the approved killing of "the enemy," are pretty appalling too.
I agree wholeheartedly that guns and gun violence are an ineradicable part of our collective identity. Kept there because of the sickness that corporate greed and ancient enmities keep on the simmer-to-boil. One more reason why we are a dead-end imperial culture. Sumus quod sumus...
Pavan, guess what? Crazy guys DO have nuclear weapons. Likud has maybe 400, and if you believed all we were told about the Dirty Commies, the Rooskies were all ready to blow up the whole northern hemisphere (and sundry other places, given how many thousands they had to play with). And of course our Bomber Loonies, who were ready to nuke Korea, nuke Vietnam, nuke the whole northern hemisphere (and sundry other places, given how many thousands they had to play with). There's still about 3,000 on hair-trigger alert, here and there.
And for the whole deterrence thing to work, it was well established that "our leaders" had to be certifiably insane: No sane person would end the whole species and much of the rest of the biosphere in the name of nationalistic pseudo-doctrine, so some wag was wise enough to invent the acronym "MAD", a sick joke, standing for "Mutual Assured Destruction," undergirded by the notion of "Massive Retaliation," where if you poke me in the eye, Leonid, I will kill all your cities and do my damndest to incinerate and neutronize you, personally...
Guns, on the other hand, are sexy and affordable and just plain FUN! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVcfgd2BiRg Here in FL, we just went past the one million mark for concealed-carry permits, out of a population of about 27 million. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYzH9BBiinM That's a nice start! Don't leave home without one!
"factually incorrect and easily shown to be so."
And just how does that make any difference in anything? The Village is only connected to the real world by the conduits that sluice in cubic money from us taxpayers and all, and the one-way mirrors that shine the Great Policy Decisions and the Fabrications That Conceal Them into the dazzled eyes of most of the rest of us.
For what it's worth,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pension_Benefit_Guaranty_Corporation
Sort of a hole-y safety net. Gee, where do you suppose the other billions of dollars (and since PBGC payouts to pensioners under most "failed" [read: raped] plans are usually less than the contracted amount the bled-out company agreed to pay, the "deficit" is a lot more than $23 billion as far as impact on the employee goes) got off too?
Where's the outrage? Oh yeah, the TeaBEGGARs are convinced that only those who Galt their way to the top are deserving of all that money. "Pensions" are for lazy mopes who don't want to "work for their money" like guys who get to appoint and oversee the "compensation committees" who approve the theft of all that pension money, money actually earned by actual work that produces something of value. (Not that Twinkies and Ho-Hos and Dum-Dums have a huge value, of course,but they produce the income that the ratty basties at the pinnacle of the pyramid skim off for their pleasure.)
So heck, yeah! STEAL our contractually-defined pensions! STEAL the enforced savings for our old age called Social Security! "There you go again!" It's all good -- some day I might be the one doing the stealing, after all.
In the meantime, the bankstas are still on a roll:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/12/neil-barofsky-too-big-to-jail-our-banking-systems-latest-disgrace.html
Of course the eventual adoption of our own hallowed, now lip-serviced-mostly, Constitution did have its share of teething problems, Federalist versus Anti-Federalist and such-like, including maybe less violent mobs in the street but maybe more advance notice and participation, and of course a very different society and tradition. And of course *also* in the wings was the "War of Northern Aggression," not too far off-stage.
It's all a matter of time, timing and degree. Good thing us little people have our agencies and instrumentalities keeping close track of US Interests in that part of the world, and doing the necessary...
" The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
And also bad ones, and idiot ones, and the paving stones are greed and self-advancement and tribalism and whatever it is that motivates "our" sneaky-petes to keep exercising their compendious skills at subornation and destabilization. It sure does not look like the "general welfare" or even "protecting (undefined but everybody-knows-what-they-are) US interests."
Is the argument that if anyone is possessed of the "correct" selective criteria, then US intervention, with all that has come to include over a little more than a century of exceptionalist, pro-corporate-interest, JF Dulles tunnel vision, the careerism of the latest crop of pants-down and doctrinally-bankrupt generals and policy lizards, the antics of Wild Bill Donovan and "our" various shills and contractors and all, is A-OK?
It's so hard to follow the logic, which so often is only "we do whatever we feel like at the time, because who is going to stop us, and who cares who gets hurt or killed?"
And how many are named or will be re-named "Venice?"
We ordinary critters have a knack for surviving and making the best of bad situations, though the ones who put us here never stop bleeding us.
