Reduced to picking nits and petty personal denigration and disparagement by way of impeaching the dude? Here, of all places? What purpose does that serve, in the greater Manichaean madness? Sad.
"Former U.S. Ambassador John Bolton told Bruce Wolf and Dan Proft on WLS that he thinks admitted leaker Edward Snowden, is guilty of treason:
“Number one, this man is a liar. He took an oath to keep the secrets that were shared with him so he could do his job. He said said he would not disclose them, and he lied. Number two, he lied because he thinks he’s smarter and has a higher morality than the rest of us. This guy thinks he has a higher morality, that he can see clearer than other 299-million 999-thousand 999 of us, and therefore he can do what he wants. I say that is the worst form of treason”.
You go, Bolton. Preferably far, far away...
And for somebody who is constantly implying long, deep involvement in Important Serious Stuff and things, it's interesting that one would cast doubt on the potential for someone in Snowden's circumstances to be disappeared. Granted that our sneaky-petes have shown some clumsiness in their tradecraft over the years, as with Castro's beard and cigars, and that whole Afghanistan-bin Laden thing...
If you ask our Responsible Historians, everything is in the text of certain documents and how you parse and syntactify the definitions of the terms. "Treason" under the Constitution is simply these few words:
“Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.”
There is a whole literature, with varying degrees of cogency and accuracy, showing that Cheney lives in a very fragile glass house regarding his disparagement of Snowden, albeit very well guarded by phalanxes of "security forces," including of course lifetime Secret Service protection.
Here's a few examples that hit the salient points of actions that warrant the charge that CHENEY is the traitor, in the worst possible way:
I guess I we should just leave it to Bill and Joe to tell us what actually is, what and who is guilty of what, in this swamp of perversion and venality that is the postnational-corporatized, privatized-profit, socialized-loss Great Game, the one that's killing our children's planet so the Few can 'live large' now... and maybe worry that Cheney might actually live to darken our counsels and plague us essentially forever, thanks to Innovative Technology: http://www.forbes.com/sites/katiedrummond/2012/07/19/dmitry-itskov-avatar/
Query: do the Billboards have some magic mechanism to remove the mercury, hormones, pesticides, sulfur compounds, cyanide and all the rest from that water that they seive from the air? And hmmmm, what happened to all the water formerly on the surface of Mars, again?
Yeah, now "Asia" can take its turn stripping the next level of life out of the planet. Really something to be proud of, to look forward to, to glory in and all that. One wonders how well "Asia" will go about divvying up the spoils -- might makes right, like the corporate West? "It's Not Illegal?" I'm sure all the displaced and starving peasants, gasping for a breath of polluted air and dripping water with a bouillabaisse of dissolved toxins into their children's slack mouths, will be all Happy Face about the Great Victory.
If "Asia" includes Russia, one of the new inventions and gadgets and concepts and ideas is how to make it possible for Vulture Capitalists and Vampire Squids(who know NO place or tribal loyalties) to essentially live forever, as imperishable as the charters and then unstoppable momentums of all the post-national corporate entities: http://www.forbes.com/sites/katiedrummond/2012/07/19/dmitry-itskov-avatar/
And how about nanoweapons, and New Biology "food" and plagues, and robots making most of us unnecessary except as consumers, and what did the Creator have in mind when he set in motion the global idiocy that has people living, if you can call it that, on and from the scraps "thrown away" in the garbage dumps of our great Postnational Cities? Crabs scrabbling in the dark depths for bits of a dead carcass...
Really, Q? That's what's happened? That's what Obama has done with his Big Brain?
Maybe you are the "Q" from the 11th dimension, who used to drive the poor USS Enterprise crew to distraction with murderous Puckish or maybe Loki-ish tricks? Played a lot of chess there, with The Only President The World Has?
And has it done any of us any good to resolve entire nominal national collectives down to single points, talking as if there is "A" Russia and "A" Syria and "A" US Empire?
In 1967 and 1968, CS ("riot gas") grenades were frequently used with the intention not only of disabling but also to kill. Often in tunnels, to kill the "gooks" hiding in there, but other applications as well.
In my own unit, our flight officers were taking the Troops' Class A rations and other supplies and trading them to Air Force types for cases of steaks and chicken that were regularly delivered to soften the hardships of base life at a huge AF/Marine installation in I Corps. Our officers were having some great barbecues while we ate canned stuff from the Korean War era. The remedy for that was several episodes (they were kind of slow learners) of CS grenades being lobbed into the middle of their barbecues. With the clear message that it could just as easily have been fragmentation grenades.
And for another example of what "war" really is, our First Sergeant took the plywood sheets that we laid on pallets so we wouldn't be living with mud floors in our tents, and made us build a nice "hooch" for him, complete with insulation to improve the efficiency of his air conditioner, and powered his man-cave with a generator that had supplied power for the beer coolers at the enlisted men's "club." And somebody tossed a CS grenade into that hooch and dropped a bolt through the hasp on the door while Sarge was sleeping. Again, a message... "Rank has its privileges," but the lower ranks have their recourse.
And for the sake of completeness, it's worth pointing out that there's a lot of guys with ragtag uniforms and civvy clothes waving RPGs and AKs and FALs and AR15-class weapons around where they have been "victorious over the infidel," yelling "Allahu Akhbar!" over and over and cutting throats and shooting unarmed and bound captives of who knows what persuasions. In those circumstances, as is pointed out, it's hard to do any dispassionate and accurate "scientific polling" too...
I'd be interested too. It's not like the folks you imply all the time you are connected to in unspecified ways have ever done anything like send mercenaries into conflict areas to exacerbate the situation in the name of some unavowable "national interest." Glad to know you are keeping an eye on all that for us, ready to pounce upon any disparagement of Great Game plays.
Useful service rendered, at least, in encouraging people of good will, who try to shine light in the dark corners, as part of trying to work for that silly ideal of peace and stability, to actually research and nail down examples of the kinds of activities that have been subjected to the "impeachment by lack of references" attack...
Looks like "Syria" is getting to the point that some "conservatives" in the US seem to long for: Armed bands, under battle leaders, shouting the Arabic equivalent of "In The Name Of The Lord!" as they dance and prance over the carcasses of other formerly fellow humans. There's lots of the kind of warporn on Youtube, and a concentrated load of it on the video archives over at Syria Comment - http://syriavideo.net/
All this high-falutin' palaver about Great Issues and the Great Game and how to "manage conflict." Like any of that reaches down to the combat level where the massacres 'n stuff go on. How can you beat the EXCITEMENT? The seduction of the WEAPONS, and the SLOGANS? Oh, the delicious anticipation as the young fella in this video lines up on a "state helicopter" with his Russian-made MANPAD! http://theaviationist.com/2013/06/10/syria-sa-16/#.UbmoY9jV3ts Then whooshBOOM! "Allahu Akbar!" and somebody's gotta put up $8 million for a replacement chopper for the "state's" inventory, and go to IDELF for another couple of SA-16s... for fun and profit. Talk about "gun shows..."
All this recourse to the Constitution, as if the words on paper have some kind of magic to hold back the Darkness. "We have given you a republic, madam, if you can keep it." Sayeth Yoo and Gonzales, the structure and strictures of the Constitution are in the present context "quaint" and "obsolete." The collective we personify as "Obama" patently agrees, with extensions and expansions. That oath stuff about "supporting and defending the Constitution" was all recited with fingers and toes crossed...
There have been other nominal and short-lived "republics" too, all getting sucked down into consumption and dissipation and empire and eventually collapse and the stuff of moral lessons preached by "conservatives" who applaud and abet and profit from the collapse.
We've got no ideals, no functioning mythos, no common goals except MORE! for US! even while the folks that actually run the joint tighten the screws on the rest of us, squeezing out and stealing our labor, our homes, our actual security, by niggles and jiggles and tugs on the levers of power...
What an honest Troop realizes about what has long gone way beyond the Citizen Soldier myth:
But then I finally admitted the truth to myself. I was fighting so that the United States could ensure its interests in the region whether it was oil, strategic troop placement or finding an additional ally in the Middle East — or a combination of them all. And you might think I became disillusioned. While it is true that I am no longer religious, I did not allow my time overseas to have a negative impact on my life. I have come to terms with my service in Iraq and realized that fighting for economic interests, while not as ennobling as fighting for freedom, actually protects the American way of life in its own fashion. In retrospect, we shouldn't have gone to Iraq, but once we were there, we had little choice but to complete the mission.
Regardless of how the American public feels about the war in Iraq, maintaining our standard of living sometimes comes at a high cost. War, and other subtler military moves, must be made in order for our nation to remain in contention as a world superpower and maintain the prosperity we have enjoyed for the last century.
Hey, bernard, I hope things are better where you are! The descent isn't always a proceso rápido, It happens in small little ways too...
"Longboat Key police to photograph vehicle license plates"
Longboat Key, Florida - Longboat Key has plenty of picture perfect spots, but later this month, town cameras will be pointed not at the palms, but at the pavement.
Cameras mounted near the two bridges leading to Longboat Key will take pictures of the vehicles both coming and going. The cameras will snap the rear end of the cars and their license plates. If a car is stolen or if the registered owner is wanted, dispatchers at the police department will receive an alert.
Police Chief Pete Cumming sees the system as a crime prevention tool.
"It doesn't photograph the occupants, all it does is alert us to vehicles associated with criminal violations," he explains.
The license plate recognition program is similar to the mobile cameras already used by some law enforcement agencies on their patrol cars. However, privacy advocates are leery of government cameras recording the movements of citizens.
"Maybe they're directed at license plates, but what they're doing is a couple of things; for one, they're creating a database of who is coming and going and when," says attorney and ACLU representative Andrea Mogensen. "So the government building that database is always subject to abuse and it's always going to lead to a privacy problem."
However, some people who spend at least part of their year on Longboat Key say the prospect of cameras doesn't bother them. "It doesn't bother me that law enforcement knows that I'm here," says Mary Enkema.
And Barbara Azzoli says, "I don't feel like it's an invasion of privacy or anything. I think security is a good thing."
The $80,000 camera and plate recognition system is being paid for by money from a law enforcement forfeiture fund.
He's a lawyer and a politician. You have to read every word carefully, in context, not be shy about doing some fact-checking and other research, and with awareness that dissembling is a good thing in the applicable professional ethics -- the functional ones, not the ever-weaker written ones. And remember the nature and structure of the system for whom he is the current figurehead, as much of it as can be seen, at least...
And I have always wondered, as I'm sure other have,about whether those lipless, grim, Superpatriots like the Dulleses and Lemay and Rough Men actually believed any of the themes and stories they told themselves about some grand Manichaean conflict -- other than the back-and-forth between the identical types of people on both sides of those Curtains (What was ours? Iron and Bamboo were taken -- were our wizards and warlords operating behind the Nylon Curtain?) who by doing what they had a serious bent to do, ( http://sovietologist.blogspot.com/2008/04/1959-usaf-proposal-to-use-nuclear.html ) made the rest of us suspect our neighbors and learn to duck'n'cover and how "with enough shovels, we're all going to make it: dig a hole and throw a couple of doors and some dirt on top -- it's the dirt that does it" -- thereby interring our sorry carcasses to reduce the health consequences for the Blessed Survivors emerging from the Continuity of Government Bunkers... http://www.amazon.com/With-Enough-Shovels-Reagan-Nuclear/dp/0394722035/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1370816324&sr=8-1&keywords=with+enough+shovels
Yemen. Population, about 24 million. About 400,000 in the military branches, ruled by the same guy who happens to be President. About 40% of the national budget goes to the military, at $3.5 billion it's over 6% of GDP, still rising thanks to a new conscription law and the Great Game. Unemployment officially 35%, actually who knows? A history of food riots, schism and unification, tribal and "religious" divisions, the usual mix. National wealth dependent on oil, expected to be depleted in 2017. Some gas reserves, mostly undeveloped. Military organized such that current ruler has to fear his "military governors" will do the same to him. "We" give the Yemeni government aid, currently and visibly, at least, about $345 million, that is largely eaten by corruption, see "Humor: Yemen’s ‘Ministry of Corruption.’" http://www.yementimes.com/en/1683/opinion/2458/Humor-Yemen%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%98Ministry-of-Corruption%E2%80%99.htm And the rest used to buy more weapons. There's a Cordon Bleu recipe for stability for you.
The coolest part is how the military, the biggest political force in this "post-colonial client state," with its fascinatingly typical "another cradle of civilization" history (quickie wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yemen#Military) is armed, trained and all that: a combination of mostly Russian weapons and aircraft, but lots of "US" C-130s in operation, and other stuff on the way. Also supplying: Italy, Czech Republic, Sweden, Britain… The very paradigm of a "good customer" for the World Military Industrialists, with a nice running conflict that has long legs and enough factoids to give cover to the "US" covert and not-so activities there. So "we" have lots of "advisers" and "contractors" and sneaky-petes flooding the zone. In local news, "U.S stepping up military presence in Yemen," with a little taste of Grand Geopolitical Thinking too. http://yemenpost.net/Detail123456789.aspx?ID=3&SubID=6378
Got to be ready to kill anyone "we" think is a threat to "US persons," which mostly is to "US persons" who are in reach only because "we" put them in harm's way as a gambit in the Great Game, and because the most-used tools in the US geopolitical drawer seem to be poisoned darts, daggers and Great Big Mother____ing Hammers…
Must be nice to be able to compartmentalize so easily and completely. Let us not note patterns, and presume sole possessoon of that higher higher consciousness... one way to dominate.
To me, at least, this is not just a "story." It's just one more index of what's in the works and what's in store for us People of the iFreedom'n'Liberty (tm).
Yes, we should all just rest calm in the assurance that all the hoo-rah is just "silly stories." And the Government, or that part of it that attracts the J. Edgars and Wild Bills and Colbys and Caseys into "governmetn service" which has damn little to do with "service" and a lot more to do with the bureaucratic metastasis of our Domestic Stasi.
No reason even going to the bother of linking to the stuff that's been coming out since 6/06 at 12:04 pm, and even before then... Through a PRISM, darkly, with forces arrayed in ECHELON formation.
Buckley actually had "information" that meant something in the Game. Who knows "who" grabbed him and did the "enhanced interrogation," and for what purposes in that little corner of the Game board? Mopes grabbed off the street and "entered" into the machinery of our institutionalized Gulag were apparently "enhanced" way beyond the point where it was clear they had no "secrets to pass." And the shameful lockdown and abuse continues, in significant part because setting those people free would make them able to relate their treatment at the hands of "our" very own Jack Bauers and heroic "agents."
Maybe part of the operant conditioning and idiot momentum that gifts us with Guantanamo in our Brave New World of Perpetual 4th Generation Warfare is that "we," the military-state security apparat that operates the Guantanolag, have only this kind of programmed response to being defeated, time and again, by not only the tiny number of individuals who plot and set off bombs and stuff in the "homeland" or against "US interests," whatever that means, not having been intercepted by the mostly effective plain old police work, but by plain people who dare to show tenacity and dignity in the face of Imperial Troopers and folks whose thinking and behavior, as best one can see, recalls other similar state-security entities.
These captives, or whatever one could accurately and honestly call them, mostly posed no "threat," but since they are weak and "we" are strong, guess what happens? Jack Bauer, maybe?
Here's a bitsy small sample of what's going on in one little corner of the Global Imperium while the stupid Great Gamers are busily getting richer and more potent and scaring the serial hell out of the rest of us:
Both the Almaz S-300P/S-400 (SA-10, SA-20) and Antey S-300V (SA-12) SAM systems grew out of the disappointments of Vietnam and the Yom Kippur wars, where single digit S-75/SA-2, S-125/SA-3 and 3M9/SA-6 series SAMs were soundly defeated in combat by the US and Israelis respectively.
Designed for the high density battlespace of late Cold War central Europe, the S-300P and S-300V series of SAMs represent the pinnacle of Soviet Cold War era SAM technology, with no effort spared to push the technological envelope. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, both systems have continued to evolve, benefitting immeasurably from large scale access to Western technology markets, and Western computational technology to support further design effort. Against the current benchmark in Western SAM technology, the Raytheon Patriot PAC-3 system, both the S-300P and S-300V series remain highly competitive.
[Anyone noticing a certain kind of idiotic futility built into the circularity of counter-counter- counter-counter- counter-counter- counter-counter- counter-counter- counter-counter-threats? Profitable as they may be for a few of us?] There's lots more war-lover idiocy on offer at the link this quote came from: http://www.ausairpower.net/APA-Grumble-Gargoyle.html, one of thousands of sources of haha "intelligence" about how the WorldMIC operates and cogitates…
And on the diplomatic front, "did they or didn't they": another chapter in the "are you lying now, or were you lying then" endless tomfoolery:
Russia: No plans to sell S-300 missile to Syria
Russia has no plans to sell Syria an advanced air defense system, its foreign minister said on Friday, denying media reports that it planned such a sale.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that Israel had informed the United States a Russian deal is imminent to sell advanced ground-to-air missiles that would significantly boost Syria's ability to stave off intervention in the conflict.
The newspaper quoted US officials as saying they were analyzing the information, but would not comment on whether they believed the sale of S-300 missile batteries was near.
Itar-Tass news agency quoted Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as saying Russia would be fulfilling contracts it has already concluded with Damascus but that this did not include sales of the S-300 system.
And on the full-on, 24/7, "trillions for threats and counterthreats, but not one cent for health care or infrastructure maintenance," no amount is too much for countermeasures front:
Greece Quietly Provides Israeli Air Force Pivotal Assistance on S-300
Greece has quietly assisted the Israeli Air Force in a previously unreported fashion as the dreaded decision of a possible Israeli preemptive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities draws closer, this reporter has learned.
A pivotal factor in Israel’s military strategy against Iran’s nuclear installations is the recent delivery to Iran of Russia’s potent S-300 Russian ground-to-air radar systems. Considered one of the world’s most versatile radar-missile systems, Russia’s S-300 batteries can simultaneous track hundreds of semi-stealth cruise missiles, long range missiles and aircraft, including airborne monitoring jets. As many as ten intruders can be simultaneously engaged by the S-300’s mobile interceptor missile batteries, military sources say. As such, the S-300 is a major threat to the long-range weapons in the Israeli arsenal. These include Israel’s long-range 1,500 km. nuclear-capable Jericho IIB missiles; unmanned missile-equipped long-range drones; Israel’s F-16s, F-15Es; long range heavy-payload F151s and F161s; and even its three new Gulfstream G550 business jets boasting a range of 6,750 nautical miles, newly outfitted with nuclear-tracking electronics and designed to loiter over or near Iranian skies for hours. The S-300 can compromise everything Israel has.
But Greece has the same Russian S-300 system.
Originally purchased by Cyprus in 1998, the Cypriot installation provoked a storm of protracted protests by Turkey because the system would make vulnerable all Turkish air movements. To resolve tensions and prevent a Turkish preemptive attack on the installations, the S-300 by international agreement was moved to Crete for safekeeping, and eventually joint-Cypriot-Greek control based on the 1993 mutual defense pact between Cyprus and Greece. On December 20, 2007, the move and installation of the S-300 was quietly completed.
In the last days of May and first week of June, 2008, Israel staged an impressive and well-reported exercise over Crete with the participation of the Greek air force. More than 100 Israeli F-16 and F-15 fighter jets, as well as Israeli rescue helicopters and mid-air refueling planes flew a massive number of mock strikes. Israeli planes reportedly never landed but were continuously refueled from airborne platforms. Israel demonstrated that a 1400 km distance could be negotiated with Israeli aircraft remaining aloft and effective. Iran’s Natanz nuclear enrichment facility is 1400 km from Israel.
While the Israeli-Greek air tactics were amply reported in the world’s media after initial reports in the New York Times, the pivotal information from Greece’s S-300 batteries has remained below the radar. By swarming its jets into the S-300’s massive electronics, Israel was able to record invaluable information about defeating, jamming and circumventing the Russian system.
Israel dubbed its exercise “Glorious Spartan.” It is recalled that 300 glorious Spartans went down in history by forestalling the massive Persian army at a tiny land passage at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC. The tiny Jewish State is now contemplating whether it must act unilaterally to forestall Iran’s nuclear threat.
And in the AIPAC-reassurance, keep-those-sales-figures-up column, there's this:
Can the U.S. F-35 fighter destroy Russia's S-300 systems?
By ARIEL COHEN
WASHINGTON, Jan. 20 (UPI) -- The American Lockheed Martin F-35 stealth Lightning Joint Strike Fighter is designed to destroy Russia's S-300 anti-aircraft missile systems, its developers say. The F-35's capability is particularly relevant in this time of increased concern over Russia's alleged sale of S-300s to Iran, a nation that has repeatedly threatened to "wipe Israel off the map."
