"...does the world care?" "The world" that counts, the Great Geopoliticians, counts on the creation of refugees and displacement of persons as one element of strategy. Some of the rest of us do what we can, up to the exhaustion of our empathy and ability to care, and of our ability to pay, since we are also paying so much to support the Game and the petro-consumption addiction and its sequelae, and simply getting the essentials for our own lives and pushing our own Imperial Juggernaut up the Sisyphean mountain, taxes us to the limit.
What a strange, sick, pathological species we are. Creating, for supposed "national interest" reasons, the equivalents of ugly and horrific natural disasters by taking money out of the public pocket to play the Game, with inevitable consequences, and then reaching back into the public pocket with that smaller, generous, increasing the Gross Domestic Product by paying out some of the costs of "rectifying" the horror. With a smug "That's baseball!" to justify the whole idiotic loop...
So we have some of us who, for the vilest and evilest of reasons, cause the equivalent of Indian Ocean tsunamis, and Gulf of Mexico hurricanes, and tornado clean-sweeps of Plains States communities, and continental wildfires, and then some others of us rush or plod to succor, or not.
And then it all becomes about "What options in violence and further destruction does Obama have at this juncture? Because after all The Russians and The Iranians and some idiot notion that "the world community" that does not include you and me in its calculus, now for stated and covert reasons simply MUST "punish" a certain wayward Player... by adding to the "bugsplat count" and "unfortunate dislocation" that who could possibly have avoided?
Would having more women in position to paw through the haystack or target useful fools 'n stuff have any mitigating effect on the horrific gathering, use and mostly abuse of 'INT of all the various "isn't it fun and smart and kewl to create new INTacronyms?" potential and existing types?
Actually, all you have to hack is the device-ery of a few of those C-Suite Muggers' "people." All the Good Stuff and Gossip will be there to scan and gainfully apply too...
Does that Simplephone also somehow obscure the location of your device from triangulation location via cell tower, and encrypt your transmissions and receptions that go out to the grid of cell towers and through the networks that we already are assured are well-observed and "collected?"
All part of previously discussed misapprehension of the nature of the Panopticon.
In a different context, a smart computer observed that "The only way to win is not to play the game..."
Back to tit- for-tat? I do know a bit of history and I even fact check myself, and you and others, from time to time. You and I both do a little exaggeration for various reasons. But never waste the opportunity to try to impeach anyone who might make points that call your assertions and absolutisms. Same world, different planet...
" the constitution gives us the right..." says Ms. Lye. Ben Franklin reportedly knew the actual situation: " We have given you a Republic, madam, if you can keep it."
Looks pretty clear that we won't have any more luck doing that than theRomans did. What did theirs last? Seventeen years? How long before our rulers started laughing at that silly piece of parchment with its high sentiments and " rights, " as amended?
There is no right, under " the law," if there is no remedy. No kind of "apology" can do more than obscure what's in the wind.
Enjoy our blog freedom while we can. We're like the Anarchists in the coffee houses...
If you look at the next post down Dr. Cole's site, the one about how mil-mil contacts and "defense contracts" interoperably operate, it ought to be apparent that the finance game and the state- security game are just all of a piece. Ordinary people pay, and pay, and pay, with their lives, their loved ones and any HEALTHY wealth and real security they may happen to accumulate, so our feudal overlords can play. How's it feel to be a helpless pawn on this RISK! tm board? Now that the real nature of the Game and its costs are starting to be more apparent?
And how frustrating to know that Rule of Law is a sham, and that there are no consequences for the parasites and predators, who will live large and die comfortably? Priced your necessites of life lately? How about that great bargain, privatized "medical treatment UNsurance?" Thinking about a home mortgage? Hmmm? And "we have to keep building a network-centric worldwide military structure, now don't we? Cuz otherwise The Rooskies, and TheChinese!!!!!! AND THAT GUY AL QUAEDA!!!!!!!!"
Thank you for that very timely and appropriate link. I hope others will read it. One wonders what, if anything, has a prayer of displacing the Current And Growing System. Which has absorbed the commercial structures and faiths that might have led to something better...
Anyone interested in the context that goes along with the implicit claim of goodness and effectiveness of US AID and NGO "democracy promotion and governance programs" abroad would do well to google "US funded programs to promote democracy and good governance abroad" and thumb through the results, many of which come pretty close to right up to date. Interesting what gets funded and promoted, and the motivations and motions.
Maybe it's a stretch, but the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, and "our" whole involvement there, was supposed to be about "democracy," which sure seems to be a chimaera detached from what people imagine it to be.
Maybe "we" need some funding of programs to promote democracy and good governance right here in our own increasingly Third World country? Notwithstanding we have BIG TVS and microwaves and searcable iDevices and stuff...
So I guess the answer to the question about whether "the US" has cut off aid , military that is, is "no?"
Contracts, you know.
New neologism too: "mil-mil." That's a good and telling one...
Anyone who thinks this is an accurate statement of why the Committee made the award ought to read the actual announcement. What had and has Obama done about encouraging diplomacy, reducing world tensions, environmental threats and all that other stuff, including the still extant and targeted nuclear arsenals?
Are you familiar at all with Central European Jewish folklore? Seems to me that we have raised us up a "GOLEM," the kind that starts to get its own ideas about its mission in life. Who's gonna be the one to try and obliterate one of the empowering letters of its name, and send it nav to being just a pile of mud? http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem
Yeah, plausible deniability and what "we" can get away with and campaign contributions and MIC salws figures and stuff, those are some of the other considerations. One really, on enormous mounds of evidence, should not even try to assert any kind of high moral purpose for our Empire's "foreign policy." "We" have no colorable claims there. And has Obama cut off military and Wonder Bread aid to the Egyptian Generalate, or not?
So let us keep picking away at each other's credibility, though. In the greater scheme, where you imply you live and breathe, I recognize my impotence and insignificance. Why is all this effort to impeach a little blog commenter so important?
One wonders just what "Obama" can or could do with that Peace Prize famous left hand, in this context...
Seems historically in any case it's hard to "force the hand" of an Imperial ruler, especially those "protected" by a Palace Guard and military corpses... gee, what are "our national interests" here,again? Where's the money?
For all you Constitutionalists out there, of whatever stripe, there's a good old fundamental notion of what's called "Hornbook law" that "there is no right without a remedy." Or in Legal Latin, "Ubi jus ibi remedium. There must always be an accessible forum in which a complainant has oyer and terminer for any petition." For those who want to tail-chase around the New Improved Supreme Court's decimation of remedies and the attendant rights, the quote comes from an interesting article titled "Principles of Constitutional Construction." http://constitution.org/cons/prin_cons.htm Which in our new Scalia/Roberts/Thomas age is largely a dead letter, especially that conjunction of "principle" with "jurisprudence" in co-called Constitutional Law. Since the Court and subsidiary courts have been crammed with post-Reagan fellow travelers have been busily extinguishing remedies that might impinge on "freedom of contract" or more important, and in very much a military notion, "freedom of action." Courts in Egypt and China and a lot of other places work the same way, playing on the rubes' perceived need for some kind of "legitimate" "rule of law" thing that they feel gives them a remedy for violations of "rights" and some recourse against arbitrary action by those more powerful than themselves.
The case reported on here is an excellent example. And of course there are plenty of apologists who know where their personal interests and affections lie, who will happily gin up an argument why what was done here is just hunky-dory...
And speaking of reasons for apologists to be laughing, there's this snippet from the same Reuters article:
Earnest also said that Egypt's detention of Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Badie was not in line with the standard that the United States would hope to uphold in protecting basic human rights.
White House says U.S. has not cut off aid to Egypt
(Reuters) - Media reports that suggest the United States has cut off aid to Egypt are not accurate, a White House spokesman said on Tuesday, adding that the Obama administration is still reviewing its options.
"That review has not concluded and ... published reports to the contrary that assistance to Egypt has been cut off are not accurate," White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters in a briefing.
He said Obama was convening a meeting with his national security team on Tuesday to discuss Egypt and the review of U.S. aid to the country.
"I wouldn't anticipate any major announcements related to our aid and assistance in the immediate aftermath of this meeting," Earnest said, noting Obama holds such meetings regularly.
The Pentagon also denied reports that military aid had been cut off.
In recent years, Washington has authorized about $1.3 billion in annual military aid and $250 million in economic assistance for Cairo.
From the git-go, it sure does not look like a "cutoff" as one might reasonably understand the term -- maybe a little chatter, with a wink and a nudge and a walk-back, about "postpone" or "delay," but the tax money to buy weapons still flows, as do the "made with pride in the USA (with parts and pieces from other co-ordinated countries like Israel and China)" weapons. And of course Wonder Bread. If the pseudo-"cutoff" is meant for Homeland consumption, it's just more non-nutritional eyewash to help cover the steady growth of what it appears that the Generals and Realists are building, that planet-covering, coordinated, interoperable, network-centric Generalship that will provide what, in exchange for our wealth and our "rights"? "Security?" That has rightly come to be an ugly onion of a word, with some pretty stinky and rotten layers as you peel it down...
Any apparent influence on the behavior of the Egyptian military rulership by virtue of the claims of a "suspension" or "cutoff," claimed again and again to do what? try to shut off or reframe or divert discussion of the larger context?
Those who live off the scraps of the Feast of the Beast probably have lots of reason to be laughing, but it's not at how supposedly "uninformed" and "wrong" the critics and skeptics are, rather at how easily and how many of the rest of us get sucked into their Narrative and Repetitive Talking Points Flux...
Which "aid," as you call that generally destabilizing, taxpayer-funded marketing activity of the Generals, like General Electric and General Dynamics and General Atomic, and of course Lockheed "We never forget who we're working for, heh heh heh" Martin?
Anybody trying to make any kind of sense of all this, rather than justifying a reason for wagging particular flags and using a complex mess as the basis for a claim of Rightness and Rationality for their pet visions of Correctness and The Proper Flow of Events, ought to integrate the stuff at this link into their thinking and their efforts to understand what might be done to Make The World A Better Place, even if just for THEIR tribe:
The comments sort of tell it all, a window into the same part of "humanity" that every hour adds more excited and exciting video snippets to this repository of pain, destruction, futility and shame: http://syriavideo.net/ "Allahu Akhbar! We're bored, we got a new shipment of 4.5 inch mortar rounds and Katyushas, and there are buildings in the city that are not reduced to rubble yet! Allahu Akhbar!"
For the "Bad MB" partisan crowd, here's how you play the Badie event:
And I see that piglipstick is being applied to one orifice of Our Exceptional Empire, with a "temporary suspension of military aid" that's apparently already been delivered to the Egyptian generals, since as the Prez says, "we cannot have normal relations with Egypt" in the present context. Wow, that'll show 'em we mean business, er, whatever... Maybe Bill will tell us what those "normal relations" consist of. Maybe we don't really need, or want, to know what they do in the bedrooms at State and Langley and MacDill...
Uh-oh, says the front brain of the Apatosaurus to the posterior nerve plexus that innervates the flanks and leg muscles, is that a CLIFF up ahead? Any thoughts on what to do now?
Complying with the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights is like upholding the Constitution: Optional, or even nugatory, if some bit of "National Interest" is invoked by Someone In Authority...
... you got to love the way these two stand with swords drawn, back to back against the increasingly angry and unruly mob, Hector and Paris, defending the Gates of Troy... Not that they don't occasionally bicker a little, for the benefit of "credibility..."
Hey, it's not really like, you know, a dictatorship or anything -- it's actually more like a pretty well-managed segue into a Pure Libertarian State of Mind... http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/11/journey-into-a-libertarian-future-part-i-%E2%80%93the-vision.html Or maybe given the technoramatationalist bent of it all, like that Keanu Reeves thing, what was it, The Matrix? Which is the Disney World facade behind which lies the Land of Soylent Green...
Actually, at places I have worked, most of the cameras were aimed at "employees stuffing expensive electronic doohickie into crotch or purse because abusive management and minuscule and diminishing pay and hours and termination or "repricing" of benefits..."
Yeah, "security cams" are just the same thing as data-grab sweeps being conducted by all and sundry in the state-security apparatus, following the trail blazed by every fearful and domineering set of humans in all the history I have ever heard of.
It appears we are in an era when rulers, up to now, have been caught flat-footed and booted out by people who were steps ahead of them in ability to organize via electronic media. And of course nobody in Government would then see that it was "vital to their personal interests" to have a chokehold grip on the throat of that form of vox populi...
Including folks who claim to be as particular and "reality-based" as Joe might think himself. Here's the text that follows a quote of that same NYT fragment, from the Telegraph Blogs by another such person:
So that's the first bit of misinformation nailed. Mr Miranda was deeply involved in the work to disseminate the NSA leaks. He is no mere friend or relative being squeezed in order to stop a journalist doing his job.
But still, can his detention be justified? Is it legal to hold him for nine hours under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000? Carrying documents related to the NSA with the intention of exposing illegal or unjustified surveillance does not make Mr Miranda a terrorist.
And here's where the frightening reach of British anti-terrorism law becomes clear. Read Schedule 7 and it is quite clear that officers do not need to suspect that an individual is a terrorist or involved in terrorism. They are allowed to stop, question and detain individuals in order to ascertain whether they might be a terrorist. They can stop anyone at all, and hold them for nine hours.
Finally, as the analyst Joshua Foust points out, the Terrorism Act, includes within its definition of terrorism the use or threat of action that "is designed seriously to interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic system," in which I think we can include the leaking of documents detailing the use of electronic surveillance. [That would require a pretty skewed reading and application, this old attorney opines.]
So while Mr Miranda no doubt spent a torrid time in a small room at Heathrow, he was by no means merely the victim of a plot to intimidate his partner. The British security services had a legitimate reason – and a duty – to detain and question the man.
But by holding him for nine hours they have given Mr Greenwald's cheerleaders a PR victory. My Twitter timeline has filled with journalists mistakenly fretting that their own wives and partners could be targeted. That is the wrong lesson to learn.
The real problem here is the way we allowed sweeping powers of detention to be imposed at borders, allowing officers to stop and question anyone – with or without good reason. We should all worry about that.
So the deal is, this was all "legal." And the remedy, if there is one, is to change the law. A neat trick in present circumstances, as the garottes are tightening on the ability to actually protect rights.
And to claim that this action was not intended to harass or affect Greenwald is getting pretty close to the kind of things used car salesmen say to sucker you into buying a beater. And Obama has told a whole lot more than three lies, as have Capper and so many others. How do you walk away from THEIR selling, and killing, lot? Move to Brazil?
Note, of course, that there's no mention here of the interests of the Brazilian government in what is done to one of its citizens...
If the Religious Right, as close as I can see to being "our" equivalent to the worst of the MB, gets any more of its way in the US, there will be blasphemy trials and auto-da-fes aplenty. Already, these folks, who are grim and determined and know how to organize, have wormed their way into the military leadership -- here's a fun link: http://www.jewsonfirst.org/military.aspx . And you can bet they are well represented in the state-security apparatus. See how much fun this all can be?: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2012/07/03/homeland-security-funded-study-lists-people-reverent-of-individual-liberty-as-extreme-right-wing-terrorists/ And of course over half of the seat-warmers in Congress are shall we say attentive to the noise our American Taliban makes, and the "mother's milk of politics," MONEY, that they can deploy, for or against.
How can we humans, forced by gravity to live in each others' pockets, wired the way we are, and with the accidents of history as they are, ever develop a set of codes and interests and behaviors that have everyone pulling on the same end of the rope, hopefully not one attached to the noose around some Other's neck? Especially when killing each other is obviously so much exciting fun, http://syriavideo.net/, and so profitable for some of us?
So far, it doesn't seem that even an existential threat to all of us can persuade even most of us to stop trying to throttle, stab, shoot or blast all the rest of us, in what the few of us want to reduce to a game of "He who dies with the most toys, WINS! With big bonus awards for being the last one left alive!" It's more fun to debate little initiatives and stratagems and horrific events, and assign blame, and use all of the above to advance one's career or one's tribal preferences...
A cursory search on "3-sigma event heat waves" makes it clear that what should have been written was "three standard deviations from the historical average." If one goes on to look at the source material, one sees some degree of confidence in the prediction that 3- and 5-sigma events "will be the likely norm for the 21st century." http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/08/14/severe-heat-waves-are-expected-to-double-by-2020 So let's not lose the reality in impeachment fog...
In the meantime, think of the air conditioner sales possibilities! The opportunities for those who can invent "windtraps" to take moisture out of the air! Maybe some smart folks will even develop suits we can wear that will catch and recycle our perspiration and urine and fecal matter! And all that new waterfront property! and the weapons and troops needed to Keep Order!
Seems we, collectively, have been handed the responsibility for our own futures. Too bad that we're ruled, as a species and (collective guilt) as most individuals, by people and preferences that feature short-term profit maximization, "demand manufacturing," the pleasure principle, the way our commercial and consumptive cultures and the ruling institutions have grown make it da_n unlikely that our kids and grandkids will have a lot to work with or much of a chance to fix anything. But the sh_ts who have moved us into this Dead Zone, the Robber Barons and early other Captains of Industry and more recently people like Henry Ford and the Koch Brothers and Murdoch and even the sainted Warren Buffett, will of course be long and comfortably dead after lives mostly characterized by grotesque accumulation, and slick perversion of politics and polities, and self-pleasing. No consequences, no restitution, not even any retribution for those who force most of us to slave and suffer and die in terror and misery...
...and does anyone wonder at all that Bill would think this bit of Realpolitik, as he so blithely describes it, is, well, A-OK? Such a wonderful, ingenue's expression of idiot faith in a corrupt and corrupting system...
And how are "we" supposed to respond, Bill, to your serial blandishments or crushing didacticisms about how it's all CT, and really it's all just good and wonderful..., or at least the kind of people who think as you do are "in charge?"
Not tremble with fear, but maybe be a little anxious, and be looking around for ways to cooperate to change the direction and rate of flow of wealth and power, from some better informed awareness of ACTUAL "serious history" and the nature of current events? Not your narrow, constrained, partisan version?
That ain't the only Global Network-Centric Interoperable-Battlespace-Manager's-Eye view of the planet surface that illuminates what the Great Global Game is doing, "accomplishing,", hither and yon:
One of the themes that Barbara Tuchman noted and extracted from her Serious History study of the Fin de Siecle Europe and the runup to WW I was that pretty uniformly, the peoples of Europe, whatever their ethnicity and national affections and allegiances and alliances, were lusting for violence, for "War!", so that the gunpowder was all piled up in the streets everywhere, just waiting for a sufficient spark. A pretty tiny one was all it took, eventually. Meantime, the Krupps and others sold guns and uniforms and other materiel to all sides, and those who finance these things did Great. Anything new under the sun?
A couple of us are all into little bits of strategy 'n'stuff, and work steadily to steer the discourse always back onto the Mainstream track, and sneersat bigger-picture stuff, and are all huffy about the incontrovertible correctness of their posthole interjections here, all drawn from some assumed position of superior knowledge. And most of the rest of us are either uninformed and speaking from our biases and fractional bits of imagery or information or knowledge, or carrying a torch or flag for some partisan Enemy-think idiocy or another. People like the creatures in this bit of propaganda, who purport to Explain It All when it comes to "Who Lost Egypt?": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4He7FOfQeA&feature=player_detailpage
Anybody asking what the goals of human existence are? What might produce something other than anomie and Forever War? Is it all just self-pleasing and consumption and domination and "Allahu Akhbar!"? The one who dies, or kills, with the most toys wins? The fun and excitement of "Capture the Flag," with real bullets and cluster-f__ units and and "smart" and soon "intelligent" munitions and mortar and artillery shells and rockets and the rest, and actually being able to kill other humans with impunity? Or maybe are we lusting for that wonderful catharsis that surely must arise, as we skate ever closer to something that seems destined to look like an earthbound version of Ragnarök? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragnar%C3%B6k However much you snipe and sneer, Joe and Bill and now maybe Larry, there really are some larger themes here, that maybe, like with human effects on the biosphere, warrant a little attention and respect, not just advantage- and rent-seeking. And the Game As Usual has nothing, NOTHING, to offer by way of even being able to keep itself going, let alone producing 'security' or 'stability' and especially not 'sustainability.' And NOTHING for the people who create the wealth, the surplus grain, that pays for it.
Joe on the Constitution: "a consensus document that all parties buy into." If that's the test, what kind of logicisticational legerdemain is required to show that what we US-ans have is a "Constitution?" Maybe it's just how one defines who the "parties" are, hey?
Go to South Carolina and look for the "U.S. Constitution," or the nether regions of Texas, like around Waco. Where the result of the War of Northern Aggression is still seen as at best a North Korea/South Korea standoff... You'll find fragments, of course -- the 2nd and 10th Amendments, and parts of the 5th... and a lot of violently ripped shreds.
I used to work on a large legal case opposite a hot-shot silk-stocking attorney who was just deLIGHTed to have gotten himself appointed to one of those USAID groups that were sent to Central Europe to "write the constitutions" for the breakup bits (our spooks never saw THAT coming, through the special prisms and blinders they still wear) of the former Soviet Empire. This was the Ground Floor Opportunity, the guy told me, for him and his club to be in on the setting in cement of the "constitutional" conditions that would benefit his Business Interest clients, letting them "legally" waltz in and make some serious shekels in those New Unplucked Markets.
The same scam was pulled, as I understand it, in Iraq, under the US-an Proconsul, L. Paul Bremer, and is under way elsewhere. What is worshiped as a faith tenet turns out. like so many such manipulable but seductive beliefs, to be so very much different than the fuzzy glow that the word conjures in the breasts of so many "patriots."