Re the behaviors of the BIGs: It seems obvious to me and others that what's in play here is pure-and-simple "Apres moi le deluge," "I'll be gone, you'll be gone"-ism. http://tradicionclasica.blogspot.com/2006/01/expression-aprs-moi-le-dluge-and-its.html
The people who are living rich, fat, luxurious, "exceptional" lives via the skimming of wealth off the dumping of externalities ("Clean Coal?" Really?) and the capture of regulatory power, simply DO NOT CARE, and they know they don't have to.
For the purposes of their own power and pleasure, and maybe out of a systematic lack of empathy among other too-human-isms, they know they will get to live out their lives in immodest comfort, free of fear, spared all consequences.
Water level rising? Hop on the private jet and buzz off to a more copacetic Eden (that you or a crony fortuitously happen to own.) Natives restless? That's what their "security details" of willing club-wielders are for. Governments getting too uppity? Replace 'em, or remind them of what happens to the too-greedy who are not post-national hyper-capitalists and already admitted to the Kleptocracy.
And us little people don't want to think bad thoughts about our fellow creatures, we give them the benefit of the doubt, or fear them, and wait for them to dispose of us and our lives.
Yep. Lying is what we humans do, spectacularly well on occasion. From what I infer from your contributions here, you may be well aware of the behavior in many contexts, and maybe of parts of it that even us cynics don't dream of even in our nightmares, let alone know about.
Maybe the "new" -cons, as in "neo"cons, are really just a wish or a projection or excrescence of the same part of the human brain as whatever the "scary-sounding" Muslim Brotherhood (scarier even than the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, or even the US Chamber of Commerce) comes from, and no different than that same set of Rough Characters that since John Foster Dulles have been leading the formerly great nation down into post-imperial irrationality and irrelevance.
Agreed, FWIW. Makes one wonder why it goes on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on....
"The purpose of torture is torture."
http://www.stateofnature.org/torturesPurpose.html
And besides, as stuff like the Milgram and prison experiments show, it's sort of soul-satisfying and kind of fun. Remember the pix we have seen from Abu Ghraib -- the smiling blond lass doing what-everrrr to some "Hajji-or-other."
Save us, Jack Bauer! The Fate of the World lies in your capable hands!
Oh, and to save you or Bill the trouble, let me write it for you: "Just because your are a Vietnam vet, that doesn't mean you know anything about anything," and "Just because you are a nurse, that doesn't mean you give a damn about Kenyans."
Does it help that my son-in-law is Ghanaian? Or does that get discounted too?
Nice mischaracterization. I said no such thing. Alternatives to combustion sure as hell are needed, but how about this time we understand what we are buying into? Does "Fukushima" or "fracking" have any resonances for you? There are externalities that proponents who profit from one technology or another would and already do obscure.
Oh, and as to the lives of Kenyans and "scary stuff," where do you get off implying I don't care about, and as a nurse I actually do something about, the welfare of my fellow humans, here and everywhere?
The cool thing about Olkaria geothermal project is that it's located in an area where there's already lots of seismic activity, as in earthquakes. So there's no likely way of figuring if any of those quakes are as a result of the drilling and pumping that's part of the cycle.
Geothermal has been rejected by a lot of locales, due to the surprising incidence of, you guessed it, earthquakes, nuisance and destructive, occasioned by the projects. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/business/energy-environment/24geotherm.html?pagewanted=all There are several US areas, other than parts of Utah, where the planet has hot zones relatively near the surface, that might like the tar shale of Canada be "profitably" exploited. Query whether the "externalities" that might flow, pardon the pun, from that kind of pricking of Mother Earth's skin, would be accounted for either in the planning and construction, or when "stuff happens" after the fact. Remember Fukushima! How's TEPCO's stock doing these days?
Maybe the people of Utah, including a large number of Mormon believers, might be concerned less about short-term feeding of the fever of Energy Hunger and more about what a place that some geologists suspect might be a place for a great Geo-redefinition, along the lines of past cataclysmic volcanism.
If we don't understand all the possible unanticipated consequences, maybe we ought be a little careful about messing with stuff like this...
Nothing new here, other than Morloch not actively soliciting Petraeus to run a coup to replace the evil Socialist Government. Anyone remember the Business Plot? Of course,. that was all just "alleged" stuff, wasn't it? Wasn't it?
http://www.ifeveryoneknew.com/read?article=7
And for the Crazy Leftist viewpoint, here's some fun:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x1868259
It can't happen here. It can't happen here. It can't happen here...
