I'll second that observation about the ubiquity of FOXcrap, at places like Bay Pines VA Hospital waiting areas (there are many and I've been in most of them), and at the VA "Community Based Outpatient Clinic" in St. Pete, FL. FOX ON, and many of the nursing staff, the white folks at least, listen to Limbaugh and Hannity on the radios in their offices, without benefit of earphones...
Lots of old veterans, of course, but thanks to multiple ongoing "wars of choice," lots of young damaged people too...
Waiting to hear from our Colonel Blimp, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Blimp, Apologists here why, other than because Chomsky does not hew to and promote the Narrative they favor and speak for and maybe even identify with and profit from, and because he is, you know, one of "those people," what he says, about the diction and fraud that befuddle the rest of us so we ignore, out of misplaced loyalty, the evil that our rulers do, is wrong. Of course one has the option of just letting this little blip be obscured in the Noah's Flood of Content, spinning away into the wake of the Leviathan...
Too bad there's not a bass line, to the little partita and fugue that plays out here and at other nexuses in blogspace, a bass line that more constantly spits out a few measures recalling the REALITY of so many and various of the "US" behaviors, or policies or whatever you want to call them, versus the graffiti sprayed on by the apologists and frank propagandists for the powers that be.
Oooh! Oooh! Time for a reminder, speaking of South and Central America, of the wit and wisdom of Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, observing that he was little other than a hired thug forcing the "wogs" to accede to the will of American Business Interests, Inc.
How far are we from the point that the Overlords feel it is not necessary to even allow the little annoyances of "liberal blogging" to continue, the point at which the grip on all the choke points identified by ALEC and PNAC and Heritage and the rest can be closed off like a border crossing on the West Bank?
Well, "WE" better just get in there and train and equip a national army of a more presentable size with new US-made equiptment, and a national police force shown how to do it right by the NYPD... That model has worked so well elsewhere, at least as to firming up the tools of repression, and sending some business to certain "US" corruptorations...
Now THAT's all it takes to "provide basic security." And, of course, a massive change in that other thing called "human nature."
The first one is just a matter of logistics. The other? Another kettle of very stinky fish...
Interesting. How humans tie their identities to groups, with flags that can be burned and bloodied, and to "leaders" who when they actually start to "lead," or get to be too effective or popular (not hardly the same thing at all,) get killed off, activating the grief-and-revenge-and affront parts of our brains. So easy, in a world full of weapons and the willingness and skillfulness to employ them, and the absence of any common notion about all being in it together, for some little idiot sh_ts to kill off a leader of another band, Jesus or Gandhi or Bhutto or the other Lady Gandhi or Sadat or Allende or those little war leader types in Syria, on and on, thus "advancing" some idiot short-term interest or another of one little bunch of parasites and cancers...
And now comes the part where fingers and words and more weapons get pointed, to no particular point if you take any kind of long view at all.
G_D forbid that we step outside or away from our historical and apparently programmed behavior, do something that's maybe more a negative-feedback stabilizing thing. Ain't gonna happen, of course. That species death wish, our basic unfitness for long-term survival, is just too potent.
For those who are all concerned, whether the concern is real or just agitprop-feigned, there's this little abstract of what the Security State is up to:
Ah, the sacredness of the Top Secret Double Secret Probation Eyes Only Security Information Pile! To be preserved at all costs! Pile all right-- pile of embarrassing, stupid, potentially-career-limiting, idiotic crap.
And the pretext, the fraud, that "the law" is some divinely given thing that grows out only healthy roots and shoots, is just that. http://www.stupidlaws.com/laws/united-states/ What a hoot, for people commenting here, where the hypocrisy and fraudulent mythology that marks "our Great Nation's" increasingly illegitimate conduct every day is made just so very manifest, to climb up on high horses, try to get everyone else to don prisms that only show one little piece of the spectrum that they want you to accept as the whole, and claim knowledge of what "the law" is, in its serried and corrupt and perverted majesty, and how an act like that performed by Snowden is "illegal."
"It's a simple question, sir: Have you stopped beating your wife? Yes, or no?"
Let us be all serious and focus on the Securitat's view of having its dirty underwear exposed, and just blow right past the interesting phenomenon of "contractors" doing, for a pretty significant profit, a pretty awful set of tasks that seem maybe just a little inconsistent with the silly notions people still have about the limits of government in a "constitutional" system. Where it's pretty clear that "the law" is whatever the people with clout say it is, both in the sense that they get to write and decide when and against whom to actually enforce it, ask people like William Calley and Dick(less) Cheney and Bradley Manning how that part works, or raise it up as a shield against righteous anger and public outrage as with the NSA revelations and "droning" that the apologists reassure us are all "perfectly legal," and in the sense that where they choose to, they can simply ignore it.
"L'etat c'est moi." "Responsible historians" debate whether Louis XIV actually ever said this, but the principle is clear, and sure seems to be manifest and plenipotent in our Imperial Capital...
Over to you, Bill, for more examples of specious reasoning...
There's who we think we are, who we pretend we are, who we can trick other people into believing we are, and who we really are. As a species, as a nation, as a tribe. And as individuals....
Sounds more like marketing, that manufactured-demand thing, or maybe like how things worked in Daley's Chicago, Boss Tweed's New York, maybe even Hussein's Iraq. "Vote early, and vote often." THAT is "democracy." Maybe if there were an acceptable definition of "legitimacy" and how it's earned and maintained, we might be headed somewhere...
A Voter is just a mobile piece of meat that can be activated to do all kinds of stupid stuff that way too often operates as a challenge to the survival of himself, his family, even his tribe, and on the Really Big Scale, the species. Giving the gift of pseudo-legitimacy to, say, Huey Long, Joe McCarthy, even The Only President We've Got...
What are these "Christians" that are written about so knowingly here?
Sounds not so much like world-girdling kinship with the dogmas of Believers I hung around with, did worship services and Acts of Charity with, Presbyterian and Baptist and Episcopalian and Methodist, until the hypocrisy got to be a little too rank. Sounds a lot more like just another tribe in the area discussed, with a common flag of sorts that still is made up of many panels of slightly or significantly different colors, stitched together with the threads of common fears as much as by any commonality of beliefs, with enough differences that the principles of behavior illuminated by stuff like Jane Elliott's "Brown Eyes-Blue Eyes" experiment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hqp6GnYqIjQ, can easily be expressed and acted on. Much like the "Christians" in the rest of the world. Or of course "Muslims."
I won't pretend to knowledge of the day-to-day practices and ethics and ethos of those sets of people, but the article indicates the seams of schism are all present and ready to unravel, or just suddenly tear, once the Common Enemy problem has been solved... or, maybe, hold together once, or until, the next Saddam rises up, to have his day in the sun.
It's pretty clear that the notion of a "rule of law" is a snare, a delusion and a convenient myth. Is there no Common Good? "Can we, can we, uh, can we all just get along? Can we?" (That ought to be good for a cynical snort or belly laugh, from the "Christians" in the Simi Valley area...) Coach used to tell us, loudly, that "THERE IS NO 'I' IN TEAM!" He didn't like having it pointed out that it doesn't take a Scrabble whiz to find a "ME" in there...
...and rather than strain themselves trying to make things what most of us used to call "better," for the benefit not only of themselves and future humans (if there are any), people with any political and military and engineering skills just Embrace The Power and walk willingly into the Mouth of Moloch.
It's a significant thing, but still a pretty tiny and egocentric one, the achievement of a right for pretty much anyone to legally marry anyone else. That seems to be about the extent of effective activism on the Left. And besides, there are so many hypocritical "wide stance" reactionaries who have their own interests served by popping off this particular relief valve. The Left can't even gain and hold territory in the area of what's summmed under the heading "abortion", can't even control the terms of the public debate on that sensitive topic.
Who gets to drive the Big Bus? What are we destined or driven to be, as a species? Any reason for us to hang around much longer, since all we seem to be doing is screwing up what for most life forms here was a pretty wonderful planet? Any reason other than to spend our lives, most of us, just making the lives of a very tiny few so incredibly, enviably "luxurious?" Oh -- and of course doing stuff like you see here? http://syriavideo.net/page/5/ (disturbing -- or titillating -- content...)
I guess we ordinary folks can consider ourselves, like maybe the Neanderthals and earlier models, a kind of "booster rocket" for the very special wealthy, fit to burn ourselves out sending them into that higher orbit, or maybe even to escape velocity. You know, that tiny fraction of the species, blessed with the Acquisitive gene, who, as many of us may have finally realized, actually will inherit the earth -- or what's left of the temperate zones...
And for something completely different, tune in here, and enjoy the show: http://syriavideo.net/ THAT's what we are, given the smallest opening.
"Not all histories are equally biased." Hey, something we can agree on!
But implicit in your statement is acceptance that bias is present, with argument (as yours with Zinn's work, which disagreement is a not so subtle impeachment-and-dismissal) over the degree and direction. And Doing History is inarguably a process of selection, ordering and presentation of stuff you call "facts" that's in its nature subjective, and subject to bias in perception, weighting and comprehension. Not to mention the slipperiness of "facts."
As to that condescending snipe-ette about "tribute to 'postmodern' ethos" in my noting that history is an exercise in story-telling, maybe just google "history is telling a story" and follow the links to all the observations of people who share your apparent biases, and mine, people with more gravitas than either of us, stating rather bluntly that that is exactly what historians do.
There is no 'true set of facts' that capture and demand respect as the One True Recitation, as all your reading should make plain. There are people whose selections and emphasis among the myriad "facts" you agree with, who reinforce your preferences and world view, and those you don't, who are apparently "unserious" or nothing much better than "agitprop" scribblers.
If one googles "critique of Morrison" or the same for Garraty, one finds that, mirabie dictu, there are lots of deep people who deeply disagree with the axes of the stories those historians tell, and their selection of "facts" as their proofs. Some even call Garraty a "socialist," fer Cliff's sake.
One little title from Morrison's works: "The Story of the 'Old Colony' of New Plymouth." Even historians know what they are doing as they read and borrow from and critique other historians' works, and research primary materials that contain their own biases, frauds and mis-statements, and from which they select and write.
You disdain Wiki, but it's interesting that the precis for Morrison, as for others memorialized there, includes an entry under the caption "Allegiance" as being to the United States of America. Also included is this bit of text about one of his works, proposing to recite the history of the Battle of Savo Island:
In his semi-official account of the Battle of Savo Island, a disastrous defeat for the U.S. Navy in World War II, Morison partly blamed the defeat on the failure of an Australian aircrew to inform the Americans of the approaching Japanese forces.[17] Morison appears to have based this story on inaccurate, now refuted, information.
(emphasis added) And I think another thing we agree on is that the Israeli efforts to sink the USS Liberty in 1967 were "factually" very much other than the official, widely reported "fact" stories from our leaders.
"Facts," it would appear, are not even what most commonly understand that term to mean, ultimately. We do the best we can, and it's best to maintain a healthy and skeptical humility about our pronouncements.
Sir, every work of history I have ever read, quite a few at my age, from a pretty broad scope, carried the stamp of the "historian's" biases and predilections and loyalties. As surely as do your comments here, and mine, too, of course. Along with what I guess you would insist you would never do, as an implied "responsible historian:" the downplaying, shading, omissions and mis-statements and mis-characterizations of "facts" that themselves are slimy, octopus-like critters that squirt ink when troubled, morph easily in shape and color, and can escape containment through cracks in the tightest argumentative box, however wide or narrow.
Which "plenty of American history texts" should be held out as meeting the presumed criterion of being "more balanced" than Zinn's works? The Beards' works, maybe? What kids learned from the McGuffey Readers? Your recommendations are awaited.
Anyone who insists they are "responsible historians" and that there is anything like a One True Recitation of History is, not to put too fine a point on it, a less than candid person. "History," after all, is an exercise in selective story-telling, out of an essentially infinite tapestry and ecology of "facts," a process that by its very nature REQUIRES a bias, a viewpoint. Often, that's one that is claimed or assumed by the "responsible historian" to be "unbiased" and "correct." By the "responsible historian" who nevertheless (often when attacking or impeaching some selection done by other "responsible historians") occasionally regurgitates truisms like "history is written by the victors."
The best we can seemingly do, and so often fail to even approach (ask the Taliban, theirs and our home-grown equivalent like Daniels and the successful school curriculum insurgents in Texas and elsewhere how pretermitting that approach so easily can be made to work) is put it all out there, and hope that people of good will and some residual knowledge of human nature and "history" garnered from some magical wellspring, in responding to some internal compass that points in the direction of decency and survival, will be able to use the brains God gave them to separate the wheat from the chaff, the nuggets of wisdom from the fool's gold of subtle, seductive and selective falsehood.
"History tells us," of course, just looking at the RECORDED (that "victors" thing again") body counts and externalized costs and actual foci and forms of our "historical" political and economic and spiritual organization, and inter alia the applications of technology to resources and to each other, to see that there's not much of a good outcome (by MY personal criteria, of course) that's either possible or likely or even imaginable...
400 to 600 nuclear weapons can glassify a lot of terrain. And gassify a lot of "enemies." And do one enormous amount of "collateral damage." You think the Thanatos-lovers in the Israeli right wing give a sh_t what comes after? Time to go back and re-read the Old Testament.
My bet is that the IDF nukes are on a hair trigger as sensitive as the ones that almost got the former contending Imperiums into several kill-the-planet Hot Wars. Here's some bedtime reading for Realpolitik Fantasists to discount and refute, as they play over their Game of RISK! (tm) scenarios of global domination: http://www.nucleardarkness.org/web/cityonfire/
I don't know, it seems to me that he and Hillary did and are doing a pretty bang-up, spot-on job of effectuating the Imperial wish list and those things that are so smugly and idiotically called "policies." As if denominating something a "policy" elevates monstrous behavior to what "everyone who understands geopoliltics" just has to accept as good sense, or at least realpolitik inevitability.
Ol' Barbara Tuchman did a pretty good job of pointing out the several "policies" that bled us into a series of world war peak-casualty events, as part of the latter stages of combusto-consumption industrialization and the private-jet or F-35 or C-130 landing approach to Elite Rule Forever Or Until We're All, You Know, Just DEAD Field...
Is "Robocop" in the same tradition as "Animal Farm" and "Brave New World" and "1984?" Diagnostic, prognistic, despondent, showing little bits of decency being crushed by the likes of Dick Jones, greedhead CEO of Omni Consumer Products?
Samantha, good luck with the notion that "our government" is going to "focus more on domestic policy." Except in the narrow sense that there will be more predations on us underclasspeople, more Big Data and "restrictions on abortion" and other human-rights issues, more crushing of modes of effective organization against kleptocracy and the Forever War and its giant wealth vacuum (like "unions"), more "conservative" and privatized schools and prisons and roads and bridges (still paid for by taxes and tolls on the general public).
Seems to me "our government" is mostly offshore already, not just its attentions but its operations, especially the Imperial Military whose officers buy the Leviathan's weapons and toys from Whereveristan, hire out the skilled tasks, and of which the "mission" has turned to simply protecting the wealth and sources of wealth of the wealthy, or might one say "filthy rich?" The structure we live under is corrupt with the Great Corruption that its "conservative" practitioners label, hypocritically or simply from unconscious irony, "Byzantine."
These folks seem to have calculated to a nicety, or just lucked into, a quantum of abuse of and parasitism on the most of us that is just below the boiling point, a little steam from time to time but no rolling bubbles, and injected enough ignorance and despondence into the pot to keep raising the boiling point by degrees to make things comfortable for their very well-fed selves, long enough off the boil, at least, to "retire" to resorts and enclaves of privilege.
Let's enjoy our momentary ability to "speak truth," to keep blowing off steam, to keep relieving the pressure in the cooker... and take such comfort as we can in the ultimate incompetence of oppressive bureaucracies that kill off all the geese that lay the golden eggs they feed from. Not that that bodes well for us geese...
So glad to see that constant submersion in all the Diluvian idiocy that gets documented here by Dr. Cole's incredible efforts has not extinguished a subtle, almost British, sense of humor:
The cabinet contains some of Egypt’s best economists, raising hopes that the country’s deep economic doldrums can be addressed.
Mark, "enlistment" (it's not "enrollment," as used below, and certainly not "matriculation") in the military is not "service," except maybe in the very tiny bit of military activity that actually, you know, "protects the nation" as the person in the street would understand the phrase. Go spend some time at military.com, at any of the veterans-for-peace sites, and in the publicly available War Department and contractor materials. It's all about wealth transfer and career paths and domination, and the "fun" of "lighting up some bug splat."
As to "service" being a "way toward education and steady gainful employment," you got any idea what the unemployment stats are for ex-GIs? Homelessness? Mental and physical disabilities? irrespective of race or ethnicity? And there is not a lot of transfer of your military education, which for the ranks is pretty sketchy, when the skills are calling in and directing artillery and air strikes, responding to ambushes that your Brass has sent you out to trigger, taking your pills, recovering from subclinical brain injuries, cleaning your weapon, stealing government equipment, repairing tanks and attack helicopters, and killing Wogs because they are trying to kill you because you are trying to kill them, in their homeland. It's no "service" to the nation to keep a large standing military, which develops lobbies and interests that are inimical to "democracy" and even to the survival of the nation and the species.
Some employers like the trained: Blackwater and similar, police, stuff like that. Not much of that, or of the carrying out of Imperial marching orders, is doing a damn thing to "protect our Great Nation," which is effectively nothing but a source of replacement body parts and rents for the very few, who themselves have ZERO loyalty to "the nation," but are happy to foster and play on the loyalties of the rest of us.
And you got the cognitive dissonance, as a GI or Gyrene, of taking an oath to "support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic," when your CinC holds that the Constitution is a dead letter and the opportunities of the moment obliterate all that high language about rights and limits and all that. And then you have to sit through "indoctrination" sessions so patently propaganda for the Empire and Christianist world view that the smartest have to laugh and the weakest have their prejudices reinforced. So you have ex-GIs and many still "in the service" going to Occupy gatherings and protests against the Forever War, to instruct the police in the content of the Constitution, and getting shot in the head and beaten and gassed for their pains. And maybe there's some who remember the treatment accorded the Bonus Marchers, after another imperial war... and the Grand Networked Idiot Interoperable Battlespace War Managers are doing their damndest to dispense with rank-and-file anyway, in favor of better-behaved hardware, and are paying contractors 10 times what GIs get to do the jobs that might actually have some "transfer benefits."
The assumption that "our majority culture" is Right and Worthy and part of some pleasant, upwardly mobile monad, and that "black culture" is pathological, ignores the real makeup of our political economy, which is based on consumptive Imperialism and concentration of wealth and beggaring and enserfment of the people who actually do the work that creates the wealth that the military and cops and private security (like the Kochs have) are actually "protecting."
This whole thread and comments pretty aptly capture the Narrative version of Current Events, from the limited perspective of the privileged, looking down and saying to each other "what blacks are," as if the horrors happening beneath their perches are sui generis, unrelated to anything they profit from and "not their problem," except as an exercise in sanitation and furtherance of their privileges. News note: All "those people" are individuals, acting as advertising and propaganda and "schooling" teach them to act, with the constant reinforcement of certain behaviors. Lots of smart people of good will have offered better diagnoses of what's wrong, and prescriptions for how to cure, ameliorate, or at least palliate the problems. There's no money in those approaches, ask Corrections Corporation of America how that works, and breaking down the status walls and fairing up the structures and behaviors that impel people toward comity, rather than anomie (the libertarian ideal) has no lobby to press for that kind of Change. More and more for fewer and fewer, screw the consequences to others, "Apres moi le deluge."
And far as I can see, there's no fixing it, not even any significant interest in trying to fix things, given the momentum and motivations in play.
Or you can just go the Heritage Foundation's web site, or Ralphie Reed's Faith & Freedom Coalition site, ffcoalition.com, for further reinforcement.
On the other hand, as far as I can see, there is NO "AMERICA" any more, if there ever was such a hypostatisation, to "fail" to address the lot and prospects and nature of black youth, which "failure" and its sequalae is just one pretty small but presently news-cycle-centric bit of what is so very wrong with our species and our particular "nation."
You got a school system increasingly dumbed down and loaded with idiot lesson plans and irrelevant "testing" intended to sell a cattle mentality, a "Christian-centric" viewpoint, and help the switch to privatized rip-off-the-public schools. You got the undeniable prison industrial complex, fed by the corrupt "war on drugs" and look-away prosecutors and judges who happily build stats by moving puny possession cases through the system.
You got legislatures stacked with Gerry Mander and Cotton Mather and ever more apartheid hypocrites, tightening the noose every session. You got an "economy" that sees blacks (and the rest of us) as malleable idiots who will yet work for coolie wages under a business model that is more work from fewer people for less pay, every day, or at least suckering us to dump our little income, however derived, into lottery tickets and Rent-A-Spinner-Rims. You got the part of "the arts" that is happy to take ticket and album and merchandise money to paint lipstick on gangsta behavior, and glorify "bad dudes" who "succeed" in managing the illicit drug trade that largely exists due to Rich White Folk hypocrisy. You got black "prosperity preachers" magnetizing the suckers 24/7.
