Makes one wonder how to even define the "problem(s)," far less envision the things that can be done to "fix it(them)." I guess the Wise just go about pursuing their "national and/or commercial and/or parochial interests," even if those pursuits make all the other problems ever worser...
Army techs used to say that the guy who designed the mechanical-hydraulic computer that was the fuel-control unit for the Lycoming T-53 turboshaft engine, which powered the Hueys I flew around in and fixed way back when, went insane from figuring out the relatively straightforward problem of getting some 8,000 tiny precision parts to meter JP-4 to the combustion section. Cf. "peace in the Middle East."
For wry smiles, a little divertimento from all the seriousness (though I guess helos were used to deliver barrel bombs, screw over various indigenous populations, and drop "political prisoners" into Disappeared status in the South Atlantic): http://www.airaffair.com/Library/Archive/Part2/heli_humor
Are there joke collections that capture the essence of (presumably grim, if "Allahu Akhbar" ebullient) takfiri humor... or would they shoot you for even asking?
Bill and Joe, from their separate anonymous perches, seem to be, along with a bunch of others in PolicySpace, standing bravely as rear guards fighting a sophisticated, sophistry-weighted holding action to allow the people, the relatively few, who "own" everything and structure the continued play of the Great Game and the "growth" of consumption, to escape consequence-free from any effective action to force or arrange any change in the gross and particular behaviors that have Dr. Cole putting up posts about planetary ecological collapse and the horrors of maybe-post-colonial conditions across so much of the planet.
So much detailed and slightly competitive erudition. Kind of diverts from and obscures the bigger picture, the larger human-nature thingie of imperial overlords conquering and manipulating and stirring the pot to keep certain other things from happening. Much of that accomplished by sneaky-petes, including Lawrence and how many of "our" CIA dudes and dude-ettes, who figure out how to catalyze big events with little frauds and gifts and personality games.
"The British, having destabilized Palestine and Syria, went on to leave Iraq with an untenable imperial legacy of Sunni rule over Shiites and Kurds, setting the stage for the current civil war." And now "our" jackals and the tendrils of the Global Interoperabbable Dysnetwork-Centric We Run Everything Battlespace Management Consortium continue that tradition, having been at it pretty consistently and on increasingly grandiose scale since what, the 1920s? 1880s?
Bear in mind the creed of the Kleptocrats who are engineering all this (aided by some really unfortunate and so easily exploitable "features" in the wetware programming of the rest of us): "Apres nous le deluge," or in the argot of what we call "Wall Street," "IBG-YBG" ("I'll be gone -- you'll be gone"). Because there are no consequences for predatory and parasitic behaviors that threaten the rest of us and even the "posterity" of these creatures (not, unfortunately, their "posteriors,") and they can take the attitude that they are immune, for their lifetimes, can get away with all that crap (along with their "people:" who ride along like little remoras), and what are us mopes going to do to them? trash their corpses or ashes? Deface their monuments?
The "grand theory" is actually just an observation that humans, under various flags, banners and excuses, and led by some really cynical and sociopathic SOBs, do serious and futile and self-perpetuating violence to one another. So you contest that al Quaeda is an "identity group?' Really? The way into the franchise is by pledging allegiance and fealty and loyalty and all that to whom, again? And what does the Administration say that Al Quaeda opposes and wants to destroy, as an index of who the adherents actually think they are? And one might be careful about cautioning others to keep the facts straight, and to accurately try to distinguish distinct and different events (while daring to look for larger patterns), after demonstrating some weakness in the same supposed flaws...
Actually, my "gut" tells me that the pre-Islam Christianization of that area was a complex process that included piggy-backing on the actions of Roman and Byzantine empires, not noted for their kindness, but eventually noted for their corruption-encouraged fading, and being overcome, by the "enthusiasms" of expansive Islam. To clarify my point, the history of that region and most of the rest of the world is replete with and in many ways driven by organized and/or anomic violence of the sort so evident right now. As far as I can tell, there are no "moral claims" to righteousness and territory, except in the myths various groups of us tell ourselves. Your grafting that "gut" misreading onto what I wrote is all invention.
For a tiny bit of the full complex context, on the "Christianizing" of the Levant, for anyone interested, look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Christians There of course is so very much more.
Converts to many new identities tend to be "enthusiastic" in their desire to dominate, decimate or dispossess others... The trick, in my humble estimation, for humans to survive much longer, is to find some common ethical and behavioral structure that puts survival and comity, on a large scale, ahead of personal advancement and profit and the proselyte's monomania. A fool's dream, I know... with so many others finding personal gain, identity or satisfaction of various perversions in doing the usual thing.
And how did "Christendom" come by its "ownership" of the Levant, again?
As an historian, Bill knows that the winners (and Rulers) write the histories, and get to choose the "facts," and insinuate the selected themes and labels, that get injected into our thinking and discourse.
@DG, Just curious: Do you think "al Quaeda" is about SPREADING IDEOLOGY, as opposed to a macho, crushing paternalism and take-it-all-for-ourselves IDENTITY, an identity that spews out of the worst places in the human psyche and in which there's a horrible race to the bottom? Were the Tamils about "spreading ideology," or the Lord's Resistance Army? Even if you look at it from an organizational standpoint, what are those "militias?" And what do they do? How about the Hutus hacking up the Tutsis?
Too bad "we" can't understand and arrange ourselves better, so that the crap that drives ALL this "extremism" gets finally lost in bad old history...
Maybe "Israel" is so involved in its rulers' destructive paternalism, and of course their heavy and profitable participation in the whole global post-trans-national arms-bazaar consortium, that there's not a lot of money or energy left over to be taking care of ordinary-person needs like water and energy and housing and such. Of course, it's all very complicated and obscured...
As to how and why the people who live behind the mask and shibboleth of "Israel," are the way they are, use your favorite search engine with "Israel corruption" as a search term. Some of the context:
Those 200 or 400 or 600 nukes, and those Krupp-built submarines, and all that other power-projection stuff that "we" winked at or supplied, sure start to loom large. Wonder what our War Planners have up their sleeves should the "Israelis" go all "USS Liberty" on the 6th Fleet, that is supposedly there to "advance security and stability in Europe and Africa." Bearing in mind that in war games, even a US asymmetric General running the "Arab Force" was able to sink most of that fleet in a few hours...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
No worries, it's all LEGAL. And the "proofs" or "reasonable doubt units" relating that there really were "threats to the national interest" in among the wedding convoy are being generated and disseminated by the Ministry of Truth right now, to provide cover for the continued idiocy... Let the fracking continue...
Short version of the longer response I posted too:
Hi, Bill! You know that is not what I said or was talking about. You are misdirecting, at best. You don't get to put words in my mouth, or hijack the train of thought, unchallenged.