According to Pravda.ru, Lockheed Martin Executive Vice President of F-35 Program Integration Tom Burbage said that, with acquisition of the F-35 fighters, Israel should no longer fear the possibility of facing S-300 systems in Syria and Iran. The computer simulations have demonstrated that the Lightning can defeat Russia's S-300 in combat.
And, of course, a whole other lot of clever, dry idiocy is on offer in the WorldMIC trade press on the onrushing obsolescence not only of "legacy weapons," but of course even the current baddest-and-worstest, soon to be profitably replaced, with Krupp-tion-lubricated sales models leading to billions in sales to "both sides" of the nominal conflicts and Great Imperial Grunting and Shoving Scrum.
And the stupid quadrille-cum-tap-dance goes on and on…
Watch out for your toes, little people – you are likely to get trod upon.
Does "prison" include "jail?" Let's not candy-coat the numbers:
(State and Federal Marijuana Prisoners)
Total Federal Prisoners 2004 = 170,535
Total State Prisoners 2004 = 1,244,311
Percent of federal prisoners held for drug law violations = 55%
Percent of state prisoners held for drug law violations = 21%
Marijuana/hashish, Percent of federal drug offenders, 2004 = 12.4%
Marijuana/hashish, Percent of state drug offenders, 2004 = 12.7%
(Total prisoners x percent drug law) x percent marijuana = "marijuana prisoners"
Federal marijuana prisoners in 2004 = 11,630
State marijuana prisoners in 2004 = 33,186
Total federal and state marijuana prisoners in 2004 = 44,816
Note: These data only address people in prisons and thus exclude the 700,000+ offenders who may be in local jails because of a marijuana conviction.
- See more at: http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/Marijuana#sthash.Cc8jhbpb.dpuf See lots more at that link. And 700,000+ does not count those in jail awaiting hearings, busted by bastard cops, or otherwise "not convicted yet." Today's set from my local area can be found here: http://www.tampabay.com/mugshots/ Just one 24-hour period, and a mesmerizing set of fellow humans who have done other stuff too. Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein are not in the mix...
The destructive potential energies in reservoirs behind dams, that themselves are so nicely vulnerable to various weapons, make great weapons in their own right, and provide all kinds of tactical and strategic options and opportunities -- more grist for the effing Great Game mill.
As long as the goal is tribal dominance, and of course "profit," achieved by destroying the stability and security of others, with the various "benefits" that accrue to a very few Players, we are well on our way to "Planet of the Apes Meets Soylent Green." But there will be so much to chatter about, along the way, and speculate on and offer Illuminations based on deep thinking and complexitations from our Well Placed Cogniscenti and Experienced Players. And what actually happens will invariably be dictated by Mr. Murphy, not the Best Laid Plans.
But there's money to be made in the interstices... Lots of it... and with any luck, you can do a Nazi Retreat to Argentina or a "Tailor of Panama" riff, to duck the big consequences of your tripping the first leg of the whole Rube Goldberg apparatus...
"I somehow managed to forget this '08 John McCain incident that explains everything about him"
Arizona Sen. John McCain took a walk through a Baghdad market on April Fool's Day, and may well have burned his presidential campaign down to the ground in the process. That little stroll has visited upon his head a deluge of humiliation and shame vast and astonishing enough to beggar imagination, and that was before the bodies started hitting the ground.
Translated into mathematical terms, McCain's walk was Pythagorean in scope, squared hypocrisy added to squared idiocy equaling squared disgrace. In political terms, McCain's Baghdad walk was a full-blown, bull-moose, train-wreck disaster of truly galactic proportions: a veritable Hindenberg of campaign photo-op debacles. It was so mind-bendingly ugly and deranged and disgusting that the once-iconic "Dukakis in the Tank" blunder now seems quaint by comparison.
The genesis of this catastrophe, in case you missed it, was a verbal gaffe by McCain during a widely broadcast interview last week. After enduring several minutes of sharp interrogation regarding his staunch support of Bush, the war and the "surge," a neuron within his logic circuits apparently misfired. He claimed, with an entirely straight face, that the streets of Baghdad are today entirely safe for an American to walk down. This whopper made even the most shamelessly craven war apologists shake their heads in public, and forced McCain to undertake a desperate face-saving lunge to recover some shred of credibility.
McCain traveled to Baghdad to prove his claim correct, and the pictures appeared shortly thereafter. In the first available frames, the senator was shown walking through a Baghdad marketplace wearing a Kevlar vest, a general on his right and a troop on his left, and a second troop three steps ahead brandishing his rifle. While this kind of protection detail seemed to undermine his claims of safety, the escort and the vest could easily be understood as normal and necessary precautions taken to protect a visiting dignitary. For a time, McCain appeared to have made his point.
It didn't last. On the heels of those narrow-scope photos came reports of what McCain's entourage was actually comprised of. That "safe" Baghdad market had been flooded with more than one hundred battle-ready troops and armored Humvees. Three Blackhawk helicopters and two Apache attack helicopters roared overhead, and sharpshooters were posted on the surrounding rooftops. Simply put, McCain's "safe" street was one overly loud mouse-fart away from being paved with flaming lead during every step of that little walk.
To compound the calamity, a report emerged two days later describing the abduction and slaughter of 21 Iraqis who worked in the marketplace McCain's mini-Normandy force had stormed the previous Sunday, an obvious act of retribution for his visit by a violent Baghdad militia. Already belied by the revealed firepower he brought along, McCain's "safe" walk in Iraq led directly to yet another horrific Baghdad bloodbath. There is bad, there is awful, and then there is this thing, this quantum singularity of ignominy that bends the very light now shining upon it.
How many nukes are still aimed across the oceans at our mutually-assuredly-destroyable populations? Who's spying on whom? Who's still "on the ground" with fun'n'games in the margins of the former USSR, stirring up trouble, doing industrial espionage, and a whole lot more?
Yeah, "checking Russian influence" is so meaningless that google shows gaggles of papers and conferences and stuff from "serious people" on all sides of the Overton Black Hole that say exactly the other thing? "Meaningless" activity, at significant public expense, out of the enormous, dead-end-momentum of the whole tribal Cold War thing? or just out of stupid Game-of-Risk HABIT? Or because it is, might one say, very cost-plus-whatever-you-can-steal-contract "profitable?"
Gee, are any of the "scenarios" the War department runs, I was going to say "world without end" but THAT obviously ain't its fate, that "involve" the Rooskies? Do the Vulture-Vampire-Squid-Capitalist-Class Attack Submarines who threaten our shores from bases on Manhattan Island have any concerns about them Rooskies cruising just miles off our shores, all hair-trigger ready to launch homing torpedoes at "our" submarines? http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/110612-632389-russian-attack-sub-cruises-off-east-coast.htm?p=full
How tough is the US Empire? So tough we don't even need to notice those guys with the bear-fur hats any more?
Because the Great Game, in its unfortunate, idiotic nature, and thanks to the persistence and disingenuity and idiocy of the Really Serious Players who take part, stuffed full of arcane lingo and acronyms and bulging with policies and dogmas, does go on, and on, and on, and on, and on, until in one way or another it stops, right?
Is it new news that "the battlefield" actually IS the entire planet and its "space environment," or that all the planning for implementation and management of the Global Network-Centric Interoperable Battlespace (GWOP, or something) has been going on, well-funded, for decades, with new little programming fillips like the "Angry Birds" cyberweapon thingie that is getting a little press the last couple of days, http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/05/pentagon-cyberwar-angry-birds/, along with this grandiose vision from Boeing, I especially like the "What ifs... at the end there, http://www.boeing.com/news/speeches/2003/roberts_030206.html, that is echoed and built upon by all the other parasitic contractors that hope, I guess, to "take over the whole world!!!!!", https://www.ncoic.org/home
Let us not forget: "The purpose of torture is torture." State Security types torture for Very Important Reasons, and because they get off on it. Apologists like John Yoo-Hoo and others, including some who have Spoken here, tell us it's all been decreed Legal And Proper by the Proper Authorities. Our Great Nation, or a subset of it anyway, even runs schools and seminars on how to do it most efficiently. And puts out training manuals and books and policy documents and videos and stuff on the proper administration, in all senses, of the Curious Activity.
And we are going to have to decide if people like Kiriakou actually fit into the carefully circumscribed mandatory definitional niche of "whistleblower" at all. And people who are so disloyal as all that, spilling the beans where everyone can see them, just have to absorb the consequences of their behavior, right? I mean, how else are all those things we don't want to see or think about our special selves going to be kept under wraps?
So for the life of me I guess I am personally hard pressed to see what the big deal problem is, right? I mean, it's not like it's being done to tens or hundreds of thousands of people, is it? Oh, it is? And, like, so what if it's notoriously ineffective? I mean, c'mon, there's worse things done in the name of Freedom'n'Liberty (tm), after all... It's really just Human Nature, after all, one of our little endearing, enduring tics...
Super, you've been around enough to know that Walt Kelly stated it for "us" so very succinctly a few decades back: We has met the enemy and he is us." With extensions and footnotes: http://www.igopogo.com/we_have_met.htm And before him Pope and Shakespeare and Plato and all those guys and gals with a smidgen or dollop or cartload of insight...
This current Imperial Extravagance is just the latest, "greatest" exemplar. Complete with boffo apologists, malefactors, et al., and iStuffed all the way up the wazoo. Even the people who have "people" to do stuff for them,, to extend their grabbing hands and the reach of their blades, have discovered exactly how icy the glissade really is: http://www.kauffman.org/research-and-policy/we-have-met-the-enemy-and-he-is-us.aspx
The comforting myth, the one they tell babies to put them to sleep, is that It Won't Happen To Us, Because WE Are SPECIAL!
And besides, says mommy under her breath, I'll be dead, comfortably dead, after a life of excess and excitement and titillation (not the same thing) thanks to that li'l ol' bumper sticker proclamation, "WE'RE SPENDING OUR CHILDREN'S INHERITANCE!" Often seen on the capacious rump of a "Class A Motorhome" on its 1.5-mpg voyage to idiot irrelevance.
The more one learns, assuming what one learns is the truth and complete and all that, an unnaturally and insupportably enormous assumption, the more one has to recognize that nothing, NOTHING, is ever what you think it is. Nothing happened the way "they" or "people" say, or even when, or by the means stated, or for what reasons, including the reasons of the people who are behind the people who are behind the people who are still behind the people who send the people to get still other people to do the stuff that you think was done, and are just absotively posilute you know why.
Brownian motion. Sure makes it easy for the sneaks and jackals and tapeworms and "complex leaders" to do the stuff they so profitably and smugly and enjoyably do...
Those of us who are "beneficiaries" of the diligence and great public largesse of the Veterans Administration, thanks to stuff that happened in one of those wars you have heretofore gone on at such didactic length about being "just" or "unjust," might argue that being outright killed by an IED (sometimes made of US-manufactured bombs or artillery shells,) or "died instantly" shot through the head or heart, or ripped up and bled out in short order, is a maudlin "last full measure," all right. But one might consider scale and scope and value of the "measure" that others of us live with for years or decades after, and our friends and families, who often were stupid and misguided enough to "support" us in our enlistments "for the good of the nation." Sent on fool's Imperial errands or "fund raisers," by pompous, venal, idiotic, incompetent politicians and officers and the whole cadre of contractors and sneaky-petes and pedantic apologists and all the rest.
That mawkish crap about "their sacrifice:" does that integrate all the various ways in which "our troops" get killed, from the nominally Medal of Honor brave, to the dude who flips a Mule while drag-racing down a hillside in I Corps, or rotting from some "medication" they were forced to consume or disease they acquired, etc.? Or are we supposed to just stop at the boundaries of the Myth and the Pathos? "Fought in a war:" you hint you know what that means. Do you? Really? The parts where guys are MPs in the main PX in Saigon and get rich off of various scams? the currency traders? The supply sergeants who sell trophy weapons taken from dead "gooks" back to the nominal enemy? the officers who steal their "troops'" class-A rations to trade to the Air Force guys for steaks and chicken flown in from home, so they could have a barbecue every night? The contractors who work drunk on aircraft and kill Troops by over-tightening a critical bolt, or leaving off a safety wire?
The whole premise is a fraud, albeit an apparently inevitable part of the human behavioral set, starting in the very Cradle of Civilization, when the first would-be emperor used the surplus grain put up by husbandmen on the way to serfdom to arm up some Troops and send them over the Euphrates to put another little mud-walled "empire" to the sword, enslave the people they didn't kill, and steal all their stuff. That Great Game, in all its subsequent, vicious, dishonest, destructive, stupid complexity.
@Bill Bodden ...I was almost going to say, "Glad to have been able to do a small service." At least in the context of the very particular moment. As for the other "service" I got to do, not so much...
Occasionally clarity and unguarded honesty combine to add another bit to the jigsaw puzzle. One Troop who worked out the end-game moral aspects of his service in a different way than I, or my uncle and father and several of my friends for that matter, did, came up with this explanation of The Meaning of Memorial Day:
While in Iraq, my platoon cleared routes, patrolled cities and villages, conducted raids on suspected enemy homes, guarded oil facilities and watched over pharmaceutical distributors. All of these missions were carried out, so we were told, in the defense of freedom. I knew men who were wounded, some severely. I personally knew a few who were killed. I saw men changed permanently. I know I was.
As a young soldier, I began the fight believing in the mission to my very core. We were in Iraq because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. After the WMD claims dissolved, I fought to stabilize the region and get rid of the al-Qaida insurgency in Iraq.
Like many other American soldiers and civilians, I was manipulated into believing that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were interchangeable enemies, both guilty of the same thing. Each of us had our rationalization for fighting, our own personal excuse for being in the war. When I realized that much of the fighting resulted from our very presence in the country, I clung to my Catholic faith.
Catholicism helped me cope with my involvement in Iraq in different ways. It was a comfort for me, especially during the hard times, and gave me a reason to stay in the fight. I began to fight to convert people to my belief system, and would discuss the differences between Christianity and Islam with my interpreter, an Iraqi national, and any other Iraqi civilian who would listen.
I kept laminated prayer cards, depicting Gabriel, St. Michael, the pope and a crusader’s cross, in my utility pocket. For me, the fight became a holy one, a sort of modern crusade. A myriad of reasons, rationalizations, excuses.
But then I finally admitted the truth to myself. I was fighting so that the United States could ensure its interests in the region whether it was oil, strategic troop placement or finding an additional ally in the Middle East — or a combination of them all. And you might think I became disillusioned. While it is true that I am no longer religious, I did not allow my time overseas to have a negative impact on my life. I have come to terms with my service in Iraq and realized that fighting for economic interests, while not as ennobling as fighting for freedom, actually protects the American way of life in its own fashion. In retrospect, we shouldn’t have gone to Iraq, but once we were there, we had little choice but to complete the mission.
Regardless of how the American public feels about the war in Iraq, maintaining our standard of living sometimes comes at a high cost. War, and other subtler military moves, must be made in order for our nation to remain in contention as a world superpower and maintain the prosperity we have enjoyed for the last century. What makes the difference is how we commemorate the men and women who have died to protect our prosperity.
Sort of explains it all, I guess… “It’s for the good of the Syndicate, and everybody has a share.” Fraudulent foreclosures dragging down real estate bubbles, hypervelocity stock "trading," Keystone XL and the concommitant fracking, "declining infrastructure," monolithic econopolitics, 4 or 6 or 8 degrees Celsius, Special Black Ops, the burgeoning Security State, and so on and so forth, we all have a share.
Haven't seen the after-action report, but one of the items often noted about rocket attacks is that the launchers and rockets are very portable, can be set up and launched in a very short time, and have often been used by people who have no connection to the launch area to "tag" the launch area and attract reprisals.
But hey, that's all part of the Great Game, isn't it? Building and distributing the rockets and launchers and all kinds of other weapons, for fun and profit, with little regard for consequences to those ever-elusive, apparently highly discounted desireables, stability, security, "peace", or with intentions to actively degrade them? And then doing all the complex stuff of trying to figure out who did what to whom for what reasons and how to respond or plan out the next 40 or 50 moves in the Game to achieve what particular goal, again? Just keeping the Game going, with the advantages that flow to a certain set of all of us?
Some of us rejoice in taking part in the complexity, and have commonality only with each other, behind a thin patina of "patriotism."
Query - is there a significant chance Hezbollah might in a reasonable time frame become a legitimate political player or be subsumed or absorbed into another one?
Brian: as a fella brought up in the time when the myths of America the Special had at least a little truth in them, when my teachers taught the forms and formalities of the "rule of law" thing under that Constitution thing, when there was a "Citizenship" merit badge for us Boy Scout types to earn (still is but different content) may I just say a heartfelt "thank you," for what you are doing day to day, and for your perseverance in the face of that Other Thing that seems to now be the Reality, the new myths, that aren't even being explored in schools or the press or even most of netspace. It takes courage of a special kind. Bless you. And thanks for posting here, for the benefit of those who don't know or would obscure and obfuscate and "justify" and apologize about (the theological definition) the crap that is committed "in our names" on helpless and hapless Others.
Regarding corporations, taxation is also a way, albeit pretty sorry, to redirect some of the externalities that the relatively new (last 4-500 years) corporate structures have been getting ever more adept at dumping of the "libertarian" Market Model and onto the general population and the rest of the planet.
Petroleum, coal, "paperandpulp," plastics and pesticides, all that stuff, have costs that for a lot of reasons, many of them under the labels of "cheerful corruption" and "regulatory capture," just somehow escape being included in the price of the product that the Magical Market is supposed to cross those hypersimplistic Supply and Demand curves for.
As is the case with trucking: Remember those little white stickers that used to adorn the butts of all those 48-foot and longer semi-trailers? The ones that read "This vehicle pays $3,280 in road use taxes every year"? http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrew-turnbull/4113060764/Part of a discontinued (due to pushback) marketing/propaganda effort to obscure the more telling point that the vehicle in question did more like $180,000 in annual damage and wear to bridges, road surfaces and other infrastructure (like toxic runoff from roadways and all those teeny black "PM-10" soot particles that are lodged in all our lungs.) http://www.epa.gov/airtrends/aqtrnd95/pm10.html (Note, says the Agency: EPA no longer updates this information, but it may be useful as a reference or resource. hahahahahaha!)
Because pavement damage increases sharply with axle weight, the reduced weight per axle of the heavier trucks again means less pavement damage. An approximation derived from extensive tests conducted in the 1950s suggests that pavement damage increases exponentially with axle weight to a power of four—the so-called “fourth power” rule...
Although additional axles on a truck can substantially reduce pavement damage, the stress to bridges depends more on the truck’s total load than on the number of axles. For this reason, increases to truck weight limits can create large costs for bridges, even when they encourage additional
axles.
For bridges, the principal cost associated with heavier trucks lies in ensuring that the bridge can accommodate the trucks without collapsing. The Comprehensive Truck Size and
Weight Study estimated the costs of truck size and weight reforms on the assumption that bridges that become
safety-deficient under the new weight limits will need to be replaced. As the study notes, this assumption probably
overstates bridge costs because some bridges could be strengthened rather than replaced, while others could be
made off-limits to the damaging vehicles. The estimated increases in bridge costs were large: 10 percent in the tri-
ple-trailer network scenario, 34 percent in the LCV network scenario, and up to 42 percent in the North Ameri-
can Trade scenario.
Weissmann and Harrison (1998a, 1998b) estimated the bridge costs for another NAFTA-related scenario, one in which types of heavy trucks that are common in Mexico and Canada are allowed on U.S. highways... The authors estimated that, in Texas alone, the introduction of the Canadian-con-
figured truck would require $7.7 billion in expenditures on bridge replacement, and that the Mexican-configured truck would require about $6.6 billion. As the Comprehensive Truck Size and Weight Study also found, the largest cost of bridge replacement turned out to be associated with the disruption to traffic while the work is underway. Of the total estimated cost for accommodating the Mexican-configured truck, about 85 percent consisted of time losses to motorists during reconstruction
The efficacy of counter-terrorist tactics is a technical question that should be considered in it own right [by WHOM?], not spun into a mush of wishful thinking that just so happens to inevitably comport with the policy preferences one arrives at from other directions.
Why does it seem that despite the interstitial fog of surely knowledgeable noise, the above sounds like a case for counter-terrorist tactical technical questions driving strategy, policy, expenditures, STATE BEHAVIOR? As opposed to, you know, the other way around?