Interesting and illustrative choices of what you would deem "ordinary bills:" tax rates, and how many tanks to buy. Our "constitutionaldemocracy" government rulers really basically agree on the two answers to those issues, lower, and more. A more telling subject for a bill would be the scope of acceptable spying on everyone everywhere all the time. Oh, wait! I know the apparent answer to how the "parties" would treat that one too! Or how about "chained CPI?" In our system, it sure looks like the only "Winners" are the moneyed interests and their Congressional lapdogs that make what they do "not illegal." The Losers? Well, look around...
Is the MB a unitary thing, or are there subsets and branches and divides in what we try so insistently to personify? Remember "Better Dead Than Red," from the same people who now proudly claim Redness as their soul? Some soccer fans kill referees and brawl and trash stadiums and downtowns, so all soccer fans are anomic, nihilistic thugs? Maybe in posse, like the rest of us too...
We all have this sense that there is a "Rightness" somewhere, that can somehow be recognized and appealed to and applied. "Democracy" and "Rule of Law" and The Will of YHWH or Allah or Buddha, maybe? Too bad our habits of tribal behavior, and incredible powers of rationalization and obfuscation, and the presence of sneaks and bullies with addictions to power and powers of oration, let us presume its existence, and the correctness of our actions as consistent with that longed-for "Rightness..."
Is that what Bill Bodden said, Joe? Really? And you find it compelling enough ironic text to have to reinforce the utility and effect of Obama's pontifications and pronouncements in this little space by mischaracterization and other bits of impeachment gamery?
you do know that the same aid continued, wholly unimpeded, throughout the Morsi period, right?
Joe, of course that was my point exactly. The whole strategy and doctrine is to create all across Africa and the other COMs a "military cooperative" that's all Interoperable and working from the same playbook that is informed by those always invoked, always unspecified, but always Sanctum Sanctorum "national interests," a strategy and doctrine that the US "security structure" has written and keeps trying to refine and impose. "We" need to play nice, for the time being, with all those militaries and militias and regimes, to cozen or coerce or "influence" them into what used to be called "alignment," and keep the arms sales and other market opportunities for even post-national "US" corporations open. F-16s, GMO seeds, earth movers so upstream countries can dehydrate downstream ones, stuff like that.
The daily details of tactics and "the news cycle," as I'm sure you know, stuff like stealing more Palestinian living space and water, and weapons to Syrians that McCain likes, and droning in Yemen, and now this new bit of murderous idiocy in Egypt, are just blips and sideshows on the larger path to --- what, again? What does "Security" mean, again? We use it all the time, but it's just a convenient feely-good fog-word.
As to differences in treatment of "Morsi" and the military while he was in office, and the current rulers, looks to me like the difference between being beaten with a noodle al dente, or with one that's been slightly overcooked...
And I guess I'm just obtuse, but looking back upthread at your citation of the four-of-20-F-16 'coitus interruptus' and the postponement of "Operation Bright Star" this year, it sure looks like you were arguing that showed how "harshly" the Empire is treating the Current Military Leadership for its Assault on Democracy. And it sure is hard to figure out just what obscure point you are contending for, and what difference it makes in the greater flow of events. It's fun to go down these side roads, though -- keeps many people distracted and entertained, and obscures the bigger-picture stuff.
And your statement of some "undeniable fact" to the effect that The Empire is "being much harder on, not more supportive of, the Sisi government than the Morsi government" ain't on the evidence, either undeniable or fact. In fact, in the frame you yourself have insisted upon, such a statement, "as everyone commonly knows," ought to be accompanied by citations and support. And it's a nice subtle distraction and impeachment, but really, what I wrote has nothing to do with what I think of the RIGOR of the Empire's response, vel non.
Folks who follow the redistricting processes, which mostly "Republicans" have subverted and dominated by persistence and organization and demonic fury on certain issues been the ones drawing districts and now of course purging voter rolls of likely Dem voters and instituting Voter ID laws and other stratagems including ballot creation and destruction, would laugh at the idea that "judicial review" by judges who, via the same application of 'democracy' have over time become very friendly to 'conservatives,' are any kind of effective check on gerrymandering. Seems even the packed Supreme Court found a way to decide the outcome of a recent presidential election that even they said was a one-time event...
As to presidents and governors revoking judicial review, all the Prez has to say is "national security" and "executive discretion" and the federal and state courts waive any jurisdiction, and governors and their attorneys general routinely make the decisions that keep all kinds of issues away from any judges that might rule, however impotently, against their power plays, while using all the semi-legitimacies of "it's legal" to pack the courts with cronies and fellow travelers.
Joe assigns unwarranted significance to both this second delay, not cancellation, of war games, and the DELAY of delivery of 4 of 20 F-16s that are part of at least a billion bucks in military "aid" to the Egyptian warlords that is still on the way.
Small change, of course, compared to annual military aid tribute to "the mouse that roared" across the Sina...
Yeah, an Arab problem. But of course our Great Gamers wer, have been, are, and will be in there trying, offering inducements of cash and weapons and "training," maybe even Viagra as to the warlords in Afghanistan, looking for levers and seams to wedge and pry things apart, aiming to extract as much wealth from those unhappy areas as possible. Studied up on the plans and activities of the Whole Earth Network-Centric Battlespace System much? Could have been written and activated by the Aliens from the movie "Independence Day," if they used writing, though of course they were telepaths... and further linked together by a Star-System-Wide Network-Centric Battlespace System.
Ouch! that's gotta really hurt... Except if one applies a poultice of money'n'materiel. Seems the expensive exercises (costly to US taxpayers) might be down for the moment, but if you read the report in the Washington Post, you get a little more context:
President Obama on Thursday canceled a joint military exercise with Egypt while leaving more than a billion dollars in annual aid in place, in a measured response to the government’s violent repression of opposition demonstrations.
And per the Post article and a little more googling, this ain't the first time the Administration delayed, postponed, put off this "annual cooperation exercise," which, per the strategies that AFRICOM is implementing, is just one tiny part of setting up a joint military cooperative, under the benign eye and arm of the US, that crosses the entire continent, with interoperable militaries in every nation that counts, ready to 'preserve the peace' and 'assure security' and 'serve the national interest.'
Some think 'the military' is like the French Armee before 1914, the soul of the nation and culture. Is what you see in Egypt what you want, what you would trust, to establish a World Security Thingie, under US leadership of course?
The peddlers and jokers who are selling the theme that 'the military' is the best institution to help us humans "manage change" and "respond to crises" in what the smarter ones among the Brass know pretty surely is coming, are the worst kinds of charlatans, and all you have to do is look at how 'conflicts' start up and are maintained and exacerbated and enlarged. No negative feedback to tamp them down, except exhaustion, a genteel sufficiency of dead bodies, and bankruptcy, viz. Egypt and Syria and so many others.
For those who have not taken the opportunity to intellectually bathe in the cesspit of militarianization yet, here's a .pdf that, in one place, exposes the kind of idiot wargamer-Risk!-player's-idiot-delight thinking that is going to get us all killed (it's available from many sources, including in Word format I think): http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/dod/dsb/climate.pdf
It's titled "Final Report - Defense Science Board Task Force on Trends and Implications of Climate Change on National and International Security." One of the many gems is this little snip, there are way too many to even start to choose from:
The United States and its developed world allies should be prepared to support, both technically and financially, civil projects that increase resilience and provide ways to adapt to forecasted climate change effects. As in the case of foreign military sales, such support could serve to boost world markets for construction and agricultural equipment, seeds, and medical supplies.
Ibid., at 77-78. So bland, so horrific. In a nutshell, what so much of this is all about...
You want to trust the MI-EverythingElseToo-C to "manage" the crises this report lays out, in the infinitely bureaucratized way they propose, or give them the world's wealth in an open checkbook to do all they propose to do in this "report," which indicates that the US security structure will magnanimously agree to undertake the enormous charge of "securing" the whole planet?
Extra points: Who said "War is nothing but a racket," and who said, "It's a syndicate, and everyone has a share"?
... but they have GREAT swimming pools, and are now mining "fossil water" from under the desert, for a profit of course, and really cool HypocrisiParties! And so MANLY in those sweeping outfits and facial hair so neatly trimmed... re Syria, have a taste of what's happening 'on the ground' today, and tomorrow, and on and on... http://syriavideo.net/page/4/ Stop in, stay a while, and look around at what the Game is wreaking... in some 'national interest,' of course.
Amazing how the same kind of people keep floating to the top of the abbatoir's septic tank that is the Great Game. What's to choose between the ayatollahs and the Kochs and Berlusconi and Amin and Arafat and Netayahooo and Jerry Falwell? Or pick almost any other state you care to name. The vultures, vampires and tapeworms always rise... and their apologists tell us that is just the way it Realist-ically is. And thanks to the accidents of our common heredity, our life spans, relative to the rate of wasting of the planet, assure the worst of them that they will usually get to pass away so very comfortably in their beds, muttering "Apres moi le deluge..." http://tradicionclasica.blogspot.com/2006/01/expression-aprs-moi-le-dluge-and-its.html
One wonders, given the physical state of the planet, if the rest of us will have the will or wisdom to do anything else, or more importantly, better.
Oh look! another decider of what is "serious history."
The evidence I've seen looks like the near sinking of the USS Liberty was multiple attacks by several branches of the IDF with clear awareness of the American flag on the mast and the clear intention to keep anyone from observing and gathering intel on the 1967 war operations. Even their "ally," the putz schmuck freier US of A. All part of "purity of arms." And "maintaining freedom of action." HOW did the Israeli folks get weapons grade nuclear material and the expertise and machinery to make 400 or 500 nuclear weapons, and "un-counting?" And all kinds of other fun stuff? Speaking of conspiracies...
Aaaahh, but the "condolence payments" appear to be pretty cheap, and serve Vital Important "National Interests." But we can't tell anyone what those Interest are! That might give away Secrets to The Enema! "In time of war, when truth is so precious, it must be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”
And since our rulers have chosen to force-frame all future human interactions as various types of fundably fungible Conflict Operations in the Grand Global Network-Centric Interoperable Battlespace which is nicely subdivided into fiefdoms labeled stuff like CENTCOM and AFRICOM, milbabble acropseudonyms that just warm and cheer the hearts of a certain kind of authoritarian human critters, the means for morphing all the rest of us into little social units that are expected to keep our heads down and while expecting us to just keep on funding this dead-end idiocy, why there you are! Blow them up, and hey! it appears we can diminish the immediate retaliation and vengeance response by laying a few shekels on the bloody ground! Just a cost of doing business, and after all, the Business of America is and always has been Business! Which in the nature of the beast has exported and expatriated itself and now smears the planet like the oily flood of black or red that in the old newsreel and propaganda animations spread evilly and sinisterly and implacably across the globe under Swastika or Hammer and Sickle or now Star and Crescent. And a certain amount of killing has always been an incident of Business, after all...
Great for whoever in India is pushing solar energy production. Seems like there's not a lot of energy going into conservation and stuff.
There's a reason why we are frightened and repelled by the Aliens in "Independence Day," whose sole raison d'etre is to take, and consume, and move on. Worse than army ants, that at least have diseases and predators (and also exhaustion of resources) to keep them in some kind of check.
It's that old Walt Kelly/Pogo thing, coupled with the shock of recognition: THEY REALLY, ACTUALLY, TOTALLY, IS "US'...
How interesting that the people in the theatre break out in cheers as the faceless baddies are vanquished by the smart guy with the virus and the brave Kamikaze self-sacrifice of a dude with a plate in his head...
Joe claims to think, with unspecified others, that establishing a Palestinian homeland is "important in and of itself." Very well and good. The "talking" remedy proposed as I guess part of his plan has proven about as worthless as Krebiozen to a cancer patient: Take this stuff if you can stand it, belieeeeve, and all the while the cancer eats away at your vitals. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krebiozen
If Joe is among those who think that Palestinian homeland is a actually a good idea, and more important if he is plugged in as implied and able to influence actual Imperial behavior, then how do you stop the endless thumbsucking and handholding and bootlicking by the US administration, which if it was a priority should (other than those pesky 4-500 nukes and all the arms we have paid for that make up most of the IDF's inventory and whatever the various spies have turned up on our Rulership' personal and professional defalcations and predations and prevarications) be a relatively straightforward item on the checklist.
Don't make it personal, Joe. "Hate the sin, but love the sinner." This actually, even though mostly impotently, is what many folks here and in the rest of the chattering universe have in their hearts: They see Business As Usual, in which they find themselves so inextricably bound and wired, is F___ED UP, and killing people and societies and the planet, and are groping toward an understanding, to follow another metaphor, of the disease process. Like the medical types are struggling to do with cancer, that multifaceted Hydra of a horror, and HIV that morphs as you look at it just as you think you've found the "OFF" switch, and the rest. Seen the satellite photos of Syria, before and now durrent? That conflict is not "sui generis," it;s the product of stuff that has gone on for centuries to the advantage of the Few and loss of the Many. "War is Heaven" for the Brass and their suppliers. The Imperial-Militarist-Corporate framing that is imposed and heavily promoted has the intent and effect, as far as I can see, of FOSTERING the disease process to the advantage of the parasites, pathogens and malignancies. And there are lots of very subtle people who find it in their interest, consciously or not, to help the HIV and tumor cells hide their real nature and intent from whatever is left of homeostasis and meta-stability and the immune system.
Nice fake conundrum, in the form of a seemingly reasonable talking point. You are a smart, subtle guy; you do that stuff well. The basic facts are that the Israeli rulers are, based on the history and the current behaviors and any other predictor I can see, just going to plow and bulldoze and chainsaw their way ahead. A "reality-based" claimant like yourself knows that darn well, and one might wonder about what you think an appropriate end point would be for this Arab-galling, destabilizing, shock-wave-and-blowback-and-"casus-impetus improvisus ac violentus"-generating US complicity in de-stating a population. And c'mon, now challenge that conclusion by demanding a string cite to establish it.
The comments here are scarcely "anti-peace-talk," but extra points to you for artfully dishonest framing. Talk or no talk, the pretty clear nature of the situation is that the Israeli rulers and business interests (surprisingly a mostly perfectly overlapping single set) intend to dispossess those 'other people' from "their" land. And I don't know, you never say, whether your work station or just your allegiance lies in the West Wing and the alphabet soup of agencies it is appended to. But kudos for subtle Socratic regular appearances here and elsewhere to reinforce a certain set of talking points and induce "approved" modes of thought.
This is more complete than what the Germans did in Czechoslovakia (and what was eventually done back to them), from the Armistice to the Surrender. People can learn from observing what's worked before.
You have to love the sound of neoliberals singing in the morning, sweet carols of Chigaustrian true belief. Sir, what makes you, personally, worth you wages? Can you protect yourself against being "outsourced" in the Great Race to the Bottom?
Where the heck do you get that weird notion? And other than the bald assertion, what support do you possibly have, other than maybe citing a very few and generally small and not "profitable" companies, generally family-owned?
I've worked for small and large businesses, not a huge sample of course but including large law firms and large national retail operations, and spent hours with CNBC and the WSJ and even The Economist. Never worked for McDonalds, but similar jobs. Growth and profit and of course executive compensation (tied to the short-term profit maximization that is the raison d'etre of our whole structure) are inescapably and inarguably the nature of the beast. More work, more "productivity," from fewer people for less pay: the essence of the labor part of the US and broader business model. Add in ever-sharper pricing strategies that come ever closer to the barren edge of what people constrained by that "inelasticity of demand" for sustenance and water and a roof, and "marketing" scams like 3 1/2 ounces of tuna in a "6-ounce" can, and 59 ounces of orange juice in the "half-gallon" box or bottle, and of course the ever-present, very brilliant manufacturing of "demand," and that's a more accurate picture.
"Equal plane?" Maybe in some non-Euclidean version of geometry... Or maybe the "people" you were talking about were the C-Suite-ers...
The "field of economics" is full employment for a bunch of "experts" who can't predict anything "economic" with all their complex models and formulas, do not give a fig for stability and sustainability, and do nothing valuable to or for the "general welfare," not surprisingly since the people who pay them to generate their excuses for vulture and tapeworm economics are the very vultures and tapeworms themselves. The people for whom some here steadily, doggedly, didactically apologize.
I have no idea what you consider what would "adequately" take care of "everyone," but from what I read, there actually is enough food and water and stuff to go all the way around the table. Except for the pigs that grab way more than their fair share. Your "economists" have all kinds of justifications for what the Many would view as some pretty skewed distribution. See earlier posts in this space, showing how wealth is distributed in the good old US of A. And your blessed National Security Apparatus as I am sure you know is well aware of what that "well-deserved Imperial levy" implies for all of us, and in their ponderous, self-serving way are planning for how to maintain your comfort and status and their own (I find the whole .pdf report creepy and scary, but that's just me):
I guess it is personally wise and justifiable to attach oneself to the gravy train. Doesn't work, for a lot of us... for most of us, it's not even a choice.
You, Bill, cite and likely don't have any basis for your assertion. Spend any time in the "alternative" sites where past and present troopers gather and you'll find plenty of soul-sick dissatisfaction with what our troops have come to recognize that they are tasked to do, how the indoctrination has morphed, and how distant "the mission" now is from the mythical "protecting constitutional democracy." Maybe that's why the droid armies are the Brass's dream and all the troop reductions are in the offing. And what interests are they "comfortable protecting" again? Stay on message now...
Dr. Cole, I don't doubt there are what I would call (MY value system, of course) decent and honorable analysts, and probably "effectives" in or out of uniform, in the State Security-Statecraft apparatus. People who may have, thanks to parentage, personal sense of values, education and various mentors and models, some residual or active sense, an honest "mission," and wisdom about what's a "real threat," however you care to define that, and what might be done to address it for the "general welfare." A sense of the real, complex, covert nature of claimed "interests," and what on the big scale is actually in play. "Interests" that by right of stealthy occupation define "the national interest" as so often invoked here. (I personally don't think people like Gary Schroen are among the decent and honorable. https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol49no4/War_on_Terror_9.htm
You have to empathize with the ones who pulled together the dots that, when assembled, spelled "9/11," seeing that other "interests" apparently guided the rulership in the use of the analysis and the event itself. Since none of them, reportedly, happened to notice the imminent collapse of the Soviet Menace and thus the entire raison d'etre of Duck'n'Coverism, And stuff like that. (Are there any examples of the sort you mentioned that can be revealed, where the analysts actually uncovered and pretermitted any SIGNIFICANT Bad Stuff, like arranging delivery of weapons-grad nuclear material to, say, Israel, or is that one of those 'Trust Us' double-secret things, even though the massive silence and massive abuses are so evident and Trust needs so much bolstering? Or is Fear designed to suppress the need for Trust?)
And one wonders if any of those analysts and effectives, simply to keep their jobs and feed their families, or in some warped or transfigured notion of loyalty, participated in putting lipstick on the various Pigs, including many episodes like Pigs, Bay Of. Let's remember that the "experts," which some posting here let the rest of us infer that they are or are aligned with, some-unspecified-how, have shown again and again that fundamental self-serving incompetence, in the species-survival sense, or even the advance-the-Imperium sense (see "Vietnam" and "Iraqafghaniyemeranistan" and AFRI- and the Leviathanian rest of the "COMs") or even in knocking the beard off Castro. Can't even (due to massiveness, apparently) even figure out how to "win" (which they don't define either) 4th Generation Wars. http://fabiusmaximus.com/2007/01/04/why-we-lose-at-4gw/
The well-schooled "experts" (remembering that Eichmann and Beria and Mengele and Arafat and Netanyahoo and Dulles and Donovan and Casey and even bin Ladin and a bunch of others were and are "experts") seem, not surprisingly, to go along with and claim to have a deep, important and "posthole-and-mass-grave" knowledge of one skewed school of political geology, and with the arcanae of security-speak and Mil-babble and a mastery of the well-proven-idiotic-and-destructive rules and play of the Great Game. And show the desire to dig, delve and then to force-fit results to some agenda and then to report as "true" the tailored, filtered, fraudulent results of their excavations. And to only dig wherever their weirdnesses and personal and small-group interests draw them. With "Experts" like Petraeus and Yoo cueing their inquiries and analysis.
It's kind of inarguable, in the current context, that the ones who go along, and the rulers here, there and everywhere, have a proven willingness to make a joke of the "self-evident truths" that too many of us still bovinely believe in and think our rulers respect and are guided by. And that the world that the new analysts and effectives are invited to "be part of changing" where the rest of us have to live into (see the NSA's and CIA's employment come-ons) is not any "quaint" Constitutionally limited place, but a lot more like the Libertarian We_ Dream. http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/11/journey-into-a-libertarian-future-part-i-%E2%80%93the-vision.html
Maybe the Rulers, like the "C-suite-ers" in the Soylent Corporation, guys and gals like maybe even Obama after he was shown the briefings and taught the secret handshake, all know that the momentum is all downhill off some tipping-point cliff and into the Valley of Death, that intoxicated with the speed and power, they've gleefully bypassed a bunch of side tracks into greener pastures, and that the best one can do for self and family is keep shoveling coal into the engine and finding personal or perverse pleasures where one can, in minute upward adjustments to the throttle, and incremental release of the brakes, and the sense of speed and power and the expectation that they can somehow, by "bailout" or comfortable natural death, get off before the cliff. (Remember what the root word of "intoxicated" is.)