Just curious, though: You got any rebuttal to the notion that that "horror" stuff produced by profitable weaponizing and sneaky-pete exacerbation of social divides, so voluminously cataloged in Death Selfies on youtube and such places these days, is valued at something close to ZERO, in the geoplotical (sic intended) calculus? Or any examples of "successful US or UN humanitarian interventions?"
Hi, Bill! No, you don't get to put words in my mouth.
You never make it clear what your involvement with "the US" that you always pitch for was, or is, but the people who have arrogated to themselves the power to deploy and project the munitions and "policy" of that reification you call "the US," to supposedly serve some chimaerical "national interest," have demonstrated an uncanny ability to destabilize, demolish, destroy, confiscate, divert, dissemble, and generally screw things up and create horror for what our rulers and troopers tend to call "wogs" and "gooks" and "Hajjis," all over the place. Nothing new for Players in the Great Game since at least Hammurabi and Sun Tzu, of course, so no particular opprobrium for "our" Empire there, except maybe as to ambition and scale.
And as pointed out by actual Serious Historians, "our" "humanitarian interventions," http://www.thenation.com/search/apachesolr_search/humanitarian%20intervention, like "nation-building" (which the Pentagram acknowledges is code for "regime change," with all that means) tend to be at the best only minutely "humanitarian" and only peripherally about "building."
What "we," or those of you who wield that imperial power, are useless and actively antithetical to are lines of thought and action that lead to silly stuff like dealing with or more wisely trying to amend the behaviors that lead to stuff like "climate change" and the endless round of profitable militarization and crushing "globalization," that shorthand for the triumph of short-term profit maximization and consequence-free Large Living for a tiny few with NO "NATIONAL" LOYALTIES AT ALL.
The "reality" all the Serious Players and Apologists yak about is a mashup of PR spin, selfish little career and bonus-baby interests, and millennia of "ruling elites" preying on everyone else. The Solons and Socrates's get knifed or garrotted or hemlocked before any marking out of pathways and incentives to decency and comity have a chance to mature.
The best thing "WE" could do is keep "OUR" amoral clumsy greedy noses out of other peoples' lives and business, and to instead serve as "WE" sort of did for a few decades as an actual beacon of hope for the aspirations of peoples wanting economic fairness or at least a bigger share, and participation, however attenuated by republic-ism, in their ruling.
You got any challenge to the notion that that "horror" stuff is valued at something close to ZERO, in the geoplotical (sic intended) calculus? You care to make a case for any "successful" "humanitarian intervention" by the overt forces and sneaky-petes marching, steaming, flying or acting under color of the ol' Red, White and Blue? Or for the long-term, species-survival wisdom of all those centuries, now, of "policy?" Or is it not honestly all about grabbing, or getting the lower orders to create or grab for "US," what "WE" can? Grab now, with some nod to maybe keeping the Syndicate in operation long enough for the present Mob to get theirs, and who cares about future generations that can neither vote, hahahahaha, nor object? All in the "national interest," which you wisely never deign to define, of course...
Too bad calculations of "US interests" by the people who get to say what they are, without the inconvenience of asking "the US" or any fear of consequences for "miscalculations," don't include long-view enumerations of what's good for the planet and the people who remain on it. The "realists" who are so good at mouthing the "US national interests" phrase seem mostly interested in preserving old-fashioned if now technically much advanced "freedom of action" for various military and economic factions (much the same thing, any more), regarding control of or just relationship to certain kinds of consumable resources and wealth transfers. The human-pain horror you can see in Syria and so many other places apparently just has a value near "zero" in the complicated formulae. But then the horrors of today are the reconstruction bonanzas of tomorrow, right? Or the seeds of new horrors to come, all of which can be short-term profit centers if one puts one's mind to it...
If you do some math on the costs of "warfighting" in my little war, Vietnam, and accept even the inflated body counts of "effectives killed," it works out to about $400,000 for each "gook" corpse or part thereof taken out of our "exceptional economy" and transferred to the whole complex Great Game machinery. One suggestion that was maybe in "Stars&Stripes" was to mint a bunch of the little gold ingots that people there favored for savings, maybe half the size of a business card, put little parachutes on them, and drop them from those B-52s and FB-111s and A-4s instead of cluster bombs and daisy cutters and Arc Light sexplosive ordnance. Would have done a lot more to change hearts and minds than the other crap...
Rather than just assuming that there's any kind of logic or wisdom to this (relatively puny, though not if you have to depend on "Public Assistance") $1.6 billion chunk of the nation's Real Wealth going into a giant corruption sink like Pakistan (note that this is "OVERT" accounting only, who knows about "other expenditures?"), largely via the cloaca known as the "Pentagon," it seemed worth a minute of futility-reinforcement to look for some context and detail, so here it is for anyone else who give a s__t:
"Direct Overt U.S. Aid Appropriations for and Military Reimbursements to Pakistan, FY2002-FY2014"
Nit-pickers and whisperers, add your Narrative here:
.
Please remind us idiots who BELEEEEEVE that all of this has been declared "LEEEGAL" by the institutions that sneer at our cherished shibboleths and faith in "the system" and our sad and desperate need for belief in limits, and Rule of Law...
Here's one part of how it's made "legal," and how idiotic Great Game pseudopodian "programs" get "justified and explained:"
"Does the aid require Egypt to meet any specific conditions regarding human rights?
Not really. When an exiled Egyptian dissident called on the U.S. to attach conditions to aid to Egypt in 2008, Francis J. Ricciardone Jr., who had recently stepped down as the U.S. ambassador to Egypt, told the Washington Post the idea was "admirable but not realistic." And then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in 2009 that military aid "should be without conditions" at a Cairo press conference."
And this is why the truly organized people, shameless in pursuit of their own idiot "interests," own the rest of us. And why people of good will can so easily be diverted by fortuitous or intentional injections of FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) into the discourse that might otherwise lead to any kind of decent, sensible, sustainable action.
Whose history shall we put the handshake in perspective with?
So "our guy" shakes hands with "their guy." And nobody notes that thanks to the way the tapeworms have entwined in the guts of the world, there really is not a whole lot of difference between what "our guy" "stands for," and what "their guy " "stands for." Either way, the kleptocrats suck ever more of the nutrition and vitality out of the people and the planet, and keep on crapping out more cysts and segments as they grow and multiply. http://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/science/tapeworm-reproduction.html
"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which. "
Hi, Joe! Maybe not altogether "cosmetic," but then you need to put a lot of lipstick on a pig...
Maybe "chimaerical" is more accurate: How's that Hope and Change crap working out for us ordinary people? Dem or Rep or Nader, join a party and vote all you want, but the "ownership society" owns ever more of everything, and rents it back to the rest of us, and sells us crap at the Company Store, for ever higher prices. What "real material gains," what "large reduction in poverty?" Got some support for that contention? Whether here or in South Africa? The disparity grows apace, as does the consumption of the living planet, for the short-term titillation of the Very Few who bear no costs.