"Why are you carrying that double-barrelled Hollands & Hollands .470 Nitro Express elephant gun at port-arms around Times Square?" asks the cop.
"To keep the wild elephants away," says the dude.
"There's not a wild elephant within 5,000 miles of here, buddy!"
"See? It works. Now let me get back to my patrolling..."
And as to wishful and magical thinking and making things up, there is proof, is there, positive or negative, from sources that don't have shall we say reasons to shade the truth to protect themselves, their careers, and the "policy preferences" THEY have (like the ones that got "us" into Iraq and are keeping "us" in Afghanistan, etc.?), that the counter-whoever-gets-blown-up tactical toys serve any strategic or even tactical purpose that "serves the national interest?"
Claiming or implying undisclosed "special expertise" does not count as "proof."
The Barbary States were actually engaged in something that used to be called "piracy," kind of like what's going on off Somalia and stuff, called that even by the US Navy, if you read carefully, and what "the young nation did" was "suppression of piracy," but hey, who's counting:
From his stack of 4 x 6 cards, Bill has spoken. Q, threfore, ED.
Actually, all he really needed is the one with card with AUMF, Article 51 and that thing that he calls the Law (sic) of War noted on it. Maybe this is what he refers to, from a perch of claimed Realpolitic Wisdom?
It ain't just the tax breaks, apparently. Does Tim have any concerns that maybe other things "influence" the price we pay for petroproducts? Like maybe there's some fire, under the billowing clouds of CO2-laden smoke, about crude oil price manipulations that might be worse for us Muppets and Dumb Money types than the LIBOR gaming?
Why do you leap to the defense of "big oil?" Which of course is corporations, made up of selected human critters who will hew to the party line, corporate entities that have nothing at all whatsover in any way shape or form to do with goobering up politics and the planet, now do they?
Maybe if the COSTS of all the externalities that these creatures excrete that have to be remedied by public tax expenditures were forced into the price of all those products and stuff you speak up for, leading to applications of ingenuity to the problem of keeping the freaking species alive by other technologies and strategies, maybe we collectively would not be looking up out of a cesspit at a sky turning yellow and brown and slowly sinking into the stinking ooze... But no, that would not be FAIR to somebody or other, would it?
The Kochs probably understand more than you know, and besides, like our FL Gov. Evil Tonedeaf Scott, they have "people" to advise them on how things work currently
Besides, all they have to do is keep the merry-go-round turning for the length of their miserable God-forsaken life spans. Since so far, at least, the Reaallly Rich have not been able to buy or steal deluxe, extended, Methusalem-quality lifespans... Other than maybe that Undead Cheney guy (will he really get a "state funeral?")... though of course the Science they in other realms spurn is working hard on that, and you can bet that "anti-death therapies" will not be part of the Medicare approved list of treatments -- for "private pay" only. "Apres them, le deluge," so why should they give a ratf___? What could those Left Behind possibly do to get revenge or retribution or restitution from their ashes or desiccated or maybe cryofrozen-in-hope-of-Scientific-resurrection corpses?
Talk about moral hazard, and perverse incentives. Libertarians love it, the very definition of success...
Koch funds NOVA, and apparently is on the board of WGBH. This is hardly a new item in the spectrum of greedybad, this is from 2010:
They don’t make ombudsmen like they used to. Once upon a time, when numerous viewers launched a credible complaint against even the appearance of loss of objectivity and conflict of interest, the ombudsman would seriously investigate the matter, talking to parties on both sides, and then rendering some considered independent judgment.
But not PBS ombudsman Michael Getler. He seems to have no trouble whatsoever with David Koch, a leading funder of the anti-scientific climate disinformation campaign (and the anti-science Tea Party), funding an episode of the great science show Nova, which:
is an effort to greenwash Koch’s activities
just happens to whitewash the threat human-caused global warming
Getler ignores the first concern entirely, and his entire defense of Nova’s dubious entanglement with Koch is “As a viewer of what strikes me and a lot of others as a consistently first-rate program, I trust NOVA.” The beauty of that defense is that it could apply equally well to essentially every PBS show. Hey, they are all first rate programs, so what the heck are you listeners complaining about?
Getler apparently sees himself the “Maytag repairman” of ombudsman. PBS ain’t broke, so don’t try to fix it. Here’s the background on why he’s wrong — and why Nova’s own defense is also wrong:...
Re: the utility of nukular weapons, as only being good for suicide: Exactly, of course. Anyone who followed the "Cold War" Strangelovian logic and the effects of nukular detonations had to come to the same conclusion, on a bigger scale. The risk is still there, as simplified here:
Under the "control" of people who, as you point out, may at some point have read Sun Tzu, but obviously learned nothing from that ancient and well-proven wisdom, or have one hell of a death wish that unfortunately would embrace many of the rest of us. Or figure they can do their corrupt thing, do like Arafat and store up "redirected" treasures in some island heaven half a world away, and run off and hide in comfort, beating their breasts in mock sorrow, when things go cockeyed.
Comforting confirmation that their guys are as mealy-mouthed and disingenuous as ours. Nothing new, nothing useful, just assurances of more of the same. Since there's the nice "diplomatic" buzz up front, but all the creepy, sneaky, greedy, good old Great Game stuff going on where most people can't see.
How does any of this elephant-dance lead to decent, secure, sustainable lives for most people? Why do the most of us have to keep supporting, with our blood and the wealth we create, just going along for the ride, with the whole nation-state conflict-generating wealth-gobbling planet-killing corporate-driven kleptocracy?
Silly questions, right? Shows how little I and other people who ask such questions know. Not "serious."
The Friedman suggestion was of course intended ironically. With human populations, with all the local and larger variations on the underlying themes of human behavior in all its ranges, one size or even a duality does not begin to fit all, depending of course on the goals of the game as set among the players who get to call the changes in the Calvinball rules.
My prayer is that whatever the structures form into in the processes between here and extinction, that the vast majority of us human critters at least are blessed with fulfillment of the first two tiers of Maslow's hierarchy. Since my ignorant, little-informed sense is that there is actually, if people put their minds to it and eschewed most of that greed thing and inhaled the essence of the ol' Golden Rule, enough of everything that really matters to go all the way around the table. But most places (except Red China and a few others) still elevate that last of all human freedoms, the freedom to fornicate and reproduce, for a variety of reasons... so the "pitch" of the seating at the table keeps changing.
"Turning it around so that it avoids social and economic deterioration will be no easy task."
Is Tom Friedman's "Flat Earth" book available in the appropriate languages, to help the businessmen in Pakistan figure out the ways to "turn it around?" The "business"-based approach has worked so well on the rest of the planet? Which direction is the vector of survival?
Super, do I really come across as just a "curdled" CT? That's strong, coming from someone as gifted and informed as you are. You sure seem to extract a lot from my little 1:02 post (as "amended" by attributions from others) and other stuff I write that actually gets posted here that ain't there, far as I'm concerned.
Yes, some governments are better than others -- even the Gilded Age was likely better for most non-elite folks than life under the things we shorthand as "Stalin" and Gaddaffyduck and Idi Amin and various dictators including the ones the US and other Cold War and Dead Empire players installed or fostered, past or present tense. And people acting together, often out of oppressed desperation, were able to foment the New Deal, now under massive pressure itself.
You impute to me a belief that I think a significant set of people prefer, or prefer to suffer under, dictatorships, or "love their tyrants," to being able to take effective part in the endless political-economic-social struggle. That's just wrong. Dare I ask, of course, how much of an effective part ordinary people who just want to live and let live can have in shaping their government, in Libya, or in the "liberal democracy" that some presume the US to be?
Also wrong is your last sentence, a cheap and pretty misdirected shot, especially from someone who seems as aware of and jaundiced and distressed about the details of history and what really goes on as you are -- it's not "CT," it's more an effort to open the curtains, and shine lights on the roaches and rodents in the dark corners. Cheap and wrong, especially, in regard to my level of public participation. (FWIW, I live on a sailboat, with a goal of "living simply that others may simply live.")
Just curious: is Libya now a "liberal democracy?" People all over the political spectrum in the US have good reasons to suspect the motives and competence of the people who make and implement "policy." "Muscular apologism" for a "muscular" set of behaviors that foe some reason only seem to favor a very narrow set of persons and interests, and too often seem to demonstrate little but horribly expensive (PUBLIC expense, that is) naivete and incompetence, is another common text in bloggery and other political discourse.
And it's not limited to the Middle East, or Near Mideast, or Far East, or AFRICOM or EURCOM or now, as we go forth to subdue and subdivide the "Arctic riches" made accessible by "human-induced climate change or what-ever," exclusive of the polar regions either.
Got any good examples (maybe excepting Libya or bombing the heck out of former Soviet Central European countries doing "ethnic cleansing," of US behaviors that are something other than imperialism, whatever you or I might mean by that term?
On the other hand, in addition to all the people who are invested in just doing more of the same combusto-consumption, there are a lot of people who are seeing great investment opportunities in various aspects of what even they are calling "climate change," out of one side of their mouths at least.
For those who have that prudent careful wise $5 to invest every week and are young enough to expect decades of compound interest and growth of "capital" to comfort their declining years, here are a few places to start looking for opportunities:
I guess until the last dehydrated, hyperthermic human drops and dies, it will always be a case that "it is an ill wind indeed that blows no man good..."
Please correct me if I'm wrong, sir, but that "$5 trade" is the transaction cost of a trade, not the purchase, the investment, that we are told we ought to be making weekly. http://www.brokerage-review.com/articles/fivedollar-trade-commissions.aspx If we just were smart enough to "make good choices."
Is it a good or a bad thing that not all of us can apparently afford to be, or are prudent and smart enough to be, as "prudent" and sharp as some of us?
The worst distortion in all of this is right in that word "give," which I guess is used in the lesser definitional sense of "hand over to."
What the Kochs and Adelson and the Cloacas of K Street are doing has not the slightest bit of "donative intent." It's bribery, buying "the law," pure and simple.
As to the sawbuck I was dumb enough to GIVE to the Obama campaign, for my part that was just in the Hope that that Chicago-Harvard clunker would actually work to Change any of the stuff that's killing the most of us for the enrichment and titillation of the tiny few of us.
And how we saved Marjah: "What happens over the next five days will be a cornerstone of your memory for the rest of your life." At about 3:35, and away the Brass flies, setting it up so he "won't sleep uneasy for not doing the right thing." "All right, gents, that's all I've got."
I hope everybody here reads the above comment at 6:26 PM very carefully. Very, very carefully. With a historian's eye. Consistency is taken as credibility, sometimes.
And speaking of that infinitely elastic, marvelously mutable "national interest," what ever happened to that This Week's Reason to Stay The Course, which got so much play not so very long ago? "Afghan mineral wealth could top $1 trillion: Pentagon"
Respectfully and totally disagree, as usual, with the insistence that Taliban-tagging and alQuaedaandbystanders-killing are any kind of justification for a MICmonster 'military solution' for "us," that is, another generation of enthusiastic young testosterone-loaded patriots, to do a doofus do-over, again.
Time for a new Mall Monument, alongside the Wall: The Tombs of the Last Ones To Die For Their Country In Wherever.
I for one couldn't finish watching, experiencing, the whole video, which is just one tiny part of what is happening every day Over There.
Oh, the horror! the BS that the lying Geopoliticists sold us! Sshhh, we're not really doing 'nationbuilding,' or 'counterinsurgency,' it's The women and little girls! THAT's the reason for Our Boys "taking time away from their families to help you dudes out," last week at least, so that Afghan officer can kidnap and screw little boys and those Afghan Army dudes can kidnap and ransom four other dudes so some local warlord can supposedly get his brother out of hock to "the Taliban," which is just other dudes screwing little boys and doing all the crap they did before "NATO Forces" got there and will do long after "we" are long gone and nothing but another set of jokes and battle tales for those dudes to tell each other around their fire pits and meals.
Of course right here on this page is the Cafepress ad for the new national symbol, running away altogether from that Stars and Stripes thing we used to display so proudly, a symbol that is not "America the Beautiful" but "the US" (and yes, copyrighted but you can buy a license to use it "as a design wrapper for your logo or message!"
C'mon, you Apologists, tell us it was all for good purposes, all in the "national interest," or at least carry forward the Big Lie that "our intentions were good." Call it an "honorable effort," all that crap, excuse yourselves with "I didn't agree with all of it," and "Bad stuff happens in war," all that too. When what it was, is and will be is nothing but a shabby thin faded peeling coat of "petroliotic redwhiteandblue paint" over that rotting Juggernaut labeled The Great American Exceptional Manifest Destiny Usual Milo Minderbinder Everyone Has A Share Idiocy.
"the sacrifices of their KIA [and MIA and WIA and mentally trashed] brothers will have been in vain."
Sorry that was once again inevitable.
Sorrow for all of us who "served" in Wars of Futility: Korea, Vietnam, Iraq (all versions), the War on Drugs, the GWOT. And maybe a little bad on us too, for thinking that "going to war" on "wogs," with all our weapons and tactics and inevitable idiocy and corruption, was doing anything to "protect the American way of life" or was "providing security for the Homeland." And a curse on our leaders, political and military, for so cynically putting us in harm's way, counting on our courage and unit cohesion to keep the Game running long past the obvious point of what you call "efficient retrograde," because as we were told in Basic by one cynical Korean War lifer whose head bobbed and hands trembled thanks to getting blown up in a tank battle, the US Military NEVER RETREATS -- it "advances rearward to previously prepared positions." Myth and futility for the troops and the taxpayers, and profits for a very few.
"There is no honor among thieves," unless via "interlocking directorates" and other forms of collusion they are cooperating in the thievery. See, e.g., "Wall Street."
Another little footnote to "history," from the Catholic Encyclopedia entries on the "suppression of the Jesuits," with an unintentional little peek at "certain Western attitudes:"
The Suppression in France was occasioned by the injuries inflicted by the English navy on French commerce in 1755. The Jesuit missionaries held a heavy stake in Martinique. They did not and could not trade, that is, buy cheap to sell dear, any more than any other religious. But they did sell the products of their great mission farms, in which many natives were employed, and this was allowed, partly to provide for the current expenses of the mission, partly in order to protect the simple, childlike natives from the common plague of dishonest intermediaries. Père Antoine* La Vallette, superior of the Martinique missions, managed these transactions with no little success, and success encouraged him to go too far. He began to borrow money to work the large undeveloped resources of the colony, and a strong letter from the governor of the island dated 1753 is extant in praise of his enterprise. But on the outbreak of war, ships carrying goods of an estimated value of 2,000,000 livres were captured and he suddenly became a bankrupt, for very large sum. His creditors were egged on to demand payment from the procurator of Paris, but he, relying on what certainly was the letter of the law, refused responsibility for the debts of an independent mission, though offering to negotiate for a settlement, for which he held out assured hopes. The creditors went to the courts, and an order was made (1760) obliging the Society to pay, and giving leave to distrain in the case of non-payment...
@Brad, and anyone else interested how Scientol -- er, libertarianism works in the realm of Argument, there's a whole trove of white papers and talking points and how-tos for Making Your Points and "arm waving" and stuff like you stuffed in your last paragraph above, here's an entry point:
And just follow the links there to the next, and the next...
Looks to me (Monsanto, CIA, Big Banks, "health insurance," etc.) that "we" are most of the way to turning it all over to "government-like organizations" already.
Seems to me that given the breadth of what it appears DOJ is going after, this very much is an investigation of an "alleged crime." That, in addition to the whistling up the existence of "the operation," being the release into the public brain of information about a bomb plot that was ostensibly part of one of the many CIA "ops" that so many times before (when the rest of us hear of them at all, via "whistleblowing" as most of us understand the term) have been shown to be STUPID and ill-advised and symptomatic of a really cancerous set of institutional behaviors.
Seems ingenuous, if not disingenuous, to try to paint this "investigation," this "plumber" activity, as consequence-free for the media. From what I read, it's making a lot of already pretty cowardly people even more nervous about doing the old-fashioned version of their jobs.
Interesting that one claiming devotion to sticking to the "known facts" states as fact that this is just "about" "this braggart" who "went to the AP and blabbed about this awesome operation." Cites? And not "about" some other thing, like deterring any spasms of conscience, or maybe some skulldugger subterfuge, like killing several birds with one stone: Shame and scare "the media" back into bland cheerleader mode or into silence, indicate to "AQAP" whatever that is that we're on to them, warn other potential suicide bombers that their "friends" may just be CIA dudes setting them up, let "the American people" feel good that the CIA is on the case, I bet there's a memo stamped "TOP SECRET" that lists these and many more "features and benefits..."
As to this horrific amazing revelation that the CIA has "a window into AQAP," the AP story broke when, in May 2012? Here it is, in FOX News: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/05/07/cia-thwarts-al-qaeda-underwear-bomb-plot-on-anniversary-bin-laden-death-us/ And how stupid do you think those incredibly sneaky al Quaedans are, those people who supposedly are an infinite threat to what Holder calls a "the American people." So stupid that they won't know that the CIA and other sneaky petes are onto them? Can one wonder whether, as reported in some places, the "bomber" was one of those saps that the FBI and such-like folks manage to snooker into various plots...
Does your happy willingness to turn the state security apparatus looser than it already is extend to Ailes' Black Hole? And if you are implying that ThinkProgress thinks that AP did something beyond the pale, maybe anyone who wants to make an informed judgment ought to read the entry there, which you did not link in your comment: http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/05/13/2005021/doj-yemen-aqap/
I wonder if the CIA, that's not "legally" supposed to be doing domestic espionage, is working with the other parts of the eExecutive to maybe go after the dozens of "outlets" that like FOX News, that protector of the American Way in All Things, saw fit to publish and announce to the whole Scooter-Libby-Friendly world?
...and our long-jawed, perfectly coiffed, Well-Suited Secretary of State tells us he is going North to the "northermost city in Sweden" to carve up the newly dying corpse of that latest and maybe Last Frontier (?nope, there's still The Ocean, water column and seabed and everything in, on and under it to carve up and extract) called "the Arctic Region," where in a mindlessly self-revealing, almost consciously self-satirical piece that his writers must have worried over for hours, in the old Huffpost, he offers the great image of the commercialization and consumption of Whatever Is Left ---
...the Arctic's ecosystem is experiencing significant, rapid shifts with far-reaching consequences. Last September, the extent of sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean reached record lows, threatening marine mammal life and local populations dependent upon them. Receding sea ice might also bring new commerce and industry to the region, including exploration of offshore oil and gas, as well as minerals. New Arctic shipping routes could significantly decrease transit times between Pacific and Atlantic ports.
All of the changes in the Arctic must change the way we approach the region. The Obama administration's new National Strategy for the Arctic Region prioritizes domestic infrastructure development as Arctic conditions change, responsible stewardship, and enhanced cooperation with our international partners. We're focused on ensuring a secure, peaceful, and prosperous Arctic.
My God, THIS CANNOT BE ALLOWED TO CONTINUE!!! Get the Destabilizer-in-Chief over at Langley on the horn right now! If Those People ever all start pulling on the same end of the rope, who knows WHERE Our Blessed Hegemony and Corporate "National" Interests will end up! Holy Jesus, this might even spread to SYRIA!, with UNTOLD consequences! Start looking for Wedges to drive into anything that looks like "solidarity!" Get some of Our People over there RIGHT NOW to, I don't know, set off a couple of bombs or something! You know what to do!
And while you're at it, get Holder over here! He needs a bracing on using all that power to keep the rabble from seeing how we are using all that power! And remind him: No "enforcement" of securities and antitrust and worker-protection and environmental laws until we finish up changing what's "legal!"
Using the IRS like the best Nixonian dorks, to suppress and deter anyone, and that includes ANYONE whether "TeaParty" or "librul," who dares to even criticize the Gummint. "Enemies" lists. From that most trustworthy of sources, apparently now fearful that the targeting picture for government abuse might include THEM and not just Hippies:
"The conclusion that the IRS came to is that they did have agents who were engaged in intimidation of political groups," Michigan Rep. Mike Rogers told "Fox News Sunday." "I don't care if you're a conservative, a liberal, a Democrat or a Republican, this should send a chill up your spine. It needs to have a full investigation."
The internal IG timeline shows a unit in the agency was looking at Tea Party and "patriot" groups dating back to early 2010. But it shows that list of criteria drastically expanding by the time a June 2011 briefing was held. It then included groups focused on government spending, government debt, taxes, and education on ways to "make America a better place to live." It even flagged groups whose file included criticism of "how the country is being run."