We ordinary folks should, I guess, be grateful that there exist people like Manning and Snowden and their predecessors and hopefully successors, who will shine a light on the rats and roaches and silverfish, back in the cupboards where they eat and crap in the stored sustenance and wealth that ordinary people have to sweat and strain to produce. Or maybe we are happier not knowing…
Yeah, Bill and Joe, it's all about that which you smugly maintain 'properly and Realistically rules' and by Divine right ought to "govern," but are so loath to define: "national interest." Smart, if maybe less honorable, move, to line up with and cheer for the big kids, when it's time for dodgeball or a rock fight…
Seems like Joe's idea of an intelligent discussion is a lot like what one gets from a Libertarian: he controls the precise question that is allowed to be discussed, he frames the issues, he supplies the "facts" both stated and inferred and implied, he sets all the definitions. I guess if one has that degree of freedom in the "discussion," there's a certain kind of "intelligence" at work...
Nice finish to the comment, though, with both subtle and IN YOUR FACE put-downs...
And of course there are no rungs on a well-greased slippery slope.
Has the "ban" on government employees including the military, and government contractors, been revised since 2010? Sure looks like the "cautions" against looking at those so-secret documents, citing fear of "electronic spillage (ES)" and reminding the potential self-educator about all those criminal liabilities for doing so, at least originally extended to whoever and wherever and from whatever computer...
As to hysteria about the fading of the First and Fourth and Fifth Amendments and other bits of the antiquated Constitution thing, one of my 3x5 cards reads "Without a remedy, there is no right."
Where's the remedies for our Brave New 1984 World behaviors?
That's the best impeachment you got? Sad. I didn't even tee off on your snipe the other day:
...While Carter’s action was admirable, Obama in comparison is acting like a jilted suitor, but then again there is not much in the way of comparison between Mr. Carter & Mr. Obama.
[Replies]Joe from Lowell
08/08/2013 at 3:37 pm
Mainly because Obama’s presidency has been successful.
Anyone else want to look up the actual net effects to the human-shared environment of "switching to 'natural gas'? To test whether the statement and judgment/opinion, "Replacing coal plants with gas plants is the most successful carbon-reduction scheme ever adopted. If you oppose the ongoing shift from coal to gas, you oppose the most successful method of reducing greenhouse gases ever developed."?
The only actual "actually important interest" Dr, Cole lists is cooperation of some sort on pressing the "Universal Forever War On Drugs," which is just part of the successful marketing and pricing structure of the people who grow, process, distribute and profit from "illegal drug trafficking." Including "small-time too-big-to-fail banks" that launder trillions, our many mini-militia police departments and their forfeiture scams and prosecutorial frauds, and federal agencies including ones that actually have visibly been involved in the drug trade to fund other idiocies of theirs. Like those Contra years 'n stuff.
Aside from "cooperating" in a global system that fortuitously results in massive sales of arms by both sides, and some elbow-bumping on maintaining the world currency, what other "actually important interests" are "we" cooperating on?
And so glad to know that "even Syria" in your moral universe or frame is "small-time stuff." Like this? http://syriavideo.net/page/7/ That kind of seems to maybe draw a nice Victorian frame around your views...
Reagan and Gorbachev in Helsinki: photo-op time? Those three Stooges at Yalta, and all that followed? This photo-op of course is meaningless in the real world of public opinion, one might guess. "Small stuff," one might say. The People Who Really Know discount it to insignificance.
People trained to their parts in the Megaton Megadeaths in ColdWarThinkistan might be excused in wondering if they need to get their knees and hips replaced, so they can refresh their "Duck and Cover" skills...
"that act of seizing power was also an expression of dissatisfaction with Morsi’s undemocratic tendencies."
I would love for the tiny group of Egyptian posters here to offer a little straw poll on why they believe the military officers did what they did, and a subsidiary question about why the troops follow their orders. There's lots of "nuance" and "complexity" there, no doubt -- along with all the stuff that "analysts" are supposed to detect and correct for. But the little I can glean is that "the military," to the extent such a heterogeneous bunch of bandits can be rolled into a personification, acted to protect its/their own substantial perks and profits. Which of course are at risk in event of a 1789 kind of event, or the more modern versions. Any idea how many senior Egyptian officers are moving their capital, the "pound" and "family" kind, to "safer realms?" ("We" can sort of track the loyalties of "our" corporate officers from the stuff in SEC filings showing some of their holdings...)
An old friend of mine, a former Iraqi world-class bicycle racer, here in the US on a work visa with our mutual employer as sponsor, said it was pretty simple: "People in my part of the world love and respect a Strongman, even if they might fear him, and prefer that kind of government. There is corruption, but we have known forever how to live with that..."
We got people playing the Game with us as tokens and sacrificial pawns. But I don't hear anybody saying what the goal(s) of the Game might be, and to infer it from observing the play, it seems to be some combination of Marbles with "us" having a giant over-sized stainless steel shooter, and "He who dies with the most toys wins," and "Kill 'em all, and let their fusty gods sort 'em out."
Egyptians and other Others (from "our" rustic point of view, that is) have good reason to think and worry and fear what "they," in this case our very own Western oligarchy, thinks. Because Shah and Nicaragua and Jonas Savimbi and Diem and dozens of others, and because thousands of hair-trigger nuclear weapons, and "sanctions" as an act of war/obscure, and the reach of "our" post-national, trans-national corporations, and even on account of that guy Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler and his successors and his illuminations. The goal of the US rulership sure does not seem even arguably to be to make the world safer for all us humans to live together in -- rather, just to make the world simply more "ours." Which of course means "theirs."
Beware lean and hungry men, who have, or imply the existence of, reasoned, nuanced, deep, detailed explanations for every act of seemingly, to the ingenue's eye, murderous, and/or greedy, and/or consumptive, and/or dead-end-imperial "statecraft," that compound shadow that they hide all their parasitical and predatory and cancerous behaviors behind...
SPIEGEL: What is your assessment of the Muslim Brotherhood?
McCain: I think they are a radical group that first of all supports Sharia law; that in itself is anti-democratic — at least as far as women are concerned. They have been involved with other terrorist organizations and I believe that they should be specifically excluded from any transition government.
3. Is McCain a hypocrite, a sincere man, or a doofus? Or all threee? Here's some history, from when his mind should by rights have been sharper than it is (back on April Fool's Day, 2007):
The stuff being so appropriately reported on is all just bullsh_t. Endless examples of the human idiocy that profits a few for a short while, lets them rule and steal and lie with great elan and eclat and support from some really sharp apologists who know where their bread is buttered or are so deep into the minutiae of Empire and global power and maintaining the Upward Path or trying very hard to get on the train themselves, that they can't or won't see where it's all headed.
Maybe the existentialists had something: we seem to be somewhere between "Waiting for Godot" and "No Exit..."
It matters to the extent that he and others can get still more others to believe what he or they believe or pretend to believe, or browbeat them other others into acquiescence. This is called "building a consensus around a policy." Or something.
That old bit about a minimum quantum of "legitimacy" being needed to rule, or its equivalent in well-organized, monomaniacal repressive power, or the poop hits the air handler.
Oh Jeebus! A whole new area of opportunity for techies with degrees, student loans and no hope of actual gainful employment to gnaw at, until not a f__t can be passed but that the Matrix will know !
Matthew 10:
…28"Do not fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. 29"Are not two sparrows sold for a cent? And yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. 30"But the very hairs of your head are all numbered.…
So obviously, the NSAEnhanced is just doing G_D's work and will! I GET it!
Get pencil and paper, kiddies, and next will come the Secret Code to set your Decoder Rings to, to decipher this week's Important Traffic:
National Security Agency -- Where Intelligence Goes to Work
Intelligence. It's the ability to think abstractly. Challenge the unknown. Solve the impossible. And at NSA, it's about protecting the Nation. A career at NSA offers the opportunity to work with the best, shape the course of the world, and secure your own future. Isn't it time to put your intelligence to work?
And you can make these unsupported assertions about the content of that supposed "highly specific communications," about "threats" to non-specific targets all over the place, and of course those patented statements about the drone killings in Yemen "obviously working" but not good enough yet and needing to go on forever because terrorism is forever, on the basis of what specific knowledge? You who excoriate others for unsupported statements and positions?
Not so long ago, there was an exchange here about how phrases like "everyone knows," and "it's well established," and your choice, "obviously," are usually markers of much the opposite. And of course we have the usual appearance of that "against the US and its interests," once again still undefined except that "everyone knows" that just means protecting the flow of wealth to the very few, and facilitating the attempts of our oligarchy to smear the peanut butter of its Power Projection all the way to the edges of the entire globe. Obviously.
"Prudent?" In this context, of patent idiocy in furtherance of imperial ambitions, at the cost of destruction of that "Constitution-based village" that lives only in jyth? What is "prudent" supposed to mean?
Or maybe a second or third time. "No such pattern of behavior"? Gee, in our new world of UNtransparency, it is so hard to know anything, isn't it? The Administration you so often plump for has never lied to the rest of us, or mis-led us, or been caught doing things that are maybe not so very good for most of us?
It's the kind of crap that "our" jackals and operatives have been doing for decades, to stir the many pots and foment regime disruption and all that. It's not like the textbooks and manuals for how to do it are not readily available on the 'net.
Blowback, one little part of that greater notion called karma, sure can be a, can I use the word without being "politically incorrect?", "bi__h"...
It seems to me that "diplomacy" and statecraft actually are undertaken and performed by individuals, not some personification called "the US." You got the Dulleses, those gritty, squint-eyed, skulduggerous Realists, and the people who formed ranks around them, a pretty small part of the polity, but somehow self-selected from those who had the drive for power and the connections and means to grab it, sending us down the Cold War Rat Hole for a generation or more, playing off their opposite numbers in "the Soviet Union" and elsewhere, all in the wake of the whole Great Game juggernaut's fireworks in WWs I and II. A relatively few individuals thinking "empire" and "hegemony" and being able to say, and mean, like little kids on the playground, "I AM the boss of you!"
The bulk of us, also individuals, who yet can be moved as "interest and affinity groups" by various manipulations and appealing falsehoods, go along with the mystiques of ballot-or-conquest-accorded "legitimacy," and because it is occasionally "our turn" to do the grabbing, acceding in an idiot's reciprocity to what is only the parasitism of the Fews under our "spoils system."
And all of this activity is catalyzed and facilitated by the flow of wealth to the Imperial center -- whether that wealth is the REAL stuff that working people create, or just lots of IOUs written by other individuals who have figured out how BS and complicated math can let them create Bespoke Suits out of iMaginary Fraudcloth. And of course by other people who put their smarta__ little heads together and come up with corporate slogans like "We Never Forget Who We're Working For," ol' Lockheed-Martin's owners' and bosses' "patriotic" declaration, right out front if deliciously deceptive, "stealthy" you might say, of their "loyalties."
Guess what? In the Great Game, which the Game of RISK! so poorly byt seductively models, the lesson is that increasingly often, "strength" -- the apparent strength of massive military and industrial concentrations -- is really weakness, and the admonitions of Sun Tzu and Mao and others about reeds bending in the tornado prove truer than the dictums of Clausewitz and Petraeus and the like.
Seems to me that dictators and authoritarians and oligarchists and kleptocrats of all nominal birth-stripes are finding, if not actually learning, that the principles that underlie the reality that "we," any Bigness, cannot win "4th Generation Wars," apply to eventually thwart them, if not, unfortunately, to educate and illuminate the Rulerships into better serving the basic individual and family NEEDS that, in being served, establish the legitimacy of the rulerships. Not that the lessons will change any of the behaviors that actually count, before the oopsie of climate collapse or some "miscalculation"-induced "release" of all those still-hair-trigger nuclear weapons...
Keeping in mind that the idiots that run the Giant Ponderous Global Inter-Inoperable Network-Centric We Rule The World Battlespace thing cannot even define some fundamentals, like what constitutes "winning," and what the goals of the game are other than transferring "civilian" wealth to the global MIC thingie and maybe making "wogs" either say "Uncle Sam" or just die, or what "the national interest" is, other than advancing their individual careers and getting naming rights for Dogmas and Strategies and keeping the oil flowing to the benefit of another small and evil and stupid "I want my life back" set of individuals up in their private jets or out on their racing yachts... (Go ahead -- search the DoD Dictionary or the enormous, expensive and growing bulk of publicly available DoD publications, for any definition of "win" or "victory" or "success." "Mission Accomplished!"? What was the mission, again, sir?)
It's all about procurement, logistics, and process, predicated on the "victory" of individual generals and staff over opposing branches and competing powers to define the parts and play of the Game. And the patent inability to even, via what our expositors of the New American Century smugly expect is "overwhelming force," to win a war game where a retired one of their own number sinks an entire US fleet, http://rense.com/general64/fore.htm, followed by a post-hoc change of the outcome by the kind of behavior that smarta__ rich kids pull in hacking the university computers to change their failing grades.
We got all those nukes, and we can't even use them! What kind of Game is that, anyway?
I guess somebody else's mother told them, like mine told me, that "persistence is rewarded." The problem with ordinary people, without "Realist" axes to grind, usually want to just persist in ordinary lives. It takes another kind of persistence, by the kind of people that (on all sides, of course) carried forward all the BS and framing and institutionalization of the Great Game idiocy that grew into our idiot "Forever War" and the incipient heat death of our species, grew like some toxic fungus out of the wastes of the apparently inevitable industrialistization and nationalistization of a world that was blessed, or cursed, with that incredible gift of extractable and rentable resources, a thing of a kind of beauty that we were given to work from. Persistence like that among the neo-liberals and PNAC and the boys and girls too at the Heritage Foundation and in our War Colleges and Service Academies, and their "enemy" analogues, in whispering and shouting and sniping with all those little message-bullets that found their marks in the amygdalas and other unfortunate bits of our limbic systems.
Persist, Joe: It's worked just great for our (and "our enemies'") militarists and Birchers and the Koch_uckers and the Party hacks in the former Soviet Union and the Irrationalist Nationalists in so many places, and of course in our great religious enterprises. Keep sniping and whispering and being smug that a few humans get to be vastly pleasured and immeasurably comfortable and ego-stroked, at the cost of the kind of misery and instability and unsurvivability that I keep directing folks to here: http://syriavideo.net/
Yep, be smugly satisfied that the tapeworms and tumors will be happily ensconced and thriving, right up to the point that we, the exhausted, cachexic host critters, start that Cheyne-Stokes breathing and our eyes sag half open and our lips turn blue and our skin turns that gray-green and our bowels and bladders release their final contents. And there will be no loving family and Hospice care to ease our passing.
But what a ride the Warlords and Captains of Industry and Vampire Squid Financialists will have had, right? And with lots of scraps for the remoras and jackals and hyenas that follow in their wake...
"Whether it is Russia, China, the Balkans, Rwanda, the Congo, or anywhere else, the US national interest should prevail."
Was this a Freudian slip, revealing the real mindset behind all those you've tossed out here comments over the years? Maybe just a problem of habits of ponderous composition and grammatical style? Of course, you and Joe have dodged the pending question about what exactly constitutes "the national interest," other than imperial faves of yours...
Too bad your "Realists" did not stop with Monroe's admonition, and went on to create and effectuate the "Monroe doctrine," with a certain amount of what do they call it, "blowback?"
One of the few things that give me hope is the thought that the whole "intelligence apparatus" is managed by venal, fallible, often monomaniacal, egocentric, clumsy, stupid, protocol-bound bureaucrats, who occasionally have managed some "great success," like screwing up Italy's and Korea's politics or installing the Shah in Iran or "managing regime change" and other really smart stratagems in other lands, but who have the same problems of sustained competence and divided counsels and idiot management as any large set of human critters with large secret open-wallet budgets and no accountability. All through history, the sneaks and Jesuits, Shakespeare's "lean and hungry men" many of whom are fat and still insatiably hungry for more clout, have managed to screw up any number of Grand Plots and Actions. The problem for us little people, who have to struggle to create little interlocked bits of stability and wealth creation to support the enormous ponderous Apatosaurian bulk of our "betters" and self-appointed "agents," is to avoid getting crushed as these behemoths lumber and battle and bite each other in the ass across our fragile planet's land, sea, air and space-scape.
Did G_D invent Murphy, or are we just lucky that randomness is a feature of this universe?
Meanwhile, while the only people paying attention to what's going on over in this obscure corner of the Real World are "investors" and militarists and Free Traders and certain bits of the US and "other country" bureaucracies, some people have reason to observe, and be joyful, that "The Booming Global Arms Trade Is Creating a New Cold War." http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/05/global-arms-trade-new-cold-war It's like finally dropping, with a familiar sigh of pleasure, into a comfy, well-worn recliner, with a cold one and a multi-function controller and a smart phone...
The WSJ and NYT and WaPo people, many of them, are happy and proud that "we" lead the league in "arms contracts batted in." That means GROWTH in an industry not tramelled by the restraints of contract compliance or serious budgetary limits. And those "Realists," who think only in a frame that holds that "countries" are actual personifications/reifications that act, Galt-like, "in their own interest," and that like "the market," that somehow will balance things out and produce some kind of meta-stability, are on the clear, visible ascendant, once again. But only because they concentrate their intelligence and energies on expanding and extending the "policies" that have had human groupings attacking and leveling each others' abodes and cities since "civilization" first got started behind the mud brick walls of Mesopotamia, and this tribe under its "king" snuck over in the night to put that other tribe to the sword and kill or enslave their people and take their stuff.
One might hope that the people who create the wealth that the Realists, Realists like Rummy and Cheney and others, get to play with, might wake up and smell the coffee and the stench of rotting corpses and start asking "Is this really in our interest, or just the interest of a few who by constant pressure and intense concentration and flat-out lying and deception, see e.g. the 'Bomber Gap,' the 'Missile Gap,' and the 'Window of Vulnerability,' not to mention the hallowed 'Domino Theory' and 'Yellow-cake/WMD,' peddle a sick and self-advancing set of fundamentally planet-destroying frauds?"
The structures that end up producing fracking and the F-35 and deep-penetration nuclear warheads and autonomous battle robots and custom mortal viruses both biological and cyber, don't seem to be ineluctable, there are numbers of people organized around healthier principles. But then they don't advance their systems via weapons and the willingness to use them. See, e.g., Costa Rica.
Still waiting for the self-declared but otherwise covert "Realists" that post here to offer some testable, vote-able definition of "national interest" that ordinary people might be able to chew on and decide if there is any nourishment or future there, or just subtle or overt poisons that only afflict the very many who aren't given the Insider's Antidote... Seems to me the "national interest" is just what a few (by birth, at least) of us, pursuing their own sick or self-satisfying preferences, like a war of choice in Afghanistan or setting up the Grand Global Interoperable Sees And Knows All But Is Too Clumsy And Stupid To "Win" Network-Centric Battlespace, can cram down the throats of the most of us. Like, for one piddling multi-trillion-dollar example, the "F-35 program."
"Russia" versus "the US," with "China" and "the EU" and the other BRIs circling, circling inside the Mixed Martial Arts Penta-Octagon... "It smells like VICTORY!"
No comments? No interest? Really? A fuse on a really big pile of munitions and madness is lit and burning, and Already vanished into the news and attention cycle flood? While a demonstration of the true import of that old nostrum about rulers ruling only with the consent of the governed works itself out? Fueled by the monstrous energies, "Allahu Akhbar!," of the limbic system, and the dynamics of crowds and mobs, and of course the very profitable business of filling the planet with weaponry that enables and facilitates and accelerates the plague of anomie, "jihadists" sticking their AKs and RPGs up over walls and the rubble piles of former walls and just letting fly, or peering through those sniper scopes and trying for the "pink mist" kill shot off there 500 meters away...
If the ruler can’t establish an acceptable quantum of legitimacy, can’t meet the real needs of most of the people, or leave them enough alone to let them meet their own, gee, what happens then?
Welcome to the world of the 4th Generation, where the "doctrines" of the Great Game Machine founder on the reality of what they've created: http://fabiusmaximus.com/2007/01/04/why-we-lose-at-4gw/ (Maybe ask yourself who the "we" in the title is...)
And for your daily dose of War Porn, be sure to tune in to http://syriavideo.net/ for more proof that 'war might be hell for some, but it sure is a lot of fun, too, for us folks with flags, slogans and guns, more guns please!'
Where are Bill and Joe to tell us all this is "in the (they once slipped and said "our") national interest," and most important, that it's all perfectly LEGAL, and that anyhow some part of the shattered polity in those sorry areas told "us" we could just go ahead and do it?!
And Joe, per your own recent post, use of "the fact that" with zero support, is an automatic TKO impeachment. Naughty, naughty. Or, as with the part of the polity you seem to speak so consistently for, is adhering to "the rules" just for suckers?
Another one of those things that are obvious, so everyone knows them, right? Common knowledge?
Wrong game, Joe. You are playing "dangle the shiny object in hopes of changing the subject," with a side play of "if you don't have the facts or the law to support you, attack the credibility of the opponent."
So delaying the delivery of 4 F-15s is "playing hardball?" In which game is that, again? And do you have a working link for your original cite-in-support, for some you know, like, context and corroboration?
On the other hand, a lot of apparently informed observers and commenters apparently feel that "the US," or some active part of our -ariat, is indeed "backing the Egyptian military." Along with several of our "partners." A little google search turns up these exemplars:
And a whole lot more, including of course some easily discountable ones like FOCHSNews.