And the principal selling themes for our whole culture are SEX and DEATH, and of course MORE MONEY. Pretty straight Freud, if you think about it. And of course you have the thing we reify as "Wall Street," always circling, circling, ripping off states and municipalities through fraudulent bond issues and pension "management" fees and self-dealing on enormous scale. And the incredible sickness that has white folks on the way down busily voting for and dangling their tea bags for the very people who are ripping them off, I guess thinking that if they can only hate and abuse the Other enough, that will stop their own stupid slide into Jerry Springer demise as stupid hosts to a huge body burden of tumors and parasites.
In sum, a bunch of disparate, mutually destructive parts loosely flying in a formation that's shaped like the made-in-Vietnam American Flag-motif underpants I saw in a recent fourth-class catalog in the trash at the local post office.
Good luck with all that, which just overwhelms the little local good-will efforts of the few of your Fellow Americans that are trying to keep the whole thing from crashing into the seawall... And of course the supra-national corporations and Serous Geopoliticians are busily bleeding the planet and the rest of us all the while...
Due to the passing of time, and the intractable, idiotic, implacable (yet behind the scenes, so very profitable) beating of that "ceterum censeo, Carthago delenda est" inverted cooking pot re-labeled "And while we are at it, Iran must be destroyed."
"Strategically, neither underestimating nor overestimating your enemy will produce your established goals." Sounds so, I don't know, WISE and EFFICIENT and all. And what are Netanyahoo's (and I adopt the misleading convention of reification/personification for, er, convenience) "established goals?"
That under-over-just-right thing is the Great Game postulate, of course. Like saying in geometry that a line is straight: in which n-space is that even "true?" But The Enemy is always an enigma, a fellow human full of surprises (see, e.g., Hiroshima and nerve gas and nanoweapons and suicide bombers, and IEDs made from bombs and artillery shells gifted to a Best Former Friend.)
And how much proof is needed to establish that the vast bulk of our generals are always ready to fight the LAST or SOME OTHER war, with rare exceptions (like Van Riper, http://www.cuttingedge.org/News/n2026.cfm, who acknowledges he would not likely be able to repeat, but the next smart tough guy would.)
I know, realistically that is how humans play what they think or tell the proles is a zero-sum game, and it's juvenile and jejune and childish and all that un-serious jazz too to, you know, question the processing and all the nearly infinite and profitable and murderous and destructive (in so many, many ways) results of the Great Game as coupled to Consumptive Capitalism-or-whatever-it-is. But it seems to me that if humans don't learn something different, oh well! Even old Sun Tzu knew that war (which back then was a simpler thing than the Global Stupid Hyper Networked Interoperable All The Data 24/7 Battlespace and all the perpetual getting-ready and bloody skirmishes that can never produce a "victor" or produce any of the kinds of Change that the war leaders promise, that eats a quarter of the world's wealth and sets us on the path to "Terminator" meets "Soylent Green") was an exercise to be oh so rarely indulged in, and that wise rulers were supposed to have a very much different calculus in mind when committing their populations to the Curious, Furious Idiocy.
The answer to the repeated question about what those "established goals" are is either a flood of Milbabble, a plethora of Pol-speak, or that smug "well, obviously you're unserious if you don't know already..."
What all our rulers are subjecting us to is a multi-treed game, where they alone, up there in the upper parts of the canopy, where they chatter to each other and crap down on the rest of us, are the "winners," by any sensible measure, and the rest of us are conveniently trained up as wealth generators to buy their toys and indulgences for them and eaters of offal and detritus, and then play the part of "bug splats" in their Game rounds. Kochs and Arafat and Netanyahoo and all the rest "live large" while we endure shrunken, fearful, increasingly desperate and actually threatened (by climate change 'n stuff) little lives...
Seems to me that "the sum of all fears" is pretty inarguably a large negative number.
They were also a bunch of dissolute, self-promoting, shameless hypocrites, selling offices and indulgences to build their personal monuments and family treasuries and fund their idiot wars. Which it seems all leaders (owners?) of religions inevitably become.
" And why would anyone expect him to change after a lifetime in such circles?"
A question that might be applied to many of us, especially those who leave hanging the implication, unsupported, of deep involvement in, and deep knowledge about, what the Deep Government has been up to. And of course "serious history." And "serious observation of international affairs." And I guess the implicit sense of how the rest of us are supposed to sleep on, secure in the belief that it's all been for our own good.
I guess there are some common threads that tie a lot of what's shaking in the world up in a nice neat knot. We got pseudo-Christians here, people with genes for organizing and repressing that "liberals" and "progressives" sadly lack, who have a set of Taliban Tenets that bind them into the same kind of political mass noted above (albeit with the seeds of schism planted in their bellies). You have to love the use of people's sense of the spiritual to turn them into serfs and renters and Quislings, subject to "rules" that the "rulers" themselves sneer at.
I'm just sure that no Imams drink alcohol, or eat proscribed food, or engage in adultery, or climb on little dancing (or altar) boys, or indulge themselves in other earthly fleshy pleasures, any more than our flood tide of Priests and TV Preachers and the heads of Mega-Churches and a whole raft of military officers and of course politicians with "wide stances" for whom abortion is anathema unless it's their daughter who was raped or "made a mistake."
It appears that Buddhists and Hindus and of course recognized state religions like Shinto and even Confucianism are subject to the same perversions, in all the meanings of that word...
Is "hypocrisy" a recognized religion?
And anyone who thinks "reformation" is the answer, or "rectification," sure is not a "serious and responsible student of history..."
Little post, small comments, great big "issue." Bill speaks solemnly for dispassionatality, doubts are raised. The underlying assumption in much here is that the death penalty deters murder,
Michigan was the first state to abolish the death penalty via its Michigan Constitution. Every attempt to revive it has failed since its prohibition in the 1800s. In the 1970s the City of Detroit had earned the nickname “The Murder City” and was identified as having the highest homicide rate in the world of any municipality with a population of over 1.5 million persons. The vast majority of the victims in Detroit during that time were black but none could face the death penalty due to the state constitutional prohibition against capital punishment. A similar logic exists in the District of Columbia which has a high percentage of black citizens, a significantly elevated murder rate and blacks being the chief victims.
Did the writer say what he meant and mean what he infers -- "similar logic" -- and if this is going to be a "good post," why no examination of all those places in the world that have abolished the death penalty as idiotic (if a lot of fun, for the vicious and intolerant and hypocritical among us)?
...what was that line about not learning from history, again?
What a comforting impasto to lay over and obscure the image of "Guernica," or maybe "The Scream," that "freedom is messy," and somehow will ineluctably lead to what, again? "Mature democracy?" Like our own? like Britain? like even Canada? like Israel?
There really are reasons why people of good will and good sense reject the version of econopolitics, that we call "democracy" and decline to define accurately, that "our" government is invested in, along with "our" corporations, and intent on slathering the world with...
Too bad greed, arrogance, ignorance, tribalism, dominionism, and all those other "forces" at work in the human-operated part of the world seem to be only a set of positive-feedback, divergent, asymptotic functions that only trend toward sustainability and stability in the propaganda of those who apologize for the current overriding actual religion (going by behaviors and outcomes) that might best be called "MOREism." More for me and my little segment or tribe, less for you Others. An enormous, complex negative-sum game, albeit carefully masked as a zero-sum, with a few interim "winners,".
And given how we are individually created, and how, on the evidence, we mostly tend to behave, it's not surprising that way too many of us operate on the notion enunciated by one of the Wall Street Vampire Squids: "Hey, everybody else is cheating and stealing and getting away with it, so I'd be a dope to do anything else, wouldn't I? Besides, by the time the sh__ really hits the fan, I'll be gone and you'll be gone anyway."
Ain't seemingly but one way for things to go from here, and despite the magical faith in magical technology or iChange to "iNnovate" something to bring us back from the brink, I hope we will all at least get to enjoy the wind-in-our-hair sensation of free-falling, before we hit the rocks...
I bet quite a few folks who visit this site are familiar with both the label, and the substance, or lack thereof, of something called "Anomie." A waypoint on the path to Ragnarök, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragnar%C3%B6k
Here's one characterization of "anomie:"
Emile Durkheim, a French sociologist, introduced the concept of anomie in his book The Division of Labor in Society, published in 1893. He used anomie to describe a condition of deregulation that was occuring in society. This meant that rules on how people ought to behave with each other were breaking down and thus people did not know what to expect from one another. Anomie, simply defined, is a state where norms (expectations on behaviors) are confused, unclear or not present. It is normlessness, Durkheim felt, that led to deviant behavior. In 1897, Durkheim used the term again in his study on Suicide, referring to a morally deregulated condition. Durkheim was preoccupied with the effects of social change. He best illustrated his concept of anomie not in a discussion of crime but of suicide.
In The Division of Labor in Society, Durkheim proposed two concepts. First, that societies evolved from a simple, nonspecialized form, called mechanical, toward a highly complex, specialized form, called organic. In the former society people behave and think alike and more or less perfom the same work tasks and have the same group-oriented goals. When societies become more complex, or organic, work also becomes more complex. In this society, people are no longer tied to one another and social bonds are impersonal.
Anomie thus refers to a breakdown of social norms and it a condition where norms no longer control the activities of members in society. Individuals cannot find their place in society without clear rules to help guide them. Changing conditions as well as adjustment of life leads to dissatisfaction, conflict, and deviance. He observed that social periods of disruption (economic depression, for instance) brought about greater anomie and higher rates of crime, suicide, and deviance.
Durkheim felt that sudden change caused a state of anomie. The system breaks down, either during a great prosperity or a great depression, anomie is the same result.
Still unclear on the concept? Now that attention is turning back a bit to that place called "Syria," as "IsitorisitnotacoupanddidtheUShaveanythingtodowithitthistime" fades into the general irrelevance, go spend some quality time viewing the plethora of little video vignettes conveniently collected and cataloged at "Syria Video," http://syriavideo.net/ That should pretty much clear up any lingering confusion or uncertainty about who rules, in the state of Anomie.
Then tune in "hellfire video" on Youtube, for some more fun...
It's like the rules in a bar fight: there ain't none.
On the other hand, "the presumption of continuity is one of the strongest in the law," and that's why, with certain limitations, past bad acts are admissible to prove or at least bolster the presumptions of current bad conduct. And it's not like there's no pretty good proof, even you acknowledge that, grudgingly, that US AlphaBENT agencies have been bad actors in the past. Actually, it's kind of foolish to even try to minimize or deny or obscure the way "we" play the Great Game. Given, as pointed out above, that the evidence of those bad acts tends not to appear until long after the events, if ever depending on how well it's covered up, it's pretty weak tea that you're pouring, leaning on impeachment by repeating references to supposed logical fallacies, and insisting that a "small degree" of involvement, which many sets of data suggest was a lot bigger than you allow, by "the US" in, e.g., the overthrow and murder of Salvador Allende, is equal to "no responsibility."
Barks like a dog, quacks like a duck, pees like a horse...
"K" Street lobbyists advise their clients to put a little money into both "sides" of the political frame here, to cover all bets and add to the apparent reality, and even to inflame the contentiousness, of the "debate."
Is the contention that via "democracy grants," the part of "the US" that plays that part of the Game proves some disinterested interest in spreading the kind of "democracy" that is the misty, water-colored, teary-eyed, lump-in-the-throat imago that we "voters" and Boy Scouts and servicemen and -women are encouraged to dream upon when thinking about the "virtues" of our system?
Some see what we all live in here as, rather, an 'inverted totalitarianism,' with a highly managed "voting" as the only bit of pro forma democracy in the substance of it:
...Inverted totalitarianism and managed democracy
Wolin believes that the United States (which he refers to using the proper noun "Superpower", to emphasize the current position of the United States as the only superpower) has been increasingly taking on totalitarian tendencies, as a result of the transformations that it has undergone during the military mobilization required to fight the Axis powers, and during the subsequent campaign of containing the Soviet Union during the Cold War:[2]
'While the versions of totalitarianism represented by Nazism and Fascism consolidated power by suppressing liberal political practices that had sunk only shallow cultural roots, Superpower represents a drive towards totality that draws from the setting where liberalism and democracy have been established for more than two centuries. It is Nazism turned upside-down, “inverted totalitarianism.” While it is a system that aspires to totality, it is driven by an ideology of the cost-effective rather than of a “master race” (Herrenvolk), by the material rather than the “ideal"....'
There's more to the insight, of course, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism, and if you read the details and do a little further study of the concept, it sure seems apposite, and to be closer to the real substance of what "we" are working to spread, like the nostalgic migrating opportunistic Scots spread gorse, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorse, across the planet...
Sounds so very much like what is happening in other places in the world, notably the good ol' US of A, where the Business Plotters and other "libertarian rectitudinalists" figured out that it was more long-term profitable to just buy their way into power, the expenses of regulatory capture being plain old cheap, both in money and pushback and aggravation and with incredible returns on investment (sic), in comparison to trying to pull off a coup.
And of course look where we are now, with "Christianists" filling local school boards (and more of our military officer ranks), Gerrymandered Republicans locking down so many state governments, the best Congress money can buy, an executive that's gone all Imperial, and every one in the power structure happy to increase the net ignorance, disaffection, stupidity and credulity of the Ballotized Electorate that thinks voting = legitimacy and that they are so blessed as to be living in a "more mature democracy." If only they could just kill off or export or disenfranchise or repress all those Others who had the audacity to be born within the same geographic boundaries.
"...infused into all aspects of the public institutions," indeed. Another reason "we" are on the skids as a species...
Hey Perfesser, given the tenor and substance of all the comments about what's afoot in Egypt, so much in the way of odds-makers doing their handicapping, maybe you could frame up a Fantasy Socioeconopolitical L:eague! With rounds based on each rollover coupulation, and "player drafts" and trades, the whole simulation! With an ante and a pot big enough to make it interesting!
Just like the real world, where it's all about personalities and clout and where the money and influence flows. Wouldn't that be fun? Lots of little play markers, from Sikorsky and Sukhoi and Boeing and Oerlikon and such, with the pot to be held by the World Bank! A much improved, more "mature" version of the Game of RISK tm!
It ain't always age, it is always behavior. There are basic needs that a population that makes the wealth the rulers live off off ought to have met. But as long as the "behaviors," which the cognoscenti dignify with the title of "policies," go beyond the level of predation and parasitism that keep those basic needs from being even minimally satisfied, the rulers are gonna have some 'splainin' to doo. Eventually.
In the political sphere, what would be the equivalent of "business model?" Or, as we are seeing more of with the activities of that thing we are still stupid enough to call the "National Security Agency," linked organizationally and by "interlocking directorates" with the rest of the "state security" apparatus and the pseudopodia of the MIC, is there no longer any sensible distinction between "business" and "politics," so that what these old guys and greedy young and younger people elsewhere are doing, grabbing for all the MORE OF EVERYTHING they can get by beggaring their neighbors while preaching faithful adherence to some religious codex or another, best described as a "business model" as surely as what the Koch brothers, and our post- and supra-national Vampire Squids and other diseases, are doing here in what used to be America, Land of the Free and Home of the Brave?
I bet we can all take comfort that "neo-liberal policies," applied under the blandishments of the IMF and World Bank, will do another bang-up job of bringing "stability and prosperity" to yet another tributary part of the planet...
Real life is made up of little anecdotes. Thank you, Shahid, for hanging that one on the clothesline, to remind us of the Pentagon Papers and Nixon's tape machines and April Glaspie and a freakin' gigantic tub of others including Castro's beard-shucking cigar...
Mine for today is a little vignette that anyone who worships or reveres or even honors what gets once again so disingenuously personified as "the military" ought to look at and remember, another tip of another iceberg:
And isn't free enterprise wonderful? There's a whole cottage industry of lawyers, ready to assist whistleblowers who can show actual dollar losses to we, the taxpayers, rather than desert-boot prints and skid marks and the imprints of tracked vehicles across our earnest trusting foreheads:
For more of what really goes on every day with your hard-earned money, please feel free, as free as we actually are any more, to google "military procurement contractor fraud." Fun stuff...
Many Americans see the “alphabet agencies” as bastions of democracy in the world.
Is that "alphabet," or "alphaBENT?"
And many fellow US-ans know dang well what those collections of too-often-corruptniks actually do, but go on to give them praise and cover for bad acts and reassure the rest of us that all that stuff, all that fiddling and Fudd-ling with the other nations of the world or many of our own under-the-Constitutional fellow citizens, is not only "legal" but also mandatorily "necessary" if Freedom'n'Democracy (tm), New! and Improved! and Wait! There's More! is to spread and prosper and "mature" among the Wogs...
No, no, no: Bill says it's all completely legal! Or at least Necessary! Or maybe Justified! As do a lot of others who speak for power!
Having had a feeding tube "passed" into my esophagus, and having been involved in the procedure as a nurse, may I venture to testify that having that done, forcibly, against one's will, over and over, is pretty inarguably a pretty rotten form of torture.
But then the purpose of power is power. The purpose of torture is torture. And if you are a freakin' Great Game bureaucrat or Colonel Klink or CinC, life is never having to acknowledge that what you are doing is, you know, WRONG, mush less to stop doing it.
Oh, look, you have maybe "radicalized" some of these people you nabbed off the street and stuck in an oubliette, https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/oubliette, so now you have the security bureaucrat's complete and perfect excuse to defer to the next guy any opprobrium and helter-skelter that might attach to maybe actually "doing the right thing!"
News flash: I'm always astonished at people who believe "the military," any "military" including our own, is some unitary body of trained men (mostly) with a common discipline and fealty and organization dedicated to the survival and prosperity of the nation that nominally arms and feeds them. That's NEVER been how it works, any more than "war" is a stand-up zero-sum game between Our Heroes and Those Baddies. And expecting or at least claiming as a visible and nominal policy goal that "training up an Army and national police force" is the way you "instill democracy" and "bring stability" to an area is so far off the mark as to be, what is it the Bobbsey Twins use for a pejorative, "ahistorical."
These events-in-context (not "stories," please, that's the Idiot MSM reduction we are way too comfortable with) end up badly, usually, because there's too much bad in the best of us and way, way too little good in the worst of us to overcome the toxins that the predators and parasites instill in us and the loss of blood from their persistent drainings. And there's personal profit and status to gain from sending "rough men" on motorcycles, armed with and firing the REAL Weapons of Mass Destruction, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/24/AR2006112400788.html, into crowds full of people full of a hypergolic mixture of hope, fear, anger, remorse, revenge, yearning, prayer...
How are US military types, who have brought us the School of the Americas, the invasion of countless countries, the idiocy of war-as-wealth-transfer-plus-body-count, all the sneaky-petery that paramilitary attachments and detachments undertake, supposed to create a nation-creating-and-sustaining "Army and national police" that will do anything other than what the average furriner (or our own Sheriff Bubbas and Militiamen) does in his daily life, only with better and more guns'n'ammo and a structure that a warlord or at a larger scale dictator can so easily co-opt?
When it comes to keeping a country or area or region that's up for grabs "destabilized," is there a formula, like there is for "evaluating raw intelligence data," for figuring out how many people you have to kill, one way or another, from which affinity group, to keep the pot on the boil or send the stew up in clouds of live, flesh-shredding steam? To reach that critical mass of tribal anger and vengeance that makes the peacemakers, even, "see red" and reach for weapons and start filling the conversational spaces that used to be occupied by "um" and "ah" and "Alma'derah" with "Allahu Akhbar!" and the air with hot rounds, and cue up the myriad little cellphone videos with little ululating clumps of "You see? You see what They are like?" people hauling another "martyr's" body through the horde, blood drops turning to Dragon's Teeth, or sawing the head off an "enemy" and cutting out his heart, Allahu Akhbar!, and eating it? (I'll eschew the video link, but it's there in "Syria Video.")
How much of this Curious Activity, Professor, is just about seizing the spoils of war, of the Ur-ians lining up to knock down the walls and empty the granaries of Nineveh, the Israelites putting everyone else to the sword and taking their stuff with a claim of G_D's blessing, the Koch brothers or Egyptian military officers or the people Bill insists are just figments of juvenile imagination running the fading "legitimate organs of government and the monopoly on violence" for their personal profit, skating along the edge of complete dissolution of all bonds in an effort to maximize their personal benefits, knowing there are no consequences for the horrors accrued to others by their terminal parasitism and smug manipulations?
Comity is a slow-growing plant, and its rhizomes and tendrils and modest blossoms and faint fragrance are easily shriveled, poisoned and detached...
Hey, the "US government" dumps a whole lot more cash and weapons and "military aid" into the laps of Likud and the IDF. Does that translate into "influence" with the Israeli rulers? And Obama and our ruling bunch have had a lot of contact with Netanyahoo and Friends, and gotten the equivalent of a shoe thrown at their collective heads, a "mooning," and an upraised middle finger.