By early 2012, the criteria were updated to include organizations involved in "limiting/expanding government," education on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and social economic reform.
Intentional non-feasance when it comes to "governance." (No cites needed, obviously)
Flat-out blindness when it comes to stuff like trillions in corruption (over 10 years, so "no harm no foul," right?") at the Pentagram ("Boys will be good ol' boys, ya know... it's just how Bidness is done.")
And a whole raft of other End-of-Dumbpire stuff that is so deliciously redolent and reminiscent of the decline and fall of other empires.
Exceptional? NOT! Not even very good at it -- the Byzantines and Romans and even the Brits went down with a lot more decadence than we are managing, though the 0.001%ers are sure giving it a run for our money:
"Bad stuff happens, but no blame, please. Unless you can hang it on some underling with no defenses, or better yet,keep anyone from finding out about it..."
That sounds not at all like an "informed discussion," Lj, rather instead like a set of apologist talking points. Kind of confirmed by the reference to "loony leftist agenda." Interesting: The "apologists" for "our" droning over there rely on "maybeonpaper" they so often cite, like the AUMF, but also say "we" can do that stuff based on "tacit approval" by the non-sovereign Pakistani "government."
Is it just me, or is it actually the case that Our Players just do not get it that they don't know how to play the Game, other than by shelling out bricks of laundered currency or this or that weapon system or montly supplies of Viagra (with regular refills), or just wielding a big old club or a Barrett .50 or cluster bomb or Really Hot Pre-Obsolete Air Combat Platform to swat virtual mosquitos? That we have some smart engineers, whose stuff gets stolen or sold by espionage or the profit motive of their post-national corporate employers? That we get played like a tin whistle by people who are much older in the Game of Byzantine cutthroat poker, whether it's Saudis or Chinese or those charming ex-Central Europeans who run Israel?
If our consumption is the engine that powers the 12-cylinder Ferrari that is REAL geopolitics, the stuff that goes on apparently beyond the ken and clue of our sneaky petes and diplomats and stuff, gee, what would happen if we just sort of stopped consuming? using up OUR land and water for the folks elsewhere, who will be the ones wagering on the price fluctuations of bitumen converted to "oil" and XL'd to the World Market, who will get richer off the fracking of our landforms, who laugh at our "troops" who are suckered into playing the Redcoats in that old mythical march to and from Lexington?
We and MI-6 that really ought, one would think, to know better, are still giving Karzai HOW much cash money in exchange for being allowed to keep on kicking in doors in Kandahar?
Waiting for the "legalistas" who apologize for the raw power exercises of the Dumbpire to tell us how the judgment of that there Paki court is "inoperative" or that Dumbpire Power trumps and vitiates that there court's jurisdiction or some other supra-rulalaw nonsense that says "we" or those who are nominally acting "for" this Great Power can do whatever "we" damn please, anywhere, any time, and whatchagonnadoaboutit? Conduct a terrarist activity on the Homeland, which will just make it all that much easier to keep the stupid cows walking up the chutes here in the Vater -- oops, Homeland?
Cuz after all, it's so patently clear that thousands of "installations" and hundreds of billions of dollars and all these killings, in the Far-away FATA, and sweatiest Somalialand, etc., have kept them Mooslum ragheads from traveling "17,000 kilometers" to ATTACK "US" BACK///(subtle irony)///
To all the geopolitical whiz kids and wunderkindern who post apologies here for The Way Things Turn Out When The Game Is Played By Their Rules, who reassure us that Serious and Adult People are in charge and the machinery of government is working just fine and all those military expenditures, overt and covert, are Necessary To Our Freedom (tm), riddle me this:
"U.S. Currently Fighting 74 Different Wars … That It Will Publicly Admit"
What are the Legalisms and Doctrines and Policies and Strategies and Tactics that make all that Wise and Proper and Necessary, again? 1,000-plus "installations" or "locations" (can't call them "bases" any more, Bagram is an "airfield," e.g.) across the planet, what to "we" get out of that? I know what "we" get out of the very, very common (and so very, very rarely surfaced and prosecuted) stuff like this:
"FIVE INDIVIDUALS ARRESTED, TWO CONTRACTING COMPANIES CHARGED IN BRIBERY CONSPIRACY RELATED TO DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE CONTRACTS IN AFGHANISTAN
A flood of complexified words comes next, to excuse and deny and defer, or maybe just {silence}, while the cancer grows silently bigger, and spreads...
"the Syrian opposition itself" -- there is an entity now that is identifiable as "the Syrian opposition?" Or is that trick of personification, that making up of monads, just one of the conveniences of geopolitical grand thinking, that allows one constructing strategies and theories to do a reductio that is so infinitely ad absurdam that the bonds to "reality" get shredded, however pretty and well-constructed the Big Picture might seem to be? All these little "actions," these heavily self-justified or covert "national interest" activities, that seem insignificant, until all of a sudden some hair trigger concatenation of events leads to Sarajevo or Pearl Harbor...
If I'm a general or a CEO in the MIC or some fella or gal who has become a National Leader and discovered that once I have all that power at hand, all that wealth to blow around, well hey, I can live out my life free from any kind of consequence that matters to me personally. It's like what happens when an ordinary person suddenly is on the other side of the bars in the county jail, who discovers that freedom from responsibility and fear of consequences that regulated his behavior when he was just a "good citizen."
Not trying to pick on anyone in particular, just a general gripe about certain habits of thought and speaking that seem inexorably to surface and mislead. Not that I have any magic to sort it all out either, of course, but the way the Game is being played sure seems to be taking all of us, players and played-upon, down into a mutual black hole.
Putin knew from his filthy past what he was in for, and Obama and Kerry and for that matter the last-generation Hillary Clinton? Where do they come from, what have they learned, and now they know the Secret Handshake and a key to the Executive Restroom, what will they do to the rest of us as they "grow into their positions" and, like metastatic cancers, out into the healthier tissues of the old body politic?
To all the GreatGameGreatPower addicts and apologists, here's the deal: The US is in your world of scenarios the "pre-eminent power," able to leap tall postulates of the Rule of International Law with facile ease. What, as you frame your thinking, is "it," that is, the personification that you reduce the complex collections of power and interest and intentions and actors to in your Great Game of Risk ™, what is "it" supposed to do in this situation, since the assumption made is that pretty much whatever "it" does is ipso facto the actuation of "the national interest" (with little caveats to demonstrate that one is "serious")? Given the binary choice repeatedly articulated elsewhere (the "Libya" option), which is supposedly either to "just" let the horrible mayhem go on, or give weapons and training and "intelligence" and "encouragement" to SOMEBODY, what is "it" supposed to do at this point in the drama? And bearing in mind that institutionally and operationally, the Security Apparatus has already lumbered into motion, and the rats and jackals are already In There distributing or "facilitating" weaponization and looking for "friends" among the enemies and ways to turn a profit off of conflict, in the best long-term WarIsARacket tradition.
Is it possible, with all the momentum and pressure and independent skullduggery by the Serious Agencies and bits of the Global Military, to just STAND DOWN, to disarm those busy little parasites, to "stay out of it?"
I guess the question sort of answers itself, doesn't it?
And the Gamers can continue with their sonorous pronouncements and justifications and rationalizations, protecting their Game which gets played out on the corpses and mashed communities of so many plain folks. Because theirs is the REAL world, after all, and hey, there's no changing REALITY, is there?
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - - that's all."....
"But I don't want to go among mad people," said Alice. "Oh, you can't help that," said the cat. "We're all mad here."
Gee, what happened to that 30% drop in military spending? Anybody else see where it went? Drop in the bucket? Is that an actual number of dollars cut out of the Pentagram share of the pie, or just a factoid statistic? Really, I would like to understand that argument and where the claimed drop in spending actually shows. It seems the other data in the linked site points to a long-term huge pile of money continuing to be dumped into the MICmachine, and failing to produce anything but more of the same.
I hope everybody reading this stuff goes and looks at the link that JfL posted, http://www.cfr.org/geoeconomics/trends-us-military-spending/p28855. It sure looks to me like the US is spending a buttload of money on its military, far more than any other "civilized country." And it sure seems with all the FAILS of so many of the great tech innovations that "we" are so busy fielding, and the patent inability to pick a "war" we can "win" in any of the traditional senses, "we" are not getting much "bang for the buck." Great Game Changers, like the XM-25, and the various latest F-series aircraft, even drones with a significant failure rate, AND JUST WHAT IS/ARE THE MISSION(S) THAT ALL THIS CRAP IS BEING PROCURED TO SUPPOSEDLY EFFECTUATE? In the meantime, all these people with investments of various sorts, money, career, ego, in WarisaRacket, are speaking Great Thoughts on the Nature of Warfare of the Fourth Generation:
and a now aging classic, "Why do we lose 4th generation wars?" from the blog of "Fabius Maximus," which bills itself as "A discussion about geopolitics, broadly defined, from an American's perspective -- about ways to reignite the spirit of a nation grown cold." From 4 January 2007, Serious Writers use the military/British convention in writing dates.
And even more dated, from 2006, fer Jaysus' sake, there's stuff like this:
$17 BILlion, or $17 TRILlion national debt? A big number, that if we are to actually give people useful work to do and thus actually get out of recession needs to probably be bigger (in some sectors, not the MIC which is already grossly, morbidly, toxically, terminally obese). Another number is the US annual aggregate expenditure on Empire, which by what looks to me to be the more complete estimates that try to capture all the hidden and obscure crap, is maybe $3 trillion a year. And we have maybe another $7 or $8 trillion, in round and rough numbers, of "war debt" for the sort-of-declared-at-least-named-and-acknowledged if actually undeclared warisarackets to make like Sisyphus and keep rolling up that long eternal hill...
Too bad the "intelligent people of the world" do not have a prayer of overcoming the vast and growing capabilities and clout and momentum and tools and toys and wealth of the "intelligence people of the world." And their buddies in CorpWorld.Gov and FinWorld.Gov.
One wonders that the Professor has not spoken on the subject of the Israeli air attacks in "sovereign Syria." Are we coming to the point that the true nature of the Game as practiced by that state and our own, and all the others that collect the wealth produced by their Ordinary Citizens to convert into Game pieces and extensions of the RISK! (tm) board, becomes a little more manifest? That Power now can do whatever it damn pleases even more openly and with even fewer repercussions and free of even apparent limits? (What's that droning noise I hear in the background, getting closer, with autonomous lethality capabilities in the ones moving up the line to "deployed" status? Time to enjoy "Terminator, the Franchise" once more.)
Waiting for the apologists to justify, or maybe point out that this is nothing new, and that what the IDF did and does is "legal" and "defensive," just like Iraq and Afghanistan and Costa Rica and et cetera. But hey, it's just one tiny nail in the coffin of humanity, after all...
Enjoying my Sunday morning viewing of War Porn over at Syria Comments' video archives of "action" in the self-disassembly of the state formerly known as Syria, aided and abetted by profitable involvements by the usual suspects...
If there was all this clandestine activity, one has to wonder why "our" involvements there have worked out the way they have for us. Of course, other than arming and destabilizing and shhhh maybe involvement in drugs? it is unfair, I guess, to expect the clandestine types to control what happens on a global scale... I guess "presence" just can't be expected to equal "competence" in the sense of VICTORY and SUCCESS and MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. But then it's hard to discern what the actual goals of the Game were and are, much less of the manifestly and intentionally opaque activities of the Sneaky Petes -- there's been a successful disappearance of billions of cash dollars, and of course provision of bricks of $100 bills and Viagra to warlords to "buy their loyalty," and an enormous multi-trillion-dollar transfer of wealth to certain parts of the economy that have little to do with the survival of America the True, let alone the species, and a lot more with the furtherance of a few corporate interests.
Gee, is that what he said? In the great complex Game you know there are ways to "flex muscles" that do not involve "force projection" or dumping weapons and troops into the pot, stuff called "diplomacy" I hear, that require maybe a kind of will to live as opposed to what looks more like a usual-imperial-death-wish abetted by post-national corporate interests that somehow get to replace a "national interest" that might benefit the most of us rather than the ones who run the Warisaracket.
I have to ask -- with all the reports of the usual behavior of our State Security types in actually arming and training one group or another of "rebels" (what's the accurate term for such a diverse bunch of gunmen? "Insurgents?" "Dissidents?" "Terrorists?" "Anti-government forces?" "Opposition fighters?" "All of the above?"), is it honest or accurate to say that Obama and his Secret Squirrels are not "intervening" in Syria?
As it evolved, the airlift correlated with shifts in the war within Syria, as rebels drove Syria’s army from territory by the middle of last year. And even as the Obama administration has publicly refused to give more than “nonlethal” aid to the rebels, the involvement of the C.I.A. in the arms shipments — albeit mostly in a consultative role, American officials say — has shown that the United States is more willing to help its Arab allies support the lethal side of the civil war.
From offices at secret locations, American intelligence officers have helped the Arab governments shop for weapons, including a large procurement from Croatia, and have vetted rebel commanders and groups to determine who should receive the weapons as they arrive, according to American officials speaking on the condition of anonymity. The C.I.A. declined to comment on the shipments or its role in them.
On the other hand, of course, who the hell cares any more? There's an avalanche of likely unstoppable imperial financial, military, "security," environmental, political and social badness rolling downhill and gaining speed, and the most of us, who create the wealth that provides the mass of schmutz that makes up the avalanche, just want decent work, families to love and be loved by, and communities to support, are square in the path. While the few of us keep throwing boulders into the flow, from nice safe perches...
All kabuki. Yup. And it seems that with the CIA, it is all "teh STUPID." Although a pretty noxious, malignant kind of stupid, from poisoned cigars to make Castro's beard fall out, to trying to bribe Afghan warlords with Viagra (and bricks of $100 bills) to be "loyal" in a place where loyalty seems to extend to tribes, maybe, and clans and families, but is driven by immediate self-interest and shrewdness. We ain't sharp enough to play in that sandbox, but then the Game, as ever, is about wealth transfer and the old but true observation that "War is nothing but a racket."
Say again what "the national interest" means? Since we are $6 trillion in the hole just for this round of Teh STUPID, US economy for working folks is in the toilet, "globalization" is a big fail with a nice chaser of environmental catastrophe to the glutton's meal of hyperconsumption, not even a pretext of "democracy" in our Republic any more...
And still the young and desperate enlist, to be indoctrinated into what kind of mind set, again?
Of course, it isn't just Yemen. "The War" has come to a lot of villages. Thanks to the state of play in the Great Game.
Now we can all enjoy the spectacle of social disintegration, with bloodshed galore, and lots of opportunities for our "trainers" and "forward men" and jackals to get us glued to another Tarbaby. I'm sure this link just can't be credible for what it displays of the ground truth in Syria, and the involvement of the Gamers there in some kind of effort to steer the well-armed, loony-looter, seemingly anomic marauders, and curry favor with possible eventual "winners" in the only way these folks apparently know how to think and react:
While it is understandable that the US does not wish to get into yet another conflict in this region, at the same time it must ensure that Assad stops any further (or new) use of Chemical weapons.
Of course, there's other stuff beyond It'sAllAboutIsrael that our Great Gamers have to factor into their, er, ah, "considerations," stuff like those now-Israeli Dolphin-class submarines the Germans were so happy to sell to people who nominally have no reason to love them (though of course there's that South African apartheid-state connection from not so many years ago to double-flash illuminate things a bit), that per the best-kept not-military-secret have nuclear-armed missiles aboard them. Read all about it, folks, and maybe remember our mutual vulnerability, our daily increasing mutual vulnerability and unwilling interdependence with every ton of coal and cubic mile of methane and megagallon of oil and GM foodcrop and Roundup molecule, and who gets rich off of adding to to REAL terror:
Maybe 400 nuclear weapons (alleged, of course, not acknowledged, ready to be "delivered" HOW, in addition to via sub-launched cruise missiles?). The USS Liberty. Jonathan Pollard. "Uncle Freier." "You must go to war on Iran to keep them from having a nuclear program. And for other reasons." STUXNET. Assassinations of diplomats. Invasion and conquest and the death-of-a-thousand cuts taking of Gaza and the West Bank. Billions in taxpayer dollars transferred from the US Treasury to where, again, every year? $6 trillion in recent war expenditures on what can only be called "STUPID" from the standpoint of any rational citizen of the United States who is thinking about his or her actual national interests?
Thanks so much for the advice and counsel. Oh, that was not just a "suggestion?" Oops, I missed the "must" in there...
Gee, why would Feaver posit just two choices for the "Obama administration:" Tough-guy idiocy of the Bush-league variety ("enforce the Red Line" HOW, exactly?), or, "sacrifice U.S. credibility" (like "we" have any of that left, right? as if "credibility" is something you "earn" by kicking in doors or unloading another sh_tstorm of Shock-N-Awe (tm))? Not possible for the Really Smart Folks in our Imperial Capital to come come up with some other "nuanced" approach to all this, with an eye toward present conduct that is looking toward a future with some reduced level of violent idiocy and further "advances" of the military monstrosity? Like maybe thinking about repairing our national rep by doing stuff that is consistent not with our "war is a racket" Great Game plots, but with some actual spread, over the long haul, of decent governance and reduction of misery?
But the neocons continue to whisper in the ear of the powerful, more's the pity.
This sure sounds reminiscent of what the 9/11 crew was up to as they moved toward doing their personal version of EFFING STUPID. Seems like "legal" terrorists like CIA operatives and, gasp, SECRET SERVICE dudes, and High Military Officers, and Repuglican Family Values Politicians, and the whole Financial Industry, and arms dealers and stuff, also live real large and high and self-indulgent as they go about acting out their part of the human tragedy, pretending it's all about High Moral Values And Freedom and Patriotism and All That. Even "the Taliban" does rape and dope, and abuses pretty little dancing boys, and that's a behavior that appears to manifest in every old-man-dominated "religious" structure.
Lots of anonymous little people out there writing and release virulent code into the net. Are they "terrorists" worthy of notice? A science fiction story of not so long ago was based on how holographic projection will likely be abused when it's developed -- juvenile delinquents record the image of the inside of an elevator car, jimmy the doors so they will open even if the car is up the shaft, and trusting souls then step into the image and down the shaft. I'm sure more applications will come to mind... Any way to "fix" that?
"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself — anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called."
— George Orwell, "1984"
And remember the "horror of the democracies," responding viscerally to images of all those Chinese, waving that Little Red Book, smiling wide, all those district commissars looking searchingly into all those faces for any sign of "deviance..."
@DanG: There's been a lot of observations about how people who trade (seemingly happily and willingly, "two killers for constant surveillance" -- that only gets more intrusive over time) their "rights" for "security" deserve and will get neither. (Unless those two are serial killers, the stats are pretty clear that murder is mostly a singular-event crime, emotion-driven and done to someone known to the killer -- not a lot of risk avoided there.)
As to abuses of state power, in arresting and detaining, there are little reports like this,
And of course there's the whole "prison industrial complex" thing and the activities of The Innocence Project and I guess a narrow and "legalistic" reading of the argument would say that the many people wrongfully detained and wrongfully convicted at least had the "benefit" of the legal process, kind of like the Occupy people beaten, penned, dragged and held by fiat.
Tell you what: I was going to say that you can go ahead and feel free to trade away your rights for some spurious "security," but the problem with that is that means MY rights go away, too. Because the kinds of people who end up running the state-security apparatus do not draw nice distinctions between those who make your argument and concessions, including people who from their positions in the world are comfortably and at least presently immune to the effects of the long, slow slide into autokleptocracy, and those of us who don't care to have that done to them.
Is the Alawite adherence to Assad something unreasonable, or something else? What is an "unreasonable level of lyalty"? Don't folks who for a variety of historical reasons, and via one accident or another, rise to the top of political and economic structures kind of notoriously "cling to power" and privilege and perquisites, for some strange reason? The military and its contractors seem to still be doing pretty well in Egypt, and some say in Iran, and of course in the US... If the act of ceding the top dog position means exposing your throat to the next in line, unless you are one of those dictators who gets "bought out" or flees to some Blessed Isle with a planeload of portable wealth?
I don't know, of course. It's the complexity you get from all those "tribes with flags" and all the "interests" that are in play, all of which come to have presence and meaning where the bombs and artillery shells fall to earth, where the blast injuries and shrapnel and bullets and RPG rounds and knives cut into vulnerable human flesh with each "soft target" corpse's former attachments linking out into the mess of emotions and expectations and greeds that are on the boil now. For the Sneaky Petes and Great Gamers, this is just a "situation" to attempt to "manage" so it develops in a way that's attractive to their rendition of "the national interest."