I know, the question you want to work from is whether there is any evidence that "the Obama administration" is putting pressure on he Egyptian military to "go back to its barracks," that wonderfully democratic-sounding phrase. Your evidence is a CNN article on how the Obama administration is apparently delaying (not stopping) delivery of F-16s to the Egyptian Air Force. Your link, security.blogs.cnn.com/2013/07/24/u-s-to-delay-f-16-delivery-to-egypt/ , does not work on either Firefox or Bing (maybe my security clearance level is not high enough), but I was able to get this little bit from one other browser's search:
"Jul 24, 2013 · President Barack Obama has decided to delay the delivery of four F-16 fighter jets to Egypt in a sign of U.S. pressure for the military there to move..."
Wow, that is some sub-freakin'-stantial PRESSURE! I don't know HOW they can RESIST it, especially knowing that the US supplier getting paid for those jets will be screaming bloody murder about interference with its trade relationships, and that the F-16s will eventually, soon, scream in for a happy landing, whatever the military rulers choose to do... They being all tied up in the politics and commerce of Egypt the way they are, just trying to protect their various perks and positions from any particle of diminution that might redirect rights and wealth to the broader populace. Kind of like our own multi-trillion-a-year militaryindustrial-contractor continuum, when you come to think of it, though "our" guys are more subtle, of course... So far...
Does anyone reading or posting here happen to know how "NSA analysts" are trained, what the content and direction of that training is, and what-all they are tasked to do? What are they supposed to look for and be sensitized to and report?
What kind of stuff DO they flag and "report," and to whom? Who-all gets to see that stuff? Have there been any "adverse personnel actions" for e.g. disclosing information to e.g. "business interests," like trade secrets 'n things that might gift some corporate person with a nice bidness advantage? Or is that a feature of the system? Any J. Edgar-type dossier-assembly abuses amongst all the Hoovering up of all those data bits? Any little local networks amongst the analysts to trade gossip bits and porn shots 'n stuff?
I'm sure there are some systems analysis types who would have pertinent and perspicacious questions to ask about what our Brave New Spooks are up to. That's above my pay grade, but I would like to know what they think...
We mopes accept terms like "analyst" blindly, as if each of those people who "earn" that kind of access and potential control over our "freedom'n'liberty'n'democracy" (tm) lives are paragons of civic virtue who would never stoop to blackmail or espionage or what the rest of us might complain about as abuse of authority of any sort. That nice neutral "analyst" would NEVER do anything bad -- their bosses would make SURE of that!
And are any of them, like many a GI who finds to his surprise that following orders to kill wogs and maybe even fellow citizens, and other duties like crushing public dissent, are inconsistent with his inclinations and his Soldier's Oath, occasionally overwhelmed by the enormity of their ability to snoop and pry and extirpate the vestiges of the social contract that the people they peep at are still, stupidly, thinking somehow protects them from oligarchic abuse and oppression and the descent back into serfdom or outright slavery?
Or have the institutions we have paid the costs of developing and maintaining and "enhancing" really jumped over all the barriers and norms and structures, like that "quaint" Constitution that so many of us seem to still beeeleeeeeve in, limits that most of us think are somehow still "operative?" Or are most of us too distracted by the noise of the entertaining parts of the Matrix, or too pre-occupied trying to keep our and our families' heads above the rising waters of a wealth-stealing "economy" to be able to focus on or manage additional concerns about? To the point that some recognize that Quislings and informers and that whole horrid set of sociopaths that profit from "authoritarian" rule have signed up to do their dirtiest against the interests of the rest of us?
On the other hand, any more, looking around at the mess we have made as a species that craps in its own nest and dining room and eats its own young and gives the highest rewards to those who steal the most and kill the most and the whole cadre of freakin' hypocrites that rule us, maybe we should be cheering the accelerating downhill charge toward the cliff...
The bad stuff that can happen by continuing to play the Great Game as it's been done before, the position you assume to be inevitable and apparently hope to return to in part by stopping all sunshine reaching the roach lairs and termite nests, seems to me to have increased by orders of magnitude. There are more unaccountable actors, more and mush deadlier and increasingly autonomous weapons, more money, more ways to induce and foment and amplify hatreds and mob behavior, and lots more destabilizing details.
Maybe a more sensible pattern for human interaction might develop, something other than just stupid recourse to massively complex analyses and policies based at root on the mostly unexplored idiotic-simplicity archetype of "the enemy." You know, that person or group we all know and recognize and act on and later discover that guess what, they are just like us, good or bad, like German and British fighter pilots getting together after the war to celebrate their mutual danger and survival. Or Russian/Soviet generals palling it up with their opposite US numbers over Scoths and vodka, so sad that circumstances forced them to plan out how to kill each others' nations and troops. You know, Reagan telling Gorbachev in Helsinki that he was so sorry that there were no Martians attacking, so that we would finally find some reason to "all just get along."
Maybe if there was MORE of a risk that the "dirty business" of what is so charitably called "diplomacy" and "statecraft" were more out in the open, with all the corruption and stupidity and childishness and venality more plain to see, maybe our rulers would have to stop misconstruing the advice of Machiavelli and Sun Tzu and Plato and all those other observers, stop pursuing a stupid and purblind self-interest that strange to say apparently is on the way to killing the habitability of our planet. Maybe some of the mindless or heedless or uninformed or unenlightened delegation or cession of all that wealth and power, to people who play a closed game that threatens mostly the pawns and rooks, might evaporate? It sure seems that continuing the Game as it has been played only makes comfy niches for predators and parasites to multiply into. A quarter of the planet's wealth, for example, goes to "the military," which actually looks like almost a unitary thingie when you examine development and procurement of weaponry and its sale and distribution. When a lot of people have come to the conclusion that there really is enough of everything that matters to go all the way around the table, except for a few pigs, that kind of waste seems pretty stupid. Arguments that "We" should protect "our" advantages and "way of life" ought to note that very few here really benefit from imperial and corporate hegemony. Here, or anywhere else.
I doubt humans, writ large, are capable of that kind of sea change, of course, so John Kerry's and Sisi's and Netanyahoo's and Petraeus's and all those etc.'s positions are secure...
Bill, you who claim to define for everyone else what constitutes "responsible historiography," and "responsible observation of geopolitics," by reference to whether you happen to agree with the content others put out there rather than any critique of intellectual process, and are so ready with unsubstantiated put-downs and condescending snipes, ought to be the last one to dare to try to hang that kind of critique around someone else's neck.
As to sensitivity to that "troll" moniker, and that spirited speech on "intellectual diversity:" What -- are you claiming a general garment held out by the commenter is cut to your measurements?
I just love your diction, sir. Finally figured out who it reminds me of: Douglas MacArthur.
Too bad you don't get to don the powdered wig and black robe, sit up on the high bench, and get to make rulings on what evidence is allowed.
I guess anyone reading this part of the thread, and the rest of blogspace of course, can and will decide for themselves the relevance and materiality and weight and credibility of the comments that get moderated into the flow...
"Yeah, we got one guy crawling around down there, but, uh, you know, we got, we definitely got something." I've looked at that video many times, and maybe you need to post the time when you say it "clearly shows a guy with an RPG aiming it towards the helicopter." Were the kids in the van a "threat" to the hotshots in the helos? Oh, yeah, they might grow up to be "Talibanners." Took care of that, right?
So the rule of engagement was what, again? Suspicion plus excitement plus the oh-so-surprising sighting of what might be an AK and might be an RPG launcher in a place that courtesy of the US invasion was turned into a kind of Mad MAx Paradise = "Kill 'em all, and let Allah sort them out"? kind of like the ol' free-fire zone rule when I was in Vietnam, McNamara says under zero-based budgeting an artillery unit has to shoot up its allotment of shells every month, or get fewer the next month, so areas declared "enemy," square miles of territory, could be blasted with impunity, maybe sometimes even killing people who just wanted the invaders out of their damn country? Or maybe just a farmer or fisherman who just wanted to be left alone to make his meager living?
You got any kind of link to "the full video" you preach from?, Oh, that's right -- it's classified.
Speaking of courage of convictions and oath-breaking, how about the consequences for the people who actually ran Abu Ghraib, and who ordered Pat Tillman into the Valley of the Shadow of Death and then tried to make a fraud out of even his actual sacrifice, or who steal trillions via the Pentagram's opaque budget, or who help nominally US war contractors sell deadly shi_ to people who are nominally "our enemies," or all the various officers and contractors right across the Bay from me at MacDill/SOCOM who have been lining their pockets and feathering their nests and lying through their oath-taking teeth about it until somebody blows the whistle on them. And of course there's darn near a plethora of other and worse examples out there, aren't there?
One can see why our Rulers and their minions are so desperate to cork off and terrorize anyone thinking to act on conscience and in the direction of honesty and "transparency" and the common good, and to dare to shine a little light on the rats and cockroaches spreading disease and eating huge lumps of wealth and setting the conditions for their fellow creatures to profit from the rot and despair.
You have to love the sick excuse given by the Players and their apologists protecting their shell games and pigeon drops, http://scams.wikispaces.com/The+Pigeon+Drop, their excuse for all the destructive, parasitic crap that goes on "covertly," where only the corrupt and venal are allowed to know about it because they are part of the crime, or what would be a crime if they hadn't re-written "the law" to render what they do "not illegal" (as if that makes it RIGHT), or so control the means and methods of social control that they are beyond all consequences... that sick excuse that goes "well, we HAVE to conduct all this 'diplomacy' and violence and graft in secret, because 'freedom' 'security' 'n 'stability' 'n stuff."
Yah, you ought to know about talking through one's hat, all ten gallons' worth. You and "Chip off the old block" seem to be the ones with the incomplete, warped, biased and censored "knowledge of history."
You want to apotheosize Obama as some paragon of General Welfare virtue, it's incumbent on you, like with the Catholic Church, to at least prove up or invent a few of the miracles that you assert warrant beatification. But then the game here is just drive-by impeachment, isn't it? No facts required. As in the courtroom, with the jury in the box: "Have you stopped beating your wife? I withdraw the question."
Two things: got a link to Cornell West's "admission," so the rest of us can test your assertion if we care to? And going by the "standards of the international community" and what is called HISTORY, the parts that the rest of us uncover or are allowed to see, maybe the claimed statement is accurate?
The Game just goes on -- we mopes are invited to see what is supposed to be a nice neat continue-the-Cold-War zero-sum-seeming Game, while at an honest level of detail, you have nothing but Bad Actors and their contractors and apologists managing a huge abuse of loyalties and an awesome transfer of wealth, a gigantic and always-growing engine of destruction and destabilization, war contractors buying from each other across "conflict" lines and selling to anyone with money including money "our" government rips out of our tax revenues and gifts to "Others" to in turn gift to the Lockheed-"We never forget who we're working for"-Martins and General Atomics and Boeing "Bribe your way to a signed contract" companies and the rest.
So:
2. If your hoped-for crushing of the impetus to expose evil and treachery and lies and fraud that your hoped-for long sentence on Bradley Manning would hopefully accomplish is passed, and m\Manning is off to Leavenworth to break rocks for an eternity, well gee, how, in the worldwide regime of "opacity" of all the covert stuff you imply and even state knowledge of, will there be a snowball's chance for the survival of any vestige of a healthy ordinary civilian economy? Or anything like what we think of when we thingk "democracy," which REQUIRES openness and transparency and all that if there's a prayer it is going to work as promised.
If "the government" succeeds, "legally" of course, for those who apparently think that an argument that something is "legal" excuses most other faults, in deterring or at least squelching and quashing and crushing any person who might, I don't know, point out that certain generals are plotting a coup with certain business interests, to do away with any "government of the people, by the people and for the people" once and for all, I guess that would be a good thing in your system of values. Because after all, the discloser would have taken an OATH, or signed a chit for their security clearance, and breaking that is a much worse sin and more damning and damaging than the barstids in the Pentagram who "disappear" trillions into who-knows-what activities and war toys that do just what, again, to protect "our national interest"?
It would take pages to list out even just the more egregious frauds and betrayals performed by any number of 'people who have taken oaths to support and defend the Constitution of the United ('Untied'?) States' and who also have, it boggles the mind, SECURITY CLEARANCES, and even better, the power to CLASSIFY documents and other evidence to "protect them from disclosure to our ('their'?) enemies"!!. Google "Pentagon fraud," and here's just one among many, many substantive entries: http://nation.time.com/2011/10/20/pentagon-fraud-business-as-usual/ Or how about this little piece, on the TRUE uses of "classification?" http://www.veteranstoday.com/2012/08/31/waging-war-on-leaks/
Interesting, what some of us give and so pedantically and didactically express such staunch loyalty to...
“The United States stands with the entire international community in bearing witness to this brave and determined struggle for the universal rights that we must all uphold, and we will long remember the images of the Tunisian people seeking to make their voices heard.”
That bit of a quote from Obama ought to illuminate the snickering fraud that marks "Americanism." In case anyone missed the irony on account of getting all misty-eyed in response to a sonorous, generous-sounding pronunciamento from The Only President We've Got.
What "international community" are you invoking, sir? Which Universal Rights are those, again, Mr. President? And I guess the "we all" who have to "struggle" to uphold them does not include "you-all" or any part of the state security apparatus that's busily working to make sure those Universal Rights become just a quaint memory...
Actually, this bare description sounds like what our Brass does all the time, sending Our Troops out along IED Alleys and into the Valley of the Shadow of Death, expecting them to trigger ambushes and to take, and make, casualties, telling them that THIS Wardak or THAT Helmand will be THE turning point in the Great War of Justice and Freedom'n'Democracy (tn) or Whatever, that the Troops would be proud to tell their grandchildren they were a decisive part of... with the Brass pretending they have a Plan for Victory of some sort, over some undefined Enemy, just like most general officers have done since Hammurabi. Check these charming travelogues, especially "Restrepo," for a taste of reality...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Afghanistan_War_%282001%E2%80%93present%29_documentaries Pick your own point of view.
Nice sounding sound bite, though about those serious Tunisian government people and their brave reaction to "extremists," which is I guess the new moniker, insurgent and Taliban and all the others maybe having been rendered "not operative?" Hey, if nothing else, there's a business opportunity here! These Troops obviously need Better Weapons and More Training! Pour it on!
Anyone got any links or sources that purport to be anything like an honest after-action report, from the Shootout At The Algerian Border, to allow something like an informed remark, more than some jingoist, I-live-for-the-Great-Game chest-thumping?
That's arrogating a lot of power of decision, when it comes to deciding whether the projection of power, whether invasion or stand-off or via some "covert" means, is "right or wrong." What does "the evidence" have to show? A poll or three, with all the weaknesses of such "evidence," that some plurality or majority of those polled "see the action as a good move?" How long after the action is the litmus test to be applied? Which set of the population gets polled? What are the actual questions, the conduct of the pollers, and all that other stuff? And do we, the suppliers and appliers of force, get to call it an "intervention," a gentle term that also covers what family members do to a black sheep with a drug or hoarding problem?
And as Joe asks of others, do you have links showing "that most libyans do see the intervention as a good move"?
Gee, we got a whole large chunk of our government working to "write people out of their own history," the government, in all its parts, overt and co-, that "we the people" pay for and provide The Troops We Support and all their really cool weapons, and sneaky-petes and jackals out in "the field," and server banks that are connected to little sockets that let our government, Inc., tap into communications of a private and business and even needle-in-an-infinitely-large-cowpie-stuck-there-often-by-FBI-etc.-provacateurs emails and phone calls and internet traffic that MIGHT be between TERRAists (or of interest to what used to be called "corporate spies")... There's a whole long history, 200 years plus, of the US "writing people out of their own history" like, say, maybe, in the case of native Americans, east to west, and in Central and South America, and in Italy and South Korea and Nicaragua and Chile and Iran and Iraq, though it looks like the people who live in what we call Afghanistan are about to kick most of "our" asses out of THEIR country, but not before we f___ed it up worse and piled corruption on body count and took a couple of trillion out of Our Economy into "privatized" hands, oh, and let us not forget Vietnam, my personal favorite! And more recently, even us ordinary Americans, pledging our allegiance to flag and republic, are being written out of our own history, just ask the neos and PNAC and the Kochs the details of that one, us suckers who still believe in that Rule of Law that the government and its friends say made the Libya thing all "legal," us suckers that still believe that the Constitution actually directs much of anything, any more.
And I bet that wise scholars of historiography know all the other places where the Great Game has been and is being played by "us," or the people who pretend to represent "us" and "our" interests, in the supposed service of some noise called "US national interests," that everybody who is "responsible" knows exactly what they are, except they can't say what, with even a bit of clarity.
And this constant recourse to claims that US actions in places like Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and now Syria are all "legal": That's a very interesting assertion, with a whole lot of scholarship that comes to a very different conclusion about the size, shape, placement and effect of the fig leaves our serial administrations have attempted to apply. Say the apologists:
"It's ok because we say it's ok." Where has that theme been heard before? And it's ok that chaos follows intervention, because that's what always happens with humans, and if the policies of various players tend to create and exacerbate the theft and oppression that occasion the dissatisfactions and pain that finally lead to revolts, and offer opportunities to "act, for humanitarian reasons," well hey, that's just the strict rules of golf in action.
Like Rumsfeld said, you always have known unknowns, and so, well, there you go! Unlimber ol' Shock'n'Awe! And keep on building and expanding and remodeling the toppling tower of imperial might...
Sir, you say "need help with security training" and "train some 5000 Libyan troops." One wonders what the course syllabi of these "trainings" consists of. Going by what is taught at the School of the Americas and by various CIA employees and "rogue former employees" and the entire large post-national "security" business, the content will not start with an oath to support and defend any kind of "constitution" that makes even a nod toward any kind of "democracy" that fits with what our foggy-minded "patriots" intuit when the hear the word.
And which tribes will be "trained?" What tradition of citizen-soldiery will be drawn on? It would never happen that the people who will be directing and funding the "training" (and inevitable indoctrination, unless the goal is to just give a bunch of angry males some combat and crowd-crushing skills and turn them loose to do whatever) would be at all interested in creating a new crop of Janissaries, now would it?
Our apologists/loyalists/obscurantists here and elsewhere would have the rest of us believe that one should never project future conduct from the uncovered past behavior (of the people who constitute the action arm of the CIA and related organizations, or the officers and contractors whose personal tics and psychoses cause them to gravitate to positions running sh_t like the School of the Americas).
And they would reassure us, with pats on the head, that all the myriad dare we call them "anti-democratic" actions of Our Great Nation's (and others' too) power-projection critters must each be taken as sui generis, and no indication of the real, long-term, consistent nature of a large, rough and grasping Hydra of a beast.
I would want a whole lot more clarity about the who, what, when, where, how and why part of all this "training," before just swallowing the bait and hook that our rulers, here and there, dangle: "Trust us, we are just trying to "stabilize" a dangerous situation. All that's needed is a competent national army and national police force, and we can give them just what the doctor ordered." Which doctor? Duvalier? Mengele? No interest at all, we are mythologized into believing and imagining, in advancing the already massive clout of the business class, especially the ones in the military and state-security, for whom the degree of opulence and influence of their current lives, and the "comfort" of their retirements, depend on how much they can steal and on preserving their privileges and the status quo or fertilizing the killing fields to allow their kind to root and prosper.
If you have a prescription for how to "train" the monopoly-on-force troops and cops and spies in some way that will eventually produce a civil, productive, sustainable, comity-driven society with a minimum of corruption and incentives to personal greed and the eventual turning of the cycle of wealth concentration, collapse or revolution, please lay it out there. It would have to include some kind of Strange Attractor impelling movement toward that Golden Rule thing, it would seem. It would be an incredibly hard sell, to the people who have the power and presence and accumulated wealth to actually, you know, write the syllabus and hire and dispatch the "trainers" and then try to hold the leashes of the dogs they have trained, thinking they have ensured some kind of overt or covert obeisance and obedience, but not having to really care, since they are totally and completely and, with a waft of a pen, "legally," insulated from the consequences...
As with various US-involved government overthrows, and the many others that have not benefited from US involvement, after the fact the successful regime changes are ipso facto "not illegal." That's the thing about Rule of Law: there are no rights without remedies, and without enforcement of "the law," that chimaerical beast, who's to say what is legal or not? There's a gazillion examples of "interpretations" and prosecutorial discretions and ambiguities and flat-out "statues and treaties and constitution are quaint documents" that only need to be referred to if they support the Will of the Ruler. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHs2coAzLJ8
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"...does the world care?" "The world" that counts, the Great Geopoliticians, counts on the creation of refugees and displacement of persons as one element of strategy. Some of the rest of us do what we can, up to the exhaustion of our empathy and ability to care, and of our ability to pay, since we are also paying so much to support the Game and the petro-consumption addiction and its sequelae, and simply getting the essentials for our own lives and pushing our own Imperial Juggernaut up the Sisyphean mountain, taxes us to the limit.
What a strange, sick, pathological species we are. Creating, for supposed "national interest" reasons, the equivalents of ugly and horrific natural disasters by taking money out of the public pocket to play the Game, with inevitable consequences, and then reaching back into the public pocket with that smaller, generous, increasing the Gross Domestic Product by paying out some of the costs of "rectifying" the horror. With a smug "That's baseball!" to justify the whole idiotic loop...
So we have some of us who, for the vilest and evilest of reasons, cause the equivalent of Indian Ocean tsunamis, and Gulf of Mexico hurricanes, and tornado clean-sweeps of Plains States communities, and continental wildfires, and then some others of us rush or plod to succor, or not.