Or maybe the hammering-down of Palestinians, the near sinking of the USS Liberty and killing of US sailors, the safe harbor for dual-citizenship Ponzi runners and murderers, and all the other incidents of what ought to be incitement that have happened over the years, are what was intended? One would hope not. But in the depths of the Great Game, who actually knows anything or controls the moves? We do love our "Game of Thrones," our "Dallas!", our "Mad Men," our "West Wing," and of course Erica/Susan Lucci.
"Responsible international observation" calls two images to mind: the range of perception of an unfortunate with narrow-angle glaucoma, and what one "knows" of our world by careful examination of one shovelful of waste from a municipal landfill.
But we are to be assured and re-assured that there are no grande or medio or even poquito conspiracies or stuff... and grown-ups are in charge. I believe I'd rather trust some eighth-graders, pimples, hormones, undeveloped prefrontal cortex, bullying, sexting and all.
More likely, US intelligence advised European allies of the possibility that Morales took Snowden with him on his plane, in which case Morales would be aiding and abetting the flight of a fugitive from US justice, without having undergone the process of granting him political asylum.
Were that to be the case, Morales would be an accessory to a crime (aiding and abetting a fugitive).
Which part of that is not a claim that Morales, and by simple logic the rest of the planet, is not subject to US law? And of course just to put the other slice of bread on the rhetorical sandwich, what is this to be taken to mean?
But just because Morales is President of Bolivia does not give him diplomatic immunity in order to aid and abet Snowden’s flight from US justice aboard his aircraft. As it was, Morales did not, but the US had the right to ensure that he did not.
Once again, the pseudo-legalistic "justification" and apologia for the activities of the increasingly idiotic Imperium.
Ozymandias's "people" and those Roman sycophants probably espoused the same kind of stuff.
Hey, look over here! Pay Attention Only To What I Say! Forget about erosion of "rights," impoverishment of the most of us (even though those not actually living on the streets due to greed-induced economy collapse or theft-by-illegal-unlawful-foreclosure might have a refrigerator and microwave in their rental space and be dumbed down enough to do a payday loan to get the latest iDreck, with the hanging threat of combustion-induced climate "dysfunction," and a broad view of "our" history that dis-includes all those wonderful Dulles-Donovan-Helms-Bush-Casey-Etc. "Stratagems" and "Programs" run from "desks" in HQ and local stations. Ask a native American or Black or little Central American democratically elected government or whatever about our proud broad history.
Bush and Cheney are fugitives from the justice of other nations, can't go certain places because those places take "war crime" seriously. Even the narrow International Law definitions of the offenses. And so we are to understand that the "blowhards" of Central and South America, having cultural and personal experience of US invasions and sponsored terrorism, are exposed to "US haw-haw justice" as aiders and abetters, or even accessories to alleged "crimes" that Justice is having some apparent difficulty fitting into the elements of various offenses and that gee whiz, have not even been how you say adjudicated yet?
Better not to "make statements against the US, or in support of Snowden." That might be taken to amount to Treason Against The Empire...
That's the smart part about just implying special background and knowledge, like being a "responsible observer of history" and being in Chile when Allende was killed and knowing 'what really happened,' and having supposedly lived in all those other countries and thus having the Truth about all the stuff that happens there, and the other bits that are part of the on-behalf-of-the-Way-Things-Just-Have-To-Be Narrative.
And on a personal note, discounting and dismissing this writer's heated-but-as-far-as-I-can-see honest and accurate observations on the Game of War as a brief participant in the Vietnam chapter and Current Serious Observer of it because, after all, I'm not the only one who was ever sent to Vietnam.
Makes it harder to call out the claimant for maybe playing the rhetorical game with less than full candor, or to evaluate the Self-Appointed Expert Witness's training, skills and knowledge, following the rules-of-evidence wisdom of Frye, Daubert and Kumho.http://www.wvu.edu/~lawfac/mmcdiarmid/Davis-Ready.pdf
Seems to me this whole long conversation is "about" trying to find a means of encouraging individual, organizational and state behaviors that actually make life "better," calmer, safer, less insecure, less prone to triggering the worst in us. With participation by partisans of this or that cancerous entity or behavioral stream who want just More Of The Same, without consequence for, and with varous benefits to, themselves.
Sure seems to me that Bill's implicit claims of both "responsible observer" cred and some unspecified, undocumented, but presumptively elevated present or former position of participatory ("I was in Chile {in some unmentioned but implicitly quasi-official capacity} when Allende was ousted and killed, so I know what happened", and other bits like "I have lived in other countries so I know all about them, more than you irresponsible juvenile conspiracy theorists") clout in the imperial apparatus he assured the rest of us is nothing but a "juvenile conspiracy theory," give him more status as a purveyor of the propaganda that we ordinary citizens have been force-fed and had snuck into our earholes and eyeballs for how long now?
Hate to frame it that way, but then there's that hackneyed bit about "quacks like a duck..." More of the same is going to kill all of us.
Gee, you have to wonder, given even the little tiny recitation given by Professor Cole of a tiny bit of what those "immature conspiracy theorists" seem to have some pretty decent evidence that "our government" has done over the decades, maybe centuries now, to "Shape the World" in the image desired by those who run so much of everything, or want and seem to intend to, see Dulleses and Koch and Bloomberg and a few thousand others, if maybe Correa, with all those Southern Command "assets" and "forces" in his country and nearby ready for deployment, and the other kinds of "power projection" by the US that there's lots of evidence also gets used, hasn't been subjected to a little, ah, pressure? Which given what's happened to other elected leaders who have gotten crossways with "Washington" and ended up deposed or dead, I guess would make him "astute."
There would seem to be a blowhard 'round here, all right, who I guess claims the exalted status of "responsible international observer." Wow.
"while some events have been influenced," you acknowledge that much at least, kind of hard to be a "responsible historian" and do at least that much. Hmmm:
"Best joke about prostitution ever done was by Bernard Shaw. He was at a party once and he told this woman that everyone would agree to do anything for money, if the price was high enough. `Surely not, she said.' `Oh yes,' he said. `Well, I wouldn't,' she said. `Oh yes you would,' he said. `For instance,' he said, `would you sleep with me for... for a million pounds?' `Well,' she said, `maybe for a million I would, yes.' `Would you do it for ten shillings?' said Bernard Shaw. `Certainly not!' said the woman `What do you take me for? A prostitute?' `We've established that already,' said Bernard Shaw. `We're just trying to fix your price now!' "
Obviously, unless the goals of the Rough Men are very different than represented, the incompetence and idiocy of so much of that "influence" has not moved the whole world very far in the direction of subservience to "US national interests."
How much "influence," again? Just to establish the price...
Kind of like what's been happening here in the US? Though "democracy" is such a nicely elastic tarp -- can be used to justify and conceal, for the sake of argument, all kinds of badness and stupidity, like to camouflage voter suppression, in the news again thanks to the Supremes and a gleeful set of reactionaries with very fast reaction times down in Texas, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/25/texas-voter-id-law_n_3497724.html, or even stuff like using thugs here in FL to tamp down the numbers for that Gore guy, http://www.walmart.com/ip/Personalized-Flag-Display-Case-and-Pedestal-Set/2403564, well-dressed of course.
A Robust Democracy we got here, where election results in Philadephia used to turn on which gang controlled the staircase leading to the polling place, via broken heads and fists and bloodshed. I personally think de Toqueville had his French tongue firmly in his cheek when he titled his work "Democracy in America." And now, of course, that other wonderfully ironic Citizens United ruling. Bet Roberts and Scalia had a pretty good guffaw over that one...
Bait-and-switch, like Reagan and the Bushes and Clinton and now The 'Only President We've Currently Got.' Who you can bet has to have an eye toward the potential for another "Business Plot," maybe this time effectuated by someone other than a person of, wait for it, Maj. Gan. Smedley Butler's moral standing and dedication to that Constitution thing, that Holy Grail that sure looks like it's made, ab initio, of Unobtainium.
Maybe not so accurate to try to lay all the blame at the feet of Morsi, given that as in the US, the military has wide and deep investments and involvement in "the economy," and a pretty clear interest in a "security state" that keeps the money flowing, complete with relief from "sequester" for those special "jobs programs" in the Big Weapon Procurement line.
There's a minimum quantum of "legitimacy" needed to produce the stability and predictability and REAL security and the other stuff that leads to enough of the population being able to satisfy their basic Maslovian needs and tamp down the tribal and schismatic urges, to keep the demagogues and other sociopaths, like the people who populate the CIA and NSA and other alphabent agencies' Sneaky Pete Departments and Branches and Directorates, from Getting Something Started, that Something of the nature that lets self-interested cretins steal and dissemble and keep the pot always just on a personally profitable boil...
They rule us by manipulating our myths. Among other dodges and pressures.
That same chant was on the lips of French (and Germans) in the runup to the conflagration that catalyzed a lot of what's still happening, back there in the early days of the 20th Century.
One might observe that since there are humans involved, there's no alternative to "this ending badly." It's just a matter of degree, how much blood and treasure lost and stolen.
And "legitimately elected?" Isn't there some dispute about that? And what a cramped notion that "democracy," pro forma, is a sine qua non of a "good state..."
I know, we can only track just so much misery, futility and idiocy at one time, but there's still a shootin'-and-corruptin' war thingie with US troops involved in Afghanistan, and a bunch of other places, and of course there's that Syria thingie.
Which possibly-former nation has/had its own beauties:
Yeah, be good little people and play nice and follow the rules and bring cookies and milk to the people in charge and they might change their behaviors eventually if you can somehow just achieve that majority in the legislature.
A couple of illuminatingly warped takes on what's going on with "the economy" of that "region," under the irresistible pressure of greed, the ineluctable pleasure of violence, the inevitable idiocy of Great Gamer and supranational corporationists, and the all but invisible defalcations of what we so foolishly call "bankers" and other predators like the departing "rulers" who strip the treasures and treasury like the Nazis did in 1945, from the pages of "Syria Comments":
Interesting how the destruction and dismantling of a place people used to just sort of live provides such great opportunities for "growth" and "profit." It's an ill wind indeed that blows no man "good."
The comments to these pieces are also so beautifully evocative and illustrative of what's fundamentally wrong with us as a species...
Sad how many people are unaware how deeply the corporate fix is in under these BS "free trade" agreements. Basically, they do away with national sovereignty when it comes to regulating the insatiable greed of that parasitic breed of tapeworms known as "post-trans-supra-national corporations." And signatory states will find themselves using their monopoly-of-violence to enforce the "rights" of these corporate creatures against their mere-mortal citizens in their own courts and administrative proceedings and in their streets too...
Oh please, God, let it be the case that this set of revelations undoes the opening of the Third Seal that is this next set of "agreements," being concluded (can't say "negotiated," since all sides of the table are in complete agreement and it's just about how much they can get away with in one grab) about as "anti-democratically" as such things are possible, where our own freaking wholly-almost-owned subsidiary Congress is "not allowed" to know the details of what is being done to us...
Not to chase fine points, but as with sunshine, there may very well be enough food and water to go around, too. But all those Maslovian necessities are subject to the processes of "ownership and rent," and manufactured shortages or simple grotesque accumulation so that a very few can sneer from their Dubaian towers at the starving rest of us.
Folks kind of laugh at our modern mythology. All the apocalyptic/zombie/vampire stuff, and our wishful thinking about retribution through TV shows like "Dexter" and "Dark Blue" and stuff. But we're moving into "Terminator" territory (see, current Detroit, and of course all that Autonomous Robot Technology stuff.) And "mastery" of biotechnology. And we're setting the conditions for that endgame so nicely captured in "Soylent Green," from the trashing of the planet to the terminal self-stimulation of the corporate elite.
One hopes a new kind of spiritual wisdom, energy and strength will come to enough of us to do better than that. One hopes.
Japan was supposed to be a nuclear-weapon-free zone too, and it was a tiny bit of a big deal when it got out that US warships making those multi-function port calls in Japan were carrying nuclear warheads on the way to idiot confrontations with idiot Soviet and idiot Chinese idiots on, over and under the South China Sea and North Pacific and other idiot "theaters of conflict." Talk about "ponerized..."
I was vacationing in Japan in 1982 at Beppu, the Suginoi Hotel. In one of the large, ornate public baths. In come three loud and enthusiastic Navy officers, strip off their uniforms and dive in without the pre-wash, causing a certain revulsion reaction among the Japanese in the bath, and they splash on over to me, the only "white" dude in the place. Got to talking, war stories and such, and they offered that the guided missile frigate and destroyer they were from in fact had nuclear missiles aboard, and got to adding that quite a few people had the ability to launch ship-to-ship nuke-tipped missiles more or less on their own "authorization," given the very short "horizon times" for incoming "Commie" missiles. Hairy hair-trigger stories about almosts... This at a time when the Japanese ordinary citizens were all het up about the "discovery" that US ships were in fact violating that no-nuke policy thing. http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=145229.0;wap2
And the jerks that bring us Planet Threat are all so suave and "nothing to worry about, we have it all under control, and besides we love that constant little frisson of DANGER."
Might one ask what are the obviously multiple purposes of all this Peeping-Tomfoolery? I'm sure the apologists for The Way Things Just Are have a bunch of "reasons"... And the virtue of the lighting of this particular fuse by Mr. Snowden and the others who have sucked it up and given us a reverse peek through the spyhole is that maybe there's enough smarts and ability and interest left in purfuit of happineff and life and liberty to keep us from disappearing into the Matrix...
And I'm reminded of how the Drill Sergeant in Basic Combat Training would brook no "excuses," at most entertain "reasons" to scoff at, for any deviations from the Program we were supposed to always be "Getting With."
No Drill Sergeant here telling these cretins to "drop and give me 20,000 quality pushups" as a way to rectify and deter bad behavior...
For me, the above link didn't work. Try this one, and of course it's just another apologia from the people who are bringing you Empire, in Nine Areas of "Responsibility" (should be "Authority") where the US Military will be the "force" that "protects US regional interests" and "sets the conditions for good governance" and all that crap: http://www.armed-services.senate.gov/statemnt/2013/03%20March/Ham%2003-07-13.pdf
But for anyone curious about the mind-set and reach and grasp of the people who claim that authority over all parts of the Global Interoperable Network-Centric Battlespace that is by Executive Decree the place formerly known as Planet Earth, it's an interesting read...
Ah, the argument used to justify the Cold War, and all kinds of other stuff. Presumes that "the government" is both competent, and interested in the survival of the species and that "nation" thing.
Back in the early '80s, I worked for the US EPA. Parts of the Agency thought compliance with environmental laws and implementing regulations would increase if the criminal sanctions Congress used to include, with funding, were actively enforced, against corporate officers as well as with cost-of-doing-business fines levied on What, Me Worry? corporate entities like Dow and Monsanto.
EPA had no investigators with what we thought of as the right kind of training, and many US Attorneys, parts of the Reaganized Justice Department, and outfits like the FBI and OSHA thought it was penny-ante scut work or inherently evil interference with Almighty Bidness, so at first it was a make-do operation. The Regional office I worked in sought to "professionalize" the work by hiring some experienced police types. We were trying to measure the applicants' skills and knowledge, a challenge for a bunch of youngish hippie tree huggers with little experience in criminal investigation and prosecution.
One person who applied for what was a pretty cushy GS-14 spot was an ex-Chicago police officer. He was really cagey about what he had done with the Chicago police force for, I recall, 15 years, and when pressed, he finally said, with a lot of condescension, that he had been an operative with the Red Squad. Only after looking up at the ceiling, doing some mental math, and offering "Okay, I think the statutes of limitations have run on what I'll tell you about." And he gave us wide-eyed (WIDE, not WILD, and getting wider as he went on) callow folks an earful, all right. Sounded just like what was reported at this link, http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/confessions-of-a-red-squad-spy/Content?oid=3293807, back when there still was a LOT of actual, you know, "reporting" by the press.
Just your imagination, or whatever else is operating. "Frank" is not "frog," any more than my personal eth, "Scoth-Irish-English," is a biological slur.
As to the frog jumping thing, Wiki, that most unreliable of resources, says it's historically and on the science an open question, not an "of course." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
Yes indeed, Monsieur Lafontaine, your "first impression" and put-down could very well be wrong. Congrats on packing a whole shipload of "conservative" sentiments into one tiny dinghy.
Their 'cause' seems to many people to be important and even to have a certain justice and honor behind it -- My impression, from this tiny sample you've provided, and it could be wrong, is that in your world order women have a much more, ah, invisible and humble place.
Given what's shaking in the world right now, it seems (my impression, again), that there's a kind of hunger for what used to be called "human rights" that seems to be gathering a little steam. Maybe there is some fundamental level of oppression and successful short-term accumulative greed beyond which symbolic gestures like these, and self-immolations, http://www.latimes.com/news/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-global-voices-tibetan-immolation-20130605,0,720668.story, and initially orderly and peaceful gatherings of people doing that we-shall-overcome/kumbayah bit of empowerment and what pejoratively is called "protest," which gatherings are then warped by agents provocateur or a nihilist/anarchist few and ramped up to violence by violent "government" and "militias" and "death squads" and driven into schism and divide-and-conquer-and-fail, like the dehiscence of old scars on a person sick with scurvy or some cancers.
One of your fellow Franks, Delacroix, offered this image of the rising up of those simple aspirations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Leading_the_People Do you think the women of Femen have any education in the classics, or a sense of the power of that exposure that exposes the blunt idiocy of "conservative" hunkering?
And there's this:
Fox commentator tells woman: 'know your role'
NEW YORK - A finger-pointing political argument on Fox News Channel boiled over when a male conservative talk show host shouted at a woman to "know your role and shut your mouth."
The man, Bill Cunningham, later asked Fox contributor Tamara Holder, "Are you going to cry?"
Fox on-air personalities on Friday were talking about the exchange on Sean Hannity's prime-time show the night before. Commentator Juan Williams concluded that Cunningham "obliterated the line" of civil discourse in his argument with Holder. The two had been brought on by Hannity to discuss whether Attorney General Eric Holder - no relation to Tamara - had committed perjury.
Cunningham, sitting next to Tamara Holder in a New York studio, called her "one of the stooges of the left that will always be there to excuse away criminal behavior." He said she had the "incurable fatal condition of liberalism that caused people like Eric Holder to be the consulary of Barack Hussein Obama."
He was jabbing a finger at Holder, who returned the favor.
"I really hope that when you speak to a judge, you don't point your finger in the person's face the entire time," she said. "Your finger does not make your point."
Cunningham is a former assistant attorney general in Ohio whose wife is on the Ohio Court of Appeals. He hosts radio and television talk shows.
"Whose finger is in my face right now?" Cunningham asked.
Replied Holder: "Mine, because I'm telling you to shut up."
"You shut up!" Cunningham said. "Know your role and shut your mouth."...
And please excuse me if I have misread your views and intent from my possibly incorrect interpretation of your comment. Too bad we can't all pull on the same end of the rope, and recognize that we are all in this slowly rising-to-a-boil pot together, and that it ultimately does not matter which of us cooks through first and which gets heat-denaturated last.
Tough issues. Looks like Bill didn't bother to read the Weisbrot item in the Guardian link above, since he didn't offer any pithy rebuttal, or offer any cites in support of his assertions. Anyone looking for substance, as opposed to unsubstantiated allegations might benefit from doing the reading.
Thanks to You, thrice-blessed Almighty God of Abraham and Isaac, that we are finally returning the Empire we have been building in your Holy Name to that set of Great International Confrontations with Seemingly Actual Evil Empires, with themes and indoctrination that are so comfortably familiar, and the policies and behaviors and institutions and expenditures and apologies that can more easily be made to conform to the Teachings.
Thank You, bless You, Most High Christ Jesus, for setting us finally, properly, back on the True Path to Your Holy Apocalypse! Before those presaged in your Divine Revelation evilly dismantle all Your Sanctified Strategic and Nuclear Weapons! and all the Really Cool and Enhanced Lethality stuff we have so diligently been creating for You!
?How about a little taste of some thinking from some people who actually live in and are really familiar with Syria and what's going on there right at this moment, folks who think Obama's course of action now is, like, stupid in the extreme?
And have any of you asked yourself the silly question, "Who is Ben Rhodes?" http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/139836.html There's more on that page, and more than ever meets the eye of the ordinary citizen who funds and stupidly supports all this sh__.