"The opposition." A nicely neutral moniker. I've watched a lot of the videos made available by various members of that category, and everybody tsks over how horrible armed violence is, but really, take a while to look at what is being done in God's name as visible in the archive being kept by the good folks at Syria Comment, and really, this is "freedom fighting?" Or "governing?" And there's a principled or even intelligent and self-interested way to take sides and figure out which bunch to give MANPADs to? And to have the nerve to say that staying out of it is cowardly and causing civilian misery? This from people who over decades, generations, centuries even, have set the initial conditions and provided the little inputs and spins that have things going the way they are, so "we" have to fear some kind of general conflagration in the HaHaHoly Land environs?
In the meantime, billions or trillions of words, and yes, these are some of them, will be uttered, typed, broadcast, to explain, evaluate, justify, condemn, parse, and particularize into misleading categories, all the elements of everyday transport of weapons, fighters, "leaders" and other demagogues, refugees, foodstuffs and water, all the flying bits of the current nexus of our insanity. While the planet burns, faster and faster. And the few, as usual, have their every little whim catered to by their "people."
Too bad us naked apes can't seem to do much better than this.
MK, I agree totally. But of course have a cavil --
"exponential gains in the size of the United States intelligence community"
...?
Habits of thought, colored by language. If the word is "gains," why then, that's a GOOD thing, right? Since we're accustomed to "gain" being an honorable goal? See "stock market" and "real estate" and "iApple..."
At the NSA jobs portal:
Where Intelligence Goes to Work
Intelligence. It's the ability to think abstractly. Challenge the unknown. Solve the impossible. And at NSA, it's about protecting the Nation. A career at NSA offers the opportunity to work with the best, shape the course of the world, and secure your own future. Isn't it time to put your intelligence to work?
On the other hand, GregoryLent's analogy to how to respond, as if these creatures with their separate reality are just junkies who might rob a few convenience stores and shoot the clerks, maybe pull a carjacking or three, on their way to death in some fetid alley, maybe understates the "threat," the virulence? Seems more to me like a particularly aggressive metastatic kind of cancer, one that's doing the stuff that "successful" cancers do, hiding from the body's immune system, "gaining exponentially" by escaping the constraints on growth that a billion years of biology built, tricking the body into building huge new arteries (angiogenesis -- http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/understandingcancer/angiogenesis ) to siphon more of the body's energy and resources into the spreading tumors without which the tumors can't grow and spread, lining up new ways to displace, convert, consume or destroy healthy tissue in favor of more of its own kind.
This is not a "friend you can walk away from." It's inside us and our institutions and eating us alive, while claiming to be "protecting us" and "providing security" and "keeping us safe." And like cancer, the "thing" that's busy every moment of every day "gaining" does not give a rip-sh_t that the net effect of its activities is the eventual, inevitable, painful, grinding, DEATH OF THE ORGANISM. And thus, eventually, of its own "successful" rotted self. http://mana-junkie.tumblr.com/post/18843214034/i-think-i-won-by-gahan-wilson
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Reduced to picking nits and petty personal denigration and disparagement by way of impeaching the dude? Here, of all places? What purpose does that serve, in the greater Manichaean madness? Sad.
Yeah, "the Government" hasn't charged him with treason. Well, no public actual legal indictment yet. But on the other hand, a google quickey yields stuff like this, from U.S. News
"Feinstein calls Snowden a traitor" -- http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2013/06/10/Feinstein-calls-Snowden-a-traitor/UPI-86781370845139/?spt=hs&or=tn What's her position in government, again?
And of course from the sneaky-pete, evil end of our shadow government, you got Dick Cheney (see this very blog) and John Bolton, http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2013/06/john-bolton-edward-snowden-is-guilty-of-worst-form-of-treason/, a fella who can actually say with a straight, well, florid face,
You go, Bolton. Preferably far, far away...
And for somebody who is constantly implying long, deep involvement in Important Serious Stuff and things, it's interesting that one would cast doubt on the potential for someone in Snowden's circumstances to be disappeared. Granted that our sneaky-petes have shown some clumsiness in their tradecraft over the years, as with Castro's beard and cigars, and that whole Afghanistan-bin Laden thing...
If you ask our Responsible Historians, everything is in the text of certain documents and how you parse and syntactify the definitions of the terms. "Treason" under the Constitution is simply these few words:
With some expansion in the US Code, at http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/part-I/chapter-115
There is a whole literature, with varying degrees of cogency and accuracy, showing that Cheney lives in a very fragile glass house regarding his disparagement of Snowden, albeit very well guarded by phalanxes of "security forces," including of course lifetime Secret Service protection.
Here's a few examples that hit the salient points of actions that warrant the charge that CHENEY is the traitor, in the worst possible way:
http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2010/01/who-is-dick-cheney.html
http://oneifbyland.blogspot.com/2004/10/case-for-treason-against-dick-cheney.html
I guess I we should just leave it to Bill and Joe to tell us what actually is, what and who is guilty of what, in this swamp of perversion and venality that is the postnational-corporatized, privatized-profit, socialized-loss Great Game, the one that's killing our children's planet so the Few can 'live large' now... and maybe worry that Cheney might actually live to darken our counsels and plague us essentially forever, thanks to Innovative Technology: http://www.forbes.com/sites/katiedrummond/2012/07/19/dmitry-itskov-avatar/
"It is my belief that this type of fraud contributed to the 2008 financial meltdown." And how big was that "contribution?" You might look at the FBI's stats for a framework: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/investigate/white_collar/mortgage-fraud/mortgage_fraud
Fraud by "homeowner" types is a pretty tiny part of the total losses in the latest large economic collapse, or whatever you call it.
There are sharks in the water, and also "vampire squid," who are a whole lot more rapacious and voracious...
On a Desert Planet. What would Shai Hulud do?
Query: do the Billboards have some magic mechanism to remove the mercury, hormones, pesticides, sulfur compounds, cyanide and all the rest from that water that they seive from the air? And hmmmm, what happened to all the water formerly on the surface of Mars, again?
Yeah, now "Asia" can take its turn stripping the next level of life out of the planet. Really something to be proud of, to look forward to, to glory in and all that. One wonders how well "Asia" will go about divvying up the spoils -- might makes right, like the corporate West? "It's Not Illegal?" I'm sure all the displaced and starving peasants, gasping for a breath of polluted air and dripping water with a bouillabaisse of dissolved toxins into their children's slack mouths, will be all Happy Face about the Great Victory.
If "Asia" includes Russia, one of the new inventions and gadgets and concepts and ideas is how to make it possible for Vulture Capitalists and Vampire Squids(who know NO place or tribal loyalties) to essentially live forever, as imperishable as the charters and then unstoppable momentums of all the post-national corporate entities: http://www.forbes.com/sites/katiedrummond/2012/07/19/dmitry-itskov-avatar/
And how about nanoweapons, and New Biology "food" and plagues, and robots making most of us unnecessary except as consumers, and what did the Creator have in mind when he set in motion the global idiocy that has people living, if you can call it that, on and from the scraps "thrown away" in the garbage dumps of our great Postnational Cities? Crabs scrabbling in the dark depths for bits of a dead carcass...
What's the Cantonese for "iCrap?"
So, smarty-pants, which faction is right?
Really, Q? That's what's happened? That's what Obama has done with his Big Brain?
Maybe you are the "Q" from the 11th dimension, who used to drive the poor USS Enterprise crew to distraction with murderous Puckish or maybe Loki-ish tricks? Played a lot of chess there, with The Only President The World Has?
And has it done any of us any good to resolve entire nominal national collectives down to single points, talking as if there is "A" Russia and "A" Syria and "A" US Empire?
In 1967 and 1968, CS ("riot gas") grenades were frequently used with the intention not only of disabling but also to kill. Often in tunnels, to kill the "gooks" hiding in there, but other applications as well.
In my own unit, our flight officers were taking the Troops' Class A rations and other supplies and trading them to Air Force types for cases of steaks and chicken that were regularly delivered to soften the hardships of base life at a huge AF/Marine installation in I Corps. Our officers were having some great barbecues while we ate canned stuff from the Korean War era. The remedy for that was several episodes (they were kind of slow learners) of CS grenades being lobbed into the middle of their barbecues. With the clear message that it could just as easily have been fragmentation grenades.
And for another example of what "war" really is, our First Sergeant took the plywood sheets that we laid on pallets so we wouldn't be living with mud floors in our tents, and made us build a nice "hooch" for him, complete with insulation to improve the efficiency of his air conditioner, and powered his man-cave with a generator that had supplied power for the beer coolers at the enlisted men's "club." And somebody tossed a CS grenade into that hooch and dropped a bolt through the hasp on the door while Sarge was sleeping. Again, a message... "Rank has its privileges," but the lower ranks have their recourse.
And for the sake of completeness, it's worth pointing out that there's a lot of guys with ragtag uniforms and civvy clothes waving RPGs and AKs and FALs and AR15-class weapons around where they have been "victorious over the infidel," yelling "Allahu Akhbar!" over and over and cutting throats and shooting unarmed and bound captives of who knows what persuasions. In those circumstances, as is pointed out, it's hard to do any dispassionate and accurate "scientific polling" too...
I'd be interested too. It's not like the folks you imply all the time you are connected to in unspecified ways have ever done anything like send mercenaries into conflict areas to exacerbate the situation in the name of some unavowable "national interest." Glad to know you are keeping an eye on all that for us, ready to pounce upon any disparagement of Great Game plays.
Useful service rendered, at least, in encouraging people of good will, who try to shine light in the dark corners, as part of trying to work for that silly ideal of peace and stability, to actually research and nail down examples of the kinds of activities that have been subjected to the "impeachment by lack of references" attack...
Looks like "Syria" is getting to the point that some "conservatives" in the US seem to long for: Armed bands, under battle leaders, shouting the Arabic equivalent of "In The Name Of The Lord!" as they dance and prance over the carcasses of other formerly fellow humans. There's lots of the kind of warporn on Youtube, and a concentrated load of it on the video archives over at Syria Comment - http://syriavideo.net/
All this high-falutin' palaver about Great Issues and the Great Game and how to "manage conflict." Like any of that reaches down to the combat level where the massacres 'n stuff go on. How can you beat the EXCITEMENT? The seduction of the WEAPONS, and the SLOGANS? Oh, the delicious anticipation as the young fella in this video lines up on a "state helicopter" with his Russian-made MANPAD! http://theaviationist.com/2013/06/10/syria-sa-16/#.UbmoY9jV3ts Then whooshBOOM! "Allahu Akbar!" and somebody's gotta put up $8 million for a replacement chopper for the "state's" inventory, and go to IDELF for another couple of SA-16s... for fun and profit. Talk about "gun shows..."
But Hey, it's just business, right?! "Companies need to focus their Export strategy on Growth markets having a plan for the Bric's is vital" (sic) http://www.bricpartner.com/hi/Ed/i/more/IDELF/ide/2252
Joe Stalin was our friend for a while, too...
Let's remember what the system the Paulists are pushing, pushing, pushing for every day actually would look like:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/11/journey-into-a-libertarian-future-part-i-%E2%80%93the-vision.html
And for folks who frustrate themselves debating with libertarians, here's an entry point into the reasons they are so what-everrrr... http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/tactn/tactn008.pdf , and another, out of a whole literature of the same: http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2006/11/tactic-for-libertarians.html
Don't get sucked in by the powdered-sugar coating, or the appearance of orderliness.
All this recourse to the Constitution, as if the words on paper have some kind of magic to hold back the Darkness. "We have given you a republic, madam, if you can keep it." Sayeth Yoo and Gonzales, the structure and strictures of the Constitution are in the present context "quaint" and "obsolete." The collective we personify as "Obama" patently agrees, with extensions and expansions. That oath stuff about "supporting and defending the Constitution" was all recited with fingers and toes crossed...
There have been other nominal and short-lived "republics" too, all getting sucked down into consumption and dissipation and empire and eventually collapse and the stuff of moral lessons preached by "conservatives" who applaud and abet and profit from the collapse.
We've got no ideals, no functioning mythos, no common goals except MORE! for US! even while the folks that actually run the joint tighten the screws on the rest of us, squeezing out and stealing our labor, our homes, our actual security, by niggles and jiggles and tugs on the levers of power...
What an honest Troop realizes about what has long gone way beyond the Citizen Soldier myth:
http://www.tampabay.com/news/perspective/memorial-days-meaning/2122691
See how many errors you can find in that soldier's mental picture...
Hey, bernard, I hope things are better where you are! The descent isn't always a proceso rápido, It happens in small little ways too...
http://www.wtsp.com/news/topstories/article/320504/250/Longboat-Key-police-to-photograph-license-plates
Kind of makes me glad I'm not going to live forever...
He's a lawyer and a politician. You have to read every word carefully, in context, not be shy about doing some fact-checking and other research, and with awareness that dissembling is a good thing in the applicable professional ethics -- the functional ones, not the ever-weaker written ones. And remember the nature and structure of the system for whom he is the current figurehead, as much of it as can be seen, at least...
"The truth? You can't HANDLE the truth!"
MK- your last paragraph above is irony, right?
And I have always wondered, as I'm sure other have,about whether those lipless, grim, Superpatriots like the Dulleses and Lemay and Rough Men actually believed any of the themes and stories they told themselves about some grand Manichaean conflict -- other than the back-and-forth between the identical types of people on both sides of those Curtains (What was ours? Iron and Bamboo were taken -- were our wizards and warlords operating behind the Nylon Curtain?) who by doing what they had a serious bent to do, ( http://sovietologist.blogspot.com/2008/04/1959-usaf-proposal-to-use-nuclear.html ) made the rest of us suspect our neighbors and learn to duck'n'cover and how "with enough shovels, we're all going to make it: dig a hole and throw a couple of doors and some dirt on top -- it's the dirt that does it" -- thereby interring our sorry carcasses to reduce the health consequences for the Blessed Survivors emerging from the Continuity of Government Bunkers... http://www.amazon.com/With-Enough-Shovels-Reagan-Nuclear/dp/0394722035/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1370816324&sr=8-1&keywords=with+enough+shovels
Yemen. Population, about 24 million. About 400,000 in the military branches, ruled by the same guy who happens to be President. About 40% of the national budget goes to the military, at $3.5 billion it's over 6% of GDP, still rising thanks to a new conscription law and the Great Game. Unemployment officially 35%, actually who knows? A history of food riots, schism and unification, tribal and "religious" divisions, the usual mix. National wealth dependent on oil, expected to be depleted in 2017. Some gas reserves, mostly undeveloped. Military organized such that current ruler has to fear his "military governors" will do the same to him. "We" give the Yemeni government aid, currently and visibly, at least, about $345 million, that is largely eaten by corruption, see "Humor: Yemen’s ‘Ministry of Corruption.’"
http://www.yementimes.com/en/1683/opinion/2458/Humor-Yemen%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%98Ministry-of-Corruption%E2%80%99.htm And the rest used to buy more weapons. There's a Cordon Bleu recipe for stability for you.
The coolest part is how the military, the biggest political force in this "post-colonial client state," with its fascinatingly typical "another cradle of civilization" history (quickie wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yemen#Military) is armed, trained and all that: a combination of mostly Russian weapons and aircraft, but lots of "US" C-130s in operation, and other stuff on the way. Also supplying: Italy, Czech Republic, Sweden, Britain… The very paradigm of a "good customer" for the World Military Industrialists, with a nice running conflict that has long legs and enough factoids to give cover to the "US" covert and not-so activities there. So "we" have lots of "advisers" and "contractors" and sneaky-petes flooding the zone. In local news, "U.S stepping up military presence in Yemen," with a little taste of Grand Geopolitical Thinking too.
http://yemenpost.net/Detail123456789.aspx?ID=3&SubID=6378
Got to be ready to kill anyone "we" think is a threat to "US persons," which mostly is to "US persons" who are in reach only because "we" put them in harm's way as a gambit in the Great Game, and because the most-used tools in the US geopolitical drawer seem to be poisoned darts, daggers and Great Big Mother____ing Hammers…
How stupid is that?
Must be nice to be able to compartmentalize so easily and completely. Let us not note patterns, and presume sole possessoon of that higher higher consciousness... one way to dominate.
To me, at least, this is not just a "story." It's just one more index of what's in the works and what's in store for us People of the iFreedom'n'Liberty (tm).
Yes, we should all just rest calm in the assurance that all the hoo-rah is just "silly stories." And the Government, or that part of it that attracts the J. Edgars and Wild Bills and Colbys and Caseys into "governmetn service" which has damn little to do with "service" and a lot more to do with the bureaucratic metastasis of our Domestic Stasi.
No reason even going to the bother of linking to the stuff that's been coming out since 6/06 at 12:04 pm, and even before then... Through a PRISM, darkly, with forces arrayed in ECHELON formation.
"Comfort ye, my people..."
Buckley actually had "information" that meant something in the Game. Who knows "who" grabbed him and did the "enhanced interrogation," and for what purposes in that little corner of the Game board? Mopes grabbed off the street and "entered" into the machinery of our institutionalized Gulag were apparently "enhanced" way beyond the point where it was clear they had no "secrets to pass." And the shameful lockdown and abuse continues, in significant part because setting those people free would make them able to relate their treatment at the hands of "our" very own Jack Bauers and heroic "agents."
Maybe part of the operant conditioning and idiot momentum that gifts us with Guantanamo in our Brave New World of Perpetual 4th Generation Warfare is that "we," the military-state security apparat that operates the Guantanolag, have only this kind of programmed response to being defeated, time and again, by not only the tiny number of individuals who plot and set off bombs and stuff in the "homeland" or against "US interests," whatever that means, not having been intercepted by the mostly effective plain old police work, but by plain people who dare to show tenacity and dignity in the face of Imperial Troopers and folks whose thinking and behavior, as best one can see, recalls other similar state-security entities.
These captives, or whatever one could accurately and honestly call them, mostly posed no "threat," but since they are weak and "we" are strong, guess what happens? Jack Bauer, maybe?
And I say that last bit with mixed feelings, having been on the receiving end of 4th Gen strategy and tactics, http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=10&cad=rja&ved=0CG4QFjAJ&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.military.com%2FContentFiles%2F4gw_manual_draft.doc&ei=aR-vUZKpM42K0QHVlID4Aw&usg=AFQjCNFhmVmpKIfm-plc1wzSaE4QqDMezQ&bvm=bv.47380653,d.dmQ, and having the reasons that "troops" always have had (racism, fear of getting killed, loss of some of our Band of Brothers, revenge and over-revenge, the stuff that motivated the Phoenix Program and its apologists and revisionists, etc.) to want, in my war, to "punish" the "gooks."
"Sophisticated" used to mean "spoiled, adulterated."
"DEFENSE" used to mean, you know, "DEFENSE." A long time ago...
"TRILLION" used to mean, like, "BILLION." The coming meaning is "QUADRILLION," of course.
"DEATH" and "DESTRUCTION" and "FUTILITY" and "IDIOCY" still sort of mean the same thing they always have meant.
Particularly for those who get "sophisticated" by "DEFENSE." They are called stuff like "BUG SPLATS" and "SOFT TARGETS."
Isn't language fun?
Here's a bitsy small sample of what's going on in one little corner of the Global Imperium while the stupid Great Gamers are busily getting richer and more potent and scaring the serial hell out of the rest of us:
[Anyone noticing a certain kind of idiotic futility built into the circularity of counter-counter- counter-counter- counter-counter- counter-counter- counter-counter- counter-counter-threats? Profitable as they may be for a few of us?] There's lots more war-lover idiocy on offer at the link this quote came from: http://www.ausairpower.net/APA-Grumble-Gargoyle.html, one of thousands of sources of haha "intelligence" about how the WorldMIC operates and cogitates…
And on the diplomatic front, "did they or didn't they": another chapter in the "are you lying now, or were you lying then" endless tomfoolery:
http://www.jpost.com/International/Russia-No-plans-to-sell-air-defense-system-to-Syria-312775
And on the full-on, 24/7, "trillions for threats and counterthreats, but not one cent for health care or infrastructure maintenance," no amount is too much for countermeasures front:
Source: http://www.defence.pk/forums/military-forum/112936-greece-quietly-provides-israeli-air-force-pivotal-assistance-s-300-a.html#ixzz2UzjqM1E8
And in the AIPAC-reassurance, keep-those-sales-figures-up column, there's this:
[Rest easy, O daughters of Sion, the Lord is with thee…]
Read more: http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Security-Industry/2009/01/20/Can-the-US-F-35-fighter-destroy-Russias-S-300-systems/UPI-39001232464740/#ixzz2Uzi588bz So all "we" got to do is gift the IDF a bunch of F-35s, and hey, THAT threat is taken care of, for now…
And, of course, a whole other lot of clever, dry idiocy is on offer in the WorldMIC trade press on the onrushing obsolescence not only of "legacy weapons," but of course even the current baddest-and-worstest, soon to be profitably replaced, with Krupp-tion-lubricated sales models leading to billions in sales to "both sides" of the nominal conflicts and Great Imperial Grunting and Shoving Scrum.