The "right to protest?" That, as Roberts and Scalia and the Kochs and all know, is subject to that old truth that "there are no rights without remedies." Ask the Occupy people how that works -- pepper spray in the eyes, "non-lethal rounds" to the head, coordinated nationwide police repression, "First Amendment Zones" miles from the gatherings of the sneering powerful ...
And don't cite this site as "evidence" of "freedom of speech" -- every keystroke is collected and collated, and can be turned, or turned off, at whim. This stuff, like Tomgram and other "protest" sites and publications, is tolerated by Power, and I think in part because it implicitly teaches anyone with a brain, and eyes to see, the apparent futility of organizing and protest.
Wherever Anonymous Joe sits, and whatever he fronts for, here and in other netspaces where he and such folks sell their pitch, there's plenty of whisperers and shills, really sharp ones, insinuating and interstitializing their little bits of intellectual pathogens.
I am curious if there is a little listing of people, other than our host, of course, who "the government," or that part of the monster that's all about enforcing idiocy and "conformity" and "shut up and eat your dirt-ity" has gone about "getting."
Bless Dr. Cole for having his own presence in the Imperial Capital as technical adviser to parts of "the government," and I hope that was part of the reason the "getting" got exposed, at least, though given the tenacity of bureaucrats in the State Security, you can bet there's still a "dossier" floating around, waiting for another bite at the apple. Not all the people targeted by our own snowballing Stasi for "get"ting have sufficient presence and cachet to hope for the same treatment. And not all of us, mice and sheep that we mostly are, with imaginations that conjure up, from Serious Historical Events and reading and even experience, all the bad stuff that can be visited upon us and those dear to us, have what it takes to persevere in trying to preserve against all the enormous enormity of all that oligopolaholic Bigness, in trying to preserve some whisper of individual and collective rights, for the "masses."
Hang together, if we can, given the inroads the Peeping Toms attracted to "Security Careers" are making in the actual ability to "asssemble and petition for redress of grievances," or hang separately...
Jasper has posited a "right" of the present 7.129-odd billion humans, and the 3-4 billion his assumptions add to the population in the next 40 years, to "expand their energy usage." Apparently with a tacit assumption that all the present indulgences and modes of converting stored to kinetic to waste-heat energy for "consumption" must be allowed to continue and expand, especially for the many humans who have not experience the pleasure of driving a Cadillac Escalade. The present level of combusto-consumption conversion, I bet he agrees, is unsustainable on a living planet, and from wherever he is coming from, politically and socially, I kind of doubt that "nuclear" has a prayer of making the situation any better. Nuke plants are as safe as they are (not very, it appears) largely because of "regulation" (and there's some anecdotal evidence that even with "regulation" in a world plagued with corruption and mischance, that is "not very") and a huge wealth transfer from ratepayers and public sources to the owners and rentiers of those plants. (Here in west FL, we ratepayers are, thanks to regulatory capture, giving Duke Power a $(as yet to be determined number of but at least 4) billion-dollar windfall in "rates" to pay for a nuclear plant that WILL NEVER BE BUILT. http://www.abcactionnews.com/dpp/news/duke-energy-customers-angry-about-money-for-nothing And for a plant at Crystal River that "free enterprise" suits (albeit from the Progress Energy entity that Duke bought to get that unearned profit), in their arrogance, was so badly damaged in "improving" it without benefit of "costly" outside engineering guidance that it is off the grid forever. http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2013-02-05/news/os-progress-energy-nuclear-plant-20130205_1_nuclear-plant-nuclear-power-plant-nuclear-electric-insurance
Partisans for "energy options" ought to announce their interest. In the name of that silly myth, "transparency." So the rest of us have a prayer of making choices, that of course includes the choice to "eat drink and be merry," because apres nous le deluge...
Of course, neither the bits of "China" that did those deals with Karzai's gang for the sale of "national" common wealth are hardly more honorable than contractors flying the US imperial colors. Just sharper at the Game of Empire than the Players flying "our" flag...
Hi Jasper! Amazing what one can do with a calculator anda handful of assumptions! Like to establish just what, again? That unless we all go for nuclear power, which with externalities and uncertainties costs HOW much, again? And let's just ignore the rutting bull elephant on the ballroom, and not "factor in" the real costs, in rights, health, stability and the chance our grandchildren won't have to eat Soylent Green, or each other in a much more direct manner? The whole shoot in' match, as constituted, provides a pretty bleak certainty for the little blue planet we collectively had the chance to be stewards of...
Good thing Scahill is more articulate in the promo video and his movie than he was in that Goodman interview. Not that any degree of articulate exposition of the corruption and idiocy at the heart of that Forever War crap will ever even begin to overcome the flood of Apologiae and recitation of shibboleths and that stupid aggressive complacence and arrogance that lies at the heart of the Empire. And of course the wonderful effects of all that self-catalyzing aggregation of Money, flooding around the gates of the Imperial Capital and its outposts...
But of course we all need to remember that according to the Serious Voices, this is all wise and legal and somehow meaningful. Not to mention profitable, and a whole lot of fun, for most of the Players in the Game.
How can ordinary people who pay for, and suffer the depredations of all this crap ,ever overturn the "system," or demand, and GET, a redirection of all that wealth and energy? How can we ordinary people ever defeat this kind of idiotic self-perpetuating and growing corruption? When do the most of us start to realize that there really is an existential threat to us and our families and friends?
And it's not like all this crap we are paying so dearly for is actually in any way making the world a better place... Except, seemingly, for those who persevere in the Game of becoming general or admiral...
It grows like a cancer, quietly, out of sight, until it eventually kills the patient.
Speaking of cancer, in the meantime THIS is what's going on vis-a-vis the Actual Warriors and their survivors:
He was president at a time when the momentum of the New Deal as well as the whole economic boom we all so fondly want to return to (just needs another global war to get back to?). He may not have "raised taxes on the rich" but on his watch the marginal tax rate for the REAL takers at the top of the heap was 92%, dropping to 91% via CONGRESSIONAL action while he was in office.
Interesting how the same sort of thing happens to other community organizer/lawyer types, isn't it? Even ones that did not have to do the in-prison martyrdom time to get their "creds..."
Waiting for the pithy riposte that reassures us that all is well in the West Wing, that "(faux) moderation in the pursuit of hegemonoligarchy is no vice..."
Too bad there's hardly a smidgen of the kind of people that think about and have the skill and fortitude to act on the notions that push in the direction of decency and comity and stability. And how many of them end up killed off early? Gandhi, Martin Luther King, maybe Jesus of Nazareth, and a relative handful more? Too few, usually, in any era, to counterbalance the Krupps and Kochs and Cheneys, who think of the rest of us, believe it or not, as "masses" to be herded and bled.