Me, personally, speaking as a former non-secret-squirrel federal employee (the EPA, for 13 years) who got to watch and try to resist what the Reaganauts did starting in 1980, as a GI who got to see the "thinking" of the Best and Brightest and of Brass Hats doing body counts and "contracting" in action for just short of 3 years in the Army, including a year in that Vietnam place, and someone who has a personal letter from H. R. Haldeman on White house stationery in response to a nasty letter I wrote to Dick Nixon about some Fish Hook/Parrot's Beak BS, reading, in total, "Dear Mr. McPhee: Rest assured, your comments have been noted," and being a fella who makes myself sad and sick trying to keep up with the crap that our ruling class has been and is pulling on us ordinary folks, I have neither trust nor respect for most of the people who are senior GS, O serie, or senior E types, and of course the "contractors" who so easily have slid into StasiLand and that idiot unending inevitable development of worser and worser and deadlier and stupid "smart" weapons and dumber dead-end tactics and obscure but profitable "doctrines" and "strategies." Leading to Gahan Wilson's horrific cartoon from my own era: http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lzwamh77o21qart8to1_500.jpg&imgrefurl=http://mana-junkie.tumblr.com/post/18843214034&h=574&w=406&sz=50&tbnid=YztX7wqVD3owOM:&tbnh=96&tbnw=68&zoom=1&usg=__eWqL5PltgzJ4fBuGC7jVb2mg2eI=&docid=RFF-7-BBveBmHM&sa=X&ei=aTPKUZmGOerF0gGNsIGABw&ved=0CC4Q9QEwAA&dur=669 At least, that grunt appears to have some idea of what "victory" means, in his value system...
The federal "security" structure is just about moving careers and money, not a damn bit about "security" the way we moo-cows think we understand it, not about "protecting our way of life." Unless we work in Crystal City or such places. Kicking in doors in Kandahar? Individually, personally working the blasting of what, 1649 "wogs" into Gehenna, on a good middle-class salary plus great benefits? Developing little spy-gnats and code and packet-grabbers to "keep an eye on" the rest of us, and prepare to do what, exactly?
I knew some serious types who kind of paid and no doubt still pay attention to "constitutional" notions and strive for decency and fairness and honesty and all that Boy Scout crap, but they are in a shrinking minority, in a business, because that's what it is, that is, as pointed out here and in a few other places, dedicated to a dead-end negative-sum game. Though of course a very few, in advance of the dead-end, will live Really Large, Infinitely Comfortable and possibly even vastly extended lives. At the expense of a lot of people who have the poor fortune to be human, blessed and cursed with a limbic system that subjects them to sectarian loyalties and sectarian violence and all that other stuff.
Dare I say that given where all this is leading us, what one's "clearance obligations" are is a meaningless set of terms when the behaviors of all those "cleared" people (interesting that being "cleared" is a stage on the way to high Scientology status), in net sum, are the grease and ball bearings that are helping slip the rest of us down a rat hole?
Were you there, Bill? or is this just more claiming of authoritative knowledge without referents, other than "You can be sure"? Following the snide little unsubstantiated indictment of Snowden, "whether or not Snowden willingly sold or gave classified secrets loaded on his hard drives and thumb drives to the Chinese and Russians." You never say -- do you have first-hand Player knowledge of how the sneaky petes do their bloody, too often idiot business where the rest of us are always advised not to look?
You're getting better at the doubt-sowing and impeachment game. Maybe you will attain Joe's status and skill level in the art of drive-by impeachment eventually?
Regarding the outsourcing of 'government' functions and intellectual property, here's a personal favorite you may have seen: A Powerpoint slide prepared by a British "consultancy" that "explains" how to Achieve Victory in Notagainistan. Or at least claims to put all the salient elements on a single page and link them all together:
If you expand the image, way down there in the lower left corner you have the, get this, COPYRIGHT CLAIM of one PA Consulting Group (PA Knowledge Ltd.) http://www.paconsulting.com/ So that slide and the rest of the presentation, created by a government-paid 'think tank,' is not even a work-for-hire to which the private firm has no possible basis to claim copyright? Ignore the idiocy of having a British firm (albeit with US sneaky-petes no doubt in the loop) tell the military how to go about COIN (though Bill will tell us about that one supposedly successful counter-insurgency in Malaysia, run violently by the Brits.)
The "contract" for millions of dollars of "thinking" under which this "think" was conjured up must be a real doozie.
"Latin America" is a pretty big place to be claiming to have the "correct" understanding of and handle on. One might wonder which of the posited binary takes on that continent and a half partake more of reality and less of polemics and apologist's re-writes... Living WHERE in Latin America, and hanging around with what kind of people? Graduates of universities, or graduates of the School of the Americas? Or some other claim to more correct authentic complete knowledge? De Soto, surprisingly enough, has numerous critics, that include observations that his remedies for inequality and "fixing" national economies are, shall we say, simplistic?
One wonders if that silly little Perkins book was on Bill's reading list, and what his critique of it might be. I thought it was pretty compelling, myself.
I had an older friend who was a partner at one of the defunct Big Eight accounting firms (Arthur Anderson). He left the firm on learning of the degree of corruption that it was engaging in with Continental Bank, as part of the fraudulent "due diligence" ratings on US-backed "loans" being made by Continental and other US banks, at the urging of our State Department and CIA, to various South and Central American oligarchies.
Again, the purposes of the loans were to get the borrower state in way over its head, with the US taxpayer on the hook to make good the loans that patently were pre-defaulted, providing, of course, risk-free returns to the banks.
The "banking officers" who cut these deals had a little "moral hazard," their compensation being a percentage of the amount loaned, and they of course were feted and "favored by senoritas" and given the best cigars and "drogas" by the host country. Leading to the kinds of leverage that Our Government so dearly loves to be able to apply, in pursuit of hegemony and profit for corporations.
Cheerful corruption is endemic in the good old US of A, too. All you have to do is live in just about any city or town and spend some time learning about contracting and zoning and permitting and annexation and lately the "race to the bottom" that's the "efforts to attract business relocations" to "bring jobs" out of one US locale to another, which are paid for with excuses from taxes and environmental regulations, gifts of public property, condemnation of private property and the rest of the scams including plain old bribery.
Having been personally solicited by several police officers and public officials over the years for little mordidas (like the "$20 handshake" to ensure timely recordation of Torrens land titles in Chicago and so many others) I will offer my little experience and observation that corruption thrives here, including PA judges who railroad kids into jails in exchange for cash, and of course all the SOBs who get away with financial murder and the theft of people's homes and livelihoods...
A certain amount of what I'd call "slack" is inevitable, even necessary, but we here are way beyond a "genteel sufficiency" of it.
The cool thing, Bill, is that almost all the points you highlight as reasons why the other Americas have not 'developed' (I guess that means "looking more like US") sure seem to apply to what's going on in the good old USA. Tax avoidance as a sport? Looks like. And I would consider the inroads and perversions of post-national and trans- and super-national corporations that drive so much "policy" and the flow of money, not to mention one Herewegoagainistania after another, to be an "external force" being exerted by outside powers to exploit the labors and ingenuity of the working engine of the population.
What would YOU approve of as constituting "a modern, efficient political and economic system?" Germany? France? The US? You applaud the neoliberals wherever they breed, like Chile, but those folks there and here could care less about the huge mass of humans with their sad little lives, working long hours for pittance pay under oppressive conditions and paying ever more (even beyond the feared HYPERINFLATION!) for necessities as the rentier class figures out where the self-ignition point of popular revolt is,and prices everything right to the fine limit.
A little bit of blaming the victim might be warranted. Not what is in your post and the sources you turn to, though. It's hard to go up against unfettered death squads and those uniformed fellas and sneaky petes trained up at the School of the Americas and more covert campuses... not to mention the jackals. I'm sure you have just a withering critique of the writings of John Perkins, like "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man," http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Economic-Hit-John-Perkins/dp/0452287081/ref=pd_sim_b_1, and "The Secret History of the American Empire: The Truth About Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and How to Change the World," http://www.amazon.com/The-Secret-History-American-Empire/dp/0452289572
"Central role in the international drug trade?" I don't see where that statement can be wrung out of the article cited, which is a puff piece unfettered by research links for an outfit seeking more money to 'fight drugs'.
On the other hand, Ecuador is one of "those little countries down there" that have taken multiple poundings from the Northern Colossus:
Ecuador had traditionally perceived drug policy as one prioritising a public health approach as opposed to law enforcement. For example the 1970 Law of Control and Intervention in the Trafficking of Narcotics emphasised the public health aspects of drug use, declaring that anyone found under the influence of drugs was to be taken directly to a hospital where it was to be determined if they were drug dependent [1]. If indeed they were classified as dependent, they underwent a rehabilitation programme under the supervision of medical personnel. Furthermore, the Plan Nacional de Prevención del Uso Indebido de Drogas (National Plan for the Prevention of Improper Drug Use) even stated the negative effects of placing too much emphasis on criminalising drug users instead of treating them as a health issue [2].
However, as the UN Drug Conventions adopted more of a prohibitionist tone, Ecuador was forced to follow suit by international pressure and lobbying. Beginning at the end of the 1980s, Ecuadorean drug policy began to give law enforcement a greater role in drug policy; for example the 1987 ‘Law of Control and Intervention in the Trafficking of Narcotics and Psychotropic Substances’ implemented harsh penalties for those convicted of drug offences, including imprisonment of between 12 and 16 years for producing or trafficking certain substances [1].
Under great pressure from the US, Ley 108, the country’s ‘Law on Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances’, was approved in 1991. This law was not developed with any regard for domestic realities, but instead to gain significant US aid; the Ecuadorian government was forced to implement this law, which according to one scholar is an extremely punitive law, entailing sentences disproportionate to the offense, contradicting due process guarantees, and violating the constitutional rights of the accused [1]. Focusing on enforcement, drug policy efficacy was measured according to how many citizens were imprisoned on drug charges. [Gee, does any of that sound familiar?]
The primary result of this has been the mass overcrowding and worsening conditions of prisons. For example, in 2007, 34% of those incarcerated were for drug offences (45% if one just examines the statistics for urban prisons) [1]. Furthermore, the weight of these laws falls disproportionately on the poor, who often engage in small-scale drug dealing for lack of employment opportunities and tend to be the target of police actions, rather than the criminal networks that run the drug trade
Google "us intervention in ecuador" for LOTS more.
That scary submarine? Not a lot of detail available, but likely not built by any "Ecuadorian cartel." http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jul/06/world/la-fg-ecuador-narco-sub-20100706 I hear Swedish or German engineers were involved. Or maybe Spanish, or Russian. Or some MIT guy thinking the pay at Electric Boat is not high enough. Anything for a buck, right?
I think he thought it was an "owner's manual" or "how-to," not a litany of prolonged evil for the benefit of the Tainted Few...
You can bet the generals and jackals who feed at the trough of Coca-Colonialism, who don't have the integrity of one (here you go, Bill, 3x5 INCOMING! Counter-battery fire!) Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler who told it like it really is, without the fake "patriotic-exceptional" bunting and fireworks, know just how to move the levers and where to stick the blades...
And in FL, because of the way the statutes are administed, it's no surprise that the disenfranchising runs about 3 to 1 as between black/Latino/other on the one hand, and white folk on the other.
The sweetest election victory is the one you STEAL.
Too bad all there is in all of this is a mashup of egos and "wants" and other greeds, churned with a fine selection of "doctrines" and "strategies" and "tactics" and "initiatives," half-baked until it blows up in the oven, all with essentially zero attention to anything more than moving from this little scenario-cum-shootin'-crisis to the next, via stratagems and "investments" that make for fun careers and big old wealth transfers. Not a whit of an inkling of a passing thought given to anything more than the perceived (dimly) possible moves that might provide some momentary advantage in a stupid game, not a concern given to the lip-serviced myths of any polity involved, or its rulers. Who thunder forward, convinced they are In Control Of Events...
We are such a profound, subtle species, aren't we?
Bill has a nice adjustable loupe through which he wants the rest of us to view 'history' as he declares it, by which the area under examination can be shrunk to a little point a couple of millimeters across.
"The West" has had a lot to do with the political and social structuring of the Balkans, all part of the idiot Great Game that has been in motion for a couple of centuries now, as most responsible historians of the area and its complexities would allow. Without "The West's" enormous wars and secret pacts and all that, the Balkans would likely be a lot less, er, "Balkanized."
Per Bill, apparently, regarding Serbia and ethnic Albanians and Kosovo, what went on there was all Milosevic's personal evil, like Gadaffyduck's antics were just his personal foibles, detached from all that had gone before and all that was in play in the Great Game that Bill thinks is the Right True Order of Things.
I'm curious what Bill would say is the "legal" underpinning for the current plunge into Ohmygodherewegoagainstania, with the make-the-manufacturers-happy, feed-the-ego-of-idiots-like-McCain injection of guided anti-tank weapons and man-portable antiaircraft weapons (bought from where, Russian clients? since they are apparently all from the "Warsaw Pact" armory to let the "fighters" replenish their ammo from captured "Government" stores. How about it, Bill? Does the AUMF cover this too, or is all we need that UN text without even the benefit of a Security Council or General resolution? Or are we now freed by greed and our grand Power to just do whatever our little idiot jackal hearts desire? And how does that preserve our way of life (whatever that currently is) and FreedomnDemocracynLiberty (tm)? Or increase our "security?"
Never mind, we are on the greased rails, running fast downhill, with Bill and others cheerleading from the slopes...
...so in addition to the military industrial complex (MIC) and prison industrial complex (PIC) we now are blessed, apropos of the Noir subject of this post and as an adjunct to the other two, the dossier initiating complex (DIC). And people used to actually bless a lot of the Alphabet Agencies, a couple of generations ago...
Some of us Collectivites are more interested in being Borg. Consider the following to all be in BOLD text:
"Preparing for a Career in National Security"
Mindset
National security is a broad term that includes military service, law enforcement, homeland security, diplomacy, intelligence, emergency management, and cyber security.
Interested individuals often report responding to a "call" to serve
National security offers unique challenges, adventures, and possible dangers
Individuals who serve in national security display appreciation for tradition and active patriotism
And for you working mothers, you missed this opportunity to network and stuff:
2013 Theme: Change Leadership and the Power of Influence
Increasing women in top leadership roles in the intelligence community is an issue of national security. The Center for Work-Life Policy and the Concours Group recently noted that unless we are prepared to incorporate our talented, educated women into our leadership structure in greater numbers, we risk facing a serious drop in the quality of our professional workforce.
We're not Joining the Oppressor, we're Improving The Leadership Quality!
And hey, there's over 45,000 current GS-11 or higher equivalent openings in the Servicing of your Country right now! Don't miss out on this well-paid, secure (ahem) Career Opportunity!
Being likely not all that far from my own personal physical/temporal endpoint, I will just join you in taking smug comfort in the fact that (as far as we know, anyway, like all the other unknown unknowns you cite) death puts us beyond consequences and remorse.
I will add a dash of bitters to the brew, however, in noting the possibility that the worst of human predators and parasites are the most likely to escape death and keep on eating whatever's left of the planet: "Russian Mogul to 'Forbes' Billionaires: Limitless Lifespans Can Be Yours" http://www.forbes.com/sites/katiedrummond/2012/07/19/dmitry-itskov-avatar/ That won't happen either. Will it?
In other news, a Rubinite will be our new US Trade Representative, say 93 Senators, a fella who has said that if wethepeople knew what "the US" was up to in the several "free trade" deals now pending, Atlantic and Pacific, we would not be amused (per Elizabeth Warren, at least):
I have heard the argument that transparency would undermine the Trade Representative’s policy to complete the trade agreement because public opposition would be significant. In other words, if people knew what was going on, they would stop it. This argument is exactly backwards. If transparency would lead to widespread public opposition to a trade agreement, then that trade agreement should not be the policy of the United States.
Not the first time the nominal puppet has been the one pulling the strings that manipulate the actions of that Brobdingnagian, heavy-browed lout wearing the "U.S." muscle shirt. (Can you spell "Likud?" How about "Diem?") Pull the strings with a little covert help from nominal bit players like the CIA and other sets of sneaky-petes, who CONCEIVE they actually run things, IMAGINE they control the important events, and ALIENATE (the "legal" meaning) all that wealth and power, back there behind the seven veils labeled Freedom (tm), Liberty (tm) and Democracy (tm), Exceptionalism (tm), and other comforting myths...
After this brief period of liberalization, Mao abruptly changed course. The crackdown continued through 1957 as an Anti-Rightist Campaign against those who were critical of the regime and its ideology. Those targeted were publicly criticized and condemned to prison labor camps. Mao remarked at the time that he had "enticed the snakes out of their caves."
Brezhnev was not as nominally gentle as Mao, of course -- how will our Stasi behave?
Whether it's us "good guys," or the "evil empire," I would think the same principle applies:
The many little hidden cancers really prosper and grow and metastasize when the ol' body's immune system is occupied trying to deal with virulent infections, and burgeoning parasites, and continual loss of blood from wounds that are kept so happily open...
Apparently there are a few other thoughtful people who try to contextualize the idiocy that's in the works once again. Here's from one of our host's friends and interlocutors, a lengthy, inclusive discourse on some of the more salient reasons why the idiots calling for Arming the Noble Resistance are once again full of shoot! shoot! and replenish the logistics flow! And why the comfortable narrative they peddle on how effective and wonderful the No-Fly Iraq and the Balkan Ballet and "Libya Libre" were is also a pile of hoooey. http://justworldnews.org/?p=3797#comments
Not that, any more than in 1956 or 1993 or 1999 or 2000 or 2001 or 2003 or 2010, any of that will manage to penetrate the mental bunkers of, or re-direct by one tiny fraction of a mil the aiming points, of the idiots inside the fluffy Depends that coddle the cojones of the fake "patriots" in the bespoke suits and be-medalled BDUs held up by the Beltway...
It won't "end well" because it won't ever end. Not until we effing stupid humans so depopulate ourselves that there's hardly any fight left in us. Or until there really is some winning of hearts and minds, on a big scale, people turned, maybe in desperation, to the long-game wisdom of the Golden Rule, turned to helping each other survive rather than strangling, stabbing, decapitating, shooting and blasting each other as they sink into that rising sea that is only floating megayachts, "Allahu akbar!!!" or "in the name of the Most High Tripartite God." Or just because it's so damn much exciting FUN: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=y7qdMZ01NTI and http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=38sfBhwz4_I
But hey, the tradition is that we struggle to stand on each others' shoulders as we drown, shredding the deltoids of "the weak" in our fight for breathable air...
In other news, the corporations that produce weapons of mass dissolution are posting record profits, http://americanfreepress.net/?p=4096 and http://www.globalissues.org/article/74/the-arms-trade-is-big-business and (for a dated but easily updated view that still captures the Big Picture) http://www.fas.org/asmp/fast_facts.htm . And the sneaky little ba__ards who "craft policy" and "declare doctrines and dogmas" and "implement strategies" and "populate and operate the Global Interoperable Network-centric Battlespace" are rising in their pay grades and advancing in their careers. Even as they order the Troops to retreat (ssssshhh!!!!!) from the latest idiocy in that "graveyard of empires" place, sending "diplomats" to "direct the future of" the latest we-broke-it-now-we-have-to-fix-it Imperial misadventure by (sssshhh!) "negotiating" with "the Taliban." As reported by those who profit from, but are excused and insulated from, combat or the costs of war: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/061813-660475-american-diplomats-tricked-by-afghan-savages.htm
Yeah, "arm the rebels." "Make it a fair fight." Say those that are either liars, or totally unclear on the concept and nature of it all.
The name of the god in which "we" do all this is binary: Moloch, and Mammon.
US to join direct peace talks in Qatar with Taliban over Afghanistan's future
The US is to open direct talks with Taliban leaders within days, it was revealed on Tuesday, after Washington agreed to drop a series of preconditions that have previously held back negotiations over the future of Afghanistan.
In a major milestone in the 12-year-old war, political representatives of the Taliban will shortly meet Afghan and US officials in Doha, the capital of Qatar, to discuss an agenda for what US officials called "peace and reconciliation" before further talks take place with Afghan government representatives soon after.
The move came on the day that Nato forces handed official control of nationwide security to Afghan troops. Less than 12 hours later, the US confirmed that four US personnel died at Bagram air base near Kabul, in what was thought to be a mortar attack...
Tell me again why the US, that piece of it that does the foreign stuff, gets to have a say in "Afghanistan's future?"
Gee, have we all seen this before? "Vietnamization?" Who plays Henry Kissinger, and who plays Le Duc Tho? What do the Afghans have in the way of Asian Tiger genes that will have them exporting nice moderately priced, slave-made clothing and crap to fill the shelves of Walmart? Oh yeah, they're sitting on "rare earths" and pipeline routes. And cultivating poppies.
So here we go again: the Neo-b__tards run a huge Racket -- excuse me, "war" -- that transfers trillions of dollars to their fellow thieves, kills and maims and displaces millions, sets the stage for more and worse of the same in the next round of all this stupid Great Game sh__. And so many of us just go along.
"The answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind -- the answer is blowing in the wind."
Just curious, it would be nice to hear from the Deep People here, with their undisclosed Deep Histories, where on the spectrum of information-gathering from Humint to Elint this NSA "Hoovering" (multiple puns intended) of All Available Data might be said to lie (also pun intended).
Since it seems us dumbshi_ USA-ans, especially the Security-State and MILINT careerists who couldn't or wouldn't connect the pre-9-11 dots, have this cybernetic notion that Elint, with all its expensive bits and pieces and contractors and crap, is so much better and perfectible than Humint or, to put a size-14 gumshoe square in the middle of the poop pile, plain old police work which, yes, involves electronic stuff too, but maybe if the militarization and securitization hasn't metastasized too far already, some actual people using their meatbrains to sift and sort.