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/07/the-plot-agains.html
For somebody that knows as much as Bill claims to about stuff all over the world, it's a wonder that he has not heard about Paris Hilton's appearance in Mecca.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2235287/Time-pilgrimage-Mecca-Paris-Hilton-opens-luxury-goods-store-holy-city-cringe-Muslims-worldwide.html
How's that for drive-by impeachment?
Maybe that "whistleblower" definition comes out of the same lexicon as "Unlawful Enema Combatants (UECs)"?
Since it appears that the migration and morphing of the meaning of words and the coining and advent of neologisms like "UECs" is (double-standard) fair play for the apologists for power and the generators of the Narrative and other propaganda? And since so many people consider Manning, who was apparently aware of some of the God-awful hypocritical fraudulent illegal-acts smoke-blowing content of what he is charged with passing along to WikiLeaks and as many have noted, that included a lot of really ugly stuff that blows holes in the Myth Curtain that obscures what's really going on, to be a "whistleblower?" And since the Players don't yet have the ability to "1984"-compel all of us to toe some dogmatic lexical line?
We all know that the Game is supposed to be conducted in a double-blind secret-room partitioned maze, to be sure that the beneficiaries of the "kindnesses" and "protections" granted by the Experienced players to the mopes who slave-labor-fund and cannon-fodderize the Energized Multilevel Paraphasic Networked Playspace do not see the real nature of all the banal and venal and stupid and evil that's done with their wealth and "in their names" and, well, TO them. So that dreck does not get exposed to the light of day and critical thought and comment.
Far as I can see, he performed a necessary service. And is taking far more than his share of lumps for it.
One has to wonder if the Palestinian leadership, of all flavors, will take the moral high ground and exercise some restraint and magnanimity toward the parts of the Israeli polity that have gone down that other road. Or whether, vengeance being as sweet (or maybe bittersweet, or pleasingly toxic) as it is, the seductions of cheap short-term seemingly satisfying actions and reprisals will win out.
It's not like there are any Major Players in the Great Game that actually give a fig about the long term. It's all, always, "What's in it for me or my little group, now!" and "What can I/we get away with?" And given the physical and moral state of the planet and its direction, it's pretty clear that there's no stability or longevity to be derived from any supposed "balance of terror" and libertarian-myth "checks and balances" of mutual greed. And of course every polity has more than its share of spoiler True Believers and absolutists happy to do violence to their own, and everyone else.
Of course, there's always Hope...
Thanks for your opinion on AQAP. One wonders if there is "A" cause that can be assigned as "THE likely cause" for the manifestation of "Unlawful Enemy Combatants" anywhere, though of course findings of causes often tend to reflect the preferences and biases of the analyst.
Too bad that "al Quaeda," and "terrorism" generally including our own home-grown and state-conducted versions that we define out of the category because we are, well, US, are so like cancer and HIV and bacterial infections, in seeming to be a disease that's always with us, that reacts seemingly intelligently to the social/political equivalents of the body's immune system and the various anti-infectives that get deployed. Over-use of which, or inappropriate application of which, just tends to make the patient sicker and susceptible to meaner versions of the bugs and tumors.
Plain old police work, coupled with longer-view political policies, seems to be a whole lot more effective than the bloated bureaucracy bristling with invective and sexy weapons that's the current prescription for the disease.
Still waiting for a plain statement of "national security and US interests" that justifies or effectually deters (let alone stops) all that stuff that we are taught so carefully to fear. And to pour out cubic money to "defeat," which never seems to happen in the GWOT any more than it does in the other idiot's exercise and wealth transfer scam, the "War On Drugs." Where, in both cases, the disease seems to keep getting more virulent and impossible to control, let alone extirpate. Maybe as a result of the nostrums being applied?
Yeah, Bill, that seems so much more, ah, logical. And backed with such strong supporting evidence, too.
Did you even follow the link, much less read his stuff?
But you continue with the assumption that the same doctrine that's bankrupting us, economically and morally, straining at gnats with Cat D-9s with guns and missiles mounted everywhere, the same "policies" that are asymmetrically making fools of our vaunted military that can't seem to "win" anything or define even what "victory" might look like? I'm sure you are offended by all the apparently actually understated negative press about our Generals and their noted incompetence and dissimulations, but you haven't bothered to define what "national security and U.S. interests" are at stake, in your view of the world, and how the present set of behaviors and expenditures and the grotesque bureaucratic "systems-based" overgrowth of the whole MIC/state security apparatus are even "making us all more secure."
"none of these have had the first thing to do with Israel."