And then it all becomes about "What options in violence and further destruction does Obama have at this juncture? Because after all The Russians and The Iranians and some idiot notion that "the world community" that does not include you and me in its calculus, now for stated and covert reasons simply MUST "punish" a certain wayward Player... by adding to the "bugsplat count" and "unfortunate dislocation" that who could possibly have avoided?
Would having more women in position to paw through the haystack or target useful fools 'n stuff have any mitigating effect on the horrific gathering, use and mostly abuse of 'INT of all the various "isn't it fun and smart and kewl to create new INTacronyms?" potential and existing types?
One would want to hope so, but...
Actually, all you have to hack is the device-ery of a few of those C-Suite Muggers' "people." All the Good Stuff and Gossip will be there to scan and gainfully apply too...
Does that Simplephone also somehow obscure the location of your device from triangulation location via cell tower, and encrypt your transmissions and receptions that go out to the grid of cell towers and through the networks that we already are assured are well-observed and "collected?"
All part of previously discussed misapprehension of the nature of the Panopticon.
In a different context, a smart computer observed that "The only way to win is not to play the game..."
Back to tit- for-tat? I do know a bit of history and I even fact check myself, and you and others, from time to time. You and I both do a little exaggeration for various reasons. But never waste the opportunity to try to impeach anyone who might make points that call your assertions and absolutisms. Same world, different planet...
" the constitution gives us the right..." says Ms. Lye. Ben Franklin reportedly knew the actual situation: " We have given you a Republic, madam, if you can keep it."
Looks pretty clear that we won't have any more luck doing that than theRomans did. What did theirs last? Seventeen years? How long before our rulers started laughing at that silly piece of parchment with its high sentiments and " rights, " as amended?
There is no right, under " the law," if there is no remedy. No kind of "apology" can do more than obscure what's in the wind.
Enjoy our blog freedom while we can. We're like the Anarchists in the coffee houses...
If you look at the next post down Dr. Cole's site, the one about how mil-mil contacts and "defense contracts" interoperably operate, it ought to be apparent that the finance game and the state- security game are just all of a piece. Ordinary people pay, and pay, and pay, with their lives, their loved ones and any HEALTHY wealth and real security they may happen to accumulate, so our feudal overlords can play. How's it feel to be a helpless pawn on this RISK! tm board? Now that the real nature of the Game and its costs are starting to be more apparent?
And how frustrating to know that Rule of Law is a sham, and that there are no consequences for the parasites and predators, who will live large and die comfortably? Priced your necessites of life lately? How about that great bargain, privatized "medical treatment UNsurance?" Thinking about a home mortgage? Hmmm? And "we have to keep building a network-centric worldwide military structure, now don't we? Cuz otherwise The Rooskies, and TheChinese!!!!!! AND THAT GUY AL QUAEDA!!!!!!!!"
Thank you for that very timely and appropriate link. I hope others will read it. One wonders what, if anything, has a prayer of displacing the Current And Growing System. Which has absorbed the commercial structures and faiths that might have led to something better...
Anyone interested in the context that goes along with the implicit claim of goodness and effectiveness of US AID and NGO "democracy promotion and governance programs" abroad would do well to google "US funded programs to promote democracy and good governance abroad" and thumb through the results, many of which come pretty close to right up to date. Interesting what gets funded and promoted, and the motivations and motions.
Maybe it's a stretch, but the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, and "our" whole involvement there, was supposed to be about "democracy," which sure seems to be a chimaera detached from what people imagine it to be.
Maybe "we" need some funding of programs to promote democracy and good governance right here in our own increasingly Third World country? Notwithstanding we have BIG TVS and microwaves and searcable iDevices and stuff...
So I guess the answer to the question about whether "the US" has cut off aid , military that is, is "no?"
Contracts, you know.
New neologism too: "mil-mil." That's a good and telling one...
Anyone who thinks this is an accurate statement of why the Committee made the award ought to read the actual announcement. What had and has Obama done about encouraging diplomacy, reducing world tensions, environmental threats and all that other stuff, including the still extant and targeted nuclear arsenals?
Are you familiar at all with Central European Jewish folklore? Seems to me that we have raised us up a "GOLEM," the kind that starts to get its own ideas about its mission in life. Who's gonna be the one to try and obliterate one of the empowering letters of its name, and send it nav to being just a pile of mud? http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem
Yeah, plausible deniability and what "we" can get away with and campaign contributions and MIC salws figures and stuff, those are some of the other considerations. One really, on enormous mounds of evidence, should not even try to assert any kind of high moral purpose for our Empire's "foreign policy." "We" have no colorable claims there. And has Obama cut off military and Wonder Bread aid to the Egyptian Generalate, or not?
So let us keep picking away at each other's credibility, though. In the greater scheme, where you imply you live and breathe, I recognize my impotence and insignificance. Why is all this effort to impeach a little blog commenter so important?
One wonders just what "Obama" can or could do with that Peace Prize famous left hand, in this context...
Seems historically in any case it's hard to "force the hand" of an Imperial ruler, especially those "protected" by a Palace Guard and military corpses... gee, what are "our national interests" here,again? Where's the money?
For all you Constitutionalists out there, of whatever stripe, there's a good old fundamental notion of what's called "Hornbook law" that "there is no right without a remedy." Or in Legal Latin, "Ubi jus ibi remedium. There must always be an accessible forum in which a complainant has oyer and terminer for any petition." For those who want to tail-chase around the New Improved Supreme Court's decimation of remedies and the attendant rights, the quote comes from an interesting article titled "Principles of Constitutional Construction." http://constitution.org/cons/prin_cons.htm Which in our new Scalia/Roberts/Thomas age is largely a dead letter, especially that conjunction of "principle" with "jurisprudence" in co-called Constitutional Law. Since the Court and subsidiary courts have been crammed with post-Reagan fellow travelers have been busily extinguishing remedies that might impinge on "freedom of contract" or more important, and in very much a military notion, "freedom of action." Courts in Egypt and China and a lot of other places work the same way, playing on the rubes' perceived need for some kind of "legitimate" "rule of law" thing that they feel gives them a remedy for violations of "rights" and some recourse against arbitrary action by those more powerful than themselves.
The case reported on here is an excellent example. And of course there are plenty of apologists who know where their personal interests and affections lie, who will happily gin up an argument why what was done here is just hunky-dory...
And speaking of reasons for apologists to be laughing, there's this snippet from the same Reuters article:
Now there's a knee-slapper for you...
"doesn't matter" to whom, in what context?
Sez Reuters, and a bunch of other places:
Which "aid," as you call that generally destabilizing, taxpayer-funded marketing activity of the Generals, like General Electric and General Dynamics and General Atomic, and of course Lockheed "We never forget who we're working for, heh heh heh" Martin?
From that traitorous rag, the Guardian:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/20/white-house-aid-egypt-obama
And for the Cold Warriors to get their shorts in a bundle about (losing "clients" is bad for Bidness):
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gCh7IpwnoiCJUgvchukP3D11mNdw?docId=CNG.afc70e226c71a62717c28c1380739a8d.751&hl=en
So has “the aid” been “suspended,” or not?
Anybody trying to make any kind of sense of all this, rather than justifying a reason for wagging particular flags and using a complex mess as the basis for a claim of Rightness and Rationality for their pet visions of Correctness and The Proper Flow of Events, ought to integrate the stuff at this link into their thinking and their efforts to understand what might be done to Make The World A Better Place, even if just for THEIR tribe:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57599302/aussie-baseball-player-killed-by-bored-okla-teens-police-say/
The comments sort of tell it all, a window into the same part of "humanity" that every hour adds more excited and exciting video snippets to this repository of pain, destruction, futility and shame: http://syriavideo.net/ "Allahu Akhbar! We're bored, we got a new shipment of 4.5 inch mortar rounds and Katyushas, and there are buildings in the city that are not reduced to rubble yet! Allahu Akhbar!"
For the "Bad MB" partisan crowd, here's how you play the Badie event:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-23769992
See how easy it is to follow the Narrative?
And I see that piglipstick is being applied to one orifice of Our Exceptional Empire, with a "temporary suspension of military aid" that's apparently already been delivered to the Egyptian generals, since as the Prez says, "we cannot have normal relations with Egypt" in the present context. Wow, that'll show 'em we mean business, er, whatever... Maybe Bill will tell us what those "normal relations" consist of. Maybe we don't really need, or want, to know what they do in the bedrooms at State and Langley and MacDill...
Uh-oh, says the front brain of the Apatosaurus to the posterior nerve plexus that innervates the flanks and leg muscles, is that a CLIFF up ahead? Any thoughts on what to do now?
Complying with the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights is like upholding the Constitution: Optional, or even nugatory, if some bit of "National Interest" is invoked by Someone In Authority...
... you got to love the way these two stand with swords drawn, back to back against the increasingly angry and unruly mob, Hector and Paris, defending the Gates of Troy... Not that they don't occasionally bicker a little, for the benefit of "credibility..."
Hey, it's not really like, you know, a dictatorship or anything -- it's actually more like a pretty well-managed segue into a Pure Libertarian State of Mind... http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/11/journey-into-a-libertarian-future-part-i-%E2%80%93the-vision.html Or maybe given the technoramatationalist bent of it all, like that Keanu Reeves thing, what was it, The Matrix? Which is the Disney World facade behind which lies the Land of Soylent Green...
Actually, at places I have worked, most of the cameras were aimed at "employees stuffing expensive electronic doohickie into crotch or purse because abusive management and minuscule and diminishing pay and hours and termination or "repricing" of benefits..."
Yeah, "security cams" are just the same thing as data-grab sweeps being conducted by all and sundry in the state-security apparatus, following the trail blazed by every fearful and domineering set of humans in all the history I have ever heard of.
It appears we are in an era when rulers, up to now, have been caught flat-footed and booted out by people who were steps ahead of them in ability to organize via electronic media. And of course nobody in Government would then see that it was "vital to their personal interests" to have a chokehold grip on the throat of that form of vox populi...
Where do you spend your working days, again?
Oh, that sort of stuff will all be sorted out when it comes to trial. When it comes to trial. When it comes to trial.
And besides, everything they do is LEGAL. They say so, right on the packaging material...
Lots of commentary about this, including the NYT article, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/19/world/europe/britain-detains-partner-of-reporter-tied-to-leaks.html?_r=0, from which Joe selected the paragraph above.
Including folks who claim to be as particular and "reality-based" as Joe might think himself. Here's the text that follows a quote of that same NYT fragment, from the Telegraph Blogs by another such person:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/robcrilly/100231572/david-mirandas-detention-is-not-as-sinister-as-it-sounds-but-our-sweeping-anti-terror-laws-are/
So the deal is, this was all "legal." And the remedy, if there is one, is to change the law. A neat trick in present circumstances, as the garottes are tightening on the ability to actually protect rights.
And some folks are all hot about the virtues and effects of "international law." Well, it appears that Schedule 7 is, shall we say, "inconsistent" with the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights, to which the UK was a "consensus" signatory, though apparently claiming the "right" to "opt out" if the authorities so choose. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=6&cad=rja&ved=0CFsQFjAF&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.law.cam.ac.uk%2Ffaculty-resources%2F10007309.pdf&ei=MU4SUuG6EubK2AX-qIDYDA&usg=AFQjCNHFsBck79pFlA1ytmeHCBp_UwI4cQ&sig2=eRRTCJo1cSDfzyYfkycjBw&bvm=bv.50768961,d.b2I So what is "the law," then, or is it just whatever Government and its agents choose to say it is?
And to claim that this action was not intended to harass or affect Greenwald is getting pretty close to the kind of things used car salesmen say to sucker you into buying a beater. And Obama has told a whole lot more than three lies, as have Capper and so many others. How do you walk away from THEIR selling, and killing, lot? Move to Brazil?
Note, of course, that there's no mention here of the interests of the Brazilian government in what is done to one of its citizens...
If the Religious Right, as close as I can see to being "our" equivalent to the worst of the MB, gets any more of its way in the US, there will be blasphemy trials and auto-da-fes aplenty. Already, these folks, who are grim and determined and know how to organize, have wormed their way into the military leadership -- here's a fun link: http://www.jewsonfirst.org/military.aspx . And you can bet they are well represented in the state-security apparatus. See how much fun this all can be?: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2012/07/03/homeland-security-funded-study-lists-people-reverent-of-individual-liberty-as-extreme-right-wing-terrorists/ And of course over half of the seat-warmers in Congress are shall we say attentive to the noise our American Taliban makes, and the "mother's milk of politics," MONEY, that they can deploy, for or against.
How can we humans, forced by gravity to live in each others' pockets, wired the way we are, and with the accidents of history as they are, ever develop a set of codes and interests and behaviors that have everyone pulling on the same end of the rope, hopefully not one attached to the noose around some Other's neck? Especially when killing each other is obviously so much exciting fun, http://syriavideo.net/, and so profitable for some of us?
So far, it doesn't seem that even an existential threat to all of us can persuade even most of us to stop trying to throttle, stab, shoot or blast all the rest of us, in what the few of us want to reduce to a game of "He who dies with the most toys, WINS! With big bonus awards for being the last one left alive!" It's more fun to debate little initiatives and stratagems and horrific events, and assign blame, and use all of the above to advance one's career or one's tribal preferences...
A cursory search on "3-sigma event heat waves" makes it clear that what should have been written was "three standard deviations from the historical average." If one goes on to look at the source material, one sees some degree of confidence in the prediction that 3- and 5-sigma events "will be the likely norm for the 21st century." http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/08/14/severe-heat-waves-are-expected-to-double-by-2020 So let's not lose the reality in impeachment fog...
In the meantime, think of the air conditioner sales possibilities! The opportunities for those who can invent "windtraps" to take moisture out of the air! Maybe some smart folks will even develop suits we can wear that will catch and recycle our perspiration and urine and fecal matter! And all that new waterfront property! and the weapons and troops needed to Keep Order!
Seems we, collectively, have been handed the responsibility for our own futures. Too bad that we're ruled, as a species and (collective guilt) as most individuals, by people and preferences that feature short-term profit maximization, "demand manufacturing," the pleasure principle, the way our commercial and consumptive cultures and the ruling institutions have grown make it da_n unlikely that our kids and grandkids will have a lot to work with or much of a chance to fix anything. But the sh_ts who have moved us into this Dead Zone, the Robber Barons and early other Captains of Industry and more recently people like Henry Ford and the Koch Brothers and Murdoch and even the sainted Warren Buffett, will of course be long and comfortably dead after lives mostly characterized by grotesque accumulation, and slick perversion of politics and polities, and self-pleasing. No consequences, no restitution, not even any retribution for those who force most of us to slave and suffer and die in terror and misery...
...and does anyone wonder at all that Bill would think this bit of Realpolitik, as he so blithely describes it, is, well, A-OK? Such a wonderful, ingenue's expression of idiot faith in a corrupt and corrupting system...
And how are "we" supposed to respond, Bill, to your serial blandishments or crushing didacticisms about how it's all CT, and really it's all just good and wonderful..., or at least the kind of people who think as you do are "in charge?"
Not tremble with fear, but maybe be a little anxious, and be looking around for ways to cooperate to change the direction and rate of flow of wealth and power, from some better informed awareness of ACTUAL "serious history" and the nature of current events? Not your narrow, constrained, partisan version?
That ain't the only Global Network-Centric Interoperable-Battlespace-Manager's-Eye view of the planet surface that illuminates what the Great Global Game is doing, "accomplishing,", hither and yon:
"Syria Devastation Unfolds Before Our Eyes"
http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2013/08/14/syria-devastation-unfolds-before-our-eyes/
And of course there's plenty of ongoing ground level evidence here, http://syriavideo.net/ and here, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-eIKYCGnOY, and all that other stuff that fills up Youtube bandwidth and touches our Warporn-lusting naughty bits.
One of the themes that Barbara Tuchman noted and extracted from her Serious History study of the Fin de Siecle Europe and the runup to WW I was that pretty uniformly, the peoples of Europe, whatever their ethnicity and national affections and allegiances and alliances, were lusting for violence, for "War!", so that the gunpowder was all piled up in the streets everywhere, just waiting for a sufficient spark. A pretty tiny one was all it took, eventually. Meantime, the Krupps and others sold guns and uniforms and other materiel to all sides, and those who finance these things did Great. Anything new under the sun?
A couple of us are all into little bits of strategy 'n'stuff, and work steadily to steer the discourse always back onto the Mainstream track, and sneersat bigger-picture stuff, and are all huffy about the incontrovertible correctness of their posthole interjections here, all drawn from some assumed position of superior knowledge. And most of the rest of us are either uninformed and speaking from our biases and fractional bits of imagery or information or knowledge, or carrying a torch or flag for some partisan Enemy-think idiocy or another. People like the creatures in this bit of propaganda, who purport to Explain It All when it comes to "Who Lost Egypt?": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4He7FOfQeA&feature=player_detailpage
Anybody asking what the goals of human existence are? What might produce something other than anomie and Forever War? Is it all just self-pleasing and consumption and domination and "Allahu Akhbar!"? The one who dies, or kills, with the most toys wins? The fun and excitement of "Capture the Flag," with real bullets and cluster-f__ units and and "smart" and soon "intelligent" munitions and mortar and artillery shells and rockets and the rest, and actually being able to kill other humans with impunity? Or maybe are we lusting for that wonderful catharsis that surely must arise, as we skate ever closer to something that seems destined to look like an earthbound version of Ragnarök? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragnar%C3%B6k However much you snipe and sneer, Joe and Bill and now maybe Larry, there really are some larger themes here, that maybe, like with human effects on the biosphere, warrant a little attention and respect, not just advantage- and rent-seeking. And the Game As Usual has nothing, NOTHING, to offer by way of even being able to keep itself going, let alone producing 'security' or 'stability' and especially not 'sustainability.' And NOTHING for the people who create the wealth, the surplus grain, that pays for it.
Joe on the Constitution: "a consensus document that all parties buy into." If that's the test, what kind of logicisticational legerdemain is required to show that what we US-ans have is a "Constitution?" Maybe it's just how one defines who the "parties" are, hey?
Go to South Carolina and look for the "U.S. Constitution," or the nether regions of Texas, like around Waco. Where the result of the War of Northern Aggression is still seen as at best a North Korea/South Korea standoff... You'll find fragments, of course -- the 2nd and 10th Amendments, and parts of the 5th... and a lot of violently ripped shreds.
Many people have pointed out that "constitutionalization" is a scam that "we" are trying to peddle or compel, along with the BS about "democracy" as the only acceptable form of government, a form that morphs every time "we" have a change in "national interests."
http://www.opendemocracy.net/openeconomy/grahame-thompson/should-we-worry-about-global-quasi-constitutionalization
http://www.juspoliticum.com/What-is-constitutionalization.html
http://icon.oxfordjournals.org/content/10/4/1076.abstract
I used to work on a large legal case opposite a hot-shot silk-stocking attorney who was just deLIGHTed to have gotten himself appointed to one of those USAID groups that were sent to Central Europe to "write the constitutions" for the breakup bits (our spooks never saw THAT coming, through the special prisms and blinders they still wear) of the former Soviet Empire. This was the Ground Floor Opportunity, the guy told me, for him and his club to be in on the setting in cement of the "constitutional" conditions that would benefit his Business Interest clients, letting them "legally" waltz in and make some serious shekels in those New Unplucked Markets.
The same scam was pulled, as I understand it, in Iraq, under the US-an Proconsul, L. Paul Bremer, and is under way elsewhere. What is worshiped as a faith tenet turns out. like so many such manipulable but seductive beliefs, to be so very much different than the fuzzy glow that the word conjures in the breasts of so many "patriots."
Interesting and illustrative choices of what you would deem "ordinary bills:" tax rates, and how many tanks to buy. Our "constitutionaldemocracy" government rulers really basically agree on the two answers to those issues, lower, and more. A more telling subject for a bill would be the scope of acceptable spying on everyone everywhere all the time. Oh, wait! I know the apparent answer to how the "parties" would treat that one too! Or how about "chained CPI?" In our system, it sure looks like the only "Winners" are the moneyed interests and their Congressional lapdogs that make what they do "not illegal." The Losers? Well, look around...
"attack on the Copts by the MB:"
Is the MB a unitary thing, or are there subsets and branches and divides in what we try so insistently to personify? Remember "Better Dead Than Red," from the same people who now proudly claim Redness as their soul? Some soccer fans kill referees and brawl and trash stadiums and downtowns, so all soccer fans are anomic, nihilistic thugs? Maybe in posse, like the rest of us too...
We all have this sense that there is a "Rightness" somewhere, that can somehow be recognized and appealed to and applied. "Democracy" and "Rule of Law" and The Will of YHWH or Allah or Buddha, maybe? Too bad our habits of tribal behavior, and incredible powers of rationalization and obfuscation, and the presence of sneaks and bullies with addictions to power and powers of oration, let us presume its existence, and the correctness of our actions as consistent with that longed-for "Rightness..."
Is that what Bill Bodden said, Joe? Really? And you find it compelling enough ironic text to have to reinforce the utility and effect of Obama's pontifications and pronouncements in this little space by mischaracterization and other bits of impeachment gamery?
Joe, of course that was my point exactly. The whole strategy and doctrine is to create all across Africa and the other COMs a "military cooperative" that's all Interoperable and working from the same playbook that is informed by those always invoked, always unspecified, but always Sanctum Sanctorum "national interests," a strategy and doctrine that the US "security structure" has written and keeps trying to refine and impose. "We" need to play nice, for the time being, with all those militaries and militias and regimes, to cozen or coerce or "influence" them into what used to be called "alignment," and keep the arms sales and other market opportunities for even post-national "US" corporations open. F-16s, GMO seeds, earth movers so upstream countries can dehydrate downstream ones, stuff like that.