And the stupid quadrille-cum-tap-dance goes on and on…
Watch out for your toes, little people – you are likely to get trod upon.
Does "prison" include "jail?" Let's not candy-coat the numbers:
- See more at: http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/Marijuana#sthash.Cc8jhbpb.dpuf See lots more at that link. And 700,000+ does not count those in jail awaiting hearings, busted by bastard cops, or otherwise "not convicted yet." Today's set from my local area can be found here: http://www.tampabay.com/mugshots/ Just one 24-hour period, and a mesmerizing set of fellow humans who have done other stuff too. Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein are not in the mix...
Of course, for the udder side, see David "I am not an a__hole" Frum: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/12/20/marijuana-s-victims.html
Does that satisfy the Fake Fairness Doctrine metric?
We have buried J. Eyewash Hoover, but he rules us from his grave...
Amen.
The destructive potential energies in reservoirs behind dams, that themselves are so nicely vulnerable to various weapons, make great weapons in their own right, and provide all kinds of tactical and strategic options and opportunities -- more grist for the effing Great Game mill.
As long as the goal is tribal dominance, and of course "profit," achieved by destroying the stability and security of others, with the various "benefits" that accrue to a very few Players, we are well on our way to "Planet of the Apes Meets Soylent Green." But there will be so much to chatter about, along the way, and speculate on and offer Illuminations based on deep thinking and complexitations from our Well Placed Cogniscenti and Experienced Players. And what actually happens will invariably be dictated by Mr. Murphy, not the Best Laid Plans.
But there's money to be made in the interstices... Lots of it... and with any luck, you can do a Nazi Retreat to Argentina or a "Tailor of Panama" riff, to duck the big consequences of your tripping the first leg of the whole Rube Goldberg apparatus...
And this guy wanted so badly to be president:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021858072
Oh brave new world that has such creatures in it...
One-sided?
How many nukes are still aimed across the oceans at our mutually-assuredly-destroyable populations? Who's spying on whom? Who's still "on the ground" with fun'n'games in the margins of the former USSR, stirring up trouble, doing industrial espionage, and a whole lot more?
Yeah, "checking Russian influence" is so meaningless that google shows gaggles of papers and conferences and stuff from "serious people" on all sides of the Overton Black Hole that say exactly the other thing? "Meaningless" activity, at significant public expense, out of the enormous, dead-end-momentum of the whole tribal Cold War thing? or just out of stupid Game-of-Risk HABIT? Or because it is, might one say, very cost-plus-whatever-you-can-steal-contract "profitable?"
Gee, are any of the "scenarios" the War department runs, I was going to say "world without end" but THAT obviously ain't its fate, that "involve" the Rooskies? Do the Vulture-Vampire-Squid-Capitalist-Class Attack Submarines who threaten our shores from bases on Manhattan Island have any concerns about them Rooskies cruising just miles off our shores, all hair-trigger ready to launch homing torpedoes at "our" submarines? http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/110612-632389-russian-attack-sub-cruises-off-east-coast.htm?p=full
How tough is the US Empire? So tough we don't even need to notice those guys with the bear-fur hats any more?
Because the Great Game, in its unfortunate, idiotic nature, and thanks to the persistence and disingenuity and idiocy of the Really Serious Players who take part, stuffed full of arcane lingo and acronyms and bulging with policies and dogmas, does go on, and on, and on, and on, and on, until in one way or another it stops, right?
Is it new news that "the battlefield" actually IS the entire planet and its "space environment," or that all the planning for implementation and management of the Global Network-Centric Interoperable Battlespace (GWOP, or something) has been going on, well-funded, for decades, with new little programming fillips like the "Angry Birds" cyberweapon thingie that is getting a little press the last couple of days, http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/05/pentagon-cyberwar-angry-birds/, along with this grandiose vision from Boeing, I especially like the "What ifs... at the end there, http://www.boeing.com/news/speeches/2003/roberts_030206.html, that is echoed and built upon by all the other parasitic contractors that hope, I guess, to "take over the whole world!!!!!", https://www.ncoic.org/home
Let us not forget: "The purpose of torture is torture." State Security types torture for Very Important Reasons, and because they get off on it. Apologists like John Yoo-Hoo and others, including some who have Spoken here, tell us it's all been decreed Legal And Proper by the Proper Authorities. Our Great Nation, or a subset of it anyway, even runs schools and seminars on how to do it most efficiently. And puts out training manuals and books and policy documents and videos and stuff on the proper administration, in all senses, of the Curious Activity.
And we are going to have to decide if people like Kiriakou actually fit into the carefully circumscribed mandatory definitional niche of "whistleblower" at all. And people who are so disloyal as all that, spilling the beans where everyone can see them, just have to absorb the consequences of their behavior, right? I mean, how else are all those things we don't want to see or think about our special selves going to be kept under wraps?
So for the life of me I guess I am personally hard pressed to see what the big deal problem is, right? I mean, it's not like it's being done to tens or hundreds of thousands of people, is it? Oh, it is? And, like, so what if it's notoriously ineffective? I mean, c'mon, there's worse things done in the name of Freedom'n'Liberty (tm), after all... It's really just Human Nature, after all, one of our little endearing, enduring tics...
Super, you've been around enough to know that Walt Kelly stated it for "us" so very succinctly a few decades back: We has met the enemy and he is us." With extensions and footnotes: http://www.igopogo.com/we_have_met.htm And before him Pope and Shakespeare and Plato and all those guys and gals with a smidgen or dollop or cartload of insight...
This current Imperial Extravagance is just the latest, "greatest" exemplar. Complete with boffo apologists, malefactors, et al., and iStuffed all the way up the wazoo. Even the people who have "people" to do stuff for them,, to extend their grabbing hands and the reach of their blades, have discovered exactly how icy the glissade really is: http://www.kauffman.org/research-and-policy/we-have-met-the-enemy-and-he-is-us.aspx
The comforting myth, the one they tell babies to put them to sleep, is that It Won't Happen To Us, Because WE Are SPECIAL!
And besides, says mommy under her breath, I'll be dead, comfortably dead, after a life of excess and excitement and titillation (not the same thing) thanks to that li'l ol' bumper sticker proclamation, "WE'RE SPENDING OUR CHILDREN'S INHERITANCE!" Often seen on the capacious rump of a "Class A Motorhome" on its 1.5-mpg voyage to idiot irrelevance.
The more one learns, assuming what one learns is the truth and complete and all that, an unnaturally and insupportably enormous assumption, the more one has to recognize that nothing, NOTHING, is ever what you think it is. Nothing happened the way "they" or "people" say, or even when, or by the means stated, or for what reasons, including the reasons of the people who are behind the people who are behind the people who are still behind the people who send the people to get still other people to do the stuff that you think was done, and are just absotively posilute you know why.
Brownian motion. Sure makes it easy for the sneaks and jackals and tapeworms and "complex leaders" to do the stuff they so profitably and smugly and enjoyably do...
"paid the last measure they can pay." {sob}
Those of us who are "beneficiaries" of the diligence and great public largesse of the Veterans Administration, thanks to stuff that happened in one of those wars you have heretofore gone on at such didactic length about being "just" or "unjust," might argue that being outright killed by an IED (sometimes made of US-manufactured bombs or artillery shells,) or "died instantly" shot through the head or heart, or ripped up and bled out in short order, is a maudlin "last full measure," all right. But one might consider scale and scope and value of the "measure" that others of us live with for years or decades after, and our friends and families, who often were stupid and misguided enough to "support" us in our enlistments "for the good of the nation." Sent on fool's Imperial errands or "fund raisers," by pompous, venal, idiotic, incompetent politicians and officers and the whole cadre of contractors and sneaky-petes and pedantic apologists and all the rest.
That mawkish crap about "their sacrifice:" does that integrate all the various ways in which "our troops" get killed, from the nominally Medal of Honor brave, to the dude who flips a Mule while drag-racing down a hillside in I Corps, or rotting from some "medication" they were forced to consume or disease they acquired, etc.? Or are we supposed to just stop at the boundaries of the Myth and the Pathos? "Fought in a war:" you hint you know what that means. Do you? Really? The parts where guys are MPs in the main PX in Saigon and get rich off of various scams? the currency traders? The supply sergeants who sell trophy weapons taken from dead "gooks" back to the nominal enemy? the officers who steal their "troops'" class-A rations to trade to the Air Force guys for steaks and chicken flown in from home, so they could have a barbecue every night? The contractors who work drunk on aircraft and kill Troops by over-tightening a critical bolt, or leaving off a safety wire?
The whole premise is a fraud, albeit an apparently inevitable part of the human behavioral set, starting in the very Cradle of Civilization, when the first would-be emperor used the surplus grain put up by husbandmen on the way to serfdom to arm up some Troops and send them over the Euphrates to put another little mud-walled "empire" to the sword, enslave the people they didn't kill, and steal all their stuff. That Great Game, in all its subsequent, vicious, dishonest, destructive, stupid complexity.
@Bill Bodden ...I was almost going to say, "Glad to have been able to do a small service." At least in the context of the very particular moment. As for the other "service" I got to do, not so much...
Occasionally clarity and unguarded honesty combine to add another bit to the jigsaw puzzle. One Troop who worked out the end-game moral aspects of his service in a different way than I, or my uncle and father and several of my friends for that matter, did, came up with this explanation of The Meaning of Memorial Day:
http://blogs.tampabay.com/news/perspective/memorial-days-meaning/2122691
Sort of explains it all, I guess… “It’s for the good of the Syndicate, and everybody has a share.” Fraudulent foreclosures dragging down real estate bubbles, hypervelocity stock "trading," Keystone XL and the concommitant fracking, "declining infrastructure," monolithic econopolitics, 4 or 6 or 8 degrees Celsius, Special Black Ops, the burgeoning Security State, and so on and so forth, we all have a share.
I'm so proud of us!
Haven't seen the after-action report, but one of the items often noted about rocket attacks is that the launchers and rockets are very portable, can be set up and launched in a very short time, and have often been used by people who have no connection to the launch area to "tag" the launch area and attract reprisals.
But hey, that's all part of the Great Game, isn't it? Building and distributing the rockets and launchers and all kinds of other weapons, for fun and profit, with little regard for consequences to those ever-elusive, apparently highly discounted desireables, stability, security, "peace", or with intentions to actively degrade them? And then doing all the complex stuff of trying to figure out who did what to whom for what reasons and how to respond or plan out the next 40 or 50 moves in the Game to achieve what particular goal, again? Just keeping the Game going, with the advantages that flow to a certain set of all of us?
Some of us rejoice in taking part in the complexity, and have commonality only with each other, behind a thin patina of "patriotism."
Yeah, Hugh, that is another good question...
Query - is there a significant chance Hezbollah might in a reasonable time frame become a legitimate political player or be subsumed or absorbed into another one?
Why can't Afghanistan get rid of this Karzai?
Brian: as a fella brought up in the time when the myths of America the Special had at least a little truth in them, when my teachers taught the forms and formalities of the "rule of law" thing under that Constitution thing, when there was a "Citizenship" merit badge for us Boy Scout types to earn (still is but different content) may I just say a heartfelt "thank you," for what you are doing day to day, and for your perseverance in the face of that Other Thing that seems to now be the Reality, the new myths, that aren't even being explored in schools or the press or even most of netspace. It takes courage of a special kind. Bless you. And thanks for posting here, for the benefit of those who don't know or would obscure and obfuscate and "justify" and apologize about (the theological definition) the crap that is committed "in our names" on helpless and hapless Others.
Which one of those guys is Ozymandias?
Regarding corporations, taxation is also a way, albeit pretty sorry, to redirect some of the externalities that the relatively new (last 4-500 years) corporate structures have been getting ever more adept at dumping of the "libertarian" Market Model and onto the general population and the rest of the planet.
Petroleum, coal, "paperandpulp," plastics and pesticides, all that stuff, have costs that for a lot of reasons, many of them under the labels of "cheerful corruption" and "regulatory capture," just somehow escape being included in the price of the product that the Magical Market is supposed to cross those hypersimplistic Supply and Demand curves for.
As is the case with trucking: Remember those little white stickers that used to adorn the butts of all those 48-foot and longer semi-trailers? The ones that read "This vehicle pays $3,280 in road use taxes every year"? http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrew-turnbull/4113060764/Part of a discontinued (due to pushback) marketing/propaganda effort to obscure the more telling point that the vehicle in question did more like $180,000 in annual damage and wear to bridges, road surfaces and other infrastructure (like toxic runoff from roadways and all those teeny black "PM-10" soot particles that are lodged in all our lungs.) http://www.epa.gov/airtrends/aqtrnd95/pm10.html (Note, says the Agency: EPA no longer updates this information, but it may be useful as a reference or resource. hahahahahaha!)
http://www.utexas.edu/research/ctr/pdf_reports/2122_S.pdf
A lot of those trucks also proudly wore stickers that read "Don't like the way I'm driving? Dial 1-800-EAT-SHIT." http://statigr.am/p/286331210904783898_190786426
And of course it's always the case that "Rust never sleeps!" http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.rollanet.org/~conorw/cwome/de_bridge_corrosion4.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.rollanet.org/~conorw/cwome/article51%2652combined.htm&h=1024&w=1536&sz=335&tbnid=qKl6WtfdvDK4HM:&tbnh=84&tbnw=126&zoom=1&usg=__TpVlD19ZgJPu3SsyC0YB5sycti0=&docid=q594RCs11iovxM&sa=X&ei=iaqfUYfJLI269gSa24HoDg&ved=0CGYQ9QEwEA&dur=7024
Why does it seem that despite the interstitial fog of surely knowledgeable noise, the above sounds like a case for counter-terrorist tactical technical questions driving strategy, policy, expenditures, STATE BEHAVIOR? As opposed to, you know, the other way around?
"Why are you carrying that double-barrelled Hollands & Hollands .470 Nitro Express elephant gun at port-arms around Times Square?" asks the cop.
"To keep the wild elephants away," says the dude.
"There's not a wild elephant within 5,000 miles of here, buddy!"
"See? It works. Now let me get back to my patrolling..."
And as to wishful and magical thinking and making things up, there is proof, is there, positive or negative, from sources that don't have shall we say reasons to shade the truth to protect themselves, their careers, and the "policy preferences" THEY have (like the ones that got "us" into Iraq and are keeping "us" in Afghanistan, etc.?), that the counter-whoever-gets-blown-up tactical toys serve any strategic or even tactical purpose that "serves the national interest?"
Claiming or implying undisclosed "special expertise" does not count as "proof."
The Barbary States were actually engaged in something that used to be called "piracy," kind of like what's going on off Somalia and stuff, called that even by the US Navy, if you read carefully, and what "the young nation did" was "suppression of piracy," but hey, who's counting:
http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/stream/faq45-4.htm
From his stack of 4 x 6 cards, Bill has spoken. Q, threfore, ED.
Actually, all he really needed is the one with card with AUMF, Article 51 and that thing that he calls the Law (sic) of War noted on it. Maybe this is what he refers to, from a perch of claimed Realpolitic Wisdom?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=zxxq3Hn7Fpo
Keith, that is such a comforting explanation for it all: "It's The Market, Stupid!"
Or maybe your comment was just really subtle snark?
It ain't just the tax breaks, apparently. Does Tim have any concerns that maybe other things "influence" the price we pay for petroproducts? Like maybe there's some fire, under the billowing clouds of CO2-laden smoke, about crude oil price manipulations that might be worse for us Muppets and Dumb Money types than the LIBOR gaming?
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-23/oil-manipulation-inquiry-shows-eu-s-hammer-after-libor.html
Why do you leap to the defense of "big oil?" Which of course is corporations, made up of selected human critters who will hew to the party line, corporate entities that have nothing at all whatsover in any way shape or form to do with goobering up politics and the planet, now do they?
Maybe if the COSTS of all the externalities that these creatures excrete that have to be remedied by public tax expenditures were forced into the price of all those products and stuff you speak up for, leading to applications of ingenuity to the problem of keeping the freaking species alive by other technologies and strategies, maybe we collectively would not be looking up out of a cesspit at a sky turning yellow and brown and slowly sinking into the stinking ooze... But no, that would not be FAIR to somebody or other, would it?
The Kochs probably understand more than you know, and besides, like our FL Gov. Evil Tonedeaf Scott, they have "people" to advise them on how things work currently
Besides, all they have to do is keep the merry-go-round turning for the length of their miserable God-forsaken life spans. Since so far, at least, the Reaallly Rich have not been able to buy or steal deluxe, extended, Methusalem-quality lifespans... Other than maybe that Undead Cheney guy (will he really get a "state funeral?")... though of course the Science they in other realms spurn is working hard on that, and you can bet that "anti-death therapies" will not be part of the Medicare approved list of treatments -- for "private pay" only. "Apres them, le deluge," so why should they give a ratf___? What could those Left Behind possibly do to get revenge or retribution or restitution from their ashes or desiccated or maybe cryofrozen-in-hope-of-Scientific-resurrection corpses?
Talk about moral hazard, and perverse incentives. Libertarians love it, the very definition of success...
Koch funds NOVA, and apparently is on the board of WGBH. This is hardly a new item in the spectrum of greedybad, this is from 2010:
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2010/09/07/206688/pbs-ombudsman-michael-getler-whitewashes-the-koch-funded-greenwashing-episode-of-nova-that-whitewashes-the-threat-of-human-caused-climate-change/?mobile=nc
And then there's this little bit, too, with a nice picture of Shaitan and his lady... http://gothamist.com/2013/05/20/how_billionaire_david_koch_gets_pbs.php
The thing about cancer is that it is relentless and obscure and most people don't want to know they have it cooking away...
Re: the utility of nukular weapons, as only being good for suicide: Exactly, of course. Anyone who followed the "Cold War" Strangelovian logic and the effects of nukular detonations had to come to the same conclusion, on a bigger scale. The risk is still there, as simplified here:
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/01/doomsday_clock_from_the_bulletin_of_the_atomic_scientists_for_2013.html
One little caveat: some 3 or 400 nuclear weapons.
Under the "control" of people who, as you point out, may at some point have read Sun Tzu, but obviously learned nothing from that ancient and well-proven wisdom, or have one hell of a death wish that unfortunately would embrace many of the rest of us. Or figure they can do their corrupt thing, do like Arafat and store up "redirected" treasures in some island heaven half a world away, and run off and hide in comfort, beating their breasts in mock sorrow, when things go cockeyed.
Comforting confirmation that their guys are as mealy-mouthed and disingenuous as ours. Nothing new, nothing useful, just assurances of more of the same. Since there's the nice "diplomatic" buzz up front, but all the creepy, sneaky, greedy, good old Great Game stuff going on where most people can't see.
How does any of this elephant-dance lead to decent, secure, sustainable lives for most people? Why do the most of us have to keep supporting, with our blood and the wealth we create, just going along for the ride, with the whole nation-state conflict-generating wealth-gobbling planet-killing corporate-driven kleptocracy?
Silly questions, right? Shows how little I and other people who ask such questions know. Not "serious."
The Friedman suggestion was of course intended ironically. With human populations, with all the local and larger variations on the underlying themes of human behavior in all its ranges, one size or even a duality does not begin to fit all, depending of course on the goals of the game as set among the players who get to call the changes in the Calvinball rules.
My prayer is that whatever the structures form into in the processes between here and extinction, that the vast majority of us human critters at least are blessed with fulfillment of the first two tiers of Maslow's hierarchy. Since my ignorant, little-informed sense is that there is actually, if people put their minds to it and eschewed most of that greed thing and inhaled the essence of the ol' Golden Rule, enough of everything that really matters to go all the way around the table. But most places (except Red China and a few others) still elevate that last of all human freedoms, the freedom to fornicate and reproduce, for a variety of reasons... so the "pitch" of the seating at the table keeps changing.
"Turning it around so that it avoids social and economic deterioration will be no easy task."
Is Tom Friedman's "Flat Earth" book available in the appropriate languages, to help the businessmen in Pakistan figure out the ways to "turn it around?" The "business"-based approach has worked so well on the rest of the planet? Which direction is the vector of survival?