Thank the Lord of Goodness that there are people with consciences who see the craphole we are all being slid down into. From, yes, Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, who was also called a traitor by bigger creeps than Cheney even, to the more recent brave souls who have tried to play the part of white blood cells, policing up at least a few of the teeming cancer cells that are circulating, circling, draining the life...
© 2024 All Rights Reserved
I'll second that observation about the ubiquity of FOXcrap, at places like Bay Pines VA Hospital waiting areas (there are many and I've been in most of them), and at the VA "Community Based Outpatient Clinic" in St. Pete, FL. FOX ON, and many of the nursing staff, the white folks at least, listen to Limbaugh and Hannity on the radios in their offices, without benefit of earphones...
Lots of old veterans, of course, but thanks to multiple ongoing "wars of choice," lots of young damaged people too...
"Respectable circles" = "responsible observers/historians"?
Waiting to hear from our Colonel Blimp, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Blimp, Apologists here why, other than because Chomsky does not hew to and promote the Narrative they favor and speak for and maybe even identify with and profit from, and because he is, you know, one of "those people," what he says, about the diction and fraud that befuddle the rest of us so we ignore, out of misplaced loyalty, the evil that our rulers do, is wrong. Of course one has the option of just letting this little blip be obscured in the Noah's Flood of Content, spinning away into the wake of the Leviathan...
Too bad there's not a bass line, to the little partita and fugue that plays out here and at other nexuses in blogspace, a bass line that more constantly spits out a few measures recalling the REALITY of so many and various of the "US" behaviors, or policies or whatever you want to call them, versus the graffiti sprayed on by the apologists and frank propagandists for the powers that be.
Oooh! Oooh! Time for a reminder, speaking of South and Central America, of the wit and wisdom of Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, observing that he was little other than a hired thug forcing the "wogs" to accede to the will of American Business Interests, Inc.
How far are we from the point that the Overlords feel it is not necessary to even allow the little annoyances of "liberal blogging" to continue, the point at which the grip on all the choke points identified by ALEC and PNAC and Heritage and the rest can be closed off like a border crossing on the West Bank?
Well, "WE" better just get in there and train and equip a national army of a more presentable size with new US-made equiptment, and a national police force shown how to do it right by the NYPD... That model has worked so well elsewhere, at least as to firming up the tools of repression, and sending some business to certain "US" corruptorations...
Now THAT's all it takes to "provide basic security." And, of course, a massive change in that other thing called "human nature."
The first one is just a matter of logistics. The other? Another kettle of very stinky fish...
Interesting. How humans tie their identities to groups, with flags that can be burned and bloodied, and to "leaders" who when they actually start to "lead," or get to be too effective or popular (not hardly the same thing at all,) get killed off, activating the grief-and-revenge-and affront parts of our brains. So easy, in a world full of weapons and the willingness and skillfulness to employ them, and the absence of any common notion about all being in it together, for some little idiot sh_ts to kill off a leader of another band, Jesus or Gandhi or Bhutto or the other Lady Gandhi or Sadat or Allende or those little war leader types in Syria, on and on, thus "advancing" some idiot short-term interest or another of one little bunch of parasites and cancers...
And now comes the part where fingers and words and more weapons get pointed, to no particular point if you take any kind of long view at all.
G_D forbid that we step outside or away from our historical and apparently programmed behavior, do something that's maybe more a negative-feedback stabilizing thing. Ain't gonna happen, of course. That species death wish, our basic unfitness for long-term survival, is just too potent.
For those who are all concerned, whether the concern is real or just agitprop-feigned, there's this little abstract of what the Security State is up to:
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/
Ah, the sacredness of the Top Secret Double Secret Probation Eyes Only Security Information Pile! To be preserved at all costs! Pile all right-- pile of embarrassing, stupid, potentially-career-limiting, idiotic crap.
And the pretext, the fraud, that "the law" is some divinely given thing that grows out only healthy roots and shoots, is just that. http://www.stupidlaws.com/laws/united-states/ What a hoot, for people commenting here, where the hypocrisy and fraudulent mythology that marks "our Great Nation's" increasingly illegitimate conduct every day is made just so very manifest, to climb up on high horses, try to get everyone else to don prisms that only show one little piece of the spectrum that they want you to accept as the whole, and claim knowledge of what "the law" is, in its serried and corrupt and perverted majesty, and how an act like that performed by Snowden is "illegal."
"It's a simple question, sir: Have you stopped beating your wife? Yes, or no?"
"Really, sir, have you no shame?"
Let us be all serious and focus on the Securitat's view of having its dirty underwear exposed, and just blow right past the interesting phenomenon of "contractors" doing, for a pretty significant profit, a pretty awful set of tasks that seem maybe just a little inconsistent with the silly notions people still have about the limits of government in a "constitutional" system. Where it's pretty clear that "the law" is whatever the people with clout say it is, both in the sense that they get to write and decide when and against whom to actually enforce it, ask people like William Calley and Dick(less) Cheney and Bradley Manning how that part works, or raise it up as a shield against righteous anger and public outrage as with the NSA revelations and "droning" that the apologists reassure us are all "perfectly legal," and in the sense that where they choose to, they can simply ignore it.
"L'etat c'est moi." "Responsible historians" debate whether Louis XIV actually ever said this, but the principle is clear, and sure seems to be manifest and plenipotent in our Imperial Capital...
Over to you, Bill, for more examples of specious reasoning...
see, e.g., http://whoprofits.org/sites/default/files/palestinian_workers_in_settlements_wp_position_paper.pdf. And gee, one wonders if there are glimpses there of what's on the way to happening in our own, our native land (taken by force and displacement from those earlier natives, who seemingly took it by force from still earlier inhabitants.)
There's who we think we are, who we pretend we are, who we can trick other people into believing we are, and who we really are. As a species, as a nation, as a tribe. And as individuals....
For a trip down memory lane: A couple of semi-domesticated old terrorists shaking hands, cautiously, under the benign smirk of one Bill Clinton -- http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/september-13-1993-israel-and-plo-sign-accord-granting-limited-palestinian-autonomy/?_r=0
Re the terrorist label: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yitzhak_Rabin, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmach
"and that is democracy."
Sounds more like marketing, that manufactured-demand thing, or maybe like how things worked in Daley's Chicago, Boss Tweed's New York, maybe even Hussein's Iraq. "Vote early, and vote often." THAT is "democracy." Maybe if there were an acceptable definition of "legitimacy" and how it's earned and maintained, we might be headed somewhere...
A Voter is just a mobile piece of meat that can be activated to do all kinds of stupid stuff that way too often operates as a challenge to the survival of himself, his family, even his tribe, and on the Really Big Scale, the species. Giving the gift of pseudo-legitimacy to, say, Huey Long, Joe McCarthy, even The Only President We've Got...
What are these "Christians" that are written about so knowingly here?
Sounds not so much like world-girdling kinship with the dogmas of Believers I hung around with, did worship services and Acts of Charity with, Presbyterian and Baptist and Episcopalian and Methodist, until the hypocrisy got to be a little too rank. Sounds a lot more like just another tribe in the area discussed, with a common flag of sorts that still is made up of many panels of slightly or significantly different colors, stitched together with the threads of common fears as much as by any commonality of beliefs, with enough differences that the principles of behavior illuminated by stuff like Jane Elliott's "Brown Eyes-Blue Eyes" experiment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hqp6GnYqIjQ, can easily be expressed and acted on. Much like the "Christians" in the rest of the world. Or of course "Muslims."
I won't pretend to knowledge of the day-to-day practices and ethics and ethos of those sets of people, but the article indicates the seams of schism are all present and ready to unravel, or just suddenly tear, once the Common Enemy problem has been solved... or, maybe, hold together once, or until, the next Saddam rises up, to have his day in the sun.
It's pretty clear that the notion of a "rule of law" is a snare, a delusion and a convenient myth. Is there no Common Good? "Can we, can we, uh, can we all just get along? Can we?" (That ought to be good for a cynical snort or belly laugh, from the "Christians" in the Simi Valley area...) Coach used to tell us, loudly, that "THERE IS NO 'I' IN TEAM!" He didn't like having it pointed out that it doesn't take a Scrabble whiz to find a "ME" in there...
...and rather than strain themselves trying to make things what most of us used to call "better," for the benefit not only of themselves and future humans (if there are any), people with any political and military and engineering skills just Embrace The Power and walk willingly into the Mouth of Moloch.
It's a significant thing, but still a pretty tiny and egocentric one, the achievement of a right for pretty much anyone to legally marry anyone else. That seems to be about the extent of effective activism on the Left. And besides, there are so many hypocritical "wide stance" reactionaries who have their own interests served by popping off this particular relief valve. The Left can't even gain and hold territory in the area of what's summmed under the heading "abortion", can't even control the terms of the public debate on that sensitive topic.
Who gets to drive the Big Bus? What are we destined or driven to be, as a species? Any reason for us to hang around much longer, since all we seem to be doing is screwing up what for most life forms here was a pretty wonderful planet? Any reason other than to spend our lives, most of us, just making the lives of a very tiny few so incredibly, enviably "luxurious?" Oh -- and of course doing stuff like you see here? http://syriavideo.net/page/5/ (disturbing -- or titillating -- content...)
I guess we ordinary folks can consider ourselves, like maybe the Neanderthals and earlier models, a kind of "booster rocket" for the very special wealthy, fit to burn ourselves out sending them into that higher orbit, or maybe even to escape velocity. You know, that tiny fraction of the species, blessed with the Acquisitive gene, who, as many of us may have finally realized, actually will inherit the earth -- or what's left of the temperate zones...
And for something completely different, tune in here, and enjoy the show: http://syriavideo.net/ THAT's what we are, given the smallest opening.
"Not all histories are equally biased." Hey, something we can agree on!
But implicit in your statement is acceptance that bias is present, with argument (as yours with Zinn's work, which disagreement is a not so subtle impeachment-and-dismissal) over the degree and direction. And Doing History is inarguably a process of selection, ordering and presentation of stuff you call "facts" that's in its nature subjective, and subject to bias in perception, weighting and comprehension. Not to mention the slipperiness of "facts."
As to that condescending snipe-ette about "tribute to 'postmodern' ethos" in my noting that history is an exercise in story-telling, maybe just google "history is telling a story" and follow the links to all the observations of people who share your apparent biases, and mine, people with more gravitas than either of us, stating rather bluntly that that is exactly what historians do.
There is no 'true set of facts' that capture and demand respect as the One True Recitation, as all your reading should make plain. There are people whose selections and emphasis among the myriad "facts" you agree with, who reinforce your preferences and world view, and those you don't, who are apparently "unserious" or nothing much better than "agitprop" scribblers.
If one googles "critique of Morrison" or the same for Garraty, one finds that, mirabie dictu, there are lots of deep people who deeply disagree with the axes of the stories those historians tell, and their selection of "facts" as their proofs. Some even call Garraty a "socialist," fer Cliff's sake.
One little title from Morrison's works: "The Story of the 'Old Colony' of New Plymouth." Even historians know what they are doing as they read and borrow from and critique other historians' works, and research primary materials that contain their own biases, frauds and mis-statements, and from which they select and write.
You disdain Wiki, but it's interesting that the precis for Morrison, as for others memorialized there, includes an entry under the caption "Allegiance" as being to the United States of America. Also included is this bit of text about one of his works, proposing to recite the history of the Battle of Savo Island:
(emphasis added) And I think another thing we agree on is that the Israeli efforts to sink the USS Liberty in 1967 were "factually" very much other than the official, widely reported "fact" stories from our leaders.
"Facts," it would appear, are not even what most commonly understand that term to mean, ultimately. We do the best we can, and it's best to maintain a healthy and skeptical humility about our pronouncements.
Sir, every work of history I have ever read, quite a few at my age, from a pretty broad scope, carried the stamp of the "historian's" biases and predilections and loyalties. As surely as do your comments here, and mine, too, of course. Along with what I guess you would insist you would never do, as an implied "responsible historian:" the downplaying, shading, omissions and mis-statements and mis-characterizations of "facts" that themselves are slimy, octopus-like critters that squirt ink when troubled, morph easily in shape and color, and can escape containment through cracks in the tightest argumentative box, however wide or narrow.
Which "plenty of American history texts" should be held out as meeting the presumed criterion of being "more balanced" than Zinn's works? The Beards' works, maybe? What kids learned from the McGuffey Readers? Your recommendations are awaited.
Anyone who insists they are "responsible historians" and that there is anything like a One True Recitation of History is, not to put too fine a point on it, a less than candid person. "History," after all, is an exercise in selective story-telling, out of an essentially infinite tapestry and ecology of "facts," a process that by its very nature REQUIRES a bias, a viewpoint. Often, that's one that is claimed or assumed by the "responsible historian" to be "unbiased" and "correct." By the "responsible historian" who nevertheless (often when attacking or impeaching some selection done by other "responsible historians") occasionally regurgitates truisms like "history is written by the victors."
The best we can seemingly do, and so often fail to even approach (ask the Taliban, theirs and our home-grown equivalent like Daniels and the successful school curriculum insurgents in Texas and elsewhere how pretermitting that approach so easily can be made to work) is put it all out there, and hope that people of good will and some residual knowledge of human nature and "history" garnered from some magical wellspring, in responding to some internal compass that points in the direction of decency and survival, will be able to use the brains God gave them to separate the wheat from the chaff, the nuggets of wisdom from the fool's gold of subtle, seductive and selective falsehood.
"History tells us," of course, just looking at the RECORDED (that "victors" thing again") body counts and externalized costs and actual foci and forms of our "historical" political and economic and spiritual organization, and inter alia the applications of technology to resources and to each other, to see that there's not much of a good outcome (by MY personal criteria, of course) that's either possible or likely or even imaginable...
400 to 600 nuclear weapons can glassify a lot of terrain. And gassify a lot of "enemies." And do one enormous amount of "collateral damage." You think the Thanatos-lovers in the Israeli right wing give a sh_t what comes after? Time to go back and re-read the Old Testament.
My bet is that the IDF nukes are on a hair trigger as sensitive as the ones that almost got the former contending Imperiums into several kill-the-planet Hot Wars. Here's some bedtime reading for Realpolitik Fantasists to discount and refute, as they play over their Game of RISK! (tm) scenarios of global domination: http://www.nucleardarkness.org/web/cityonfire/
I don't know, it seems to me that he and Hillary did and are doing a pretty bang-up, spot-on job of effectuating the Imperial wish list and those things that are so smugly and idiotically called "policies." As if denominating something a "policy" elevates monstrous behavior to what "everyone who understands geopoliltics" just has to accept as good sense, or at least realpolitik inevitability.
Ol' Barbara Tuchman did a pretty good job of pointing out the several "policies" that bled us into a series of world war peak-casualty events, as part of the latter stages of combusto-consumption industrialization and the private-jet or F-35 or C-130 landing approach to Elite Rule Forever Or Until We're All, You Know, Just DEAD Field...
Anybody remember the back story in "Robocop?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboCop
Is "Robocop" in the same tradition as "Animal Farm" and "Brave New World" and "1984?" Diagnostic, prognistic, despondent, showing little bits of decency being crushed by the likes of Dick Jones, greedhead CEO of Omni Consumer Products?
"Oh, c'mon, it's only a movie..."
...and which definition of "treason" are you using, Jane?
Samantha, good luck with the notion that "our government" is going to "focus more on domestic policy." Except in the narrow sense that there will be more predations on us underclasspeople, more Big Data and "restrictions on abortion" and other human-rights issues, more crushing of modes of effective organization against kleptocracy and the Forever War and its giant wealth vacuum (like "unions"), more "conservative" and privatized schools and prisons and roads and bridges (still paid for by taxes and tolls on the general public).
Seems to me "our government" is mostly offshore already, not just its attentions but its operations, especially the Imperial Military whose officers buy the Leviathan's weapons and toys from Whereveristan, hire out the skilled tasks, and of which the "mission" has turned to simply protecting the wealth and sources of wealth of the wealthy, or might one say "filthy rich?" The structure we live under is corrupt with the Great Corruption that its "conservative" practitioners label, hypocritically or simply from unconscious irony, "Byzantine."
These folks seem to have calculated to a nicety, or just lucked into, a quantum of abuse of and parasitism on the most of us that is just below the boiling point, a little steam from time to time but no rolling bubbles, and injected enough ignorance and despondence into the pot to keep raising the boiling point by degrees to make things comfortable for their very well-fed selves, long enough off the boil, at least, to "retire" to resorts and enclaves of privilege.
Let's enjoy our momentary ability to "speak truth," to keep blowing off steam, to keep relieving the pressure in the cooker... and take such comfort as we can in the ultimate incompetence of oppressive bureaucracies that kill off all the geese that lay the golden eggs they feed from. Not that that bodes well for us geese...
So glad to see that constant submersion in all the Diluvian idiocy that gets documented here by Dr. Cole's incredible efforts has not extinguished a subtle, almost British, sense of humor:
Well played, sir!
Opportunism and dishonesty and fraud and oppression are not all a one way street: http://www.sptimes.com/2002/04/14/Floridian/The_punch_bowl_incide.shtml
We're all all-too-human. Too bad the Golden Rule isn't a rule at all.
Mark, "enlistment" (it's not "enrollment," as used below, and certainly not "matriculation") in the military is not "service," except maybe in the very tiny bit of military activity that actually, you know, "protects the nation" as the person in the street would understand the phrase. Go spend some time at military.com, at any of the veterans-for-peace sites, and in the publicly available War Department and contractor materials. It's all about wealth transfer and career paths and domination, and the "fun" of "lighting up some bug splat."
As to "service" being a "way toward education and steady gainful employment," you got any idea what the unemployment stats are for ex-GIs? Homelessness? Mental and physical disabilities? irrespective of race or ethnicity? And there is not a lot of transfer of your military education, which for the ranks is pretty sketchy, when the skills are calling in and directing artillery and air strikes, responding to ambushes that your Brass has sent you out to trigger, taking your pills, recovering from subclinical brain injuries, cleaning your weapon, stealing government equipment, repairing tanks and attack helicopters, and killing Wogs because they are trying to kill you because you are trying to kill them, in their homeland. It's no "service" to the nation to keep a large standing military, which develops lobbies and interests that are inimical to "democracy" and even to the survival of the nation and the species.
Some employers like the trained: Blackwater and similar, police, stuff like that. Not much of that, or of the carrying out of Imperial marching orders, is doing a damn thing to "protect our Great Nation," which is effectively nothing but a source of replacement body parts and rents for the very few, who themselves have ZERO loyalty to "the nation," but are happy to foster and play on the loyalties of the rest of us.
And you got the cognitive dissonance, as a GI or Gyrene, of taking an oath to "support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic," when your CinC holds that the Constitution is a dead letter and the opportunities of the moment obliterate all that high language about rights and limits and all that. And then you have to sit through "indoctrination" sessions so patently propaganda for the Empire and Christianist world view that the smartest have to laugh and the weakest have their prejudices reinforced. So you have ex-GIs and many still "in the service" going to Occupy gatherings and protests against the Forever War, to instruct the police in the content of the Constitution, and getting shot in the head and beaten and gassed for their pains. And maybe there's some who remember the treatment accorded the Bonus Marchers, after another imperial war... and the Grand Networked Idiot Interoperable Battlespace War Managers are doing their damndest to dispense with rank-and-file anyway, in favor of better-behaved hardware, and are paying contractors 10 times what GIs get to do the jobs that might actually have some "transfer benefits."
The assumption that "our majority culture" is Right and Worthy and part of some pleasant, upwardly mobile monad, and that "black culture" is pathological, ignores the real makeup of our political economy, which is based on consumptive Imperialism and concentration of wealth and beggaring and enserfment of the people who actually do the work that creates the wealth that the military and cops and private security (like the Kochs have) are actually "protecting."
This whole thread and comments pretty aptly capture the Narrative version of Current Events, from the limited perspective of the privileged, looking down and saying to each other "what blacks are," as if the horrors happening beneath their perches are sui generis, unrelated to anything they profit from and "not their problem," except as an exercise in sanitation and furtherance of their privileges. News note: All "those people" are individuals, acting as advertising and propaganda and "schooling" teach them to act, with the constant reinforcement of certain behaviors. Lots of smart people of good will have offered better diagnoses of what's wrong, and prescriptions for how to cure, ameliorate, or at least palliate the problems. There's no money in those approaches, ask Corrections Corporation of America how that works, and breaking down the status walls and fairing up the structures and behaviors that impel people toward comity, rather than anomie (the libertarian ideal) has no lobby to press for that kind of Change. More and more for fewer and fewer, screw the consequences to others, "Apres moi le deluge."
And far as I can see, there's no fixing it, not even any significant interest in trying to fix things, given the momentum and motivations in play.