The daily details of tactics and "the news cycle," as I'm sure you know, stuff like stealing more Palestinian living space and water, and weapons to Syrians that McCain likes, and droning in Yemen, and now this new bit of murderous idiocy in Egypt, are just blips and sideshows on the larger path to --- what, again? What does "Security" mean, again? We use it all the time, but it's just a convenient feely-good fog-word.
As to differences in treatment of "Morsi" and the military while he was in office, and the current rulers, looks to me like the difference between being beaten with a noodle al dente, or with one that's been slightly overcooked...
And I guess I'm just obtuse, but looking back upthread at your citation of the four-of-20-F-16 'coitus interruptus' and the postponement of "Operation Bright Star" this year, it sure looks like you were arguing that showed how "harshly" the Empire is treating the Current Military Leadership for its Assault on Democracy. And it sure is hard to figure out just what obscure point you are contending for, and what difference it makes in the greater flow of events. It's fun to go down these side roads, though -- keeps many people distracted and entertained, and obscures the bigger-picture stuff.
And your statement of some "undeniable fact" to the effect that The Empire is "being much harder on, not more supportive of, the Sisi government than the Morsi government" ain't on the evidence, either undeniable or fact. In fact, in the frame you yourself have insisted upon, such a statement, "as everyone commonly knows," ought to be accompanied by citations and support. And it's a nice subtle distraction and impeachment, but really, what I wrote has nothing to do with what I think of the RIGOR of the Empire's response, vel non.
Folks who follow the redistricting processes, which mostly "Republicans" have subverted and dominated by persistence and organization and demonic fury on certain issues been the ones drawing districts and now of course purging voter rolls of likely Dem voters and instituting Voter ID laws and other stratagems including ballot creation and destruction, would laugh at the idea that "judicial review" by judges who, via the same application of 'democracy' have over time become very friendly to 'conservatives,' are any kind of effective check on gerrymandering. Seems even the packed Supreme Court found a way to decide the outcome of a recent presidential election that even they said was a one-time event...
As to presidents and governors revoking judicial review, all the Prez has to say is "national security" and "executive discretion" and the federal and state courts waive any jurisdiction, and governors and their attorneys general routinely make the decisions that keep all kinds of issues away from any judges that might rule, however impotently, against their power plays, while using all the semi-legitimacies of "it's legal" to pack the courts with cronies and fellow travelers.
There's a reason it's called "the spoils system..." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system
Joe assigns unwarranted significance to both this second delay, not cancellation, of war games, and the DELAY of delivery of 4 of 20 F-16s that are part of at least a billion bucks in military "aid" to the Egyptian warlords that is still on the way.
Small change, of course, compared to annual military aid tribute to "the mouse that roared" across the Sina...
Yeah, an Arab problem. But of course our Great Gamers wer, have been, are, and will be in there trying, offering inducements of cash and weapons and "training," maybe even Viagra as to the warlords in Afghanistan, looking for levers and seams to wedge and pry things apart, aiming to extract as much wealth from those unhappy areas as possible. Studied up on the plans and activities of the Whole Earth Network-Centric Battlespace System much? Could have been written and activated by the Aliens from the movie "Independence Day," if they used writing, though of course they were telepaths... and further linked together by a Star-System-Wide Network-Centric Battlespace System.
What do you find when you just follow the money?
Ouch! that's gotta really hurt... Except if one applies a poultice of money'n'materiel. Seems the expensive exercises (costly to US taxpayers) might be down for the moment, but if you read the report in the Washington Post, you get a little more context:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-cancels-egypt-joint-military-exercise-over-crackdown-but-leaves-aid-in-place/2013/08/15/4001e208-05b2-11e3-88d6-d5795fab4637_story.html
And per the Post article and a little more googling, this ain't the first time the Administration delayed, postponed, put off this "annual cooperation exercise," which, per the strategies that AFRICOM is implementing, is just one tiny part of setting up a joint military cooperative, under the benign eye and arm of the US, that crosses the entire continent, with interoperable militaries in every nation that counts, ready to 'preserve the peace' and 'assure security' and 'serve the national interest.'
Oh, and how about those F-16s that are being 'delayed?' http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2013/07/201372552158438124.html
Some think 'the military' is like the French Armee before 1914, the soul of the nation and culture. Is what you see in Egypt what you want, what you would trust, to establish a World Security Thingie, under US leadership of course?
The peddlers and jokers who are selling the theme that 'the military' is the best institution to help us humans "manage change" and "respond to crises" in what the smarter ones among the Brass know pretty surely is coming, are the worst kinds of charlatans, and all you have to do is look at how 'conflicts' start up and are maintained and exacerbated and enlarged. No negative feedback to tamp them down, except exhaustion, a genteel sufficiency of dead bodies, and bankruptcy, viz. Egypt and Syria and so many others.
For those who have not taken the opportunity to intellectually bathe in the cesspit of militarianization yet, here's a .pdf that, in one place, exposes the kind of idiot wargamer-Risk!-player's-idiot-delight thinking that is going to get us all killed (it's available from many sources, including in Word format I think): http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/dod/dsb/climate.pdf
It's titled "Final Report - Defense Science Board Task Force on Trends and Implications of Climate Change on National and International Security." One of the many gems is this little snip, there are way too many to even start to choose from:
Ibid., at 77-78. So bland, so horrific. In a nutshell, what so much of this is all about...
You want to trust the MI-EverythingElseToo-C to "manage" the crises this report lays out, in the infinitely bureaucratized way they propose, or give them the world's wealth in an open checkbook to do all they propose to do in this "report," which indicates that the US security structure will magnanimously agree to undertake the enormous charge of "securing" the whole planet?
Extra points: Who said "War is nothing but a racket," and who said, "It's a syndicate, and everyone has a share"?
"When the only tool in your toolbox, or the only tool you know how to use, is a Great Big Mutha____in' Hammer..."
Gee, I wonder if what Sasi's STASI did there was "in the national interest"?
... but they have GREAT swimming pools, and are now mining "fossil water" from under the desert, for a profit of course, and really cool HypocrisiParties! And so MANLY in those sweeping outfits and facial hair so neatly trimmed... re Syria, have a taste of what's happening 'on the ground' today, and tomorrow, and on and on... http://syriavideo.net/page/4/ Stop in, stay a while, and look around at what the Game is wreaking... in some 'national interest,' of course.
Amazing how the same kind of people keep floating to the top of the abbatoir's septic tank that is the Great Game. What's to choose between the ayatollahs and the Kochs and Berlusconi and Amin and Arafat and Netayahooo and Jerry Falwell? Or pick almost any other state you care to name. The vultures, vampires and tapeworms always rise... and their apologists tell us that is just the way it Realist-ically is. And thanks to the accidents of our common heredity, our life spans, relative to the rate of wasting of the planet, assure the worst of them that they will usually get to pass away so very comfortably in their beds, muttering "Apres moi le deluge..." http://tradicionclasica.blogspot.com/2006/01/expression-aprs-moi-le-dluge-and-its.html
One wonders, given the physical state of the planet, if the rest of us will have the will or wisdom to do anything else, or more importantly, better.
Oh look! another decider of what is "serious history."
The evidence I've seen looks like the near sinking of the USS Liberty was multiple attacks by several branches of the IDF with clear awareness of the American flag on the mast and the clear intention to keep anyone from observing and gathering intel on the 1967 war operations. Even their "ally," the putz schmuck freier US of A. All part of "purity of arms." And "maintaining freedom of action." HOW did the Israeli folks get weapons grade nuclear material and the expertise and machinery to make 400 or 500 nuclear weapons, and "un-counting?" And all kinds of other fun stuff? Speaking of conspiracies...
Aaaahh, but the "condolence payments" appear to be pretty cheap, and serve Vital Important "National Interests." But we can't tell anyone what those Interest are! That might give away Secrets to The Enema! "In time of war, when truth is so precious, it must be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”
And since our rulers have chosen to force-frame all future human interactions as various types of fundably fungible Conflict Operations in the Grand Global Network-Centric Interoperable Battlespace which is nicely subdivided into fiefdoms labeled stuff like CENTCOM and AFRICOM, milbabble acropseudonyms that just warm and cheer the hearts of a certain kind of authoritarian human critters, the means for morphing all the rest of us into little social units that are expected to keep our heads down and while expecting us to just keep on funding this dead-end idiocy, why there you are! Blow them up, and hey! it appears we can diminish the immediate retaliation and vengeance response by laying a few shekels on the bloody ground! Just a cost of doing business, and after all, the Business of America is and always has been Business! Which in the nature of the beast has exported and expatriated itself and now smears the planet like the oily flood of black or red that in the old newsreel and propaganda animations spread evilly and sinisterly and implacably across the globe under Swastika or Hammer and Sickle or now Star and Crescent. And a certain amount of killing has always been an incident of Business, after all...
"What! Me Worry?"
Great for whoever in India is pushing solar energy production. Seems like there's not a lot of energy going into conservation and stuff.
There's a reason why we are frightened and repelled by the Aliens in "Independence Day," whose sole raison d'etre is to take, and consume, and move on. Worse than army ants, that at least have diseases and predators (and also exhaustion of resources) to keep them in some kind of check.
It's that old Walt Kelly/Pogo thing, coupled with the shock of recognition: THEY REALLY, ACTUALLY, TOTALLY, IS "US'...
How interesting that the people in the theatre break out in cheers as the faceless baddies are vanquished by the smart guy with the virus and the brave Kamikaze self-sacrifice of a dude with a plate in his head...
Joe claims to think, with unspecified others, that establishing a Palestinian homeland is "important in and of itself." Very well and good. The "talking" remedy proposed as I guess part of his plan has proven about as worthless as Krebiozen to a cancer patient: Take this stuff if you can stand it, belieeeeve, and all the while the cancer eats away at your vitals. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krebiozen
If Joe is among those who think that Palestinian homeland is a actually a good idea, and more important if he is plugged in as implied and able to influence actual Imperial behavior, then how do you stop the endless thumbsucking and handholding and bootlicking by the US administration, which if it was a priority should (other than those pesky 4-500 nukes and all the arms we have paid for that make up most of the IDF's inventory and whatever the various spies have turned up on our Rulership' personal and professional defalcations and predations and prevarications) be a relatively straightforward item on the checklist.
Don't make it personal, Joe. "Hate the sin, but love the sinner." This actually, even though mostly impotently, is what many folks here and in the rest of the chattering universe have in their hearts: They see Business As Usual, in which they find themselves so inextricably bound and wired, is F___ED UP, and killing people and societies and the planet, and are groping toward an understanding, to follow another metaphor, of the disease process. Like the medical types are struggling to do with cancer, that multifaceted Hydra of a horror, and HIV that morphs as you look at it just as you think you've found the "OFF" switch, and the rest. Seen the satellite photos of Syria, before and now durrent? That conflict is not "sui generis," it;s the product of stuff that has gone on for centuries to the advantage of the Few and loss of the Many. "War is Heaven" for the Brass and their suppliers. The Imperial-Militarist-Corporate framing that is imposed and heavily promoted has the intent and effect, as far as I can see, of FOSTERING the disease process to the advantage of the parasites, pathogens and malignancies. And there are lots of very subtle people who find it in their interest, consciously or not, to help the HIV and tumor cells hide their real nature and intent from whatever is left of homeostasis and meta-stability and the immune system.
Nice fake conundrum, in the form of a seemingly reasonable talking point. You are a smart, subtle guy; you do that stuff well. The basic facts are that the Israeli rulers are, based on the history and the current behaviors and any other predictor I can see, just going to plow and bulldoze and chainsaw their way ahead. A "reality-based" claimant like yourself knows that darn well, and one might wonder about what you think an appropriate end point would be for this Arab-galling, destabilizing, shock-wave-and-blowback-and-"casus-impetus improvisus ac violentus"-generating US complicity in de-stating a population. And c'mon, now challenge that conclusion by demanding a string cite to establish it.
The comments here are scarcely "anti-peace-talk," but extra points to you for artfully dishonest framing. Talk or no talk, the pretty clear nature of the situation is that the Israeli rulers and business interests (surprisingly a mostly perfectly overlapping single set) intend to dispossess those 'other people' from "their" land. And I don't know, you never say, whether your work station or just your allegiance lies in the West Wing and the alphabet soup of agencies it is appended to. But kudos for subtle Socratic regular appearances here and elsewhere to reinforce a certain set of talking points and induce "approved" modes of thought.
This is more complete than what the Germans did in Czechoslovakia (and what was eventually done back to them), from the Armistice to the Surrender. People can learn from observing what's worked before.
You have to love the sound of neoliberals singing in the morning, sweet carols of Chigaustrian true belief. Sir, what makes you, personally, worth you wages? Can you protect yourself against being "outsourced" in the Great Race to the Bottom?
Where the heck do you get that weird notion? And other than the bald assertion, what support do you possibly have, other than maybe citing a very few and generally small and not "profitable" companies, generally family-owned?
I've worked for small and large businesses, not a huge sample of course but including large law firms and large national retail operations, and spent hours with CNBC and the WSJ and even The Economist. Never worked for McDonalds, but similar jobs. Growth and profit and of course executive compensation (tied to the short-term profit maximization that is the raison d'etre of our whole structure) are inescapably and inarguably the nature of the beast. More work, more "productivity," from fewer people for less pay: the essence of the labor part of the US and broader business model. Add in ever-sharper pricing strategies that come ever closer to the barren edge of what people constrained by that "inelasticity of demand" for sustenance and water and a roof, and "marketing" scams like 3 1/2 ounces of tuna in a "6-ounce" can, and 59 ounces of orange juice in the "half-gallon" box or bottle, and of course the ever-present, very brilliant manufacturing of "demand," and that's a more accurate picture.
"Equal plane?" Maybe in some non-Euclidean version of geometry... Or maybe the "people" you were talking about were the C-Suite-ers...
The "field of economics" is full employment for a bunch of "experts" who can't predict anything "economic" with all their complex models and formulas, do not give a fig for stability and sustainability, and do nothing valuable to or for the "general welfare," not surprisingly since the people who pay them to generate their excuses for vulture and tapeworm economics are the very vultures and tapeworms themselves. The people for whom some here steadily, doggedly, didactically apologize.
I have no idea what you consider what would "adequately" take care of "everyone," but from what I read, there actually is enough food and water and stuff to go all the way around the table. Except for the pigs that grab way more than their fair share. Your "economists" have all kinds of justifications for what the Many would view as some pretty skewed distribution. See earlier posts in this space, showing how wealth is distributed in the good old US of A. And your blessed National Security Apparatus as I am sure you know is well aware of what that "well-deserved Imperial levy" implies for all of us, and in their ponderous, self-serving way are planning for how to maintain your comfort and status and their own (I find the whole .pdf report creepy and scary, but that's just me):
http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports/ADA552760.pdf
Others offer a more human perspective:
http://www.acme-journal.org/vol11/Gilbert2012.pdf
But to make sure there will be a perpetual threat to "manage" and "counter," the Brass offer this:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/11/climate-change_n_2855007.html
And others call "BS" on that set of notions:
http://csis.org/files/publication/120128_US_DoD_Threat_National_Security.pdf
I guess it is personally wise and justifiable to attach oneself to the gravy train. Doesn't work, for a lot of us... for most of us, it's not even a choice.
You, Bill, cite and likely don't have any basis for your assertion. Spend any time in the "alternative" sites where past and present troopers gather and you'll find plenty of soul-sick dissatisfaction with what our troops have come to recognize that they are tasked to do, how the indoctrination has morphed, and how distant "the mission" now is from the mythical "protecting constitutional democracy." Maybe that's why the droid armies are the Brass's dream and all the troop reductions are in the offing. And what interests are they "comfortable protecting" again? Stay on message now...
Dr. Cole, I don't doubt there are what I would call (MY value system, of course) decent and honorable analysts, and probably "effectives" in or out of uniform, in the State Security-Statecraft apparatus. People who may have, thanks to parentage, personal sense of values, education and various mentors and models, some residual or active sense, an honest "mission," and wisdom about what's a "real threat," however you care to define that, and what might be done to address it for the "general welfare." A sense of the real, complex, covert nature of claimed "interests," and what on the big scale is actually in play. "Interests" that by right of stealthy occupation define "the national interest" as so often invoked here. (I personally don't think people like Gary Schroen are among the decent and honorable. https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol49no4/War_on_Terror_9.htm
You have to empathize with the ones who pulled together the dots that, when assembled, spelled "9/11," seeing that other "interests" apparently guided the rulership in the use of the analysis and the event itself. Since none of them, reportedly, happened to notice the imminent collapse of the Soviet Menace and thus the entire raison d'etre of Duck'n'Coverism, And stuff like that. (Are there any examples of the sort you mentioned that can be revealed, where the analysts actually uncovered and pretermitted any SIGNIFICANT Bad Stuff, like arranging delivery of weapons-grad nuclear material to, say, Israel, or is that one of those 'Trust Us' double-secret things, even though the massive silence and massive abuses are so evident and Trust needs so much bolstering? Or is Fear designed to suppress the need for Trust?)
And one wonders if any of those analysts and effectives, simply to keep their jobs and feed their families, or in some warped or transfigured notion of loyalty, participated in putting lipstick on the various Pigs, including many episodes like Pigs, Bay Of. Let's remember that the "experts," which some posting here let the rest of us infer that they are or are aligned with, some-unspecified-how, have shown again and again that fundamental self-serving incompetence, in the species-survival sense, or even the advance-the-Imperium sense (see "Vietnam" and "Iraqafghaniyemeranistan" and AFRI- and the Leviathanian rest of the "COMs") or even in knocking the beard off Castro. Can't even (due to massiveness, apparently) even figure out how to "win" (which they don't define either) 4th Generation Wars. http://fabiusmaximus.com/2007/01/04/why-we-lose-at-4gw/
The well-schooled "experts" (remembering that Eichmann and Beria and Mengele and Arafat and Netanyahoo and Dulles and Donovan and Casey and even bin Ladin and a bunch of others were and are "experts") seem, not surprisingly, to go along with and claim to have a deep, important and "posthole-and-mass-grave" knowledge of one skewed school of political geology, and with the arcanae of security-speak and Mil-babble and a mastery of the well-proven-idiotic-and-destructive rules and play of the Great Game. And show the desire to dig, delve and then to force-fit results to some agenda and then to report as "true" the tailored, filtered, fraudulent results of their excavations. And to only dig wherever their weirdnesses and personal and small-group interests draw them. With "Experts" like Petraeus and Yoo cueing their inquiries and analysis.
It's kind of inarguable, in the current context, that the ones who go along, and the rulers here, there and everywhere, have a proven willingness to make a joke of the "self-evident truths" that too many of us still bovinely believe in and think our rulers respect and are guided by. And that the world that the new analysts and effectives are invited to "be part of changing" where the rest of us have to live into (see the NSA's and CIA's employment come-ons) is not any "quaint" Constitutionally limited place, but a lot more like the Libertarian We_ Dream. http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/11/journey-into-a-libertarian-future-part-i-%E2%80%93the-vision.html
Maybe the Rulers, like the "C-suite-ers" in the Soylent Corporation, guys and gals like maybe even Obama after he was shown the briefings and taught the secret handshake, all know that the momentum is all downhill off some tipping-point cliff and into the Valley of Death, that intoxicated with the speed and power, they've gleefully bypassed a bunch of side tracks into greener pastures, and that the best one can do for self and family is keep shoveling coal into the engine and finding personal or perverse pleasures where one can, in minute upward adjustments to the throttle, and incremental release of the brakes, and the sense of speed and power and the expectation that they can somehow, by "bailout" or comfortable natural death, get off before the cliff. (Remember what the root word of "intoxicated" is.)
We ordinary folks should, I guess, be grateful that there exist people like Manning and Snowden and their predecessors and hopefully successors, who will shine a light on the rats and roaches and silverfish, back in the cupboards where they eat and crap in the stored sustenance and wealth that ordinary people have to sweat and strain to produce. Or maybe we are happier not knowing…
Yeah, Bill and Joe, it's all about that which you smugly maintain 'properly and Realistically rules' and by Divine right ought to "govern," but are so loath to define: "national interest." Smart, if maybe less honorable, move, to line up with and cheer for the big kids, when it's time for dodgeball or a rock fight…
Seems like Joe's idea of an intelligent discussion is a lot like what one gets from a Libertarian: he controls the precise question that is allowed to be discussed, he frames the issues, he supplies the "facts" both stated and inferred and implied, he sets all the definitions. I guess if one has that degree of freedom in the "discussion," there's a certain kind of "intelligence" at work...
Nice finish to the comment, though, with both subtle and IN YOUR FACE put-downs...
And of course there are no rungs on a well-greased slippery slope.
Has the "ban" on government employees including the military, and government contractors, been revised since 2010? Sure looks like the "cautions" against looking at those so-secret documents, citing fear of "electronic spillage (ES)" and reminding the potential self-educator about all those criminal liabilities for doing so, at least originally extended to whoever and wherever and from whatever computer...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/05/us-military-banned-from-v_n_671967.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Foreign-Policy/2010/1207/US-to-federal-workers-If-you-read-WikiLeaks-you-re-breaking-the-law
As to hysteria about the fading of the First and Fourth and Fifth Amendments and other bits of the antiquated Constitution thing, one of my 3x5 cards reads "Without a remedy, there is no right."