Super, do I really come across as just a "curdled" CT? That's strong, coming from someone as gifted and informed as you are. You sure seem to extract a lot from my little 1:02 post (as "amended" by attributions from others) and other stuff I write that actually gets posted here that ain't there, far as I'm concerned.
Yes, some governments are better than others -- even the Gilded Age was likely better for most non-elite folks than life under the things we shorthand as "Stalin" and Gaddaffyduck and Idi Amin and various dictators including the ones the US and other Cold War and Dead Empire players installed or fostered, past or present tense. And people acting together, often out of oppressed desperation, were able to foment the New Deal, now under massive pressure itself.
My reply to the latest mendacious Joepeachment, redacted by our host, pointed out only that maybe WJM's claim that there's an accomplished Libyan transition from dictatorship to "liberal democracy" was maybe overstated, and that the jostling and clubbing for pre-eminence was still in flux and the shape of things sort of undecided. With a string cite to articles from various sources that noted the same thing. Here's just two:
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/05/20135284233380962.html
http://www.thenational.ae/thenationalconversation/comment/lawless-libya-needs-to-build-new-democratic-institutions
You impute to me a belief that I think a significant set of people prefer, or prefer to suffer under, dictatorships, or "love their tyrants," to being able to take effective part in the endless political-economic-social struggle. That's just wrong. Dare I ask, of course, how much of an effective part ordinary people who just want to live and let live can have in shaping their government, in Libya, or in the "liberal democracy" that some presume the US to be?
Also wrong is your last sentence, a cheap and pretty misdirected shot, especially from someone who seems as aware of and jaundiced and distressed about the details of history and what really goes on as you are -- it's not "CT," it's more an effort to open the curtains, and shine lights on the roaches and rodents in the dark corners. Cheap and wrong, especially, in regard to my level of public participation. (FWIW, I live on a sailboat, with a goal of "living simply that others may simply live.")
Just curious: is Libya now a "liberal democracy?" People all over the political spectrum in the US have good reasons to suspect the motives and competence of the people who make and implement "policy." "Muscular apologism" for a "muscular" set of behaviors that foe some reason only seem to favor a very narrow set of persons and interests, and too often seem to demonstrate little but horribly expensive (PUBLIC expense, that is) naivete and incompetence, is another common text in bloggery and other political discourse.
And it's not limited to the Middle East, or Near Mideast, or Far East, or AFRICOM or EURCOM or now, as we go forth to subdue and subdivide the "Arctic riches" made accessible by "human-induced climate change or what-ever," exclusive of the polar regions either.
Got any good examples (maybe excepting Libya or bombing the heck out of former Soviet Central European countries doing "ethnic cleansing," of US behaviors that are something other than imperialism, whatever you or I might mean by that term?
On the other hand, in addition to all the people who are invested in just doing more of the same combusto-consumption, there are a lot of people who are seeing great investment opportunities in various aspects of what even they are calling "climate change," out of one side of their mouths at least.
For those who have that prudent careful wise $5 to invest every week and are young enough to expect decades of compound interest and growth of "capital" to comfort their declining years, here are a few places to start looking for opportunities:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-07/investors-embrace-climate-change-chase-hotter-profits.html
http://www.mindfulmoney.co.uk/wp/mmexplainer/energy-climate-changes-investment-opportunities/
http://www.iigcc.org/
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-03-07/investors-seek-ways-to-profit-from-global-warming
I guess until the last dehydrated, hyperthermic human drops and dies, it will always be a case that "it is an ill wind indeed that blows no man good..."
Please correct me if I'm wrong, sir, but that "$5 trade" is the transaction cost of a trade, not the purchase, the investment, that we are told we ought to be making weekly. http://www.brokerage-review.com/articles/fivedollar-trade-commissions.aspx If we just were smart enough to "make good choices."
There are of course stocks priced under $5 a share, and there are folks who assure us that the "million dollar mark" is only 9, count 'em, NINE trades in penny stocks away, and for a small fee will tell us how to get rich quick too. http://www.pennystockdreamteamreview.net/can-5-really-turn-into-1-million-in-9-simple-trades/
Is it a good or a bad thing that not all of us can apparently afford to be, or are prudent and smart enough to be, as "prudent" and sharp as some of us?
Oh, look, Mommie! It's one aspect of the game of "geopolitics!" Can we ALL play? I get the Red, White and Blue and Digital Camo BDU Men, okay?
The worst distortion in all of this is right in that word "give," which I guess is used in the lesser definitional sense of "hand over to."
What the Kochs and Adelson and the Cloacas of K Street are doing has not the slightest bit of "donative intent." It's bribery, buying "the law," pure and simple.
As to the sawbuck I was dumb enough to GIVE to the Obama campaign, for my part that was just in the Hope that that Chicago-Harvard clunker would actually work to Change any of the stuff that's killing the most of us for the enrichment and titillation of the tiny few of us.
There's a lot more video that ought to "make us uncomfortable." Complete with lots of "excuses" from the Brass.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8J_XbqFZmA
And how we saved Marjah: "What happens over the next five days will be a cornerstone of your memory for the rest of your life." At about 3:35, and away the Brass flies, setting it up so he "won't sleep uneasy for not doing the right thing." "All right, gents, that's all I've got."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9Pq5JZ2Fd8
This is what victory looks like?
I hope everybody here reads the above comment at 6:26 PM very carefully. Very, very carefully. With a historian's eye. Consistency is taken as credibility, sometimes.
And speaking of that infinitely elastic, marvelously mutable "national interest," what ever happened to that This Week's Reason to Stay The Course, which got so much play not so very long ago? "Afghan mineral wealth could top $1 trillion: Pentagon"
http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/06/14/us-afghanistan-minerals-idUSTRE65D0OH20100614
Respectfully and totally disagree, as usual, with the insistence that Taliban-tagging and alQuaedaandbystanders-killing are any kind of justification for a MICmonster 'military solution' for "us," that is, another generation of enthusiastic young testosterone-loaded patriots, to do a doofus do-over, again.
Time for a new Mall Monument, alongside the Wall: The Tombs of the Last Ones To Die For Their Country In Wherever.
I for one couldn't finish watching, experiencing, the whole video, which is just one tiny part of what is happening every day Over There.
Oh, the horror! the BS that the lying Geopoliticists sold us! Sshhh, we're not really doing 'nationbuilding,' or 'counterinsurgency,' it's The women and little girls! THAT's the reason for Our Boys "taking time away from their families to help you dudes out," last week at least, so that Afghan officer can kidnap and screw little boys and those Afghan Army dudes can kidnap and ransom four other dudes so some local warlord can supposedly get his brother out of hock to "the Taliban," which is just other dudes screwing little boys and doing all the crap they did before "NATO Forces" got there and will do long after "we" are long gone and nothing but another set of jokes and battle tales for those dudes to tell each other around their fire pits and meals.
Same sh_t, same careerists, same contractors, new subcontinent. Once again, who will be the last GI to get killed over there? So HIS family can get a nice flag to put up in that made-in-China triangular Flag Display Case from Walmart? http://www.walmart.com/ip/Personalized-Flag-Display-Case-and-Pedestal-Set/2403564 And he can get HIS or HER name added to the Wikipedia article on the "War in Afghanistan," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_%282001%E2%80%93present%29, for dismissive jerks to dismiss and scholars to argue over who the LAST REAL DEAD ONE actually was. http://www.vietvet.org/edgewall.htm
Of course right here on this page is the Cafepress ad for the new national symbol, running away altogether from that Stars and Stripes thing we used to display so proudly, a symbol that is not "America the Beautiful" but "the US" (and yes, copyrighted but you can buy a license to use it "as a design wrapper for your logo or message!"
C'mon, you Apologists, tell us it was all for good purposes, all in the "national interest," or at least carry forward the Big Lie that "our intentions were good." Call it an "honorable effort," all that crap, excuse yourselves with "I didn't agree with all of it," and "Bad stuff happens in war," all that too. When what it was, is and will be is nothing but a shabby thin faded peeling coat of "petroliotic redwhiteandblue paint" over that rotting Juggernaut labeled The Great American Exceptional Manifest Destiny Usual Milo Minderbinder Everyone Has A Share Idiocy.
"the sacrifices of their KIA [and MIA and WIA and mentally trashed] brothers will have been in vain."
Sorry that was once again inevitable.
Sorrow for all of us who "served" in Wars of Futility: Korea, Vietnam, Iraq (all versions), the War on Drugs, the GWOT. And maybe a little bad on us too, for thinking that "going to war" on "wogs," with all our weapons and tactics and inevitable idiocy and corruption, was doing anything to "protect the American way of life" or was "providing security for the Homeland." And a curse on our leaders, political and military, for so cynically putting us in harm's way, counting on our courage and unit cohesion to keep the Game running long past the obvious point of what you call "efficient retrograde," because as we were told in Basic by one cynical Korean War lifer whose head bobbed and hands trembled thanks to getting blown up in a tank battle, the US Military NEVER RETREATS -- it "advances rearward to previously prepared positions." Myth and futility for the troops and the taxpayers, and profits for a very few.
Don't neglect the "legal" offensive use of the regulatory structures to attack competitors and restrain trade and fix prices. One side of it:
http://www.annenberg.northwestern.edu/pubs/telmar/telmar06.htm
Another, of course, is the entire "intellectual property" monster, near the pinnacle of which is this:
"Why Does Monsanto Sue Farmers Who Save Seeds?" http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/Pages/why-does-monsanto-sue-farmers-who-save-seeds.aspx
"There is no honor among thieves," unless via "interlocking directorates" and other forms of collusion they are cooperating in the thievery. See, e.g., "Wall Street."
Another little footnote to "history," from the Catholic Encyclopedia entries on the "suppression of the Jesuits," with an unintentional little peek at "certain Western attitudes:"
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14096a.htm
Libertarians wear cassocks too?
@Brad, and anyone else interested how Scientol -- er, libertarianism works in the realm of Argument, there's a whole trove of white papers and talking points and how-tos for Making Your Points and "arm waving" and stuff like you stuffed in your last paragraph above, here's an entry point:
http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/tactn/tactn008.pdf
You gotta love cults, especially ones who arrested their development in Debating Club...
The true nature and aims of libertarianism, in six interesting parts, starting with Part I:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/11/journey-into-a-libertarian-future-part-i-%E2%80%93the-vision.html
And just follow the links there to the next, and the next...
Looks to me (Monsanto, CIA, Big Banks, "health insurance," etc.) that "we" are most of the way to turning it all over to "government-like organizations" already.
Enjoy your "freedoms" while you can, folks...
Once again, Mr. Yoo-Hoo tries his hand at re-writing history...
Seems to me that given the breadth of what it appears DOJ is going after, this very much is an investigation of an "alleged crime." That, in addition to the whistling up the existence of "the operation," being the release into the public brain of information about a bomb plot that was ostensibly part of one of the many CIA "ops" that so many times before (when the rest of us hear of them at all, via "whistleblowing" as most of us understand the term) have been shown to be STUPID and ill-advised and symptomatic of a really cancerous set of institutional behaviors.
Seems ingenuous, if not disingenuous, to try to paint this "investigation," this "plumber" activity, as consequence-free for the media. From what I read, it's making a lot of already pretty cowardly people even more nervous about doing the old-fashioned version of their jobs.
Interesting that one claiming devotion to sticking to the "known facts" states as fact that this is just "about" "this braggart" who "went to the AP and blabbed about this awesome operation." Cites? And not "about" some other thing, like deterring any spasms of conscience, or maybe some skulldugger subterfuge, like killing several birds with one stone: Shame and scare "the media" back into bland cheerleader mode or into silence, indicate to "AQAP" whatever that is that we're on to them, warn other potential suicide bombers that their "friends" may just be CIA dudes setting them up, let "the American people" feel good that the CIA is on the case, I bet there's a memo stamped "TOP SECRET" that lists these and many more "features and benefits..."
Efrem: still carrying a torch for Scooter Libby?
As to this horrific amazing revelation that the CIA has "a window into AQAP," the AP story broke when, in May 2012? Here it is, in FOX News: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/05/07/cia-thwarts-al-qaeda-underwear-bomb-plot-on-anniversary-bin-laden-death-us/ And how stupid do you think those incredibly sneaky al Quaedans are, those people who supposedly are an infinite threat to what Holder calls a "the American people." So stupid that they won't know that the CIA and other sneaky petes are onto them? Can one wonder whether, as reported in some places, the "bomber" was one of those saps that the FBI and such-like folks manage to snooker into various plots...
Does your happy willingness to turn the state security apparatus looser than it already is extend to Ailes' Black Hole? And if you are implying that ThinkProgress thinks that AP did something beyond the pale, maybe anyone who wants to make an informed judgment ought to read the entry there, which you did not link in your comment: http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/05/13/2005021/doj-yemen-aqap/
I wonder if the CIA, that's not "legally" supposed to be doing domestic espionage, is working with the other parts of the eExecutive to maybe go after the dozens of "outlets" that like FOX News, that protector of the American Way in All Things, saw fit to publish and announce to the whole Scooter-Libby-Friendly world?
...and our long-jawed, perfectly coiffed, Well-Suited Secretary of State tells us he is going North to the "northermost city in Sweden" to carve up the newly dying corpse of that latest and maybe Last Frontier (?nope, there's still The Ocean, water column and seabed and everything in, on and under it to carve up and extract) called "the Arctic Region," where in a mindlessly self-revealing, almost consciously self-satirical piece that his writers must have worried over for hours, in the old Huffpost, he offers the great image of the commercialization and consumption of Whatever Is Left ---
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johnkerry/climate-change-and-the-fu_b_3272250.html?show_comment_id=252967806#comment_252967806
"Responsible stewardship?" Aaayup, as they say in Massachusetts.
My God, THIS CANNOT BE ALLOWED TO CONTINUE!!! Get the Destabilizer-in-Chief over at Langley on the horn right now! If Those People ever all start pulling on the same end of the rope, who knows WHERE Our Blessed Hegemony and Corporate "National" Interests will end up! Holy Jesus, this might even spread to SYRIA!, with UNTOLD consequences! Start looking for Wedges to drive into anything that looks like "solidarity!" Get some of Our People over there RIGHT NOW to, I don't know, set off a couple of bombs or something! You know what to do!
And while you're at it, get Holder over here! He needs a bracing on using all that power to keep the rabble from seeing how we are using all that power! And remind him: No "enforcement" of securities and antitrust and worker-protection and environmental laws until we finish up changing what's "legal!"
Looks like the whole Dumbpire is devolving into something of a cross between the Keystone Kops and The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight:
Inter alia, ponderous efforts to crush "transparency" by demolishing "leakers" (except the approved ones, of course.)
"Obama Pursuing Leakers Sends Warning to Whistle-Blowers"
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-18/obama-pursuing-leakers-sends-warning-to-whistle-blowers.html
Using the IRS like the best Nixonian dorks, to suppress and deter anyone, and that includes ANYONE whether "TeaParty" or "librul," who dares to even criticize the Gummint. "Enemies" lists. From that most trustworthy of sources, apparently now fearful that the targeting picture for government abuse might include THEM and not just Hippies:
Read more: http://nation.foxnews.com/irs/2013/05/13/irs-targeted-groups-criticized-government#ixzz2TGfAxSlL
Launch the Drones! http://www.metacafe.com/watch/an-oRCt4J72mh2tn/the_wizard_of_oz_1939_the_army_of_flying_monkeys/
Intentional non-feasance when it comes to "governance." (No cites needed, obviously)
Flat-out blindness when it comes to stuff like trillions in corruption (over 10 years, so "no harm no foul," right?") at the Pentagram ("Boys will be good ol' boys, ya know... it's just how Bidness is done.")
http://www.wanttoknow.info/corruptiongovernmentmilitary Yeah, old news but no change except to get worse...
And a whole raft of other End-of-Dumbpire stuff that is so deliciously redolent and reminiscent of the decline and fall of other empires.
Exceptional? NOT! Not even very good at it -- the Byzantines and Romans and even the Brits went down with a lot more decadence than we are managing, though the 0.001%ers are sure giving it a run for our money:
http://www.superyachts.com/largest-yachts
And speaking of ironically delicious:
"Yogi Sinking Report Concluded; No Blame, But Unanswered Questions"
http://megayachtnews.com/2013/02/investigation-superyacht-yogi-sinking/#ixzz2TGdQLG00
"Bad stuff happens, but no blame, please. Unless you can hang it on some underling with no defenses, or better yet,keep anyone from finding out about it..."
That sounds not at all like an "informed discussion," Lj, rather instead like a set of apologist talking points. Kind of confirmed by the reference to "loony leftist agenda." Interesting: The "apologists" for "our" droning over there rely on "maybeonpaper" they so often cite, like the AUMF, but also say "we" can do that stuff based on "tacit approval" by the non-sovereign Pakistani "government."
But keep on selling the line, it works for FOX, since 74% of Republicans believe Benghazi is far worse than that thing called "Watergate" and its progeny, and 39% of those folks have no idea even where Benghazi is -- not even the right hemisphere for many of them. http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2013/05/voters-trust-clinton-over-gop-on-benghazi.html
Is it just me, or is it actually the case that Our Players just do not get it that they don't know how to play the Game, other than by shelling out bricks of laundered currency or this or that weapon system or montly supplies of Viagra (with regular refills), or just wielding a big old club or a Barrett .50 or cluster bomb or Really Hot Pre-Obsolete Air Combat Platform to swat virtual mosquitos? That we have some smart engineers, whose stuff gets stolen or sold by espionage or the profit motive of their post-national corporate employers? That we get played like a tin whistle by people who are much older in the Game of Byzantine cutthroat poker, whether it's Saudis or Chinese or those charming ex-Central Europeans who run Israel?
If our consumption is the engine that powers the 12-cylinder Ferrari that is REAL geopolitics, the stuff that goes on apparently beyond the ken and clue of our sneaky petes and diplomats and stuff, gee, what would happen if we just sort of stopped consuming? using up OUR land and water for the folks elsewhere, who will be the ones wagering on the price fluctuations of bitumen converted to "oil" and XL'd to the World Market, who will get richer off the fracking of our landforms, who laugh at our "troops" who are suckered into playing the Redcoats in that old mythical march to and from Lexington?
We and MI-6 that really ought, one would think, to know better, are still giving Karzai HOW much cash money in exchange for being allowed to keep on kicking in doors in Kandahar?
Waiting for the "legalistas" who apologize for the raw power exercises of the Dumbpire to tell us how the judgment of that there Paki court is "inoperative" or that Dumbpire Power trumps and vitiates that there court's jurisdiction or some other supra-rulalaw nonsense that says "we" or those who are nominally acting "for" this Great Power can do whatever "we" damn please, anywhere, any time, and whatchagonnadoaboutit? Conduct a terrarist activity on the Homeland, which will just make it all that much easier to keep the stupid cows walking up the chutes here in the Vater -- oops, Homeland?
Cuz after all, it's so patently clear that thousands of "installations" and hundreds of billions of dollars and all these killings, in the Far-away FATA, and sweatiest Somalialand, etc., have kept them Mooslum ragheads from traveling "17,000 kilometers" to ATTACK "US" BACK///(subtle irony)///
To all the geopolitical whiz kids and wunderkindern who post apologies here for The Way Things Turn Out When The Game Is Played By Their Rules, who reassure us that Serious and Adult People are in charge and the machinery of government is working just fine and all those military expenditures, overt and covert, are Necessary To Our Freedom (tm), riddle me this:
"U.S. Currently Fighting 74 Different Wars … That It Will Publicly Admit"
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/05/u-s-currently-fighting-74-different-wars-that-it-publicly-admits.html
What are the Legalisms and Doctrines and Policies and Strategies and Tactics that make all that Wise and Proper and Necessary, again? 1,000-plus "installations" or "locations" (can't call them "bases" any more, Bagram is an "airfield," e.g.) across the planet, what to "we" get out of that? I know what "we" get out of the very, very common (and so very, very rarely surfaced and prosecuted) stuff like this:
"FIVE INDIVIDUALS ARRESTED, TWO CONTRACTING COMPANIES CHARGED IN BRIBERY CONSPIRACY RELATED TO DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE CONTRACTS IN AFGHANISTAN
http://www.justice.gov/atr/public/press_releases/2008/236565.htm
(I especially like this one, as a former "troop" myself:
" For troops in Iraq, shower still may be fatal --
Military races to inspect more than 90,000 facilities to reduce deadly threat"
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/29891090/ns/us_news-military/t/troops-iraq-shower-still-may-be-fatal/#.UY63fUrouOQ
90,000 "facilities" in Iraq? That's a typo, right? Don't you guys have editors? Oh, you stand by that number?)