And as o=Prof. Cole notes, so many sneaks and apologists and frauds are Johnny-on-the-Spot to ride the emotions and milk the pathos and derail the real messages and print and sell the T-shirts and other memorabilia... Obama pronounces, sonorously and maybe with a sigh of relief that one more possible "threat" to the Empire is off the scene, "Now he belongs to the ages." -sniff--
How many know (or care) what MLK's observations on social justice and wealth distribution were?
The Afrikaners took over South Africa following a playbook that the Roves and Gingriches and Kochs have been reading from for decades. Infiltrate the lower levels of the bureaucracy, local and state, with people sworn to allegiance to the Oligarchy, control the schools and other public and eventually private means of learning, fill the higher levels of the bureaucracies and the courts with fellow travelers, all that stuff. http://books.google.com/books?id=UTNhTscJ9m4C&pg=PA96&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false
"It's only a movie," actually a franchise as Hollywood calls it, but people wanting clues about Dystroit might go back and enjoy (?) the "Robocop" series.. Not uniformly good theater, but Omni Consumer Products sure looks familiar, as do its principals (and principles, if you can call them that.)
"In the near future, Detroit, Michigan is on the verge of collapse due to financial ruin and overrun by crime. The city has signed a deal with the mega-corporation Omni Consumer Products (OCP) to allow them to run the police force, in exchange for allowing OCP to demolish "Old Detroit" and construct a high-end utopia called "Delta City" to be managed by OCP. This moves angers the police officers as they are now beholden to OCP, and threaten to strike. OCP evaluates other options for law enforcement. OCP senior president Dick Jones (Ronny Cox) offers the ED-209 enforcement droid, but when it kills a board member during a demonstration, the OCP chairman (Dan O'Herlihy) decides to go with the experimental cyborg design titled "Robocop" as suggested by the younger Bob Morton (Miguel Ferrer), infuriating Jones...."
Yah, it's all a matter of categories and definitions, isn't it? The Exceptional US and its subsidiaries and affiliates, as pointed out by some of the sneered-at comments, and of course the main post, is run by people who so respect the rule of law and so fear the consequences of its application to them that they went to the trouble of suborning the institutions of legislation, interpretation and enforcement. Defining corruption, that great Leviathan of greed and abuse, out of existence for huge swathes of what people would generally agree, whether or not they click the first link, is the essence of deadly corruption, and criminalizing the trivial, is such a wonderfully Calvinist and hypocritical way of doing business.
And I bet, naw, I'm SURE, it's profitable, under some theories of value, to be flacking for the folks who have figured out how to scam the shibboleths that move the masses...
The trick, from the standpoint of ordinary people who do the work that makes the wealth, and then suffer and bleed thanks to that corruption in all its ugly forms, is to figure out how to limit the inevitable to a tolerable level. In smaller social units, the vulnerability of the Grabbers to correction, from shunning to more violent forms, has a chance of limiting the predation and parasitism. Not so much as the structure gets bigger...
Them robots and computers might not be bribe-able, might not demand their little mordidas, in any form one could anticipate presently. But until the Machine really becomes electronomechanical, without squishy and corrupt protoplasmic involvement, and develops its own ethics (which might, as some speculate, include killing off all that unpredictable anti-Collective protoplasm), the machines and positronic brains will be imagined, created and built in the first instance by the oh so corrupt and corruptible creatures that give us the NSA computers and bots, the "activities" of the CIA and other Mafias and supra-national corporations, the Global Interoperable Dominate The World Just Like The Commies Were Supposed To Plan To Do Network-centric Battlebabblespace,, complete with its core-value myth of "benevolent supremacy" fronting the reality of Krupp-and-Koch-land and the irrepressible impulses of the would-be and are-already Gilded Agers to own (and rent out and consume and shed externalities everywhere) EVERYTHING, with nice little profitable violent sideshows like Notagainistan and Syria and Angola and the CAR and all that.
In the good-news column, here in FL a pod of 50-odd pilot whales stranded themselves down by the Everglades, apparently led onto the beach by a few diseased individuals. Now, 35 or more of them have turned about and swum back into deeper waters (albeit waters fouled by the whole system "capped" by the BP "Deepwater Horizon incident" with its enormous and growing -- thanks to sloth and greed and other venial and mortal sins -- burden of plastic crap -- oil-based -- and dropping pH).
Anyone care to join them, in the quest for less fouled and healthier seas and survival?
Serious Historians, those dedicated,irrepressible, implacable guardians and disseminators of the National Mythology and protectors of the Powers that Be, tell us the whole Cold War schtick was one of the High Points of US Civilization. My first memory of TV viewing was of one episode of the black-and-white McCarthy "reality TV show" in about 1952, on a friend's early console TV. Scary crap for a little tyke in first grade, starting out in the process of trying to learn how to be a citizen... And of course it's gotten a lot worse. Maybe it will be a relief to finally come to love Big Brother. And if I can also make myself useful to the Matrix, I'll get to decline into senescence with some grace... Seems like past service in the older Imperial Army doesn't count for much.
Milo Minderbinder's "accounting practices?" They sure did in my experience. Under McNamara's Really Smart Zero-Based Budgeting, artillery units in Vietnam had to expend all their rounds every month or risk getting fewer the next month. forget about the idiocy of the whole enterprise, this one little fillip led to end-of-month "fire missions" of lots of ordnance into the nearest "free-fire zones," parts of Vietnam that were designated by the High Command as so irretrievably "gook" that anything in there was presumptively guilty of anti-US-Interest Activity, kind of like the thinking so artfully apologized for by some who post here. Since my unit's tents were pitched just beneath the muzzles of a battery of 155 self-propelled guns, and since Marines have an "artful" sense of humor, once a month these dudes would yell out gleefully so we could anticipate it, "Fire Mission!," level their pieces, out tompions, and fire for effect over us, the muzzle blasts tending to collapse our sun-rotted tents. Blowing who-knows-or-who-cares-who-or-what to flinders some 8 or 10 miles down range. If you read the desiccated Wiki entry, you either get a nice reinforcement of your pro-warlord belief structure, or a peek into the horror at the heart of what we humans do:
Oh, come on now! I read here, and see endlessly on the TV how benevolent "the US" is! Bearing in mind that "the US" is just a clumsy and obscure personification that covers all the stuff done by nominal "US" corporations (actually and mostly completelly post-national, self-loyal greed and consumption machines) and the various organs and agencies of the Empire (largely the same set as those enormous, in all senses of that word, corporate blobs) that are funded and staffed by "our" populace...
We clearly live in tough times, much tougher than most people want to face. Our species and many other species are on the chopping block. The crimes of humanity against our planetary supports may be fatal, and humanity is nowhere near making an effective corporate choice to change direction. The task of awakening the masses to these crises and rooting out conservative leaders is so huge that our existing movements of sanity are overwhelmed, and too often give up on pressing for changes adequate to the challenges we face.
It is easy to lose hope in the face of impending environmental disaster. In this photo montage, burning oil storage tanks loom amid warming temperatures and rampant floods. Credit: Creative Commons/Jean Schweitzer.