Not even the very smidgen of a tiny bit of a first thing? Absolutely sure that there's no weensie meensie cheensie little minuscule bit to do with Israel? Israelis had not even a tiny little bitsy role or involvement in all that stuff? Doesn't help too much to keep all the other potential "powers" that might have been of benefit and interest to the tiny little state of Israel?
I know it's not fair to expect someone to try to prove a negative, but you set the standard of proof with your post. I sure would like to know what you might have that would eliminate from "no first thing to do" possibility the strange notion that Israelis, the ones who play the Great Game over there and here in our hallowed halls of government too, who demonstrably have their fingers in every pie within reach or that might come within reach.
As if.
It's just, on a larger scale, what happens at the doors of WalMart at 0600 on Black Friday. Everybody jostling and shoving for a piece of the dream, hoping to come out ahead of the next guy. Families setting up wedge formations, the muscleheads shoving the weaker out of the way or trampling on them, people ripping stuff out of other people's hands, sucker punches and line-bucking, a little residue of decency in pockets among the crowd where the alltoohuman behaviors produce some sentimental reaction, and a "security" apparatus that would like to keep order but is driven at root by profit considerations and its own myths and fears.
And all because of that disease of "MOREism," and the inability of all those humans to accept that if no one is greedy and succumbs to or embraces an insatiable appetite and avarice and covetousness and cupidity, there's enough of everything that matters, among the Maslow fundamentals, to go all the way around the table. Except, of course, for the few who swallow down most of what's on the platters, and have figured out how to get the rest of us fighting each other over the scraps.
Maybe there's a strain of homeostatic motivation in the Egyptian culture to eventually even things out. I would hope so, so would billions of others who have looked to the Arab Spring as a metaphor for their own circumstances, where community and commonality and commensalism and symbiosis looked to be defeating the parasites and predators. Note how some who participate here want to make sure to kill that notion before it gets too well established... even if it's just a myth, hey, the US was BUILT on myths, well-tended myths, that have so far kept us from complete dissolution. And John Carney, who lives to create and foster the instability that creates financialized profits, is among those telling us that "stability is fragility," a more substantial and better camouflaged statement of the old "Greed is Good" thing. http://www.cnbc.com/id/49943069
We are all in this together, except for what the complex stirrings of our limbic systems have us doing to one another... and the Big Box we have, perforce, to live in, is heating up.
Meanwhile, back on the ranch:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/25/air-raid-kills-10-childre_n_2188933.html
Back in the US, back in the US, back in the USSR:
http://www.thenewstribe.com/2012/11/26/russia-pm-dmitry-medvedev-slams-unacceptable-support-of-syria-rebels/
GIs who spent much time on the ground in Vietnam, and Our Brave Troops who are currently being used and abused by our political and military leaders, all have much the same kinds of stories to tell. That "fog of war" thing is always smoked up as an excuse and cover for all the crap that really goes on:
http://www.militarycorruption.com/index26.htm
And let's not forget stuff like the Phoenix Program:\
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Program
And for an overview of how big and pervasive the problem of corruption, that biases and clouds all the activities of our Sacred Military, the one institution that "most Americans still have regard for," lookie here:
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2000/wp0023.pdf
Of course that problem is scarcely delimited to the US, now is it, especially where you have Boeing bribing federal officials to disregard or spoil bids for (questionable) military contracts from Foreign Competitors, taking a wrist slap and still "getting the contract."
But of course that's just what we humans do. too bad we pretend we are better than we are, and are credulous and dishonorable enough to actually believe it.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/10/08/what_the_vikings_can_teach_us_about_terrorism?page=0,0
Gee, could it be...?
Yeah, we are far gone into the age of creative fabrication of convenient myths and fables, where "sex sells" just about anything. Abby Martin ain't exactly Axis Sally or one of the many Tokyo Roses (nor in my estimation does she play the Righteous Wronged all that well, with inartful theatrics and even fluffing her lines at points -- she is no Rachel Maddow). But she has her opposite numbers in many Ministries of Truth, including Voice of America as you note, and of course FOXy Blondes, and NPR/PBS where the subtlety of the purveying of the Reactionary Notion of What's To Be Believed has risen, along with the "qualities" of the work product of orifices like "PolitiFacts," to a truly Squealer level of competence. (For those for whom the Squealer reference is obscure, a quick review at http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/animalfarm/characters.html)
As you point out below, Joe, there's a huge, vastly profitable disinformation and DYSinformation industry out there, both NGO and in mufti and right up front like the "Pentagon spokespeople" and various saps that become hapless stooges who've mastered the stay-on-message two-step, like Ron Ziegler or that Gibbs fella, working tirelessly to make the rest of us more ignorant and malleable and enervated and Pissed-Off-With-The-Enemy-Du-Jour-Ou-Moment. And not a tiny bit of assurance that all that effort is doing a goddam thing to make the lot of the common person a tiny whit better, and pretty strong assurances that it's doing just the opposite.