Look it up for yourself. Here's one link: http://www.childstats.gov/americaschildren/famsoc2.asp
Or you can just go the Heritage Foundation's web site, or Ralphie Reed's Faith & Freedom Coalition site, ffcoalition.com, for further reinforcement.
On the other hand, as far as I can see, there is NO "AMERICA" any more, if there ever was such a hypostatisation, to "fail" to address the lot and prospects and nature of black youth, which "failure" and its sequalae is just one pretty small but presently news-cycle-centric bit of what is so very wrong with our species and our particular "nation."
You got a school system increasingly dumbed down and loaded with idiot lesson plans and irrelevant "testing" intended to sell a cattle mentality, a "Christian-centric" viewpoint, and help the switch to privatized rip-off-the-public schools. You got the undeniable prison industrial complex, fed by the corrupt "war on drugs" and look-away prosecutors and judges who happily build stats by moving puny possession cases through the system.
You got legislatures stacked with Gerry Mander and Cotton Mather and ever more apartheid hypocrites, tightening the noose every session. You got an "economy" that sees blacks (and the rest of us) as malleable idiots who will yet work for coolie wages under a business model that is more work from fewer people for less pay, every day, or at least suckering us to dump our little income, however derived, into lottery tickets and Rent-A-Spinner-Rims. You got the part of "the arts" that is happy to take ticket and album and merchandise money to paint lipstick on gangsta behavior, and glorify "bad dudes" who "succeed" in managing the illicit drug trade that largely exists due to Rich White Folk hypocrisy. You got black "prosperity preachers" magnetizing the suckers 24/7.
And the principal selling themes for our whole culture are SEX and DEATH, and of course MORE MONEY. Pretty straight Freud, if you think about it. And of course you have the thing we reify as "Wall Street," always circling, circling, ripping off states and municipalities through fraudulent bond issues and pension "management" fees and self-dealing on enormous scale. And the incredible sickness that has white folks on the way down busily voting for and dangling their tea bags for the very people who are ripping them off, I guess thinking that if they can only hate and abuse the Other enough, that will stop their own stupid slide into Jerry Springer demise as stupid hosts to a huge body burden of tumors and parasites.
In sum, a bunch of disparate, mutually destructive parts loosely flying in a formation that's shaped like the made-in-Vietnam American Flag-motif underpants I saw in a recent fourth-class catalog in the trash at the local post office.
Good luck with all that, which just overwhelms the little local good-will efforts of the few of your Fellow Americans that are trying to keep the whole thing from crashing into the seawall... And of course the supra-national corporations and Serous Geopoliticians are busily bleeding the planet and the rest of us all the while...
Due to the passing of time, and the intractable, idiotic, implacable (yet behind the scenes, so very profitable) beating of that "ceterum censeo, Carthago delenda est" inverted cooking pot re-labeled "And while we are at it, Iran must be destroyed."
"Strategically, neither underestimating nor overestimating your enemy will produce your established goals." Sounds so, I don't know, WISE and EFFICIENT and all. And what are Netanyahoo's (and I adopt the misleading convention of reification/personification for, er, convenience) "established goals?"
That under-over-just-right thing is the Great Game postulate, of course. Like saying in geometry that a line is straight: in which n-space is that even "true?" But The Enemy is always an enigma, a fellow human full of surprises (see, e.g., Hiroshima and nerve gas and nanoweapons and suicide bombers, and IEDs made from bombs and artillery shells gifted to a Best Former Friend.)
And how much proof is needed to establish that the vast bulk of our generals are always ready to fight the LAST or SOME OTHER war, with rare exceptions (like Van Riper, http://www.cuttingedge.org/News/n2026.cfm, who acknowledges he would not likely be able to repeat, but the next smart tough guy would.)
I know, realistically that is how humans play what they think or tell the proles is a zero-sum game, and it's juvenile and jejune and childish and all that un-serious jazz too to, you know, question the processing and all the nearly infinite and profitable and murderous and destructive (in so many, many ways) results of the Great Game as coupled to Consumptive Capitalism-or-whatever-it-is. But it seems to me that if humans don't learn something different, oh well! Even old Sun Tzu knew that war (which back then was a simpler thing than the Global Stupid Hyper Networked Interoperable All The Data 24/7 Battlespace and all the perpetual getting-ready and bloody skirmishes that can never produce a "victor" or produce any of the kinds of Change that the war leaders promise, that eats a quarter of the world's wealth and sets us on the path to "Terminator" meets "Soylent Green") was an exercise to be oh so rarely indulged in, and that wise rulers were supposed to have a very much different calculus in mind when committing their populations to the Curious, Furious Idiocy.
The answer to the repeated question about what those "established goals" are is either a flood of Milbabble, a plethora of Pol-speak, or that smug "well, obviously you're unserious if you don't know already..."
What all our rulers are subjecting us to is a multi-treed game, where they alone, up there in the upper parts of the canopy, where they chatter to each other and crap down on the rest of us, are the "winners," by any sensible measure, and the rest of us are conveniently trained up as wealth generators to buy their toys and indulgences for them and eaters of offal and detritus, and then play the part of "bug splats" in their Game rounds. Kochs and Arafat and Netanyahoo and all the rest "live large" while we endure shrunken, fearful, increasingly desperate and actually threatened (by climate change 'n stuff) little lives...
Seems to me that "the sum of all fears" is pretty inarguably a large negative number.
They were also a bunch of dissolute, self-promoting, shameless hypocrites, selling offices and indulgences to build their personal monuments and family treasuries and fund their idiot wars. Which it seems all leaders (owners?) of religions inevitably become.
" And why would anyone expect him to change after a lifetime in such circles?"
A question that might be applied to many of us, especially those who leave hanging the implication, unsupported, of deep involvement in, and deep knowledge about, what the Deep Government has been up to. And of course "serious history." And "serious observation of international affairs." And I guess the implicit sense of how the rest of us are supposed to sleep on, secure in the belief that it's all been for our own good.
On another front,
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/07/13/1223376/-If-you-want-to-remain-blissfully-naive-do-not-read-this-post
and
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/07/14/1223578/-Debating-techniques
Like with so many tipping-point exercises, it doesn't take much to topple the balanced rock.
I guess there are some common threads that tie a lot of what's shaking in the world up in a nice neat knot. We got pseudo-Christians here, people with genes for organizing and repressing that "liberals" and "progressives" sadly lack, who have a set of Taliban Tenets that bind them into the same kind of political mass noted above (albeit with the seeds of schism planted in their bellies). You have to love the use of people's sense of the spiritual to turn them into serfs and renters and Quislings, subject to "rules" that the "rulers" themselves sneer at.
I'm just sure that no Imams drink alcohol, or eat proscribed food, or engage in adultery, or climb on little dancing (or altar) boys, or indulge themselves in other earthly fleshy pleasures, any more than our flood tide of Priests and TV Preachers and the heads of Mega-Churches and a whole raft of military officers and of course politicians with "wide stances" for whom abortion is anathema unless it's their daughter who was raped or "made a mistake."
It appears that Buddhists and Hindus and of course recognized state religions like Shinto and even Confucianism are subject to the same perversions, in all the meanings of that word...
Is "hypocrisy" a recognized religion?
And anyone who thinks "reformation" is the answer, or "rectification," sure is not a "serious and responsible student of history..."
Our partners in oppression and their friends in our government would never acknowledge such a thing, but 'the evidence is suggestive...'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=YAxH8hUpD2c
http://www.wisconsinproject.org/countries/israel/nuke.html
Little post, small comments, great big "issue." Bill speaks solemnly for dispassionatality, doubts are raised. The underlying assumption in much here is that the death penalty deters murder,
Did the writer say what he meant and mean what he infers -- "similar logic" -- and if this is going to be a "good post," why no examination of all those places in the world that have abolished the death penalty as idiotic (if a lot of fun, for the vicious and intolerant and hypocritical among us)?
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/09/opinion/09dow.html?_r=0
And of course one might read the link the Professor extracted the graph from, http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/issues/death-penalty/us-death-penalty-facts/death-penalty-and-race
Or this: http://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/aclu_dp_factsheet4.pdf
Which of the logical fallacies is it to imply that when you "take away the death penalty," more murders occur? Speaking of context and perspective...
...what was that line about not learning from history, again?
What a comforting impasto to lay over and obscure the image of "Guernica," or maybe "The Scream," that "freedom is messy," and somehow will ineluctably lead to what, again? "Mature democracy?" Like our own? like Britain? like even Canada? like Israel?
There really are reasons why people of good will and good sense reject the version of econopolitics, that we call "democracy" and decline to define accurately, that "our" government is invested in, along with "our" corporations, and intent on slathering the world with...
Too bad greed, arrogance, ignorance, tribalism, dominionism, and all those other "forces" at work in the human-operated part of the world seem to be only a set of positive-feedback, divergent, asymptotic functions that only trend toward sustainability and stability in the propaganda of those who apologize for the current overriding actual religion (going by behaviors and outcomes) that might best be called "MOREism." More for me and my little segment or tribe, less for you Others. An enormous, complex negative-sum game, albeit carefully masked as a zero-sum, with a few interim "winners,".
Too bad there does not seem to be a "strange attractor," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor#Strange_attractor, a kind of species-wide homeostasis, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeostasis, and http://people.scs.carleton.ca/~mvvelzen/pH/pH.html?q=~mvvelzen/pH/pH.html, in the matrix we breathe and excrete and combust and otherwise consume and grasp in, that moves all the seeming and maybe actual random, fractal silliness and horror, and occasional little domains of "goodness," toward a meta-stable state.
And given how we are individually created, and how, on the evidence, we mostly tend to behave, it's not surprising that way too many of us operate on the notion enunciated by one of the Wall Street Vampire Squids: "Hey, everybody else is cheating and stealing and getting away with it, so I'd be a dope to do anything else, wouldn't I? Besides, by the time the sh__ really hits the fan, I'll be gone and you'll be gone anyway."
Ain't seemingly but one way for things to go from here, and despite the magical faith in magical technology or iChange to "iNnovate" something to bring us back from the brink, I hope we will all at least get to enjoy the wind-in-our-hair sensation of free-falling, before we hit the rocks...
I bet quite a few folks who visit this site are familiar with both the label, and the substance, or lack thereof, of something called "Anomie." A waypoint on the path to Ragnarök, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragnar%C3%B6k
Here's one characterization of "anomie:"
http://criminology.fsu.edu/crimtheory/week8.htm
Still unclear on the concept? Now that attention is turning back a bit to that place called "Syria," as "IsitorisitnotacoupanddidtheUShaveanythingtodowithitthistime" fades into the general irrelevance, go spend some quality time viewing the plethora of little video vignettes conveniently collected and cataloged at "Syria Video," http://syriavideo.net/ That should pretty much clear up any lingering confusion or uncertainty about who rules, in the state of Anomie.
Then tune in "hellfire video" on Youtube, for some more fun...
It's like the rules in a bar fight: there ain't none.
Egypt's not the only place that's saddled with a "deep government," now is it?...
On the other hand, "the presumption of continuity is one of the strongest in the law," and that's why, with certain limitations, past bad acts are admissible to prove or at least bolster the presumptions of current bad conduct. And it's not like there's no pretty good proof, even you acknowledge that, grudgingly, that US AlphaBENT agencies have been bad actors in the past. Actually, it's kind of foolish to even try to minimize or deny or obscure the way "we" play the Great Game. Given, as pointed out above, that the evidence of those bad acts tends not to appear until long after the events, if ever depending on how well it's covered up, it's pretty weak tea that you're pouring, leaning on impeachment by repeating references to supposed logical fallacies, and insisting that a "small degree" of involvement, which many sets of data suggest was a lot bigger than you allow, by "the US" in, e.g., the overthrow and murder of Salvador Allende, is equal to "no responsibility."
Barks like a dog, quacks like a duck, pees like a horse...
"K" Street lobbyists advise their clients to put a little money into both "sides" of the political frame here, to cover all bets and add to the apparent reality, and even to inflame the contentiousness, of the "debate."
Is the contention that via "democracy grants," the part of "the US" that plays that part of the Game proves some disinterested interest in spreading the kind of "democracy" that is the misty, water-colored, teary-eyed, lump-in-the-throat imago that we "voters" and Boy Scouts and servicemen and -women are encouraged to dream upon when thinking about the "virtues" of our system?
Some see what we all live in here as, rather, an 'inverted totalitarianism,' with a highly managed "voting" as the only bit of pro forma democracy in the substance of it:
There's more to the insight, of course, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism, and if you read the details and do a little further study of the concept, it sure seems apposite, and to be closer to the real substance of what "we" are working to spread, like the nostalgic migrating opportunistic Scots spread gorse, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorse, across the planet...
Sounds so very much like what is happening in other places in the world, notably the good ol' US of A, where the Business Plotters and other "libertarian rectitudinalists" figured out that it was more long-term profitable to just buy their way into power, the expenses of regulatory capture being plain old cheap, both in money and pushback and aggravation and with incredible returns on investment (sic), in comparison to trying to pull off a coup.
And of course look where we are now, with "Christianists" filling local school boards (and more of our military officer ranks), Gerrymandered Republicans locking down so many state governments, the best Congress money can buy, an executive that's gone all Imperial, and every one in the power structure happy to increase the net ignorance, disaffection, stupidity and credulity of the Ballotized Electorate that thinks voting = legitimacy and that they are so blessed as to be living in a "more mature democracy." If only they could just kill off or export or disenfranchise or repress all those Others who had the audacity to be born within the same geographic boundaries.
"...infused into all aspects of the public institutions," indeed. Another reason "we" are on the skids as a species...
Hey Perfesser, given the tenor and substance of all the comments about what's afoot in Egypt, so much in the way of odds-makers doing their handicapping, maybe you could frame up a Fantasy Socioeconopolitical L:eague! With rounds based on each rollover coupulation, and "player drafts" and trades, the whole simulation! With an ante and a pot big enough to make it interesting!
Just like the real world, where it's all about personalities and clout and where the money and influence flows. Wouldn't that be fun? Lots of little play markers, from Sikorsky and Sukhoi and Boeing and Oerlikon and such, with the pot to be held by the World Bank! A much improved, more "mature" version of the Game of RISK tm!
It ain't always age, it is always behavior. There are basic needs that a population that makes the wealth the rulers live off off ought to have met. But as long as the "behaviors," which the cognoscenti dignify with the title of "policies," go beyond the level of predation and parasitism that keep those basic needs from being even minimally satisfied, the rulers are gonna have some 'splainin' to doo. Eventually.
In the political sphere, what would be the equivalent of "business model?" Or, as we are seeing more of with the activities of that thing we are still stupid enough to call the "National Security Agency," linked organizationally and by "interlocking directorates" with the rest of the "state security" apparatus and the pseudopodia of the MIC, is there no longer any sensible distinction between "business" and "politics," so that what these old guys and greedy young and younger people elsewhere are doing, grabbing for all the MORE OF EVERYTHING they can get by beggaring their neighbors while preaching faithful adherence to some religious codex or another, best described as a "business model" as surely as what the Koch brothers, and our post- and supra-national Vampire Squids and other diseases, are doing here in what used to be America, Land of the Free and Home of the Brave?
I bet we can all take comfort that "neo-liberal policies," applied under the blandishments of the IMF and World Bank, will do another bang-up job of bringing "stability and prosperity" to yet another tributary part of the planet...
Real life is made up of little anecdotes. Thank you, Shahid, for hanging that one on the clothesline, to remind us of the Pentagon Papers and Nixon's tape machines and April Glaspie and a freakin' gigantic tub of others including Castro's beard-shucking cigar...
Mine for today is a little vignette that anyone who worships or reveres or even honors what gets once again so disingenuously personified as "the military" ought to look at and remember, another tip of another iceberg:
"Defense contractor to pay $6M amid allegations of Tampa-based fraud" http://www.tampabay.com/news/military/defense-contractor-to-pay-6m-amid-allegations-of-tampa-based-fraud/2130520
And isn't free enterprise wonderful? There's a whole cottage industry of lawyers, ready to assist whistleblowers who can show actual dollar losses to we, the taxpayers, rather than desert-boot prints and skid marks and the imprints of tracked vehicles across our earnest trusting foreheads:
http://www.federalgovernmentcontractorfraud.com/militaryprocurementfraudlawsuits.htm
For more of what really goes on every day with your hard-earned money, please feel free, as free as we actually are any more, to google "military procurement contractor fraud." Fun stuff...
Which Ann is this? Coulter?
Is that "alphabet," or "alphaBENT?"
And many fellow US-ans know dang well what those collections of too-often-corruptniks actually do, but go on to give them praise and cover for bad acts and reassure the rest of us that all that stuff, all that fiddling and Fudd-ling with the other nations of the world or many of our own under-the-Constitutional fellow citizens, is not only "legal" but also mandatorily "necessary" if Freedom'n'Democracy (tm), New! and Improved! and Wait! There's More! is to spread and prosper and "mature" among the Wogs...
Bill and Joe and their staff were consulted about the proper descriptors to apply...
No, no, no: Bill says it's all completely legal! Or at least Necessary! Or maybe Justified! As do a lot of others who speak for power!
Having had a feeding tube "passed" into my esophagus, and having been involved in the procedure as a nurse, may I venture to testify that having that done, forcibly, against one's will, over and over, is pretty inarguably a pretty rotten form of torture.
But then the purpose of power is power. The purpose of torture is torture. And if you are a freakin' Great Game bureaucrat or Colonel Klink or CinC, life is never having to acknowledge that what you are doing is, you know, WRONG, mush less to stop doing it.
Oh, look, you have maybe "radicalized" some of these people you nabbed off the street and stuck in an oubliette, https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/oubliette, so now you have the security bureaucrat's complete and perfect excuse to defer to the next guy any opprobrium and helter-skelter that might attach to maybe actually "doing the right thing!"
"That's some catch, that Catch-22."
"That's right, it's the best there is." http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2093/whats-the-origin-of-catch-22
News flash: I'm always astonished at people who believe "the military," any "military" including our own, is some unitary body of trained men (mostly) with a common discipline and fealty and organization dedicated to the survival and prosperity of the nation that nominally arms and feeds them. That's NEVER been how it works, any more than "war" is a stand-up zero-sum game between Our Heroes and Those Baddies. And expecting or at least claiming as a visible and nominal policy goal that "training up an Army and national police force" is the way you "instill democracy" and "bring stability" to an area is so far off the mark as to be, what is it the Bobbsey Twins use for a pejorative, "ahistorical."
These events-in-context (not "stories," please, that's the Idiot MSM reduction we are way too comfortable with) end up badly, usually, because there's too much bad in the best of us and way, way too little good in the worst of us to overcome the toxins that the predators and parasites instill in us and the loss of blood from their persistent drainings. And there's personal profit and status to gain from sending "rough men" on motorcycles, armed with and firing the REAL Weapons of Mass Destruction, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/24/AR2006112400788.html, into crowds full of people full of a hypergolic mixture of hope, fear, anger, remorse, revenge, yearning, prayer...
How are US military types, who have brought us the School of the Americas, the invasion of countless countries, the idiocy of war-as-wealth-transfer-plus-body-count, all the sneaky-petery that paramilitary attachments and detachments undertake, supposed to create a nation-creating-and-sustaining "Army and national police" that will do anything other than what the average furriner (or our own Sheriff Bubbas and Militiamen) does in his daily life, only with better and more guns'n'ammo and a structure that a warlord or at a larger scale dictator can so easily co-opt?
When it comes to keeping a country or area or region that's up for grabs "destabilized," is there a formula, like there is for "evaluating raw intelligence data," for figuring out how many people you have to kill, one way or another, from which affinity group, to keep the pot on the boil or send the stew up in clouds of live, flesh-shredding steam? To reach that critical mass of tribal anger and vengeance that makes the peacemakers, even, "see red" and reach for weapons and start filling the conversational spaces that used to be occupied by "um" and "ah" and "Alma'derah" with "Allahu Akhbar!" and the air with hot rounds, and cue up the myriad little cellphone videos with little ululating clumps of "You see? You see what They are like?" people hauling another "martyr's" body through the horde, blood drops turning to Dragon's Teeth, or sawing the head off an "enemy" and cutting out his heart, Allahu Akhbar!, and eating it? (I'll eschew the video link, but it's there in "Syria Video.")
How much of this Curious Activity, Professor, is just about seizing the spoils of war, of the Ur-ians lining up to knock down the walls and empty the granaries of Nineveh, the Israelites putting everyone else to the sword and taking their stuff with a claim of G_D's blessing, the Koch brothers or Egyptian military officers or the people Bill insists are just figments of juvenile imagination running the fading "legitimate organs of government and the monopoly on violence" for their personal profit, skating along the edge of complete dissolution of all bonds in an effort to maximize their personal benefits, knowing there are no consequences for the horrors accrued to others by their terminal parasitism and smug manipulations?
Comity is a slow-growing plant, and its rhizomes and tendrils and modest blossoms and faint fragrance are easily shriveled, poisoned and detached...