In this situation, a heresy with regard to Christian hope has arisen. I will call it “futilitarianism,” having stolen that name from one of its adherents. Futilitarianism is a fairly sober and comforting faith. It allows its believers to be honest about the current crises without having to think through how a positive outcome might be strategized and accomplished. These believers make a strong case for their peace of mind. They are correct about the futility of our liberal halfway measures. They are correct about the fact that we can never know the results of what we do. They are correct that no outward success can replace the importance of dealing with their own inner stress. They are correct in holding that even if the world around us is completely hopeless, we can still hope to live a productive and meaningful life, as the human species slides into the abyss.
And the individuals who have figured out how to profitably sucker and kill the rest of us, wholesale and retail, will live their really Large lives and pass away free from any consequences...
...and, of course, going at it from the other direction is the former nation of "America." Looks to me like "America" fails in each and every one of the categories of nationhood and presumably "Democracy" cited above. And no, Bill and Joe, it is no longer apparent that "the sainted US" can do ANYTHING "right," except in the movement of Overton windows and suchlike...
Re Bill's challenge, here is one little piece of context:
This last day of the jirga was all very strange. The ‘representatives’ of a nation of millions could not have come to such near identical conclusions as they did without behind-the-scenes organisation. How that was done was reasonably clear: the delegates were largely hand-picked and the jirga facilitators mainly came from or were organised by the Office of Administrative Affairs run by Sadeq Mudaber who was also head of the jirga secretariat and is a close Karzai ally. The pro-BSA advisor to the president on national security, former foreign minister, Rangin Dadfar Spanta, and his people were also there to answer “technical questions”. Several delegates told AAN that provincial governors, who were among the delegates, had played their ‘traditional’ role in such gatherings as government enforcers.
One can read the whole article and step back through the links, or wait for Last-Word Bill to tell us what it actually said...
Maybe Brian can't tell us because, like the excuses given for official secrecy, to do so would reveal sources, methods and actions that risk "security."
"Frankly, the US would be better off withdrawing from the Afghan quagmire..." For once, something to agree with. I might add that wisdom and the national interest might support the same notion regarding a lot of other places where US forces, of all sorts, and nominal "US"-actual-post-supra-national corporate "interests," are busily playing the Game.
But as to the pronouncement about the universality of SOFAs, might I offer this bit of context?
Good grief indeed, Bill! Did I say or even imply that M. Attaher was a neocon or anything like? I was pointing to the article in question, in context, looking for the source of the quoted words. And then maybe inartfully pointing out how difficult it will be, given all the noisy neocons and what are called, way too kindly and succinctly, "hard-liners," who gain from the Game, people whose lexicon is full of the exact "kill them all, they are less than human" content, people whose facades and dogmas run against comity and accommodation, in pursuit of "national interests" that very clearly are about money (even if the planet burns) and what Bill calls "maximum flexibility." Which in the US case is the high hand of imperialism, with all rights and range of action reserved to our rulers. National sovereignty of others? Treaty rights? "Rule of law?" To be ignored and ridden down with impunity in a fog of "legalisms" and crafty PR.
I'll cop to being angry about the framing of geopolitics that hypersimplifies and artlessly obscures the nature of the Game, including the idiotic personification of nations. If that "nail" is one of the parts of the behaviors of the powerful and those who get rich off of activities that are killing the rest of us, in my so very humble estimation, I'll gladly give Bill more chances to impeach my observations by serial mischaracterization, and to smugly denigrate from his high horse.
Maybe the reader should go look at the "sourcing" and decide for him- or herself the validity of the claimed language. http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/netanyahus-finest-hour%E2%80%94or-not-9468?page=1 And then go spend some time with the neocon "policy" rags in our very own Free Democratic America to see what some of our high officials have to say about "enemies" of one sort or another. And it's been regularly reported here that people on the other side of the ancient divide say and believe and act on notions that are at least as immoderate as the claimed Khameini words.
From that same "National Interest," there's stuff like this, too:
Just a wild guess, but isn't "Mideast peace" a kind of aspirational oxymoron? Even Bill and Joe remind us of the complexities, politely so-called, of that weird and wonderful set of interrelationships, with such a long history of backstabbing, empire building, attachments of convenience, well-bred racial and ethnic and "religious" antipathies, and one strong man after another seeking to follow the advice of 'The Prince' on gaining and holding power over others.
Too bad that there's no common model for stability and "peace" that passes from ruler to ruler through the generations, and there are always the Whisperers at the ears and keyholes of power, seeking advantage and profit... which comes generally from ever closer approaches to chaos.
Dare one point out the counter-narrative context here? The part about the Imperium dodging a bullet (actually a huge number of them) by the narrowest of fortuities, where possible idiocy or possible real sense averted yet another Milo Minderbinder "war racket," as the various "interests" with their oh so very narrow focuses and big-talking geopolitical vocabularies lumbered toward slinging Tomahawks at "targets" of some sort, "just because?" That maybe our grand geopoliticians are actually just caught up in the end-of-habitable-planet scrabble for a larger personal chunk of wealth to stimulate and protect them in the End Times they and their "policies" are apparently bringing about, and terribly aware of, or worse, oblivious to? Or that the whispering class, that tells us every day how wise and deep our Rulers are, or blows smoke in our eyes to keep our shoulders to the great wheels of Commerce, missed a little local triumph or two when accident and error stepped in?
For those of us who yak about "democracy," and "freedom," (less often flagged, the cognitive dissonance being just too much even for the jingoistiest, maybe) and that idiot fraud, "national interest," that whitewashes so much and regiments the less aware into believing they are really part, and even beneficiaries, of some grand, well-managed "progress."
It ain't a theater, it's oil' Plato's cave...
And yet a little more context, for those who care to read up on SOFAs, those bits of furniture on which our imperial centurions often park their commodious backsides:
For anyone serious about understanding SOFAs, attention to this latter link will give a more complete picture than you will get from the presumptions and presumptuous comments found here.
Ms. Marshall, you would need a rather large prayer circle to overcome the incantations of the persistent, dogged, dedicated, driven, indefatigable persons, private, public and corporate, that keep this mythical charade called "geopolitics" erected for their personal benefit, playing on the moral weaknesses and fears of the rest of us.
As you know, Mr. Player, the "countries" do not "agree:" various elites, with more or less legitimacy (usually less, often with "inputs" from our own imperial bureaucracies) go through the motions of ratifying those arrangements. The local yokels who have reason to expect that occupying troops abide by and be subject to local law get screwed. Seems our sainted Forefathers had some problem with occupation troops too, leading to
"No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution And one Forefather, John Adams, represented the British soldiers in COLONIAL LOCAL court against homicide charges, where the colonists had been doing the same stuff that "militant insurgents" are doing in other imperially occupied places.