And what is with all the nominally rational, uniformly male commenters here going on and on about how "hot" the RT spokesbroad is? Does Truth always come out of the mouths of "babes?" Faux aggressiveness is not a becoming trait all the time, especially when if you listen carefully, you hear echoes of Glenn Beck and that horse's giant ass, Limbaugh -- says the Hot Babe, "this is an opinion show, and I am entitled to my opinion!!!!" (Or at least entitled, with the backing of one of many propaganda apparati, to spew her lines effectively via the kind of media exposure the lady enjoys.)
Our only protection against being taught or suckered into the belief that "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others," is a critical faculty honed to an Ockham's-Razor edge by anger at being suckered and lied to and screwed over again and again by the Mephistophelian Machiavellists among us. [Note the tragic horror of Mephistopheles' existence, written out briefly here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mephistopheles
Ask Al Gore how those checks and balances are working. In a nation where the state security structure is all about an Imperial presidency (now don't say it ain't so), and capturing lifetime appointments of SupCt justices for "conservatives," and gee, there is so much that could be said about Congress, that World's Greatest Deliberative Body, the best laws and delegated regulatory functions that money can buy.
So sad that everything gets reduced to little sound bites and talking points. "Sharia hitting the fan"? I guess that's kind of cute... Any idea what "Sharia" is, other than a cute little catch phrase deployed like a stream of ink from a squid's posterior to distinguish obviously good "US" from obviously evil THEM?
I happen to like the Professor's pointed paralleling of people who on the one hand are zombie-ing around in their consumptive People Of The Mall haze, unaware of the degree to which their "rights" and "freedom" are being "Matrix"ed away from them, comfortably swallowing comfortable assurances that there is no reason to be afraid, at least nothing to fear from The Government or the Powers That Be, (not waterboarding, or eavesdropping, or bases and stratagems being played all across the planet, or trillions of their wealth being stolen and transferred to Wallstreet and LockheedMartin and various "security contractors") -- as opposed to THEM-- as long as you are not doing anything wrong, right?
And on the other hand, people, our fellow humans, who are working in a very different kind of climate, still feeling the pain of despotism and kleptocracy and going through that confused horror of power-grabbing by the usual types that see their opportunities to advance themselves and their set in times of upset.
(The cool part, though there is a finite temporal limit, is that Egypt will indeed be "moving forward" along the jagged track of its destiny, whether ruled by kleptocracy or governed by Solons.)
All, of course, because we humans don't have a clue how to go about regulating and governing ourselves, sustainably and decently, for the greater good (as opposed to pretending to do so, behind a convenient set of myths and deceptions, and depending on the vast inertia and high pain tolerance of the crowd to generate taxable wealth and provide labor and cannon fodder) except very locally, when we have to look each other in the eyes, and over pretty short bits of time.
How quickly the newly advanced waste their legitimacy:
http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/11/23/15384363-egyptian-protesters-police-clash-as-morsi-defends-wide-new-powers?lite
But they don't really fail. The dictators and kleptocrats get not only very rich, they have a nice run causing pain and horror to a lot of other humans. there's always a few of us in every population who are wired with the programming on how to accumulate and wield absolute power. Just like each of us generates some active cancer cells somewhere in our bodies, every day, and if we are lucky, our immune systems will catch and recycle them before they get a real foothold.
Let us remember how so many of the kleptodictator class, including a whole lot of Nazis, and Bourbons, and guys like Batista, and geez, how many others, accumulate a lot of portable wealth and then split for Happy Trails Retirement Spas before the crowds get to them. And a lot of their "people" do pretty well off the scamming and stealing, too, and also seem pretty adept at stepping off the train before it crashes into the gorge...
When will they ever learn?
When will they e-e-ever learn?
Here we go agaaaiiiinnnn...
Nice hit on all the talking points.
But I read some of the Israeli newspapers and blog comments, and you have one hard row to hoe claiming any moral high ground on any substantive basis when it comes to rancid racism. Too many "kill all the Arabs" and "push them into the sea" and "they are not even human" out of the fertile vocabularies of Israeli writers and netizens to count...