Did Tim McVeigh or Ted Kaczynski "take credit?"
Hey, the "US government" dumps a whole lot more cash and weapons and "military aid" into the laps of Likud and the IDF. Does that translate into "influence" with the Israeli rulers? And Obama and our ruling bunch have had a lot of contact with Netanyahoo and Friends, and gotten the equivalent of a shoe thrown at their collective heads, a "mooning," and an upraised middle finger.
Or maybe the hammering-down of Palestinians, the near sinking of the USS Liberty and killing of US sailors, the safe harbor for dual-citizenship Ponzi runners and murderers, and all the other incidents of what ought to be incitement that have happened over the years, are what was intended? One would hope not. But in the depths of the Great Game, who actually knows anything or controls the moves? We do love our "Game of Thrones," our "Dallas!", our "Mad Men," our "West Wing," and of course Erica/Susan Lucci.
"Responsible international observation" calls two images to mind: the range of perception of an unfortunate with narrow-angle glaucoma, and what one "knows" of our world by careful examination of one shovelful of waste from a municipal landfill.
But we are to be assured and re-assured that there are no grande or medio or even poquito conspiracies or stuff... and grown-ups are in charge. I believe I'd rather trust some eighth-graders, pimples, hormones, undeveloped prefrontal cortex, bullying, sexting and all.
I guess nobody sensed maybe a little irony in Professor Cole's opening question in this sub-thread, or cared to take it seriously...
Which part of that is not a claim that Morales, and by simple logic the rest of the planet, is not subject to US law? And of course just to put the other slice of bread on the rhetorical sandwich, what is this to be taken to mean?
Once again, the pseudo-legalistic "justification" and apologia for the activities of the increasingly idiotic Imperium.
Ozymandias's "people" and those Roman sycophants probably espoused the same kind of stuff.
Hey, look over here! Pay Attention Only To What I Say! Forget about erosion of "rights," impoverishment of the most of us (even though those not actually living on the streets due to greed-induced economy collapse or theft-by-illegal-unlawful-foreclosure might have a refrigerator and microwave in their rental space and be dumbed down enough to do a payday loan to get the latest iDreck, with the hanging threat of combustion-induced climate "dysfunction," and a broad view of "our" history that dis-includes all those wonderful Dulles-Donovan-Helms-Bush-Casey-Etc. "Stratagems" and "Programs" run from "desks" in HQ and local stations. Ask a native American or Black or little Central American democratically elected government or whatever about our proud broad history.
Bush and Cheney are fugitives from the justice of other nations, can't go certain places because those places take "war crime" seriously. Even the narrow International Law definitions of the offenses. And so we are to understand that the "blowhards" of Central and South America, having cultural and personal experience of US invasions and sponsored terrorism, are exposed to "US haw-haw justice" as aiders and abetters, or even accessories to alleged "crimes" that Justice is having some apparent difficulty fitting into the elements of various offenses and that gee whiz, have not even been how you say adjudicated yet?
Better not to "make statements against the US, or in support of Snowden." That might be taken to amount to Treason Against The Empire...
That's the smart part about just implying special background and knowledge, like being a "responsible observer of history" and being in Chile when Allende was killed and knowing 'what really happened,' and having supposedly lived in all those other countries and thus having the Truth about all the stuff that happens there, and the other bits that are part of the on-behalf-of-the-Way-Things-Just-Have-To-Be Narrative.
And on a personal note, discounting and dismissing this writer's heated-but-as-far-as-I-can-see honest and accurate observations on the Game of War as a brief participant in the Vietnam chapter and Current Serious Observer of it because, after all, I'm not the only one who was ever sent to Vietnam.
Makes it harder to call out the claimant for maybe playing the rhetorical game with less than full candor, or to evaluate the Self-Appointed Expert Witness's training, skills and knowledge, following the rules-of-evidence wisdom of Frye, Daubert and Kumho. http://www.wvu.edu/~lawfac/mmcdiarmid/Davis-Ready.pdf
Seems to me this whole long conversation is "about" trying to find a means of encouraging individual, organizational and state behaviors that actually make life "better," calmer, safer, less insecure, less prone to triggering the worst in us. With participation by partisans of this or that cancerous entity or behavioral stream who want just More Of The Same, without consequence for, and with varous benefits to, themselves.
Sure seems to me that Bill's implicit claims of both "responsible observer" cred and some unspecified, undocumented, but presumptively elevated present or former position of participatory ("I was in Chile {in some unmentioned but implicitly quasi-official capacity} when Allende was ousted and killed, so I know what happened", and other bits like "I have lived in other countries so I know all about them, more than you irresponsible juvenile conspiracy theorists") clout in the imperial apparatus he assured the rest of us is nothing but a "juvenile conspiracy theory," give him more status as a purveyor of the propaganda that we ordinary citizens have been force-fed and had snuck into our earholes and eyeballs for how long now?
Hate to frame it that way, but then there's that hackneyed bit about "quacks like a duck..." More of the same is going to kill all of us.
Gee, you have to wonder, given even the little tiny recitation given by Professor Cole of a tiny bit of what those "immature conspiracy theorists" seem to have some pretty decent evidence that "our government" has done over the decades, maybe centuries now, to "Shape the World" in the image desired by those who run so much of everything, or want and seem to intend to, see Dulleses and Koch and Bloomberg and a few thousand others, if maybe Correa, with all those Southern Command "assets" and "forces" in his country and nearby ready for deployment, and the other kinds of "power projection" by the US that there's lots of evidence also gets used, hasn't been subjected to a little, ah, pressure? Which given what's happened to other elected leaders who have gotten crossways with "Washington" and ended up deposed or dead, I guess would make him "astute."
There would seem to be a blowhard 'round here, all right, who I guess claims the exalted status of "responsible international observer." Wow.
Always so reassuring, sir. Like Huxley's Soma...
"while some events have been influenced," you acknowledge that much at least, kind of hard to be a "responsible historian" and do at least that much. Hmmm:
Obviously, unless the goals of the Rough Men are very different than represented, the incompetence and idiocy of so much of that "influence" has not moved the whole world very far in the direction of subservience to "US national interests."
How much "influence," again? Just to establish the price...
Kind of like what's been happening here in the US? Though "democracy" is such a nicely elastic tarp -- can be used to justify and conceal, for the sake of argument, all kinds of badness and stupidity, like to camouflage voter suppression, in the news again thanks to the Supremes and a gleeful set of reactionaries with very fast reaction times down in Texas, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/25/texas-voter-id-law_n_3497724.html, or even stuff like using thugs here in FL to tamp down the numbers for that Gore guy, http://www.walmart.com/ip/Personalized-Flag-Display-Case-and-Pedestal-Set/2403564, well-dressed of course.
A Robust Democracy we got here, where election results in Philadephia used to turn on which gang controlled the staircase leading to the polling place, via broken heads and fists and bloodshed. I personally think de Toqueville had his French tongue firmly in his cheek when he titled his work "Democracy in America." And now, of course, that other wonderfully ironic Citizens United ruling. Bet Roberts and Scalia had a pretty good guffaw over that one...
Bait-and-switch, like Reagan and the Bushes and Clinton and now The 'Only President We've Currently Got.' Who you can bet has to have an eye toward the potential for another "Business Plot," maybe this time effectuated by someone other than a person of, wait for it, Maj. Gan. Smedley Butler's moral standing and dedication to that Constitution thing, that Holy Grail that sure looks like it's made, ab initio, of Unobtainium.
Maybe not so accurate to try to lay all the blame at the feet of Morsi, given that as in the US, the military has wide and deep investments and involvement in "the economy," and a pretty clear interest in a "security state" that keeps the money flowing, complete with relief from "sequester" for those special "jobs programs" in the Big Weapon Procurement line.
For a non-Wiki bit, albeit incomplete, of mainstream history on the involvement of the Egyptian military in that thing called "governance," which can be good or bad of course, too often bad in this world, lookie here: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/07/130705-egypt-morsi-government-overthrow-military-revolution-independence-history/
There's a minimum quantum of "legitimacy" needed to produce the stability and predictability and REAL security and the other stuff that leads to enough of the population being able to satisfy their basic Maslovian needs and tamp down the tribal and schismatic urges, to keep the demagogues and other sociopaths, like the people who populate the CIA and NSA and other alphabent agencies' Sneaky Pete Departments and Branches and Directorates, from Getting Something Started, that Something of the nature that lets self-interested cretins steal and dissemble and keep the pot always just on a personally profitable boil...
They rule us by manipulating our myths. Among other dodges and pressures.
That same chant was on the lips of French (and Germans) in the runup to the conflagration that catalyzed a lot of what's still happening, back there in the early days of the 20th Century.
One might observe that since there are humans involved, there's no alternative to "this ending badly." It's just a matter of degree, how much blood and treasure lost and stolen.
And "legitimately elected?" Isn't there some dispute about that? And what a cramped notion that "democracy," pro forma, is a sine qua non of a "good state..."
That can morph so nicely into the bully's reformulation: "Hate me, do they? I'll give the little __its something to REALLY whine about."
I know, we can only track just so much misery, futility and idiocy at one time, but there's still a shootin'-and-corruptin' war thingie with US troops involved in Afghanistan, and a bunch of other places, and of course there's that Syria thingie.
Which possibly-former nation has/had its own beauties:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCtRZLK8SwM
And there's people in lots of places, like "the only democracy in the Middle East," that are happy to see the tearing-apart proceeding apace...
Yeah, be good little people and play nice and follow the rules and bring cookies and milk to the people in charge and they might change their behaviors eventually if you can somehow just achieve that majority in the legislature.
A couple of illuminatingly warped takes on what's going on with "the economy" of that "region," under the irresistible pressure of greed, the ineluctable pleasure of violence, the inevitable idiocy of Great Gamer and supranational corporationists, and the all but invisible defalcations of what we so foolishly call "bankers" and other predators like the departing "rulers" who strip the treasures and treasury like the Nazis did in 1945, from the pages of "Syria Comments":
"Deconstructing the Syrian Banking System," by Andrew Cunningham, a consultant who advises on how to extend the world "banking" system into damaged terrain, and "The Economic Collapse of Syria." http://www.joshualandis.com/blog/the-effect-of-the-conflict-on-syrian-banking-and-economy/
Interesting how the destruction and dismantling of a place people used to just sort of live provides such great opportunities for "growth" and "profit." It's an ill wind indeed that blows no man "good."
The comments to these pieces are also so beautifully evocative and illustrative of what's fundamentally wrong with us as a species...
Sad how many people are unaware how deeply the corporate fix is in under these BS "free trade" agreements. Basically, they do away with national sovereignty when it comes to regulating the insatiable greed of that parasitic breed of tapeworms known as "post-trans-supra-national corporations." And signatory states will find themselves using their monopoly-of-violence to enforce the "rights" of these corporate creatures against their mere-mortal citizens in their own courts and administrative proceedings and in their streets too...
A primer of sorts: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/07/will-snowden-revelations-about-spying-on-foreign-governments-undermine-the-european-and-pacific-trade-talks.html
Oh please, God, let it be the case that this set of revelations undoes the opening of the Third Seal that is this next set of "agreements," being concluded (can't say "negotiated," since all sides of the table are in complete agreement and it's just about how much they can get away with in one grab) about as "anti-democratically" as such things are possible, where our own freaking wholly-almost-owned subsidiary Congress is "not allowed" to know the details of what is being done to us...
Not to chase fine points, but as with sunshine, there may very well be enough food and water to go around, too. But all those Maslovian necessities are subject to the processes of "ownership and rent," and manufactured shortages or simple grotesque accumulation so that a very few can sneer from their Dubaian towers at the starving rest of us.
Folks kind of laugh at our modern mythology. All the apocalyptic/zombie/vampire stuff, and our wishful thinking about retribution through TV shows like "Dexter" and "Dark Blue" and stuff. But we're moving into "Terminator" territory (see, current Detroit, and of course all that Autonomous Robot Technology stuff.) And "mastery" of biotechnology. And we're setting the conditions for that endgame so nicely captured in "Soylent Green," from the trashing of the planet to the terminal self-stimulation of the corporate elite.
One hopes a new kind of spiritual wisdom, energy and strength will come to enough of us to do better than that. One hopes.
Japan was supposed to be a nuclear-weapon-free zone too, and it was a tiny bit of a big deal when it got out that US warships making those multi-function port calls in Japan were carrying nuclear warheads on the way to idiot confrontations with idiot Soviet and idiot Chinese idiots on, over and under the South China Sea and North Pacific and other idiot "theaters of conflict." Talk about "ponerized..."
I was vacationing in Japan in 1982 at Beppu, the Suginoi Hotel. In one of the large, ornate public baths. In come three loud and enthusiastic Navy officers, strip off their uniforms and dive in without the pre-wash, causing a certain revulsion reaction among the Japanese in the bath, and they splash on over to me, the only "white" dude in the place. Got to talking, war stories and such, and they offered that the guided missile frigate and destroyer they were from in fact had nuclear missiles aboard, and got to adding that quite a few people had the ability to launch ship-to-ship nuke-tipped missiles more or less on their own "authorization," given the very short "horizon times" for incoming "Commie" missiles. Hairy hair-trigger stories about almosts... This at a time when the Japanese ordinary citizens were all het up about the "discovery" that US ships were in fact violating that no-nuke policy thing. http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=145229.0;wap2
And the jerks that bring us Planet Threat are all so suave and "nothing to worry about, we have it all under control, and besides we love that constant little frisson of DANGER."
Might one ask what are the obviously multiple purposes of all this Peeping-Tomfoolery? I'm sure the apologists for The Way Things Just Are have a bunch of "reasons"... And the virtue of the lighting of this particular fuse by Mr. Snowden and the others who have sucked it up and given us a reverse peek through the spyhole is that maybe there's enough smarts and ability and interest left in purfuit of happineff and life and liberty to keep us from disappearing into the Matrix...
And I'm reminded of how the Drill Sergeant in Basic Combat Training would brook no "excuses," at most entertain "reasons" to scoff at, for any deviations from the Program we were supposed to always be "Getting With."
No Drill Sergeant here telling these cretins to "drop and give me 20,000 quality pushups" as a way to rectify and deter bad behavior...
For me, the above link didn't work. Try this one, and of course it's just another apologia from the people who are bringing you Empire, in Nine Areas of "Responsibility" (should be "Authority") where the US Military will be the "force" that "protects US regional interests" and "sets the conditions for good governance" and all that crap: http://www.armed-services.senate.gov/statemnt/2013/03%20March/Ham%2003-07-13.pdf
But for anyone curious about the mind-set and reach and grasp of the people who claim that authority over all parts of the Global Interoperable Network-Centric Battlespace that is by Executive Decree the place formerly known as Planet Earth, it's an interesting read...
Speak of trolls, and the Bobbsey twins just appeared... speaking for the Great Narrative-ization of everything.
Run him down, boys, can't be having any change for the better, now, or exposing the black heart and rendings of the beast you so often speak for...
Ah, the argument used to justify the Cold War, and all kinds of other stuff. Presumes that "the government" is both competent, and interested in the survival of the species and that "nation" thing.
Back in the early '80s, I worked for the US EPA. Parts of the Agency thought compliance with environmental laws and implementing regulations would increase if the criminal sanctions Congress used to include, with funding, were actively enforced, against corporate officers as well as with cost-of-doing-business fines levied on What, Me Worry? corporate entities like Dow and Monsanto.
EPA had no investigators with what we thought of as the right kind of training, and many US Attorneys, parts of the Reaganized Justice Department, and outfits like the FBI and OSHA thought it was penny-ante scut work or inherently evil interference with Almighty Bidness, so at first it was a make-do operation. The Regional office I worked in sought to "professionalize" the work by hiring some experienced police types. We were trying to measure the applicants' skills and knowledge, a challenge for a bunch of youngish hippie tree huggers with little experience in criminal investigation and prosecution.
One person who applied for what was a pretty cushy GS-14 spot was an ex-Chicago police officer. He was really cagey about what he had done with the Chicago police force for, I recall, 15 years, and when pressed, he finally said, with a lot of condescension, that he had been an operative with the Red Squad. Only after looking up at the ceiling, doing some mental math, and offering "Okay, I think the statutes of limitations have run on what I'll tell you about." And he gave us wide-eyed (WIDE, not WILD, and getting wider as he went on) callow folks an earful, all right. Sounded just like what was reported at this link, http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/confessions-of-a-red-squad-spy/Content?oid=3293807, back when there still was a LOT of actual, you know, "reporting" by the press.
Nothing new here, you've known about it for years and put up with it. Disperse to your homes or be brutalized! The Panopticon, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/opinion/the-price-of-the-panopticon.html?_r=0, has its unsleeping, all-seeing Eye of Sauron on you, buster!
Just your imagination, or whatever else is operating. "Frank" is not "frog," any more than my personal eth, "Scoth-Irish-English," is a biological slur.
As to the frog jumping thing, Wiki, that most unreliable of resources, says it's historically and on the science an open question, not an "of course." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
Yes indeed, Monsieur Lafontaine, your "first impression" and put-down could very well be wrong. Congrats on packing a whole shipload of "conservative" sentiments into one tiny dinghy.
Their 'cause' seems to many people to be important and even to have a certain justice and honor behind it -- My impression, from this tiny sample you've provided, and it could be wrong, is that in your world order women have a much more, ah, invisible and humble place.
Given what's shaking in the world right now, it seems (my impression, again), that there's a kind of hunger for what used to be called "human rights" that seems to be gathering a little steam. Maybe there is some fundamental level of oppression and successful short-term accumulative greed beyond which symbolic gestures like these, and self-immolations, http://www.latimes.com/news/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-global-voices-tibetan-immolation-20130605,0,720668.story, and initially orderly and peaceful gatherings of people doing that we-shall-overcome/kumbayah bit of empowerment and what pejoratively is called "protest," which gatherings are then warped by agents provocateur or a nihilist/anarchist few and ramped up to violence by violent "government" and "militias" and "death squads" and driven into schism and divide-and-conquer-and-fail, like the dehiscence of old scars on a person sick with scurvy or some cancers.
One of your fellow Franks, Delacroix, offered this image of the rising up of those simple aspirations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Leading_the_People Do you think the women of Femen have any education in the classics, or a sense of the power of that exposure that exposes the blunt idiocy of "conservative" hunkering?
And there's this:
There's a little more at http://tbo.com/tribtv/fox-commentator-tells-woman-know-your-role-20130621/
Ever heard of "Lysistrata?" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysistrata
And please excuse me if I have misread your views and intent from my possibly incorrect interpretation of your comment. Too bad we can't all pull on the same end of the rope, and recognize that we are all in this slowly rising-to-a-boil pot together, and that it ultimately does not matter which of us cooks through first and which gets heat-denaturated last.
Tough issues. Looks like Bill didn't bother to read the Weisbrot item in the Guardian link above, since he didn't offer any pithy rebuttal, or offer any cites in support of his assertions. Anyone looking for substance, as opposed to unsubstantiated allegations might benefit from doing the reading.
Thanks to You, thrice-blessed Almighty God of Abraham and Isaac, that we are finally returning the Empire we have been building in your Holy Name to that set of Great International Confrontations with Seemingly Actual Evil Empires, with themes and indoctrination that are so comfortably familiar, and the policies and behaviors and institutions and expenditures and apologies that can more easily be made to conform to the Teachings.
Thank You, bless You, Most High Christ Jesus, for setting us finally, properly, back on the True Path to Your Holy Apocalypse! Before those presaged in your Divine Revelation evilly dismantle all Your Sanctified Strategic and Nuclear Weapons! and all the Really Cool and Enhanced Lethality stuff we have so diligently been creating for You!
?How about a little taste of some thinking from some people who actually live in and are really familiar with Syria and what's going on there right at this moment, folks who think Obama's course of action now is, like, stupid in the extreme?
http://www.joshualandis.com/blog/news-round-up-june-2013/
And have any of you asked yourself the silly question, "Who is Ben Rhodes?" http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/139836.html There's more on that page, and more than ever meets the eye of the ordinary citizen who funds and stupidly supports all this sh__.
Time for some more wisdom and beauty from Omar Khayyám? Sugar in our tea instead of salt in our wounds?