You wonder, too, if there are not other "inducements to (temporary and convenient) 'loyalty'" in play. Is there a part number for the shrink-wrapper used to brick up those millions in bribe money? "Get out of jail free" cards for the successful opium makers?
Recall that our imperial military is so wedded to the mission du jour that they will bribe "terrorists," or are they "insurgents" or "militants" or "fighters" in the press briefings, to both drive, and "guard," and not to ambush, the convoy trucks delivering through "inactive areass" all that gasoline and diesel and munitions and MREs to whatever is the current Active Scene of Futility Battlespot. Milo Minderbinder LOVES this crap. And how about "Viagra for 'backing'", as a tactic to "reward" the warlords at the Jirga? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/3965138/CIA-give-Afghan-warlords-Viagra-in-exchange-for-information-on-Taliban.html
The CIA let Gary Schroen publish his "what I did on my Summer Vacation" essay, "First In: An Insider's account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War On Terror in Afghanistan," which displays not only the true "fluid" nature of Important Relationships in that territory, but the tricks and tips a CIA field officer would want to know on how to "steer" those relationships and grease them with cash, weapons, whateverittakes to do just what, again? https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol49no4/War_on_Terror_9.htm Written by J. Daniel Moore, who by subtle diction and jingo-enthusiasm could be our own Joe...
RE money: The BBC report I saw this AM, that could have come straight from one of our own media outlets, had an Afghani talking head talking with the nice Indian lady talking head, and he pointed out that a major selling point for our buddy Karzai was the "billions and billions of dollars that will continue to be poured into the Afghan [sic] economy by continued UN [UN!] presence." Nice B-roll video of the Loya Jirga in action in that great hall built and decorated with what, US money again, all those dudes with their personal interests in their little corners of Traditional Afghanistan, and Karzai doing the Imitation Strong Man hard sell on it all. Talking heads give passing reference to little concerns about how "UN" troops bust into people's homes and do all that other stuff, even (gasp!) a mention that "some think" this "contributes to continued terrorism," along with the killing and raping and stealing and drugs and all that other stuff that invading and occupation armies from other empires have always done as "their due."
Bill says immunity of US [US!] troops from local law is "nothing special." Ask a lot of residents of Guam and Japan and Korea and the Philippines and various central and South American and African places whether they agree. "Nothing special" for the empire, of course... actually, it's more and more apparent that it's more and more of that "racket," extended into really new territory, that ol' Smedley Butler tried to shine a little light on.
Interesting, on a small sample of course, how seemingly "geopolitically" aware people in the streets of wreckage are "over there," compared to our mall-walking US populace.
Still, why just call the participants in actual violence "government forces" and "rebels?" The narrator did add a segue to "jihadis," seems more accurate and indicates how little political boundaries apparently have to do with the root causes of "ALLAHU AKHBAR!!!" idiotic violence and destruction on the "rebel" side, at least. But spend time with the available images of that set of eruptions, like a bad case of shingles, currently being fed and fomented by nominal US and other players, and the commonalities of idiot cruelty and viciousness across the "battlespace" between all the field forces and their "leadership" seem pretty clear. What would you call it, a "focused nihilism?" With a large dose of anomie? And gee whiz, there is apparently joy and FUN! in "martyrdom!" What's better, becoming a Martyr or Martyring some other dude?
Good to at least document what's shaking, with serious and wry and sad shakes of the head, but what's the combination of new impulses and changed inputs that will direct all that energy into building, instead of demolishing buildings and lives? Does it just run its inevitable course down into the "relationships" and ruined, meaningless urban landscape of "Call of Duty?"
And those "United States interests" would be just what, again? Not much to do with "stability" or "sustainability" or some sad notion like "general welfare," just more of the same old pursuit of some vain triumph of imperial oligarchy, oiligarchy, hegemony. Not a clue about or smidgen of interest in squishy stuff like "making the world a better place for the most of us rather than a very few of us," just "maximum freedom of action" for some chimaerical "nation" that is just a set of very PRIVATE, for-profit "interests," if it is anything at all...
Let's remember how the MIC Battlespace thingie works: Some clique of officers and "contractors" and Players constructs a Doctrine. A set of specs for an "appropriate" bunch of procurements gets under way. The prototype and testing parts lumber into motion, with money infusions from an unaccountable "budget" we taxpayers keep stuffing up. Various add-ons appear, with their own costs. The support systems and personnel and managers become a constituency of "people 'earning' good middle-class incomes" building and managing it all, with clout related to where stuff gets built and the size of the procurement.
And the whole goal is "DEPLOYMENT," at which point the whole shootin' match is no longer even slightly tentative, it's a PROGRAM, with its own logic and politics and momentum that has not a damn thing to do with "civilian control of the military" or any kind of what I at least would call healthy "policy."
Like the F-22, the F-35, more $8 billion aircraft carriers for more surplus admirals to hang their flags on, the V-22, the fast-growing development of "autonomous Terminator-class Warfighting Machines," all that crap.
Enjoy it, people -- you have hardly a prayer of changing any of it, including the inevitable endpoint, as long as you keep buying into the idiot myths, and paying for the stuff that actually is going on...
What's always interesting to me is the reality that there's a "polity" of militarists and supporters and suppliers that lops over all the manipulatable political and social boundaries that incubate all those casi belli. These monsters gather, among other places, at International Arms Shows where they pollinate each others' fecund murderous imaginations to "extend technology" to ever greater Lethality (the US War Department even has a whole Lethality Project that invites even "non-traditional MIC businesses" to come up with more -- and for the "successful bidders," very profitable -- Terminator-class death-dealing devices.)
In the virtual world, forget "national loyalties" 'n the silly stuff the ordinary people believe: English, particularly dry British English, the diction of Janes' All The World's Killing Machines, a quietly enthusiastic kind of Consumer Report-ism for the universe of Forever Warfare, is the lingua franca, for a seamless web of engineers and machinists and their heady managers who are just EXCITED about the POSSIBILITIES, particularly INTERNATIONAL SALES FIGURES! Here's one seminal sample, from one of the largest of the post-national war sellers, Boeing: http://www.boeing.com/news/speeches/2003/roberts_030206.html I really like the "What if--"s down at the bottom of a speech extolling a global infinite-resource-eating warmanaging apparatus and its killing appendages.
As to where that all leads, Barbara Tuchman's "Guns of August" lays out a lot of the seedy and Idiotic crap behind our serial Grand Violence, and to bring it up to date, in this centennial year of the Great War, lookie here: "Behind the Storm: Was World War I the outcome of elite machinations?" http://www.thenation.com/article/177134/behind-storm And other scholarship, unblinded by jingoist idiocy...