And Karzai is, snicker, avowedly "on the take," complete with plain brown envelopes stuffed with cash.
How stupid ARE "we," how stupid will "we" continue to be?
"We" get the famous Green Weenie.
How's that go, again? Oh yeak, "War is nothing but a racket." http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c7661072-b402-11e2-ace9-00144feabdc0.html
A flood of complexified words comes next, to excuse and deny and defer, or maybe just {silence}, while the cancer grows silently bigger, and spreads...
Why dissect them? You have to KILL them to do that.
Ooooohhh... I get it...
"the Syrian opposition itself" -- there is an entity now that is identifiable as "the Syrian opposition?" Or is that trick of personification, that making up of monads, just one of the conveniences of geopolitical grand thinking, that allows one constructing strategies and theories to do a reductio that is so infinitely ad absurdam that the bonds to "reality" get shredded, however pretty and well-constructed the Big Picture might seem to be? All these little "actions," these heavily self-justified or covert "national interest" activities, that seem insignificant, until all of a sudden some hair trigger concatenation of events leads to Sarajevo or Pearl Harbor...
If I'm a general or a CEO in the MIC or some fella or gal who has become a National Leader and discovered that once I have all that power at hand, all that wealth to blow around, well hey, I can live out my life free from any kind of consequence that matters to me personally. It's like what happens when an ordinary person suddenly is on the other side of the bars in the county jail, who discovers that freedom from responsibility and fear of consequences that regulated his behavior when he was just a "good citizen."
Not trying to pick on anyone in particular, just a general gripe about certain habits of thought and speaking that seem inexorably to surface and mislead. Not that I have any magic to sort it all out either, of course, but the way the Game is being played sure seems to be taking all of us, players and played-upon, down into a mutual black hole.
Putin knew from his filthy past what he was in for, and Obama and Kerry and for that matter the last-generation Hillary Clinton? Where do they come from, what have they learned, and now they know the Secret Handshake and a key to the Executive Restroom, what will they do to the rest of us as they "grow into their positions" and, like metastatic cancers, out into the healthier tissues of the old body politic?
To all the GreatGameGreatPower addicts and apologists, here's the deal: The US is in your world of scenarios the "pre-eminent power," able to leap tall postulates of the Rule of International Law with facile ease. What, as you frame your thinking, is "it," that is, the personification that you reduce the complex collections of power and interest and intentions and actors to in your Great Game of Risk ™, what is "it" supposed to do in this situation, since the assumption made is that pretty much whatever "it" does is ipso facto the actuation of "the national interest" (with little caveats to demonstrate that one is "serious")? Given the binary choice repeatedly articulated elsewhere (the "Libya" option), which is supposedly either to "just" let the horrible mayhem go on, or give weapons and training and "intelligence" and "encouragement" to SOMEBODY, what is "it" supposed to do at this point in the drama? And bearing in mind that institutionally and operationally, the Security Apparatus has already lumbered into motion, and the rats and jackals are already In There distributing or "facilitating" weaponization and looking for "friends" among the enemies and ways to turn a profit off of conflict, in the best long-term WarIsARacket tradition.
Is it possible, with all the momentum and pressure and independent skullduggery by the Serious Agencies and bits of the Global Military, to just STAND DOWN, to disarm those busy little parasites, to "stay out of it?"
I guess the question sort of answers itself, doesn't it?
And the Gamers can continue with their sonorous pronouncements and justifications and rationalizations, protecting their Game which gets played out on the corpses and mashed communities of so many plain folks. Because theirs is the REAL world, after all, and hey, there's no changing REALITY, is there?
Through the Looking Glass.
Let's try it out: "Benghazi!" "Karzai!" "Kardashian!" "Watergate!" "Constitution!" "Methylmercury!" "Tea Party!"...
Gee, what happened to that 30% drop in military spending? Anybody else see where it went? Drop in the bucket? Is that an actual number of dollars cut out of the Pentagram share of the pie, or just a factoid statistic? Really, I would like to understand that argument and where the claimed drop in spending actually shows. It seems the other data in the linked site points to a long-term huge pile of money continuing to be dumped into the MICmachine, and failing to produce anything but more of the same.
I hope everybody reading this stuff goes and looks at the link that JfL posted, http://www.cfr.org/geoeconomics/trends-us-military-spending/p28855. It sure looks to me like the US is spending a buttload of money on its military, far more than any other "civilized country." And it sure seems with all the FAILS of so many of the great tech innovations that "we" are so busy fielding, and the patent inability to pick a "war" we can "win" in any of the traditional senses, "we" are not getting much "bang for the buck." Great Game Changers, like the XM-25, and the various latest F-series aircraft, even drones with a significant failure rate, AND JUST WHAT IS/ARE THE MISSION(S) THAT ALL THIS CRAP IS BEING PROCURED TO SUPPOSEDLY EFFECTUATE? In the meantime, all these people with investments of various sorts, money, career, ego, in WarisaRacket, are speaking Great Thoughts on the Nature of Warfare of the Fourth Generation:
http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/cyberpunked-living/gibson-on-the-4th-generation-war-were-losing/
and a now aging classic, "Why do we lose 4th generation wars?" from the blog of "Fabius Maximus," which bills itself as "A discussion about geopolitics, broadly defined, from an American's perspective -- about ways to reignite the spirit of a nation grown cold." From 4 January 2007, Serious Writers use the military/British convention in writing dates.
And even more dated, from 2006, fer Jaysus' sake, there's stuff like this:
http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/cyberpunked-living/gibson-on-the-4th-generation-war-were-losing/
$17 BILlion, or $17 TRILlion national debt? A big number, that if we are to actually give people useful work to do and thus actually get out of recession needs to probably be bigger (in some sectors, not the MIC which is already grossly, morbidly, toxically, terminally obese). Another number is the US annual aggregate expenditure on Empire, which by what looks to me to be the more complete estimates that try to capture all the hidden and obscure crap, is maybe $3 trillion a year. And we have maybe another $7 or $8 trillion, in round and rough numbers, of "war debt" for the sort-of-declared-at-least-named-and-acknowledged if actually undeclared warisarackets to make like Sisyphus and keep rolling up that long eternal hill...
Too bad the "intelligent people of the world" do not have a prayer of overcoming the vast and growing capabilities and clout and momentum and tools and toys and wealth of the "intelligence people of the world." And their buddies in CorpWorld.Gov and FinWorld.Gov.
Old enough to remember the closing line of "Laugh-in," speaking of "American Empire?" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ8Vrvy0VeE
"Say goodnight, Dick!"
Other reports from amongst the activities of "the ignorantly clashing armies of the night" say it was just a chicken farm, no big deal -- but wow, that must have been some serious pile of chicken s__t that made up that last blast... http://www.infowars.com/israeli-air-strike-targeted-chicken-farm-civilian-infrastructure/
One wonders that the Professor has not spoken on the subject of the Israeli air attacks in "sovereign Syria." Are we coming to the point that the true nature of the Game as practiced by that state and our own, and all the others that collect the wealth produced by their Ordinary Citizens to convert into Game pieces and extensions of the RISK! (tm) board, becomes a little more manifest? That Power now can do whatever it damn pleases even more openly and with even fewer repercussions and free of even apparent limits? (What's that droning noise I hear in the background, getting closer, with autonomous lethality capabilities in the ones moving up the line to "deployed" status? Time to enjoy "Terminator, the Franchise" once more.)
Waiting for the apologists to justify, or maybe point out that this is nothing new, and that what the IDF did and does is "legal" and "defensive," just like Iraq and Afghanistan and Costa Rica and et cetera. But hey, it's just one tiny nail in the coffin of humanity, after all...
Enjoying my Sunday morning viewing of War Porn over at Syria Comments' video archives of "action" in the self-disassembly of the state formerly known as Syria, aided and abetted by profitable involvements by the usual suspects...
If there was all this clandestine activity, one has to wonder why "our" involvements there have worked out the way they have for us. Of course, other than arming and destabilizing and shhhh maybe involvement in drugs? it is unfair, I guess, to expect the clandestine types to control what happens on a global scale... I guess "presence" just can't be expected to equal "competence" in the sense of VICTORY and SUCCESS and MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. But then it's hard to discern what the actual goals of the Game were and are, much less of the manifestly and intentionally opaque activities of the Sneaky Petes -- there's been a successful disappearance of billions of cash dollars, and of course provision of bricks of $100 bills and Viagra to warlords to "buy their loyalty," and an enormous multi-trillion-dollar transfer of wealth to certain parts of the economy that have little to do with the survival of America the True, let alone the species, and a lot more with the furtherance of a few corporate interests.
Gee, is that what he said? In the great complex Game you know there are ways to "flex muscles" that do not involve "force projection" or dumping weapons and troops into the pot, stuff called "diplomacy" I hear, that require maybe a kind of will to live as opposed to what looks more like a usual-imperial-death-wish abetted by post-national corporate interests that somehow get to replace a "national interest" that might benefit the most of us rather than the ones who run the Warisaracket.
I have to ask -- with all the reports of the usual behavior of our State Security types in actually arming and training one group or another of "rebels" (what's the accurate term for such a diverse bunch of gunmen? "Insurgents?" "Dissidents?" "Terrorists?" "Anti-government forces?" "Opposition fighters?" "All of the above?"), is it honest or accurate to say that Obama and his Secret Squirrels are not "intervening" in Syria?
http://www.globalresearch.ca/ny-times-scrubs-mention-of-cia-arming-syrian-rebels/5302360
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/terrorism-security/2012/0621/Report-CIA-aids-in-funneling-arms-to-Syrian-rebels
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/25/world/middleeast/arms-airlift-to-syrian-rebels-expands-with-cia-aid.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
On the other hand, of course, who the hell cares any more? There's an avalanche of likely unstoppable imperial financial, military, "security," environmental, political and social badness rolling downhill and gaining speed, and the most of us, who create the wealth that provides the mass of schmutz that makes up the avalanche, just want decent work, families to love and be loved by, and communities to support, are square in the path. While the few of us keep throwing boulders into the flow, from nice safe perches...
All kabuki. Yup. And it seems that with the CIA, it is all "teh STUPID." Although a pretty noxious, malignant kind of stupid, from poisoned cigars to make Castro's beard fall out, to trying to bribe Afghan warlords with Viagra (and bricks of $100 bills) to be "loyal" in a place where loyalty seems to extend to tribes, maybe, and clans and families, but is driven by immediate self-interest and shrewdness. We ain't sharp enough to play in that sandbox, but then the Game, as ever, is about wealth transfer and the old but true observation that "War is nothing but a racket."
Say again what "the national interest" means? Since we are $6 trillion in the hole just for this round of Teh STUPID, US economy for working folks is in the toilet, "globalization" is a big fail with a nice chaser of environmental catastrophe to the glutton's meal of hyperconsumption, not even a pretext of "democracy" in our Republic any more...
And still the young and desperate enlist, to be indoctrinated into what kind of mind set, again?
Of course, it isn't just Yemen. "The War" has come to a lot of villages. Thanks to the state of play in the Great Game.
Now we can all enjoy the spectacle of social disintegration, with bloodshed galore, and lots of opportunities for our "trainers" and "forward men" and jackals to get us glued to another Tarbaby. I'm sure this link just can't be credible for what it displays of the ground truth in Syria, and the involvement of the Gamers there in some kind of effort to steer the well-armed, loony-looter, seemingly anomic marauders, and curry favor with possible eventual "winners" in the only way these folks apparently know how to think and react:
http://www.joshualandis.com/blog/oil-wars-nusras-expanding-reach-syrian-taliban/#ViewPollResults
Of course, there's other stuff beyond It'sAllAboutIsrael that our Great Gamers have to factor into their, er, ah, "considerations," stuff like those now-Israeli Dolphin-class submarines the Germans were so happy to sell to people who nominally have no reason to love them (though of course there's that South African apartheid-state connection from not so many years ago to double-flash illuminate things a bit), that per the best-kept not-military-secret have nuclear-armed missiles aboard them. Read all about it, folks, and maybe remember our mutual vulnerability, our daily increasing mutual vulnerability and unwilling interdependence with every ton of coal and cubic mile of methane and megagallon of oil and GM foodcrop and Roundup molecule, and who gets rich off of adding to to REAL terror:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/israel-deploys-nuclear-weapons-on-german-built-submarines-a-836784.html
Maybe 400 nuclear weapons (alleged, of course, not acknowledged, ready to be "delivered" HOW, in addition to via sub-launched cruise missiles?). The USS Liberty. Jonathan Pollard. "Uncle Freier." "You must go to war on Iran to keep them from having a nuclear program. And for other reasons." STUXNET. Assassinations of diplomats. Invasion and conquest and the death-of-a-thousand cuts taking of Gaza and the West Bank. Billions in taxpayer dollars transferred from the US Treasury to where, again, every year? $6 trillion in recent war expenditures on what can only be called "STUPID" from the standpoint of any rational citizen of the United States who is thinking about his or her actual national interests?
Thanks so much for the advice and counsel. Oh, that was not just a "suggestion?" Oops, I missed the "must" in there...
Gee, why would Feaver posit just two choices for the "Obama administration:" Tough-guy idiocy of the Bush-league variety ("enforce the Red Line" HOW, exactly?), or, "sacrifice U.S. credibility" (like "we" have any of that left, right? as if "credibility" is something you "earn" by kicking in doors or unloading another sh_tstorm of Shock-N-Awe (tm))? Not possible for the Really Smart Folks in our Imperial Capital to come come up with some other "nuanced" approach to all this, with an eye toward present conduct that is looking toward a future with some reduced level of violent idiocy and further "advances" of the military monstrosity? Like maybe thinking about repairing our national rep by doing stuff that is consistent not with our "war is a racket" Great Game plots, but with some actual spread, over the long haul, of decent governance and reduction of misery?
But the neocons continue to whisper in the ear of the powerful, more's the pity.
This sure sounds reminiscent of what the 9/11 crew was up to as they moved toward doing their personal version of EFFING STUPID. Seems like "legal" terrorists like CIA operatives and, gasp, SECRET SERVICE dudes, and High Military Officers, and Repuglican Family Values Politicians, and the whole Financial Industry, and arms dealers and stuff, also live real large and high and self-indulgent as they go about acting out their part of the human tragedy, pretending it's all about High Moral Values And Freedom and Patriotism and All That. Even "the Taliban" does rape and dope, and abuses pretty little dancing boys, and that's a behavior that appears to manifest in every old-man-dominated "religious" structure.
Lots of anonymous little people out there writing and release virulent code into the net. Are they "terrorists" worthy of notice? A science fiction story of not so long ago was based on how holographic projection will likely be abused when it's developed -- juvenile delinquents record the image of the inside of an elevator car, jimmy the doors so they will open even if the car is up the shaft, and trusting souls then step into the image and down the shaft. I'm sure more applications will come to mind... Any way to "fix" that?
And then there's this,
http://reason.com/blog/2013/04/25/saying-privacy-is-off-the-table-nyc-poli
And this:
http://www.tampabay.com/opinion/columns/column-cheer-the-boston-cameras-but-do-you-want-big-brother-watching-all/2117805
And just for fun:
"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself — anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called."
— George Orwell, "1984"
And remember the "horror of the democracies," responding viscerally to images of all those Chinese, waving that Little Red Book, smiling wide, all those district commissars looking searchingly into all those faces for any sign of "deviance..."
@DanG: There's been a lot of observations about how people who trade (seemingly happily and willingly, "two killers for constant surveillance" -- that only gets more intrusive over time) their "rights" for "security" deserve and will get neither. (Unless those two are serial killers, the stats are pretty clear that murder is mostly a singular-event crime, emotion-driven and done to someone known to the killer -- not a lot of risk avoided there.)
As to abuses of state power, in arresting and detaining, there are little reports like this,
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2011/12/14/377664/thousands-of-us-citizens-illegally-detained-in-crackdown-on-undocumented-immigrants/
and this bit of weirdness,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/us/immigrants-released-ahead-of-automatic-budget-cuts.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
And of course there's the whole "prison industrial complex" thing and the activities of The Innocence Project and I guess a narrow and "legalistic" reading of the argument would say that the many people wrongfully detained and wrongfully convicted at least had the "benefit" of the legal process, kind of like the Occupy people beaten, penned, dragged and held by fiat.
Tell you what: I was going to say that you can go ahead and feel free to trade away your rights for some spurious "security," but the problem with that is that means MY rights go away, too. Because the kinds of people who end up running the state-security apparatus do not draw nice distinctions between those who make your argument and concessions, including people who from their positions in the world are comfortably and at least presently immune to the effects of the long, slow slide into autokleptocracy, and those of us who don't care to have that done to them.
Is the Alawite adherence to Assad something unreasonable, or something else? What is an "unreasonable level of lyalty"? Don't folks who for a variety of historical reasons, and via one accident or another, rise to the top of political and economic structures kind of notoriously "cling to power" and privilege and perquisites, for some strange reason? The military and its contractors seem to still be doing pretty well in Egypt, and some say in Iran, and of course in the US... If the act of ceding the top dog position means exposing your throat to the next in line, unless you are one of those dictators who gets "bought out" or flees to some Blessed Isle with a planeload of portable wealth?
I don't know, of course. It's the complexity you get from all those "tribes with flags" and all the "interests" that are in play, all of which come to have presence and meaning where the bombs and artillery shells fall to earth, where the blast injuries and shrapnel and bullets and RPG rounds and knives cut into vulnerable human flesh with each "soft target" corpse's former attachments linking out into the mess of emotions and expectations and greeds that are on the boil now. For the Sneaky Petes and Great Gamers, this is just a "situation" to attempt to "manage" so it develops in a way that's attractive to their rendition of "the national interest."
"The opposition." A nicely neutral moniker. I've watched a lot of the videos made available by various members of that category, and everybody tsks over how horrible armed violence is, but really, take a while to look at what is being done in God's name as visible in the archive being kept by the good folks at Syria Comment, and really, this is "freedom fighting?" Or "governing?" And there's a principled or even intelligent and self-interested way to take sides and figure out which bunch to give MANPADs to? And to have the nerve to say that staying out of it is cowardly and causing civilian misery? This from people who over decades, generations, centuries even, have set the initial conditions and provided the little inputs and spins that have things going the way they are, so "we" have to fear some kind of general conflagration in the HaHaHoly Land environs?
In the meantime, billions or trillions of words, and yes, these are some of them, will be uttered, typed, broadcast, to explain, evaluate, justify, condemn, parse, and particularize into misleading categories, all the elements of everyday transport of weapons, fighters, "leaders" and other demagogues, refugees, foodstuffs and water, all the flying bits of the current nexus of our insanity. While the planet burns, faster and faster. And the few, as usual, have their every little whim catered to by their "people."
Too bad us naked apes can't seem to do much better than this.
MK, I agree totally. But of course have a cavil --
...?
Habits of thought, colored by language. If the word is "gains," why then, that's a GOOD thing, right? Since we're accustomed to "gain" being an honorable goal? See "stock market" and "real estate" and "iApple..."
At the NSA jobs portal:
http://www.nsa.gov/careers/
On the other hand, GregoryLent's analogy to how to respond, as if these creatures with their separate reality are just junkies who might rob a few convenience stores and shoot the clerks, maybe pull a carjacking or three, on their way to death in some fetid alley, maybe understates the "threat," the virulence? Seems more to me like a particularly aggressive metastatic kind of cancer, one that's doing the stuff that "successful" cancers do, hiding from the body's immune system, "gaining exponentially" by escaping the constraints on growth that a billion years of biology built, tricking the body into building huge new arteries (angiogenesis -- http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/understandingcancer/angiogenesis ) to siphon more of the body's energy and resources into the spreading tumors without which the tumors can't grow and spread, lining up new ways to displace, convert, consume or destroy healthy tissue in favor of more of its own kind.
This is not a "friend you can walk away from." It's inside us and our institutions and eating us alive, while claiming to be "protecting us" and "providing security" and "keeping us safe." And like cancer, the "thing" that's busy every moment of every day "gaining" does not give a rip-sh_t that the net effect of its activities is the eventual, inevitable, painful, grinding, DEATH OF THE ORGANISM. And thus, eventually, of its own "successful" rotted self. http://mana-junkie.tumblr.com/post/18843214034/i-think-i-won-by-gahan-wilson