Me, personally, speaking as a former non-secret-squirrel federal employee (the EPA, for 13 years) who got to watch and try to resist what the Reaganauts did starting in 1980, as a GI who got to see the "thinking" of the Best and Brightest and of Brass Hats doing body counts and "contracting" in action for just short of 3 years in the Army, including a year in that Vietnam place, and someone who has a personal letter from H. R. Haldeman on White house stationery in response to a nasty letter I wrote to Dick Nixon about some Fish Hook/Parrot's Beak BS, reading, in total, "Dear Mr. McPhee: Rest assured, your comments have been noted," and being a fella who makes myself sad and sick trying to keep up with the crap that our ruling class has been and is pulling on us ordinary folks, I have neither trust nor respect for most of the people who are senior GS, O serie, or senior E types, and of course the "contractors" who so easily have slid into StasiLand and that idiot unending inevitable development of worser and worser and deadlier and stupid "smart" weapons and dumber dead-end tactics and obscure but profitable "doctrines" and "strategies." Leading to Gahan Wilson's horrific cartoon from my own era: http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lzwamh77o21qart8to1_500.jpg&imgrefurl=http://mana-junkie.tumblr.com/post/18843214034&h=574&w=406&sz=50&tbnid=YztX7wqVD3owOM:&tbnh=96&tbnw=68&zoom=1&usg=__eWqL5PltgzJ4fBuGC7jVb2mg2eI=&docid=RFF-7-BBveBmHM&sa=X&ei=aTPKUZmGOerF0gGNsIGABw&ved=0CC4Q9QEwAA&dur=669 At least, that grunt appears to have some idea of what "victory" means, in his value system...
The federal "security" structure is just about moving careers and money, not a damn bit about "security" the way we moo-cows think we understand it, not about "protecting our way of life." Unless we work in Crystal City or such places. Kicking in doors in Kandahar? Individually, personally working the blasting of what, 1649 "wogs" into Gehenna, on a good middle-class salary plus great benefits? Developing little spy-gnats and code and packet-grabbers to "keep an eye on" the rest of us, and prepare to do what, exactly?
I knew some serious types who kind of paid and no doubt still pay attention to "constitutional" notions and strive for decency and fairness and honesty and all that Boy Scout crap, but they are in a shrinking minority, in a business, because that's what it is, that is, as pointed out here and in a few other places, dedicated to a dead-end negative-sum game. Though of course a very few, in advance of the dead-end, will live Really Large, Infinitely Comfortable and possibly even vastly extended lives. At the expense of a lot of people who have the poor fortune to be human, blessed and cursed with a limbic system that subjects them to sectarian loyalties and sectarian violence and all that other stuff.
Dare I say that given where all this is leading us, what one's "clearance obligations" are is a meaningless set of terms when the behaviors of all those "cleared" people (interesting that being "cleared" is a stage on the way to high Scientology status), in net sum, are the grease and ball bearings that are helping slip the rest of us down a rat hole?
"Mission Accomplished, SIR!"
Were you there, Bill? or is this just more claiming of authoritative knowledge without referents, other than "You can be sure"? Following the snide little unsubstantiated indictment of Snowden, "whether or not Snowden willingly sold or gave classified secrets loaded on his hard drives and thumb drives to the Chinese and Russians." You never say -- do you have first-hand Player knowledge of how the sneaky petes do their bloody, too often idiot business where the rest of us are always advised not to look?
You're getting better at the doubt-sowing and impeachment game. Maybe you will attain Joe's status and skill level in the art of drive-by impeachment eventually?
Regarding the outsourcing of 'government' functions and intellectual property, here's a personal favorite you may have seen: A Powerpoint slide prepared by a British "consultancy" that "explains" how to Achieve Victory in Notagainistan. Or at least claims to put all the salient elements on a single page and link them all together:
http://eatitorwearit.wordpress.com/2010/04/28/the-afghanistan-war-explained-a-powerpoint-too-far/
If you expand the image, way down there in the lower left corner you have the, get this, COPYRIGHT CLAIM of one PA Consulting Group (PA Knowledge Ltd.) http://www.paconsulting.com/ So that slide and the rest of the presentation, created by a government-paid 'think tank,' is not even a work-for-hire to which the private firm has no possible basis to claim copyright? Ignore the idiocy of having a British firm (albeit with US sneaky-petes no doubt in the loop) tell the military how to go about COIN (though Bill will tell us about that one supposedly successful counter-insurgency in Malaysia, run violently by the Brits.)
The "contract" for millions of dollars of "thinking" under which this "think" was conjured up must be a real doozie.
Want a tiny sample of Your Tax Dollars In Action in the huge procurement machinery that spends your trillions and mine for stuff like that Powerpoint slide, and heavier weapons and how-to training (not including how to, you know, "govern," to the Deserving Insurgents in Syria? https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2013/03/28/2013-07106/defense-federal-acquisition-regulation-supplement-proposal-adequacy-checklist-dfars-case-2011-d042
"Latin America" is a pretty big place to be claiming to have the "correct" understanding of and handle on. One might wonder which of the posited binary takes on that continent and a half partake more of reality and less of polemics and apologist's re-writes... Living WHERE in Latin America, and hanging around with what kind of people? Graduates of universities, or graduates of the School of the Americas? Or some other claim to more correct authentic complete knowledge? De Soto, surprisingly enough, has numerous critics, that include observations that his remedies for inequality and "fixing" national economies are, shall we say, simplistic?
One wonders if that silly little Perkins book was on Bill's reading list, and what his critique of it might be. I thought it was pretty compelling, myself.
I had an older friend who was a partner at one of the defunct Big Eight accounting firms (Arthur Anderson). He left the firm on learning of the degree of corruption that it was engaging in with Continental Bank, as part of the fraudulent "due diligence" ratings on US-backed "loans" being made by Continental and other US banks, at the urging of our State Department and CIA, to various South and Central American oligarchies.
Again, the purposes of the loans were to get the borrower state in way over its head, with the US taxpayer on the hook to make good the loans that patently were pre-defaulted, providing, of course, risk-free returns to the banks.
The "banking officers" who cut these deals had a little "moral hazard," their compensation being a percentage of the amount loaned, and they of course were feted and "favored by senoritas" and given the best cigars and "drogas" by the host country. Leading to the kinds of leverage that Our Government so dearly loves to be able to apply, in pursuit of hegemony and profit for corporations.
Bill probably discounts Howard Zinn as a "serious responsible historian," but here are a few observations Professor Zinn made, not so long ago, about bits of the Great Game as played by "Americans:" http://news.rapgenius.com/Howard-zinn-chapter-21-carter-reagan-bush-the-bipartisan-consensus-lyrics#lyric
"Say it ain't so, Joe!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sox_Scandal
Cheerful corruption is endemic in the good old US of A, too. All you have to do is live in just about any city or town and spend some time learning about contracting and zoning and permitting and annexation and lately the "race to the bottom" that's the "efforts to attract business relocations" to "bring jobs" out of one US locale to another, which are paid for with excuses from taxes and environmental regulations, gifts of public property, condemnation of private property and the rest of the scams including plain old bribery.
Having been personally solicited by several police officers and public officials over the years for little mordidas (like the "$20 handshake" to ensure timely recordation of Torrens land titles in Chicago and so many others) I will offer my little experience and observation that corruption thrives here, including PA judges who railroad kids into jails in exchange for cash, and of course all the SOBs who get away with financial murder and the theft of people's homes and livelihoods...
A certain amount of what I'd call "slack" is inevitable, even necessary, but we here are way beyond a "genteel sufficiency" of it.
The cool thing, Bill, is that almost all the points you highlight as reasons why the other Americas have not 'developed' (I guess that means "looking more like US") sure seem to apply to what's going on in the good old USA. Tax avoidance as a sport? Looks like. And I would consider the inroads and perversions of post-national and trans- and super-national corporations that drive so much "policy" and the flow of money, not to mention one Herewegoagainistania after another, to be an "external force" being exerted by outside powers to exploit the labors and ingenuity of the working engine of the population.
What would YOU approve of as constituting "a modern, efficient political and economic system?" Germany? France? The US? You applaud the neoliberals wherever they breed, like Chile, but those folks there and here could care less about the huge mass of humans with their sad little lives, working long hours for pittance pay under oppressive conditions and paying ever more (even beyond the feared HYPERINFLATION!) for necessities as the rentier class figures out where the self-ignition point of popular revolt is,and prices everything right to the fine limit.
A little bit of blaming the victim might be warranted. Not what is in your post and the sources you turn to, though. It's hard to go up against unfettered death squads and those uniformed fellas and sneaky petes trained up at the School of the Americas and more covert campuses... not to mention the jackals. I'm sure you have just a withering critique of the writings of John Perkins, like "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man," http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Economic-Hit-John-Perkins/dp/0452287081/ref=pd_sim_b_1, and "The Secret History of the American Empire: The Truth About Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and How to Change the World," http://www.amazon.com/The-Secret-History-American-Empire/dp/0452289572
Stop breaking it, and you won't have to fix it.
"Central role in the international drug trade?" I don't see where that statement can be wrung out of the article cited, which is a puff piece unfettered by research links for an outfit seeking more money to 'fight drugs'.
On the other hand, Ecuador is one of "those little countries down there" that have taken multiple poundings from the Northern Colossus:
- See more at: http://reformdrugpolicy.com/beckley-main-content/new-approaches/future-directions-for-drug-policy-reform/latin-america/ecuador-2/#sthash.zt2LDI2O.dpuf
And of course here's one bit what gets done in our name, in those "little foreign countries":
http://williamblum.org/chapters/killing-hope/ecuador
Google "us intervention in ecuador" for LOTS more.
That scary submarine? Not a lot of detail available, but likely not built by any "Ecuadorian cartel." http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jul/06/world/la-fg-ecuador-narco-sub-20100706 I hear Swedish or German engineers were involved. Or maybe Spanish, or Russian. Or some MIT guy thinking the pay at Electric Boat is not high enough. Anything for a buck, right?
Here's some fun details of this part of the Great Game: http://www.combatreform.org/thunderballfromunderthesea.htm
Too bad feeding our US-an appetites is killing the whole planet and its little cultures...
I think he thought it was an "owner's manual" or "how-to," not a litany of prolonged evil for the benefit of the Tainted Few...
You can bet the generals and jackals who feed at the trough of Coca-Colonialism, who don't have the integrity of one (here you go, Bill, 3x5 INCOMING! Counter-battery fire!) Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler who told it like it really is, without the fake "patriotic-exceptional" bunting and fireworks, know just how to move the levers and where to stick the blades...
And in FL, because of the way the statutes are administed, it's no surprise that the disenfranchising runs about 3 to 1 as between black/Latino/other on the one hand, and white folk on the other.
The sweetest election victory is the one you STEAL.
Too bad all there is in all of this is a mashup of egos and "wants" and other greeds, churned with a fine selection of "doctrines" and "strategies" and "tactics" and "initiatives," half-baked until it blows up in the oven, all with essentially zero attention to anything more than moving from this little scenario-cum-shootin'-crisis to the next, via stratagems and "investments" that make for fun careers and big old wealth transfers. Not a whit of an inkling of a passing thought given to anything more than the perceived (dimly) possible moves that might provide some momentary advantage in a stupid game, not a concern given to the lip-serviced myths of any polity involved, or its rulers. Who thunder forward, convinced they are In Control Of Events...
We are such a profound, subtle species, aren't we?
Shall we embrace Thanatos more ardently, anyone? http://thoughtsfromthemiddleseat.com/2011/02/28/explaining-thanatos-the-death-drive/
Bill has a nice adjustable loupe through which he wants the rest of us to view 'history' as he declares it, by which the area under examination can be shrunk to a little point a couple of millimeters across.
"The West" has had a lot to do with the political and social structuring of the Balkans, all part of the idiot Great Game that has been in motion for a couple of centuries now, as most responsible historians of the area and its complexities would allow. Without "The West's" enormous wars and secret pacts and all that, the Balkans would likely be a lot less, er, "Balkanized."
Per Bill, apparently, regarding Serbia and ethnic Albanians and Kosovo, what went on there was all Milosevic's personal evil, like Gadaffyduck's antics were just his personal foibles, detached from all that had gone before and all that was in play in the Great Game that Bill thinks is the Right True Order of Things.
I'm curious what Bill would say is the "legal" underpinning for the current plunge into Ohmygodherewegoagainstania, with the make-the-manufacturers-happy, feed-the-ego-of-idiots-like-McCain injection of guided anti-tank weapons and man-portable antiaircraft weapons (bought from where, Russian clients? since they are apparently all from the "Warsaw Pact" armory to let the "fighters" replenish their ammo from captured "Government" stores. How about it, Bill? Does the AUMF cover this too, or is all we need that UN text without even the benefit of a Security Council or General resolution? Or are we now freed by greed and our grand Power to just do whatever our little idiot jackal hearts desire? And how does that preserve our way of life (whatever that currently is) and FreedomnDemocracynLiberty (tm)? Or increase our "security?"
Never mind, we are on the greased rails, running fast downhill, with Bill and others cheerleading from the slopes...
...so in addition to the military industrial complex (MIC) and prison industrial complex (PIC) we now are blessed, apropos of the Noir subject of this post and as an adjunct to the other two, the dossier initiating complex (DIC). And people used to actually bless a lot of the Alphabet Agencies, a couple of generations ago...
Per someone I used to know, the operative sentence is "When YOU to that, it's WRONG -- when I do that, it's DIFFERENT."
Evil is always exempt from prosecution.
Some of us Collectivites are more interested in being Borg. Consider the following to all be in BOLD text:
- See more at: http://www.hsc.edu/Career-Education/Career-Tiger-Tracks/National-Security.html#sthash.XF4Hblcc.dpuf
And for you working mothers, you missed this opportunity to network and stuff:
http://www.workingmother.com/conference-events/leadership-summit-women-national-security-careers-2013
We're not Joining the Oppressor, we're Improving The Leadership Quality!
And hey, there's over 45,000 current GS-11 or higher equivalent openings in the Servicing of your Country right now! Don't miss out on this well-paid, secure (ahem) Career Opportunity!
So just follow Pat Robertson's advice and TAKE HIM OUT! http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-08-22-robertson-_x.htm?POE=click-refer Maybe we could, like give him cancer or something. Or make his beard fall out.
It's not like "we" lack the ability, right? So it's just a matter of having the WILL.
For giggles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Robertson_controversies
Being likely not all that far from my own personal physical/temporal endpoint, I will just join you in taking smug comfort in the fact that (as far as we know, anyway, like all the other unknown unknowns you cite) death puts us beyond consequences and remorse.
I will add a dash of bitters to the brew, however, in noting the possibility that the worst of human predators and parasites are the most likely to escape death and keep on eating whatever's left of the planet: "Russian Mogul to 'Forbes' Billionaires: Limitless Lifespans Can Be Yours" http://www.forbes.com/sites/katiedrummond/2012/07/19/dmitry-itskov-avatar/ That won't happen either. Will it?
In other news, a Rubinite will be our new US Trade Representative, say 93 Senators, a fella who has said that if wethepeople knew what "the US" was up to in the several "free trade" deals now pending, Atlantic and Pacific, we would not be amused (per Elizabeth Warren, at least):
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/06/19/warren-on-trans-pacific-partnership-if-people-knew-what-was-going-on-they-would-stop-it/ and for context, and yet another reason for dyspepsia and nightmares, http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/05/secret-free-trade-negotiations-will-gut-regulations-further-enrich-multinationals-and-big-financial-firms.html
On again, off again, jiggity-jig... http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Where_does_the_lyric_home_again_home_again_jiggity_jig_originate
Not the first time the nominal puppet has been the one pulling the strings that manipulate the actions of that Brobdingnagian, heavy-browed lout wearing the "U.S." muscle shirt. (Can you spell "Likud?" How about "Diem?") Pull the strings with a little covert help from nominal bit players like the CIA and other sets of sneaky-petes, who CONCEIVE they actually run things, IMAGINE they control the important events, and ALIENATE (the "legal" meaning) all that wealth and power, back there behind the seven veils labeled Freedom (tm), Liberty (tm) and Democracy (tm), Exceptionalism (tm), and other comforting myths...
Meanwhile, back here in blogspace, "Let a hundred flowers bloom," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign, let us revel in our little Prague Spring, http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/prague_spring_1968.htm, because
Brezhnev was not as nominally gentle as Mao, of course -- how will our Stasi behave?
Whether it's us "good guys," or the "evil empire," I would think the same principle applies:
The many little hidden cancers really prosper and grow and metastasize when the ol' body's immune system is occupied trying to deal with virulent infections, and burgeoning parasites, and continual loss of blood from wounds that are kept so happily open...
Apparently there are a few other thoughtful people who try to contextualize the idiocy that's in the works once again. Here's from one of our host's friends and interlocutors, a lengthy, inclusive discourse on some of the more salient reasons why the idiots calling for Arming the Noble Resistance are once again full of shoot! shoot! and replenish the logistics flow! And why the comfortable narrative they peddle on how effective and wonderful the No-Fly Iraq and the Balkan Ballet and "Libya Libre" were is also a pile of hoooey. http://justworldnews.org/?p=3797#comments
Not that, any more than in 1956 or 1993 or 1999 or 2000 or 2001 or 2003 or 2010, any of that will manage to penetrate the mental bunkers of, or re-direct by one tiny fraction of a mil the aiming points, of the idiots inside the fluffy Depends that coddle the cojones of the fake "patriots" in the bespoke suits and be-medalled BDUs held up by the Beltway...
It won't "end well" because it won't ever end. Not until we effing stupid humans so depopulate ourselves that there's hardly any fight left in us. Or until there really is some winning of hearts and minds, on a big scale, people turned, maybe in desperation, to the long-game wisdom of the Golden Rule, turned to helping each other survive rather than strangling, stabbing, decapitating, shooting and blasting each other as they sink into that rising sea that is only floating megayachts, "Allahu akbar!!!" or "in the name of the Most High Tripartite God." Or just because it's so damn much exciting FUN: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=y7qdMZ01NTI and http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=38sfBhwz4_I
But hey, the tradition is that we struggle to stand on each others' shoulders as we drown, shredding the deltoids of "the weak" in our fight for breathable air...
In other news, the corporations that produce weapons of mass dissolution are posting record profits, http://americanfreepress.net/?p=4096 and http://www.globalissues.org/article/74/the-arms-trade-is-big-business and (for a dated but easily updated view that still captures the Big Picture) http://www.fas.org/asmp/fast_facts.htm . And the sneaky little ba__ards who "craft policy" and "declare doctrines and dogmas" and "implement strategies" and "populate and operate the Global Interoperable Network-centric Battlespace" are rising in their pay grades and advancing in their careers. Even as they order the Troops to retreat (ssssshhh!!!!!) from the latest idiocy in that "graveyard of empires" place, sending "diplomats" to "direct the future of" the latest we-broke-it-now-we-have-to-fix-it Imperial misadventure by (sssshhh!) "negotiating" with "the Taliban." As reported by those who profit from, but are excused and insulated from, combat or the costs of war: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/061813-660475-american-diplomats-tricked-by-afghan-savages.htm
Yeah, "arm the rebels." "Make it a fair fight." Say those that are either liars, or totally unclear on the concept and nature of it all.
The name of the god in which "we" do all this is binary: Moloch, and Mammon.
...and the next really cool story is in the wind:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/18/us-peace-talks-taliban-afghanistan
Tell me again why the US, that piece of it that does the foreign stuff, gets to have a say in "Afghanistan's future?"
Gee, have we all seen this before? "Vietnamization?" Who plays Henry Kissinger, and who plays Le Duc Tho? What do the Afghans have in the way of Asian Tiger genes that will have them exporting nice moderately priced, slave-made clothing and crap to fill the shelves of Walmart? Oh yeah, they're sitting on "rare earths" and pipeline routes. And cultivating poppies.
And speaking of fast-disappearing stories, and speaking of treason, how about that Nixon guy, huh? Sabotaging the ending of the Vietnam war? http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/lbj-tapes-nixon-sabotaged-vietnam-peace-talks/
So here we go again: the Neo-b__tards run a huge Racket -- excuse me, "war" -- that transfers trillions of dollars to their fellow thieves, kills and maims and displaces millions, sets the stage for more and worse of the same in the next round of all this stupid Great Game sh__. And so many of us just go along.
"The answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind -- the answer is blowing in the wind."
Stupid effing humans.
Just curious, it would be nice to hear from the Deep People here, with their undisclosed Deep Histories, where on the spectrum of information-gathering from Humint to Elint this NSA "Hoovering" (multiple puns intended) of All Available Data might be said to lie (also pun intended).
Since it seems us dumbshi_ USA-ans, especially the Security-State and MILINT careerists who couldn't or wouldn't connect the pre-9-11 dots, have this cybernetic notion that Elint, with all its expensive bits and pieces and contractors and crap, is so much better and perfectible than Humint or, to put a size-14 gumshoe square in the middle of the poop pile, plain old police work which, yes, involves electronic stuff too, but maybe if the militarization and securitization hasn't metastasized too far already, some actual people using their meatbrains to sift and sort.
Thank the Lord of Goodness that there are people with consciences who see the craphole we are all being slid down into. From, yes, Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, who was also called a traitor by bigger creeps than Cheney even, to the more recent brave souls who have tried to play the part of white blood cells, policing up at least a few of the teeming cancer cells that are circulating, circling, draining the life...
Like these opportunities:
http://www.nsa.gov/careers/
http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/archive/2011/July/Pages/TheJobsoftheFutureinNationalSecurityandIntelligence.aspx
http://www.workingmother.com/conference-events/national-security/events
http://www.indeed.com/q-National-Security-jobs.html
Opportunity everywhere!