And of course all the other stuff that Professor Cole and others have pointed out about how Israelis have been doing it to the Palestinians. And just a little way down the page, there's the argument that Israel must keep the Palestinians down, because after all someday, those smelly distant relatives whose water and gas and arable land many Israelis covet and have already taken much of might some day ALSO have nuclear weapons and an overwhelming air, navy and land force that they might use to do to the Israelis what is being done to them. Unassailable logic, all right.
And humans being what they are, those of us who have a little experience of bloodshed can be pretty certain that there will be a lot more. It's just what us self-justifying tribal vicious humans do. Behind all kinds of pretences to moral righteousness. All equally putrid. But so wonderfully seductive, and so soul-satisfying when your Enemy lies hacked and bloodless at your feet.
As you know, this is all complicated stuff, worse than trying to figure out the Krebs/citric acid cycle in Biology 101 and without disinterested scientists working to make it all clear.
Ask yourself another question (there are many more, of course): What's the value of the natural gas reserves found off the Gaza coast in an area that for anyone else would clearly be 'national interest' territory, but which the Israeli government acts as if they already own it (apparently by "right of conquest.") http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2012-11-20/war-gaza-war-over-natural-gas
And of course as with Apartheid South Africa, keeping the Palestinians down and out both aims at providing a cheap, expendable labor pool for Israeli businesses, and if the Likudniks are right, eventually a gradual disappearance or extermination of people with claims to land and resources at least as cognizable as the ones they make. If the Ls are wrong, and as has often happened in our human tragicomedy desperation reaches that critical mass before the "Arabs" expire from starvation, there will be hell to pay for the comfortable Israelis who support and facilitate all this. And there's no Nelson Mandela to tamp down the chain reaction here.
Maybe the mouse is not plotting some huge PR coup against that implacable asymmetric tiger of an adversary as much as simply, once again, acting from pent-up anger and desperation. Not all the world is made up of "rational actors" and Masters of the Great Game.
Any information, Professor, on the provenance of the Hamas rockets, particularly whether there is a "leadership" in the sort of unitary sense that Cervantes seems to assume? And do the Hamas "leaders" really warrant contempt in the same way the bully-boys with the huge arsenal Uncle Sucker has helped to fill might attract negative emotions from others in the world? Or is that post just another example of that "false equivalence" thing?
Loud applause!
Barbara Tuchman has a whole interesting book on what she calls "The March of Folly," the constant, unvarying (except in local intensity) refrain in human "governance" of leaders and rulers acting so very clearly against what one might think was the "general welfare" and so often even their own survival interests, establishing and pursuing "policies" of self-defeat in the face of many better options, and despite clear advice on ugly and inevitable consequences. Like the Trojans pulling that horse inside the walls, without even poking it with spears. And the 14th-century Popes, pursuing worldly glory by destroying the Church. And the Bourbon monarchy. And the US in imperial adventures like Vietnam and Iragafanipakistan.
Wonder what the triggers for the Israeli Defense Force keepers of those 400 nuclear warheads are, under their version of the Single Integrated Operational Plan, and what their targeting maps look like... It would be interesting to know if any "US interests" have little rings of fire drawn around them.
There's a lot of characteristics that various proponents claim to set us apart from the rest of nature -- self-awareness, laughter, that opposable thumb. It sure seems to me that the most telling is the ability consistently and repeatedly to do stupid stuff to ourselves. With huge consequences.
That's the old definition, by the way. It was inconvenient, PR-wise, for the Coalition Provisional Authority and the "Coalition" carrying water for whatever Karzai's mob is (neither are a "constituted government"), and changed, as best I can make out, in a 2003 revision of the DoD Dictionary. It is hardly the only entry that has been revised to support the political bullshit underpinning the War-is-a-Racket.
What's the chances that the US can back away from the cult of the Warrior? "Call of Duty: Black Ops", the wonderfully exciting "simulation" that involves a whole lot of killing others, sold $500 million worth of copies on its recent release. And the content of TV and youtube and all the rest of how we learn about the world...
Maybe if the US military brass were smart enough to not "invest" us in wars that make no sense, and where there is no definition of "winning" and no measure of success other than body counts and money spent and really puffy articles inflating the General Reputation of the Brass.
And I have to note that from what I see, the Brass are in no way committed to "protecting AMERICAN lives," not where things like Pat Tillman and so many other friendly-fire (that sick notion) "incidents." And where hundreds of billions are spent on technical approaches to "defeating IEDs" but out in the real world, GIs are still being used as protoplasmic explosives detectors, and they either have ESP or magical powers of perception to spot the tiny clues and tells, or they get blown up, often with US-made bombs and artillery shells.