Don't get suckered into believing that an Evil Cabal of Dudes In White Turbans are growing monstrous toadstools like the drone device pictured above, all by themselves in their Secret Laboratories and Manufactories, as a threat to the whole Civilized World. It's more like the engineers and murder managers in the Iranian fraction of the Global Interoperable Network-Centric Battlespace are just one little set of stipes on THIS giant parasitic pathogenic "world's largest organism," http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=strange-but-true-largest-organism-is-fungus a fungus that just grows and grows and grows, older than Christianity or Islam...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armillaria Looks like the General Atomics Squints who dreamed up the Predator and Raptor and progeny have set the model for more of the same from all over... All paid for by those of us who are the future Bugsplats in the sights of those immaculately conceived Weapons Systems...
Speaking of door knocks, how about Fred Hampton? https://www.google.com/search?q=fred+hampton&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a Sheriff Joe Arpaio's subjects, daring to "look Hispanic?" Freedom Riders, school desegregation/Bull Connor/George Wallace/KKK, Chicago and New York "Red Squads," the "freedoms" and "rights of citizenship accorded to "Occupy," our ever-more-militarized-securitized police presence, any number of NO-knock and "whoops, wrong address, kill the dog and shoot the homeowner and then file false reports and retreat behind that Thin Blue Line" episodes and, for honest serious historians, so very much more. It ain't the "imperfection," it's the sickening hypocrisy. And the nominal goal is what, again? Justice, fairness, equality of persons and opportunity and that Rule of Law that is no respecter of persons? A political process at least more transparent than ALEC and CREEP? All to "Promote The General Welfare?" Or did I miss something in Civics and Polysci 101 and US History?
By that definition, many might question how the US is characterized. Surely not as a "democracy?" Rule of law, full of faked foreclosures, selective enforcement, private prisons, legislation by bribe, all that? I guess by squinting one could say the judicial system "functions," since papers get filed and orders and rulings issued, but "justice" not so much... "Transparent political process?" Hmmm... And "our" history of "spreading democracy" sure looks like "we" have spread a lot of other stuff, but not much of that stuff that in its abstraction makes us all puff-chested and weepy...
Yeah, "risible." Meaning "ridiculously laughable." One wonders if there is a prescription for any actions that might lead to a government with the legitimacy and clout to promote a more general well-being? Maybe another "Competent authoritarian" to instill some "discipline?" "We" apparently are okay with the Afghanistan thing functioning the way it does, with a nice center of opportunity-breeding corruption with a big base and airport in Kabul and a very few "controlled" outlying areas, and warlords and mullahs again running the most of the country in a more "traditional" way, and whoopppee! another record opium harvest!
What are the elements that distinguish "real democracies," again? As inchoate and/or arbitrary as the ones that define "the national interest"?
Gee, another problem exacerbated by the whole "more weapons, everywhere, all the time" schtick that just WHO profits from, again?
And what kind of "training?" Weapons familiarization and marksmanship and sniping techniques? Combat courses in urban warfare? "Crowd control?" The curricula of the "School of the Americas?" Protecting rich and powerful players and their all-important and ever-growing "property?" Surely not squishy crap like "neighborhood policing," or the elements of building a civil society, or conflict reduction, or overcoming tribal biases in favor of a "general welfare" awareness. Or just bribing warlords to stand down for a while...
A context sampler, for your delectation and enjoyment:
There's lots more out there, by "our" and other government and militaries, and of course it's a growth industry! like the privatized-prison business, that profits from what, again?
The pretextual goal is apparently "building a legitimate political structure," the reality is what, again? A "workable" authoritarian ruler? With all the impacts of arms injections, greedy extractable resource seekers, Players of the Game from far and near, etc., how does one go about the task any more? Since it's so complex, and starting from a base of repression and aspirations warped by advantage-seekers at all levels?
Seems press freedom is a necessary condition for decent governance on behalf of the general welfare and in creating real legitimacy. Hence the context:
Is it impolite to ask, "Did 'WE' really NEED Pakistan?" Which ones of "us," what "elements" of "Pakistan," for what purpose(s) again, and how has that all worked out? So far?
I know, it's just the diction of Grand Geopolitics that "we" are all so used to and apparently comfortable with and, maybe even for some of us, smug in the illusion that using the form puts us in the "inside group," no matter how "it" misleads away from maybe a healthier understanding of the inescapable truth, with the gravity well and our frail physiologies and limbic systems and apparently inexhaustible "consumer demand" and "Call of Duty: End of the World" being what they are, that WE ARE ALL STUCK IN THIS SAME HOLE TOGETHER????
I hear there are actually ways to get out of holes and pits, but they usually involve some kind of altruism and cooperation. Of course, our myths and fables and epics tell a lot about the chances of that working out well... http://www.aesopfables.com/cgi/aesop1.cgi?4&TheScorpionandtheFrog
Incredible. You really maintain that the separate huge developments of nuclear weapons by India and Pakistan were conducted "in secret and presented the US with a fait accompli"? That our vaunted sneaky-petes were caught flat-footed after all the crap that guys like A.Q. Khan pulled? Even the Israeli program -- no one in the burgeoning oligosecuritomilitarindustrial kleptocracy was aware of their "motions," even from the stuff Mr. Koroi referenced? http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/pakistan/nuke/ I like the way "the US" "suspended sanctions" on those programs "in the national interest."
Extra points for your plug for "this President," which of course is in every place you can insert one, from wherever you so furiously post. Really? Obama is more serious than all his predecessors on non-proliferation?
It appears that "Iran-Contra" is still alive, maybe as just "Contra Iran," as a tenet of National Interest Politics among those rulers of ours who appear to be confused and dopey and lost, in the complexity and personal profit-seeking opportunism and ego- and career-building, about all the weird and wonderful and uncontrollably horrible stuff that they and their predecessors have set in motion by all that "grasping" and "pivoting..."
And I see that opium production from Afghanistan reached another record high this last twelvemonth... Way to go, all you Policymakers!
It's so nice to know, from our window into the White House, cracked occasionally by Presidential apologists to give a peek inside but only when the Emperor happens to be fully clothed, so nice to know that dissembling and dysfunction are to be relied on to produce, in one little corner of the powder magazine we have built as the playing field for the Great Game, that maybe in this corner, this time, the dis-dys will not result in some idiocy striking a match or a spark.
So comforting, to anyone who puzzles over possible pathways to human survival in a time of universal re-re-re-re-armament and terminal consumption for the benefit of ever fewer, that the future is in such capable hands, ones that but for another idiot fortuity were ready to start flinging Tomahawks at "carefully selected targets" in Syria while adding fuel to the bonfire of horror burning there right now. All while juggling full-bore chain saws, as Really Smart Geopoliticians pull-start ever more saws into motion and toss them into the delicate "balance" that our brilliant President and his men are maintaining to "protect us" and "advance the national interests."
Might I encourage one and all, once again, to drop in at syriavideo.net for more REALITY, and go over to youtube and enjoy what you find by calling up the videos cataloged under "Syria sniper head shot"?