Where's the remedies for our Brave New 1984 World behaviors?
...or maybe it was just very obscure, double-secret irony?
That's the best impeachment you got? Sad. I didn't even tee off on your snipe the other day:
Now THERE is one sweepingly, breathtakingly loyalist drive-by assertion... https://www.juancole.com/2013/08/officials-including-addington.html
Sniper tactics apparently mean ALWAYS shooting when you have a shot, and a safe path of retreat into deep cover and the Fog of War...
For other approved talking points on the benefits of natural gas, go here:
http://www.naturalgas.org/environment/naturalgas.asp
And then there's this, from Texas: http://stateimpact.npr.org/texas/2013/06/04/report-as-natural-gas-displaces-coal-carbon-emissions-fall/ , with a comment asking "Why does it feel like this article is about 18 months too late? Coal is already on the rise again..."
Anyone else want to look up the actual net effects to the human-shared environment of "switching to 'natural gas'? To test whether the statement and judgment/opinion, "Replacing coal plants with gas plants is the most successful carbon-reduction scheme ever adopted. If you oppose the ongoing shift from coal to gas, you oppose the most successful method of reducing greenhouse gases ever developed."?
The only actual "actually important interest" Dr, Cole lists is cooperation of some sort on pressing the "Universal Forever War On Drugs," which is just part of the successful marketing and pricing structure of the people who grow, process, distribute and profit from "illegal drug trafficking." Including "small-time too-big-to-fail banks" that launder trillions, our many mini-militia police departments and their forfeiture scams and prosecutorial frauds, and federal agencies including ones that actually have visibly been involved in the drug trade to fund other idiocies of theirs. Like those Contra years 'n stuff.
Aside from "cooperating" in a global system that fortuitously results in massive sales of arms by both sides, and some elbow-bumping on maintaining the world currency, what other "actually important interests" are "we" cooperating on?
And so glad to know that "even Syria" in your moral universe or frame is "small-time stuff." Like this? http://syriavideo.net/page/7/ That kind of seems to maybe draw a nice Victorian frame around your views...
Reagan and Gorbachev in Helsinki: photo-op time? Those three Stooges at Yalta, and all that followed? This photo-op of course is meaningless in the real world of public opinion, one might guess. "Small stuff," one might say. The People Who Really Know discount it to insignificance.
People trained to their parts in the Megaton Megadeaths in ColdWarThinkistan might be excused in wondering if they need to get their knees and hips replaced, so they can refresh their "Duck and Cover" skills...
I would love for the tiny group of Egyptian posters here to offer a little straw poll on why they believe the military officers did what they did, and a subsidiary question about why the troops follow their orders. There's lots of "nuance" and "complexity" there, no doubt -- along with all the stuff that "analysts" are supposed to detect and correct for. But the little I can glean is that "the military," to the extent such a heterogeneous bunch of bandits can be rolled into a personification, acted to protect its/their own substantial perks and profits. Which of course are at risk in event of a 1789 kind of event, or the more modern versions. Any idea how many senior Egyptian officers are moving their capital, the "pound" and "family" kind, to "safer realms?" ("We" can sort of track the loyalties of "our" corporate officers from the stuff in SEC filings showing some of their holdings...)
An old friend of mine, a former Iraqi world-class bicycle racer, here in the US on a work visa with our mutual employer as sponsor, said it was pretty simple: "People in my part of the world love and respect a Strongman, even if they might fear him, and prefer that kind of government. There is corruption, but we have known forever how to live with that..."
We got people playing the Game with us as tokens and sacrificial pawns. But I don't hear anybody saying what the goal(s) of the Game might be, and to infer it from observing the play, it seems to be some combination of Marbles with "us" having a giant over-sized stainless steel shooter, and "He who dies with the most toys wins," and "Kill 'em all, and let their fusty gods sort 'em out."
Egyptians and other Others (from "our" rustic point of view, that is) have good reason to think and worry and fear what "they," in this case our very own Western oligarchy, thinks. Because Shah and Nicaragua and Jonas Savimbi and Diem and dozens of others, and because thousands of hair-trigger nuclear weapons, and "sanctions" as an act of war/obscure, and the reach of "our" post-national, trans-national corporations, and even on account of that guy Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler and his successors and his illuminations. The goal of the US rulership sure does not seem even arguably to be to make the world safer for all us humans to live together in -- rather, just to make the world simply more "ours." Which of course means "theirs."
Beware lean and hungry men, who have, or imply the existence of, reasoned, nuanced, deep, detailed explanations for every act of seemingly, to the ingenue's eye, murderous, and/or greedy, and/or consumptive, and/or dead-end-imperial "statecraft," that compound shadow that they hide all their parasitical and predatory and cancerous behaviors behind...
1. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
2.
Maybe that's just a syntactical tic or something. http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/11/29/the-three-faces-of-john-mccain-on-the-muslim-brotherhood/
3. Is McCain a hypocrite, a sincere man, or a doofus? Or all threee? Here's some history, from when his mind should by rights have been sharper than it is (back on April Fool's Day, 2007):
"Visiting Iraq, McCain Cites Progress on Safety Issues" http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/01/AR2007040100325.html
"Baghdad merchants astounded at McCain's claims of security / They say the market he saw, surrounded by GIs and humvees, wasn't real life" http://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Baghdad-merchants-astounded-at-McCain-s-claims-of-2605502.php
"Snipers back at Baghdad market after McCain visit" http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/04/02/us-iraq-shorja-idUSCOL25181720070402
The stuff being so appropriately reported on is all just bullsh_t. Endless examples of the human idiocy that profits a few for a short while, lets them rule and steal and lie with great elan and eclat and support from some really sharp apologists who know where their bread is buttered or are so deep into the minutiae of Empire and global power and maintaining the Upward Path or trying very hard to get on the train themselves, that they can't or won't see where it's all headed.
Maybe the existentialists had something: we seem to be somewhere between "Waiting for Godot" and "No Exit..."
It matters to the extent that he and others can get still more others to believe what he or they believe or pretend to believe, or browbeat them other others into acquiescence. This is called "building a consensus around a policy." Or something.
That old bit about a minimum quantum of "legitimacy" being needed to rule, or its equivalent in well-organized, monomaniacal repressive power, or the poop hits the air handler.
A well established fact that everyone knows. Obviously.
Oh Jeebus! A whole new area of opportunity for techies with degrees, student loans and no hope of actual gainful employment to gnaw at, until not a f__t can be passed but that the Matrix will know !
Matthew 10:
So obviously, the NSAEnhanced is just doing G_D's work and will! I GET it!
Get pencil and paper, kiddies, and next will come the Secret Code to set your Decoder Rings to, to decipher this week's Important Traffic:
http://www.nsa.gov/careers/
And you can make these unsupported assertions about the content of that supposed "highly specific communications," about "threats" to non-specific targets all over the place, and of course those patented statements about the drone killings in Yemen "obviously working" but not good enough yet and needing to go on forever because terrorism is forever, on the basis of what specific knowledge? You who excoriate others for unsupported statements and positions?
Not so long ago, there was an exchange here about how phrases like "everyone knows," and "it's well established," and your choice, "obviously," are usually markers of much the opposite. And of course we have the usual appearance of that "against the US and its interests," once again still undefined except that "everyone knows" that just means protecting the flow of wealth to the very few, and facilitating the attempts of our oligarchy to smear the peanut butter of its Power Projection all the way to the edges of the entire globe. Obviously.
"Prudent?" In this context, of patent idiocy in furtherance of imperial ambitions, at the cost of destruction of that "Constitution-based village" that lives only in jyth? What is "prudent" supposed to mean?
Kind of like "Al Qaeda" and Joseph Statesecurity...
There's always a first time...
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/10/07-3
Or maybe a second or third time. "No such pattern of behavior"? Gee, in our new world of UNtransparency, it is so hard to know anything, isn't it? The Administration you so often plump for has never lied to the rest of us, or mis-led us, or been caught doing things that are maybe not so very good for most of us?
Thoughts from elsewhere:
http://www.examiner.com/article/obama-s-terror-alert-due-to-same-terrorists-he-seeks-to-arm-syria?cid=rss
It's the kind of crap that "our" jackals and operatives have been doing for decades, to stir the many pots and foment regime disruption and all that. It's not like the textbooks and manuals for how to do it are not readily available on the 'net.
Blowback, one little part of that greater notion called karma, sure can be a, can I use the word without being "politically incorrect?", "bi__h"...
It seems to me that "diplomacy" and statecraft actually are undertaken and performed by individuals, not some personification called "the US." You got the Dulleses, those gritty, squint-eyed, skulduggerous Realists, and the people who formed ranks around them, a pretty small part of the polity, but somehow self-selected from those who had the drive for power and the connections and means to grab it, sending us down the Cold War Rat Hole for a generation or more, playing off their opposite numbers in "the Soviet Union" and elsewhere, all in the wake of the whole Great Game juggernaut's fireworks in WWs I and II. A relatively few individuals thinking "empire" and "hegemony" and being able to say, and mean, like little kids on the playground, "I AM the boss of you!"
The bulk of us, also individuals, who yet can be moved as "interest and affinity groups" by various manipulations and appealing falsehoods, go along with the mystiques of ballot-or-conquest-accorded "legitimacy," and because it is occasionally "our turn" to do the grabbing, acceding in an idiot's reciprocity to what is only the parasitism of the Fews under our "spoils system."
And all of this activity is catalyzed and facilitated by the flow of wealth to the Imperial center -- whether that wealth is the REAL stuff that working people create, or just lots of IOUs written by other individuals who have figured out how BS and complicated math can let them create Bespoke Suits out of iMaginary Fraudcloth. And of course by other people who put their smarta__ little heads together and come up with corporate slogans like "We Never Forget Who We're Working For," ol' Lockheed-Martin's owners' and bosses' "patriotic" declaration, right out front if deliciously deceptive, "stealthy" you might say, of their "loyalties."
Guess what? In the Great Game, which the Game of RISK! so poorly byt seductively models, the lesson is that increasingly often, "strength" -- the apparent strength of massive military and industrial concentrations -- is really weakness, and the admonitions of Sun Tzu and Mao and others about reeds bending in the tornado prove truer than the dictums of Clausewitz and Petraeus and the like.
Seems to me that dictators and authoritarians and oligarchists and kleptocrats of all nominal birth-stripes are finding, if not actually learning, that the principles that underlie the reality that "we," any Bigness, cannot win "4th Generation Wars," apply to eventually thwart them, if not, unfortunately, to educate and illuminate the Rulerships into better serving the basic individual and family NEEDS that, in being served, establish the legitimacy of the rulerships. Not that the lessons will change any of the behaviors that actually count, before the oopsie of climate collapse or some "miscalculation"-induced "release" of all those still-hair-trigger nuclear weapons...
Keeping in mind that the idiots that run the Giant Ponderous Global Inter-Inoperable Network-Centric We Rule The World Battlespace thing cannot even define some fundamentals, like what constitutes "winning," and what the goals of the game are other than transferring "civilian" wealth to the global MIC thingie and maybe making "wogs" either say "Uncle Sam" or just die, or what "the national interest" is, other than advancing their individual careers and getting naming rights for Dogmas and Strategies and keeping the oil flowing to the benefit of another small and evil and stupid "I want my life back" set of individuals up in their private jets or out on their racing yachts... (Go ahead -- search the DoD Dictionary or the enormous, expensive and growing bulk of publicly available DoD publications, for any definition of "win" or "victory" or "success." "Mission Accomplished!"? What was the mission, again, sir?)
It's all about procurement, logistics, and process, predicated on the "victory" of individual generals and staff over opposing branches and competing powers to define the parts and play of the Game. And the patent inability to even, via what our expositors of the New American Century smugly expect is "overwhelming force," to win a war game where a retired one of their own number sinks an entire US fleet, http://rense.com/general64/fore.htm, followed by a post-hoc change of the outcome by the kind of behavior that smarta__ rich kids pull in hacking the university computers to change their failing grades.
We got all those nukes, and we can't even use them! What kind of Game is that, anyway?
I guess somebody else's mother told them, like mine told me, that "persistence is rewarded." The problem with ordinary people, without "Realist" axes to grind, usually want to just persist in ordinary lives. It takes another kind of persistence, by the kind of people that (on all sides, of course) carried forward all the BS and framing and institutionalization of the Great Game idiocy that grew into our idiot "Forever War" and the incipient heat death of our species, grew like some toxic fungus out of the wastes of the apparently inevitable industrialistization and nationalistization of a world that was blessed, or cursed, with that incredible gift of extractable and rentable resources, a thing of a kind of beauty that we were given to work from. Persistence like that among the neo-liberals and PNAC and the boys and girls too at the Heritage Foundation and in our War Colleges and Service Academies, and their "enemy" analogues, in whispering and shouting and sniping with all those little message-bullets that found their marks in the amygdalas and other unfortunate bits of our limbic systems.
Persist, Joe: It's worked just great for our (and "our enemies'") militarists and Birchers and the Koch_uckers and the Party hacks in the former Soviet Union and the Irrationalist Nationalists in so many places, and of course in our great religious enterprises. Keep sniping and whispering and being smug that a few humans get to be vastly pleasured and immeasurably comfortable and ego-stroked, at the cost of the kind of misery and instability and unsurvivability that I keep directing folks to here: http://syriavideo.net/
Yep, be smugly satisfied that the tapeworms and tumors will be happily ensconced and thriving, right up to the point that we, the exhausted, cachexic host critters, start that Cheyne-Stokes breathing and our eyes sag half open and our lips turn blue and our skin turns that gray-green and our bowels and bladders release their final contents. And there will be no loving family and Hospice care to ease our passing.
But what a ride the Warlords and Captains of Industry and Vampire Squid Financialists will have had, right? And with lots of scraps for the remoras and jackals and hyenas that follow in their wake...
Nice dodge, Bill. From your mouth to G_D's ears.
Was this a Freudian slip, revealing the real mindset behind all those you've tossed out here comments over the years? Maybe just a problem of habits of ponderous composition and grammatical style? Of course, you and Joe have dodged the pending question about what exactly constitutes "the national interest," other than imperial faves of yours...
Too bad your "Realists" did not stop with Monroe's admonition, and went on to create and effectuate the "Monroe doctrine," with a certain amount of what do they call it, "blowback?"
One of the few things that give me hope is the thought that the whole "intelligence apparatus" is managed by venal, fallible, often monomaniacal, egocentric, clumsy, stupid, protocol-bound bureaucrats, who occasionally have managed some "great success," like screwing up Italy's and Korea's politics or installing the Shah in Iran or "managing regime change" and other really smart stratagems in other lands, but who have the same problems of sustained competence and divided counsels and idiot management as any large set of human critters with large secret open-wallet budgets and no accountability. All through history, the sneaks and Jesuits, Shakespeare's "lean and hungry men" many of whom are fat and still insatiably hungry for more clout, have managed to screw up any number of Grand Plots and Actions. The problem for us little people, who have to struggle to create little interlocked bits of stability and wealth creation to support the enormous ponderous Apatosaurian bulk of our "betters" and self-appointed "agents," is to avoid getting crushed as these behemoths lumber and battle and bite each other in the ass across our fragile planet's land, sea, air and space-scape.
Did G_D invent Murphy, or are we just lucky that randomness is a feature of this universe?
Meanwhile, while the only people paying attention to what's going on over in this obscure corner of the Real World are "investors" and militarists and Free Traders and certain bits of the US and "other country" bureaucracies, some people have reason to observe, and be joyful, that "The Booming Global Arms Trade Is Creating a New Cold War." http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/05/global-arms-trade-new-cold-war It's like finally dropping, with a familiar sigh of pleasure, into a comfy, well-worn recliner, with a cold one and a multi-function controller and a smart phone...
The WSJ and NYT and WaPo people, many of them, are happy and proud that "we" lead the league in "arms contracts batted in." That means GROWTH in an industry not tramelled by the restraints of contract compliance or serious budgetary limits. And those "Realists," who think only in a frame that holds that "countries" are actual personifications/reifications that act, Galt-like, "in their own interest," and that like "the market," that somehow will balance things out and produce some kind of meta-stability, are on the clear, visible ascendant, once again. But only because they concentrate their intelligence and energies on expanding and extending the "policies" that have had human groupings attacking and leveling each others' abodes and cities since "civilization" first got started behind the mud brick walls of Mesopotamia, and this tribe under its "king" snuck over in the night to put that other tribe to the sword and kill or enslave their people and take their stuff.
One might hope that the people who create the wealth that the Realists, Realists like Rummy and Cheney and others, get to play with, might wake up and smell the coffee and the stench of rotting corpses and start asking "Is this really in our interest, or just the interest of a few who by constant pressure and intense concentration and flat-out lying and deception, see e.g. the 'Bomber Gap,' the 'Missile Gap,' and the 'Window of Vulnerability,' not to mention the hallowed 'Domino Theory' and 'Yellow-cake/WMD,' peddle a sick and self-advancing set of fundamentally planet-destroying frauds?"
The structures that end up producing fracking and the F-35 and deep-penetration nuclear warheads and autonomous battle robots and custom mortal viruses both biological and cyber, don't seem to be ineluctable, there are numbers of people organized around healthier principles. But then they don't advance their systems via weapons and the willingness to use them. See, e.g., Costa Rica.
One view of the Game, not my view of course: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4176645 This is what "the end of history" looks like?
Here's another: http://sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com/2013/04/tyrants-beware-4th-generation-warfare.html
Still waiting for the self-declared but otherwise covert "Realists" that post here to offer some testable, vote-able definition of "national interest" that ordinary people might be able to chew on and decide if there is any nourishment or future there, or just subtle or overt poisons that only afflict the very many who aren't given the Insider's Antidote... Seems to me the "national interest" is just what a few (by birth, at least) of us, pursuing their own sick or self-satisfying preferences, like a war of choice in Afghanistan or setting up the Grand Global Interoperable Sees And Knows All But Is Too Clumsy And Stupid To "Win" Network-Centric Battlespace, can cram down the throats of the most of us. Like, for one piddling multi-trillion-dollar example, the "F-35 program."
"Russia" versus "the US," with "China" and "the EU" and the other BRIs circling, circling inside the Mixed Martial Arts Penta-Octagon... "It smells like VICTORY!"
No comments? No interest? Really? A fuse on a really big pile of munitions and madness is lit and burning, and Already vanished into the news and attention cycle flood? While a demonstration of the true import of that old nostrum about rulers ruling only with the consent of the governed works itself out? Fueled by the monstrous energies, "Allahu Akhbar!," of the limbic system, and the dynamics of crowds and mobs, and of course the very profitable business of filling the planet with weaponry that enables and facilitates and accelerates the plague of anomie, "jihadists" sticking their AKs and RPGs up over walls and the rubble piles of former walls and just letting fly, or peering through those sniper scopes and trying for the "pink mist" kill shot off there 500 meters away...
If the ruler can’t establish an acceptable quantum of legitimacy, can’t meet the real needs of most of the people, or leave them enough alone to let them meet their own, gee, what happens then?
Welcome to the world of the 4th Generation, where the "doctrines" of the Great Game Machine founder on the reality of what they've created: http://fabiusmaximus.com/2007/01/04/why-we-lose-at-4gw/ (Maybe ask yourself who the "we" in the title is...)
And for your daily dose of War Porn, be sure to tune in to http://syriavideo.net/ for more proof that 'war might be hell for some, but it sure is a lot of fun, too, for us folks with flags, slogans and guns, more guns please!'
Where are Bill and Joe to tell us all this is "in the (they once slipped and said "our") national interest," and most important, that it's all perfectly LEGAL, and that anyhow some part of the shattered polity in those sorry areas told "us" we could just go ahead and do it?!
And Joe, per your own recent post, use of "the fact that" with zero support, is an automatic TKO impeachment. Naughty, naughty. Or, as with the part of the polity you seem to speak so consistently for, is adhering to "the rules" just for suckers?
Another one of those things that are obvious, so everyone knows them, right? Common knowledge?
Wrong game, Joe. You are playing "dangle the shiny object in hopes of changing the subject," with a side play of "if you don't have the facts or the law to support you, attack the credibility of the opponent."
So delaying the delivery of 4 F-15s is "playing hardball?" In which game is that, again? And do you have a working link for your original cite-in-support, for some you know, like, context and corroboration?
On the other hand, a lot of apparently informed observers and commenters apparently feel that "the US," or some active part of our -ariat, is indeed "backing the Egyptian military." Along with several of our "partners." A little google search turns up these exemplars:
"Never mind the coup: U.S. military aid will continue to flow to Egypt": http://mondoweiss.net/2013/07/never-military-continue.html
"Muted Response on Military Sparks Theory U.S. Backs Coup": http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324251504578580063622815992.html
And a whole lot more, including of course some easily discountable ones like FOCHSNews.
I know, the question you want to work from is whether there is any evidence that "the Obama administration" is putting pressure on he Egyptian military to "go back to its barracks," that wonderfully democratic-sounding phrase. Your evidence is a CNN article on how the Obama administration is apparently delaying (not stopping) delivery of F-16s to the Egyptian Air Force. Your link, security.blogs.cnn.com/2013/07/24/u-s-to-delay-f-16-delivery-to-egypt/ , does not work on either Firefox or Bing (maybe my security clearance level is not high enough), but I was able to get this little bit from one other browser's search:
"Jul 24, 2013 · President Barack Obama has decided to delay the delivery of four F-16 fighter jets to Egypt in a sign of U.S. pressure for the military there to move..."