Just curious -- do you really think that the US military establishment is capable of "protecting civilians" in Afghanistan, to the point needed to allow a legitimate government of all the people (who seem disposed to resist any such thing)? The military can't even define, let alone achieve, "success" or "victory." Let alone a "mission," which in theory ought to be a sort of NATIONAL decision, not one to be delegated to people who get rich and important off continued conflict, right up to an dincluding the Great Global Interoperable Networked Battlespace. But them folks are real good at playing the same game that made them rich through the Cold War and is still working well for them.
One of my little personal 3x5 cards is a scene from an "embedded" moment: A Marine squad leader is confronting a villager among a bunch of others who had moved out of a market town after repeated "insurgent" attacks and threats. The Gyrene tells him he is supposed to move himself and his family and people back into the town, and that the Marines will "protect them." He says that he has orders from the Brass that this village is to be a linchpin of the Rebuilding Doctrine in this valley, so the people just have to move back in, that's all there is to that.
Says the villager (as translated, I don't speak the lingo so who knows if it was accurate) "With all your weapons and your technology, you Americans can't even protect YOURSELVES against the fighters. How do you expect us to believe you are going to protect US?"
Great point, let me add something if I might:
Per the DoD Dictionary of Military Terms:
"governing authority" is undefined, but it has come to include our brief proconsular rule of Iraq and presumably "things" like the Karzai mob in Kabul. No reference to "legitimacy" or any of its correlatives anywhere in the DoD Dictionary. Maybe in some other War Department text?
Sure seems to me that like the Vietnam thing, the whole operation is built and based on a fundamental ILlegigitmacy, invasion and occupation.
Given the success of Israeli/Zionic "interests" in the US in warping the public discourse here without firing a shot (as far as I can recall, other than that business about trying to sink the USS Liberty back in '67), one might reply that PR efforts by the Palestinians have been mighty, but totally obscured by their owners and occupiers in the one "market" where over time, doses of the true on-the-ground might have a chance of making a difference.
But you know those awful Palestinians are all Arab Terrrorists, don't you? So they are Our Enemy Too, and the Likudniks are doing us a favor using weapons we mostly supply to push them into the Mediterranean.
Speaking of "do not understand," what a wonderfully obscure bit of writing by whoeveryouare, a person such as you are. I, for one, after reading your takedown of the post, am now just full of questions and doubts about the relative positions and roles of the Likudniks and that fraction of the people in Israel who are all about working out that destiny written way back in the Pentateuch to "slay all them other Nations with the sword take their stuff," on the one hand, and them horrible gigantic world-democracy-crushing Palestinians. With all their nuclear weapons hidden away in the tunnels under what's not been occupied in Gaza.
Too bad this is the best too many of us humans can manage, all the lying and little sneaking around and killing and gathering in all the healthy wealth in the world for their personal pleasure and the aggrandizement of their little tribe.
Maybe that ought to be an invitation to look at the whole realm of Smart Weaponry and military "intelligence" -- look up "military fails" on youtube for a fun assortment of real-world performance of all those high-tech game-changers that aren't. Ever since de Seversky (and that Sun Tzu of animation, Walt Disney, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paY6y87rrpE) peddled the notion of "Victory Through Air Power," the MIC across the planet has been selling sugarplum fairies to gullible taxpayers and kleptocrats. (Yes, Hellfires usually do ignite and blow something up, but watch those youtube "military fail" videos for what very often happens, and do a little research on "friendly fire" deaths -- the myths of competence and effectiveness are hugely overblown.) And we might recall that those expensive "Patriot" missiles actually were not so very successful back in the day of Gulf War I, contrary to Raytheon's and the War Department's hype. There's a long tradition of both fiscal and performance fraud in all those grotesquely expensive procurement programs (sold, not very gracefully, as "jobs programs," like the F-22 and F-35.)
When are we ordinary humans, busily creating real wealth out of real labor and stuff that actually works, going to figure out how thoroughly we are being "had" by the Powers That Be? The constant BS of "We need more money!" from the shites who run the Pentagram needs to be given more exposure and truth-testing.