Wow, that is some sub-freakin'-stantial PRESSURE! I don't know HOW they can RESIST it, especially knowing that the US supplier getting paid for those jets will be screaming bloody murder about interference with its trade relationships, and that the F-16s will eventually, soon, scream in for a happy landing, whatever the military rulers choose to do... They being all tied up in the politics and commerce of Egypt the way they are, just trying to protect their various perks and positions from any particle of diminution that might redirect rights and wealth to the broader populace. Kind of like our own multi-trillion-a-year militaryindustrial-contractor continuum, when you come to think of it, though "our" guys are more subtle, of course... So far...
Does anyone reading or posting here happen to know how "NSA analysts" are trained, what the content and direction of that training is, and what-all they are tasked to do? What are they supposed to look for and be sensitized to and report?
What kind of stuff DO they flag and "report," and to whom? Who-all gets to see that stuff? Have there been any "adverse personnel actions" for e.g. disclosing information to e.g. "business interests," like trade secrets 'n things that might gift some corporate person with a nice bidness advantage? Or is that a feature of the system? Any J. Edgar-type dossier-assembly abuses amongst all the Hoovering up of all those data bits? Any little local networks amongst the analysts to trade gossip bits and porn shots 'n stuff?
I'm sure there are some systems analysis types who would have pertinent and perspicacious questions to ask about what our Brave New Spooks are up to. That's above my pay grade, but I would like to know what they think...
We mopes accept terms like "analyst" blindly, as if each of those people who "earn" that kind of access and potential control over our "freedom'n'liberty'n'democracy" (tm) lives are paragons of civic virtue who would never stoop to blackmail or espionage or what the rest of us might complain about as abuse of authority of any sort. That nice neutral "analyst" would NEVER do anything bad -- their bosses would make SURE of that!
And are any of them, like many a GI who finds to his surprise that following orders to kill wogs and maybe even fellow citizens, and other duties like crushing public dissent, are inconsistent with his inclinations and his Soldier's Oath, occasionally overwhelmed by the enormity of their ability to snoop and pry and extirpate the vestiges of the social contract that the people they peep at are still, stupidly, thinking somehow protects them from oligarchic abuse and oppression and the descent back into serfdom or outright slavery?
Or have the institutions we have paid the costs of developing and maintaining and "enhancing" really jumped over all the barriers and norms and structures, like that "quaint" Constitution that so many of us seem to still beeeleeeeeve in, limits that most of us think are somehow still "operative?" Or are most of us too distracted by the noise of the entertaining parts of the Matrix, or too pre-occupied trying to keep our and our families' heads above the rising waters of a wealth-stealing "economy" to be able to focus on or manage additional concerns about? To the point that some recognize that Quislings and informers and that whole horrid set of sociopaths that profit from "authoritarian" rule have signed up to do their dirtiest against the interests of the rest of us?
On the other hand, any more, looking around at the mess we have made as a species that craps in its own nest and dining room and eats its own young and gives the highest rewards to those who steal the most and kill the most and the whole cadre of freakin' hypocrites that rule us, maybe we should be cheering the accelerating downhill charge toward the cliff...
The bad stuff that can happen by continuing to play the Great Game as it's been done before, the position you assume to be inevitable and apparently hope to return to in part by stopping all sunshine reaching the roach lairs and termite nests, seems to me to have increased by orders of magnitude. There are more unaccountable actors, more and mush deadlier and increasingly autonomous weapons, more money, more ways to induce and foment and amplify hatreds and mob behavior, and lots more destabilizing details.
Maybe a more sensible pattern for human interaction might develop, something other than just stupid recourse to massively complex analyses and policies based at root on the mostly unexplored idiotic-simplicity archetype of "the enemy." You know, that person or group we all know and recognize and act on and later discover that guess what, they are just like us, good or bad, like German and British fighter pilots getting together after the war to celebrate their mutual danger and survival. Or Russian/Soviet generals palling it up with their opposite US numbers over Scoths and vodka, so sad that circumstances forced them to plan out how to kill each others' nations and troops. You know, Reagan telling Gorbachev in Helsinki that he was so sorry that there were no Martians attacking, so that we would finally find some reason to "all just get along."
Maybe if there was MORE of a risk that the "dirty business" of what is so charitably called "diplomacy" and "statecraft" were more out in the open, with all the corruption and stupidity and childishness and venality more plain to see, maybe our rulers would have to stop misconstruing the advice of Machiavelli and Sun Tzu and Plato and all those other observers, stop pursuing a stupid and purblind self-interest that strange to say apparently is on the way to killing the habitability of our planet. Maybe some of the mindless or heedless or uninformed or unenlightened delegation or cession of all that wealth and power, to people who play a closed game that threatens mostly the pawns and rooks, might evaporate? It sure seems that continuing the Game as it has been played only makes comfy niches for predators and parasites to multiply into. A quarter of the planet's wealth, for example, goes to "the military," which actually looks like almost a unitary thingie when you examine development and procurement of weaponry and its sale and distribution. When a lot of people have come to the conclusion that there really is enough of everything that matters to go all the way around the table, except for a few pigs, that kind of waste seems pretty stupid. Arguments that "We" should protect "our" advantages and "way of life" ought to note that very few here really benefit from imperial and corporate hegemony. Here, or anywhere else.
I doubt humans, writ large, are capable of that kind of sea change, of course, so John Kerry's and Sisi's and Netanyahoo's and Petraeus's and all those etc.'s positions are secure...
Bill, you who claim to define for everyone else what constitutes "responsible historiography," and "responsible observation of geopolitics," by reference to whether you happen to agree with the content others put out there rather than any critique of intellectual process, and are so ready with unsubstantiated put-downs and condescending snipes, ought to be the last one to dare to try to hang that kind of critique around someone else's neck.
As to sensitivity to that "troll" moniker, and that spirited speech on "intellectual diversity:" What -- are you claiming a general garment held out by the commenter is cut to your measurements?
Whip it to him, Bill! Lay it on thick!
I just love your diction, sir. Finally figured out who it reminds me of: Douglas MacArthur.
Too bad you don't get to don the powdered wig and black robe, sit up on the high bench, and get to make rulings on what evidence is allowed.
I guess anyone reading this part of the thread, and the rest of blogspace of course, can and will decide for themselves the relevance and materiality and weight and credibility of the comments that get moderated into the flow...
"Let's shoot! Light 'em all up!"
"Yeah, we got one guy crawling around down there, but, uh, you know, we got, we definitely got something." I've looked at that video many times, and maybe you need to post the time when you say it "clearly shows a guy with an RPG aiming it towards the helicopter." Were the kids in the van a "threat" to the hotshots in the helos? Oh, yeah, they might grow up to be "Talibanners." Took care of that, right?
So the rule of engagement was what, again? Suspicion plus excitement plus the oh-so-surprising sighting of what might be an AK and might be an RPG launcher in a place that courtesy of the US invasion was turned into a kind of Mad MAx Paradise = "Kill 'em all, and let Allah sort them out"? kind of like the ol' free-fire zone rule when I was in Vietnam, McNamara says under zero-based budgeting an artillery unit has to shoot up its allotment of shells every month, or get fewer the next month, so areas declared "enemy," square miles of territory, could be blasted with impunity, maybe sometimes even killing people who just wanted the invaders out of their damn country? Or maybe just a farmer or fisherman who just wanted to be left alone to make his meager living?
You got any kind of link to "the full video" you preach from?, Oh, that's right -- it's classified.
Speaking of courage of convictions and oath-breaking, how about the consequences for the people who actually ran Abu Ghraib, and who ordered Pat Tillman into the Valley of the Shadow of Death and then tried to make a fraud out of even his actual sacrifice, or who steal trillions via the Pentagram's opaque budget, or who help nominally US war contractors sell deadly shi_ to people who are nominally "our enemies," or all the various officers and contractors right across the Bay from me at MacDill/SOCOM who have been lining their pockets and feathering their nests and lying through their oath-taking teeth about it until somebody blows the whistle on them. And of course there's darn near a plethora of other and worse examples out there, aren't there?
One can see why our Rulers and their minions are so desperate to cork off and terrorize anyone thinking to act on conscience and in the direction of honesty and "transparency" and the common good, and to dare to shine a little light on the rats and cockroaches spreading disease and eating huge lumps of wealth and setting the conditions for their fellow creatures to profit from the rot and despair.
You have to love the sick excuse given by the Players and their apologists protecting their shell games and pigeon drops, http://scams.wikispaces.com/The+Pigeon+Drop, their excuse for all the destructive, parasitic crap that goes on "covertly," where only the corrupt and venal are allowed to know about it because they are part of the crime, or what would be a crime if they hadn't re-written "the law" to render what they do "not illegal" (as if that makes it RIGHT), or so control the means and methods of social control that they are beyond all consequences... that sick excuse that goes "well, we HAVE to conduct all this 'diplomacy' and violence and graft in secret, because 'freedom' 'security' 'n 'stability' 'n stuff."
"It has always been this way." Well, at some point, as the planet appears to be indicating, there is an end. But the self-interested and perverse will just say "it won't affect me, personally, and hey, if everyone else is doing it, I'd be a fool, a freier, http://mondoweiss.net/2009/07/jpost-memo-to-obama-israel-doesnt-keep-its-word-on-settlements.html, not to do it too..."
Yah, you ought to know about talking through one's hat, all ten gallons' worth. You and "Chip off the old block" seem to be the ones with the incomplete, warped, biased and censored "knowledge of history."
You want to apotheosize Obama as some paragon of General Welfare virtue, it's incumbent on you, like with the Catholic Church, to at least prove up or invent a few of the miracles that you assert warrant beatification. But then the game here is just drive-by impeachment, isn't it? No facts required. As in the courtroom, with the jury in the box: "Have you stopped beating your wife? I withdraw the question."
For those looking to call it all just a bunch of CT, here's this: http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread692822/pg1
"Our government" would never do this kind of stuff. Right?
Two things: got a link to Cornell West's "admission," so the rest of us can test your assertion if we care to? And going by the "standards of the international community" and what is called HISTORY, the parts that the rest of us uncover or are allowed to see, maybe the claimed statement is accurate?
Want some cookies with your 'ilk'?
Big IFs:
1. Pollard's detention patently has NOT deterred Israelis and their agents here from espionage against the US and even against US "interests."
http://www.councilforthenationalinterest.org/costs/spying
This next link is really fun: http://www.presstv.com/detail/2013/03/14/293496/israel-cyberspying-on-us-with-immunity/ And of course there's lots more at "israeli espionage against the United States" in Google.
The Game just goes on -- we mopes are invited to see what is supposed to be a nice neat continue-the-Cold-War zero-sum-seeming Game, while at an honest level of detail, you have nothing but Bad Actors and their contractors and apologists managing a huge abuse of loyalties and an awesome transfer of wealth, a gigantic and always-growing engine of destruction and destabilization, war contractors buying from each other across "conflict" lines and selling to anyone with money including money "our" government rips out of our tax revenues and gifts to "Others" to in turn gift to the Lockheed-"We never forget who we're working for"-Martins and General Atomics and Boeing "Bribe your way to a signed contract" companies and the rest.
So:
2. If your hoped-for crushing of the impetus to expose evil and treachery and lies and fraud that your hoped-for long sentence on Bradley Manning would hopefully accomplish is passed, and m\Manning is off to Leavenworth to break rocks for an eternity, well gee, how, in the worldwide regime of "opacity" of all the covert stuff you imply and even state knowledge of, will there be a snowball's chance for the survival of any vestige of a healthy ordinary civilian economy? Or anything like what we think of when we thingk "democracy," which REQUIRES openness and transparency and all that if there's a prayer it is going to work as promised.
If "the government" succeeds, "legally" of course, for those who apparently think that an argument that something is "legal" excuses most other faults, in deterring or at least squelching and quashing and crushing any person who might, I don't know, point out that certain generals are plotting a coup with certain business interests, to do away with any "government of the people, by the people and for the people" once and for all, I guess that would be a good thing in your system of values. Because after all, the discloser would have taken an OATH, or signed a chit for their security clearance, and breaking that is a much worse sin and more damning and damaging than the barstids in the Pentagram who "disappear" trillions into who-knows-what activities and war toys that do just what, again, to protect "our national interest"?
It would take pages to list out even just the more egregious frauds and betrayals performed by any number of 'people who have taken oaths to support and defend the Constitution of the United ('Untied'?) States' and who also have, it boggles the mind, SECURITY CLEARANCES, and even better, the power to CLASSIFY documents and other evidence to "protect them from disclosure to our ('their'?) enemies"!!. Google "Pentagon fraud," and here's just one among many, many substantive entries: http://nation.time.com/2011/10/20/pentagon-fraud-business-as-usual/ Or how about this little piece, on the TRUE uses of "classification?" http://www.veteranstoday.com/2012/08/31/waging-war-on-leaks/
Interesting, what some of us give and so pedantically and didactically express such staunch loyalty to...
Say what?
That bit of a quote from Obama ought to illuminate the snickering fraud that marks "Americanism." In case anyone missed the irony on account of getting all misty-eyed in response to a sonorous, generous-sounding pronunciamento from The Only President We've Got.
What "international community" are you invoking, sir? Which Universal Rights are those, again, Mr. President? And I guess the "we all" who have to "struggle" to uphold them does not include "you-all" or any part of the state security apparatus that's busily working to make sure those Universal Rights become just a quaint memory...
They got a Jesuit with an ear for marketing.
Actually, this bare description sounds like what our Brass does all the time, sending Our Troops out along IED Alleys and into the Valley of the Shadow of Death, expecting them to trigger ambushes and to take, and make, casualties, telling them that THIS Wardak or THAT Helmand will be THE turning point in the Great War of Justice and Freedom'n'Democracy (tn) or Whatever, that the Troops would be proud to tell their grandchildren they were a decisive part of... with the Brass pretending they have a Plan for Victory of some sort, over some undefined Enemy, just like most general officers have done since Hammurabi. Check these charming travelogues, especially "Restrepo," for a taste of reality...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Afghanistan_War_%282001%E2%80%93present%29_documentaries Pick your own point of view.
Nice sounding sound bite, though about those serious Tunisian government people and their brave reaction to "extremists," which is I guess the new moniker, insurgent and Taliban and all the others maybe having been rendered "not operative?" Hey, if nothing else, there's a business opportunity here! These Troops obviously need Better Weapons and More Training! Pour it on!
Anyone got any links or sources that purport to be anything like an honest after-action report, from the Shootout At The Algerian Border, to allow something like an informed remark, more than some jingoist, I-live-for-the-Great-Game chest-thumping?
That's arrogating a lot of power of decision, when it comes to deciding whether the projection of power, whether invasion or stand-off or via some "covert" means, is "right or wrong." What does "the evidence" have to show? A poll or three, with all the weaknesses of such "evidence," that some plurality or majority of those polled "see the action as a good move?" How long after the action is the litmus test to be applied? Which set of the population gets polled? What are the actual questions, the conduct of the pollers, and all that other stuff? And do we, the suppliers and appliers of force, get to call it an "intervention," a gentle term that also covers what family members do to a black sheep with a drug or hoarding problem?
And as Joe asks of others, do you have links showing "that most libyans do see the intervention as a good move"?
Gee, we got a whole large chunk of our government working to "write people out of their own history," the government, in all its parts, overt and co-, that "we the people" pay for and provide The Troops We Support and all their really cool weapons, and sneaky-petes and jackals out in "the field," and server banks that are connected to little sockets that let our government, Inc., tap into communications of a private and business and even needle-in-an-infinitely-large-cowpie-stuck-there-often-by-FBI-etc.-provacateurs emails and phone calls and internet traffic that MIGHT be between TERRAists (or of interest to what used to be called "corporate spies")... There's a whole long history, 200 years plus, of the US "writing people out of their own history" like, say, maybe, in the case of native Americans, east to west, and in Central and South America, and in Italy and South Korea and Nicaragua and Chile and Iran and Iraq, though it looks like the people who live in what we call Afghanistan are about to kick most of "our" asses out of THEIR country, but not before we f___ed it up worse and piled corruption on body count and took a couple of trillion out of Our Economy into "privatized" hands, oh, and let us not forget Vietnam, my personal favorite! And more recently, even us ordinary Americans, pledging our allegiance to flag and republic, are being written out of our own history, just ask the neos and PNAC and the Kochs the details of that one, us suckers who still believe in that Rule of Law that the government and its friends say made the Libya thing all "legal," us suckers that still believe that the Constitution actually directs much of anything, any more.
And I bet that wise scholars of historiography know all the other places where the Great Game has been and is being played by "us," or the people who pretend to represent "us" and "our" interests, in the supposed service of some noise called "US national interests," that everybody who is "responsible" knows exactly what they are, except they can't say what, with even a bit of clarity.
And this constant recourse to claims that US actions in places like Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and now Syria are all "legal": That's a very interesting assertion, with a whole lot of scholarship that comes to a very different conclusion about the size, shape, placement and effect of the fig leaves our serial administrations have attempted to apply. Say the apologists:
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2011-06-15-libya-white-house_n.htm
Say others: http://reason.com/blog/2011/08/22/does-toppling-qaddafi-make-us
http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/04/14/more_to_read_about_libya
And lots more, of course.
"It's ok because we say it's ok." Where has that theme been heard before? And it's ok that chaos follows intervention, because that's what always happens with humans, and if the policies of various players tend to create and exacerbate the theft and oppression that occasion the dissatisfactions and pain that finally lead to revolts, and offer opportunities to "act, for humanitarian reasons," well hey, that's just the strict rules of golf in action.
Like Rumsfeld said, you always have known unknowns, and so, well, there you go! Unlimber ol' Shock'n'Awe! And keep on building and expanding and remodeling the toppling tower of imperial might...
Sir, you say "need help with security training" and "train some 5000 Libyan troops." One wonders what the course syllabi of these "trainings" consists of. Going by what is taught at the School of the Americas and by various CIA employees and "rogue former employees" and the entire large post-national "security" business, the content will not start with an oath to support and defend any kind of "constitution" that makes even a nod toward any kind of "democracy" that fits with what our foggy-minded "patriots" intuit when the hear the word.
And which tribes will be "trained?" What tradition of citizen-soldiery will be drawn on? It would never happen that the people who will be directing and funding the "training" (and inevitable indoctrination, unless the goal is to just give a bunch of angry males some combat and crowd-crushing skills and turn them loose to do whatever) would be at all interested in creating a new crop of Janissaries, now would it?
Our apologists/loyalists/obscurantists here and elsewhere would have the rest of us believe that one should never project future conduct from the uncovered past behavior (of the people who constitute the action arm of the CIA and related organizations, or the officers and contractors whose personal tics and psychoses cause them to gravitate to positions running sh_t like the School of the Americas).
And they would reassure us, with pats on the head, that all the myriad dare we call them "anti-democratic" actions of Our Great Nation's (and others' too) power-projection critters must each be taken as sui generis, and no indication of the real, long-term, consistent nature of a large, rough and grasping Hydra of a beast.
I would want a whole lot more clarity about the who, what, when, where, how and why part of all this "training," before just swallowing the bait and hook that our rulers, here and there, dangle: "Trust us, we are just trying to "stabilize" a dangerous situation. All that's needed is a competent national army and national police force, and we can give them just what the doctor ordered." Which doctor? Duvalier? Mengele? No interest at all, we are mythologized into believing and imagining, in advancing the already massive clout of the business class, especially the ones in the military and state-security, for whom the degree of opulence and influence of their current lives, and the "comfort" of their retirements, depend on how much they can steal and on preserving their privileges and the status quo or fertilizing the killing fields to allow their kind to root and prosper.
There's a reason the "honest graft" pronouncement of George Washington Plunkitt resonates so deeply: "I seen my opportunities and I took 'em." http://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/66767.html He's just one pig on the porch at the Animal Farm, and Yasser Arafat, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/09/in-a-ruined-country/304167/, and a bunch of Israeli pols, http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/08/31/a-nation-under-investigation.html, and J. Edgar Hoover and the Dulles Boys and any number of past, current and "developing" "leaders" are sitting up there with them, smoking cigars and snifting fine brandy and laughing at how stupid the rest of us four-leggers are...
If you have a prescription for how to "train" the monopoly-on-force troops and cops and spies in some way that will eventually produce a civil, productive, sustainable, comity-driven society with a minimum of corruption and incentives to personal greed and the eventual turning of the cycle of wealth concentration, collapse or revolution, please lay it out there. It would have to include some kind of Strange Attractor impelling movement toward that Golden Rule thing, it would seem. It would be an incredibly hard sell, to the people who have the power and presence and accumulated wealth to actually, you know, write the syllabus and hire and dispatch the "trainers" and then try to hold the leashes of the dogs they have trained, thinking they have ensured some kind of overt or covert obeisance and obedience, but not having to really care, since they are totally and completely and, with a waft of a pen, "legally," insulated from the consequences...
As with various US-involved government overthrows, and the many others that have not benefited from US involvement, after the fact the successful regime changes are ipso facto "not illegal." That's the thing about Rule of Law: there are no rights without remedies, and without enforcement of "the law," that chimaerical beast, who's to say what is legal or not? There's a gazillion examples of "interpretations" and prosecutorial discretions and ambiguities and flat-out "statues and treaties and constitution are quaint documents" that only need to be referred to if they support the Will of the Ruler. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHs2coAzLJ8
After all, f___ing up Iraq was "legal."