Or maybe just to an excuse for more of the lead-casting same. Seems the Likudniks have done a better job of winding up the machinery of jingoism and racism this time around. Just check out the local news and front pages in Israel... http://www.haaretz.com/
Maybe one of us out here who is enraged by the multi-layered deceptions and frauds that are hidden behind the Shallow Narrative you apologize for mistook "Paula Pollard" for Jane Harman Kardon, about whom it is said, by sources you would no doubt be happy to impeach, that at the very least, according to one or more sources, spent some time on the phone agreeing to use her considerable clout to have the Justice Department down-charge a couple of AIPAC folks who were, ahem, maybe involved, like Jonathan Pollard and a bunch of other "Americans," in espionage for the Israeli government AGAINST THE INTERESTS OF THE U.S. http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/11/14/jane-harmon-and-israeli-spying/ But of course in your world those interests are sufficiently aligned, in the grander elements of the Great Game, you doubtless don't share this guy's concern: http://www.viewzone.com/dualcitizen.html
And in case you forget, there's more than one ex-CIA type who thinks that Our Friend and Ally Israel (or at least the CIA-neocon equivalent over there) is the most serious security threat to the US in the Mideast, and of all the places that's reported in Googlespace, I'm linking to Ha'aretz, as an at least interesting source. http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/former-u-s-officials-say-cia-considers-israel-to-be-mideast-s-biggest-spy-threat-1.454189.
Not sure whether Ha'aretz was concerned, or just bragging...
Aside: Why is "Red Dawn" the heavy-sell "Thanksgiving movie" this year? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1234719/synopsis
For all those Really Smart People who know all there is to know about Afghanistan now and in the future if only the pet policies and institutions they apologize for are carried out and carried along (at great and growing expense), here's maybe one tiny piece of a niggling bit of a smidgen of doubt about Our Allies Who Are Running/Stealing The Country:
There's the Narrative (that so many buy into, because, not surprisingly given the effort expended to create it, it fits so comfortably and neatly with the Exceptionalist, jingoist world view) and there's the reality. Which is so wonderfully inconsistent with the Narrative, when fortuity lifts little corners of the Big Sand and Spinach Tarp and exposes how it's really being done, in our names and with our money.
And no, all "Arabs" and "Iranians" and all the other folks that some of us are so charmed as to identify as "Unlawful Enemas" are not nice people. But it sure seems that the way the Game is being played simply amplifies the badness, here, there, and everywhere. Of course there are so many dark corners where rats and roaches can do their business that it's impossible to keep it all illuminated so we who are sponsoring the Pretty Narrative can at least see the Actual Reality parts, not the images displayed like Pat Tillman and pre-Pecker-Problems Petraeus and All-Wise McChrystal and Unknown-Unknowns Rummy and Dick the Lesser Cheney, and have half a chance at getting to ask, and even maybe weigh in on the decisions, whether what all those jackals and sneaky-petes and Foggy-Bottomists and Pentagrammers make any sense in our increasingly mutually vulnerable world.
On the other hand, suspension of disbelief is so, ah, comforting. Along with the reassurance that Competent Expert People are "in charge here."
"My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what's really going on to be scared." Plauger, P. J. (Apparently inapplicable to Foreign Policy and Military Doctrine Experts, who are generally personally immune to the hard consequences of their policies and doctrines. Getting canned for getting caught with your pants down, and maybe other unspecified but wonderfully speculatable-about misdemeanors and felonies, is not a hard consequence.)
"An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field."
Niels Bohr
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/words/ex/expert162875.html#l3thoBqg991vtuZm.99 (Some of our War Leaders seem to be approaching that limit, but the boundary on the right side of the graph is quite asymptotic... Good thing for them -- and more so for the rest of us -- that so far, there's been enough resilience in our living system to spare us from any really hugely mortal consequences and outcomes.)
About all we're missing now from the "Catch-22" Dumb-theon are Lt.-Col.-Gen. "Everybody March!" Scheisskpof, and ex-PFC Wintergreen and his mimeograph machine. We already got Milo Minderbinder busily and profitably selling out the troops and the nation, in spades...
Ooh! Ooh! Time for another Surge!
Or maybe just to recognize that there not only is nothing for us to "fix" in Notagainistan, not even all the tea in China, or all the wealth of our great nation, diverted into that swamp of corruption and tribalism, would be able to "fix" things there to the satisfaction of Our Leaders and the People Who Believe We Are Exceptional.
How many times are "we" going to let the street criminals sucker us with yet another game of Three Card Monte?
Ooh! Ooh! Them Iranians took potshots at one of our Drones! Casus Belli! Casus Belli! Quick! Buy Lockheed-Martin, the company that brags "We know who we're working for:" http://www.cnbc.com/id/49765573