Is it intentional misdirection or just "ahistorical blindness" that compels efforts to obscure MC's point? So sensitive to any criticism of "the US," so protective of the jingoist Narrative and the image of "our" Exceptionalism. Yes, it would be illuminating to have your syllabus and reading list on the subject...
Seems to me MC was pointing out that rebound and blowback effects of Great Powers finally withdrawing, by force or other compulsions of actual "history," their commercial and oppressive instrumentalities of colonial and imperial hegemony from various points on the globe, can be ugly and "uncontrolled." Just like the results of "the US" and "its" clumsy, bullying extractions and "interventions," overt and co-, that pretty clearly have been inconsistent with a truly NATIONAL interest in favor of parochial Gamesmanship and profit- and rent-seeking, and disingenuous hijacking of that potent phrase, "national interest." Oh, and "nation-building" and "democratization."
And do Serious Historians all buy into the Great Game spoofery that the personified "US" has over all these decades just altruistically been acting, through various "Agencies," to "cooperate" with your falsely reified National Entities to "advance mutual interests," as opposed to "controlling" them? The oversimplification and obfuscation almost takes one's breath away...
After my Vietnam "tour," I had more than 6 months left on my enlistment, so I had to serve it out at Ft. Hood, Aug. '68 to June '69, as a personnel clerk in the HQ company of the 2nd Armored Division, old "Hell On Wheels." (The "service" back then would "release" those of us with less than 6 months because we were such a set of "mutinous pains in the a__" to their "orderly rooms."
Nine months of "outprocessing" GIs who were walking-wounded, physically and mentally. And a lot of them "had a problem with authority," after experiencing the idiocy and futility and horror, with undischargable loads of fear and sometimes guilt and really scary reflexes and behaviors. Lots of bad conduct and general discharges, often after courts-martial. There was essentially no "treatment" that I can recall, and of course no parades and nurses in starched uniforms to respond to the urge to, ah, kiss, and end up on the cover of "LIFE." http://www.posterrevolution.com/poster.cfm/kissing-the-war-goodbye-sailor-nurse-art-poster-print-24x36?class=1001&gclid=CLGW0PDQ4LoCFUhk7AodIAMAuQ
It wasn't just officers who hold soldiers in contempt -- the NCO upper ranks were just as bad. Too bad most of us are happy to live with the myths and John Wayne and Ronald Reagan images, whatever it actually costs (Vietnam, all by itself, at least $4 trillion and counting, a lot more if one counts the externalities.) All these "policy-in-the-air, So-Serious, sonorous portentous grand-geopolitical-jerky-eatery tits-for-tats are just so much toxic smoke and fun-house mirrors. For the benefit, only, of the real "winners," the ones at the ends of the money trails...
Yah, speaking of catching up with the rest of the world, think of all those Greek and Persian and Turkish warriors from past Empires, and the "offense with no name" that characterize(s)(d) all those naval gundecks and dark corners of the holds and the officers' quarters of Great Wooden and Steel Warships, and remember there's a reason the Amazons were feared!
And hey, gay, straight, female or other, join the military, go to foreign lands, meet interesting people, and kill them! While raping others in your Band of Siblings. It's an opportunity you can't have in civilian life, unless you work for, like, Xe/Blackwater, whose troops, like other "contractors," get paid TEN TIMES (with great health care and retirement plans) what numbnut GIs get (plus food stamps) for the same work!
I hear that being bisexual doubles your chances of getting a date -- opening the closet doors sure increases the pool of recruits, doesn't it?
Let's remember the real fundamentals, at the heart of all our modern entertainment and mythology: Sex and Death. Naval officers trading top-secret info to corporations for sex, and Tuesday morning DroneDeath lotteries in the Situation Room and how much fun! "Call of Duty!" is! With a lot of ribbons, drums, fooferaws and furbelows added, to "give it all meaning." In the "national interest," of course.
There are probably people in France and England and Greece and Spain and Portugal and those little islands in the Med and elsewhere who are suffering a FISCAL blitzkrieg, a monetary imperialism, who might disagree with the blithe assertion that Germany has been completely remade into a peaceful, productive player in Europe and the world." Selling U-boats to the Israelis? Joining in "UN" conflicts? And do I remember something about providing technology and assistance to folks like Hussein and Assad and Saddam? One little piece of the Game: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/07/trade-imbalances-lead-to-debt-imbalances-or-why-mercantilist-nations-shouldnt-beef-about-their-profligate-customers.html
But then the claimed characteristic is that the personified Serious monolith analyzed as "Germany" is a "player." Would have to agree with that, at least...
JW, that's all just giving a tuneup and a paint job and adding smiley-face stickers to a broke-down, brakeless bus we have been stupid enough to pay for a ride in. As it stands at the top of a hill at the bottom of which is an abrupt cliff. With drivers who get to jump off into a nice cushioned berth, right before it goes over the edge.
But we do just love our idiotic wars, and all the wealth that they transfer, and how puffed up they make us feel...
In the "war argot" in Vietnam, "Numbah 10" meant "really bad." "Numbah 1" meant "really good!" Prof. Cole, dare this aging veteran, once stupid enough to buy into the delusions that are driving so many others to support AGAINST ANY HONORABLE NOTION OF "NATIONAL INTEREST" POLICIES (that ridiculous word) suggest that you have your list upside down? All the other items would fade mostly out if this last bit came first.
Delusions that "our troops" are kicking a__ and blowing sh_t up to "preserve Democracy" or even "preserve our way of life," which is self-limiting and self-destroying (though ego-satisfying and so very "profitable" for a very few) by killing our planetary life systems. Delusions that a huge industry and its pendant "contractor" dongle, based on combustoconsumption and its long history of "enrich-the few-as-THE-national interest," and the thuggery that Smedley Butler acknowledge he took such vivid part in, and the idiot notion that a national policy/military/industrial/sneaky-pete apparatus, is spreading what we so foolishly believe is "democracy," that palest and most obscure of shibboleths, by means of what the war planners clearly understand is "national-building" by forcible regime change, on a global scale. Delusions that all that military "might" might somehow be able to "win" (undefined term) any 4th Generation conflict (can't call 'em "wars" any more) or combined-forces operation in someplace like the Persian Gulf. Delusions that the spindizzy mechanism that has lifted "policy-making" off the ground-truth level to where it's all just "How can we make a buck off this?" and "How can I stir the pot and advance my career on the crest of some latest Dogma initiative?" provides any king of pathway to survival, let alone even spurious "stability" that itself is the Enemy of the Apparatus. Delusions that "Battlespace Managers," who have divvied up the whole globe into their little Commands, can leverage the developing horrors of ecological disaster into career and role and functional aggrandizement via suckering those of us who PAY for all this in so many ways to hand over the keys to the whole Global Interoperable Network-Centric Maserati Thingie, because all the other parasites who see where the money is flowing have hitched their inventive lexicons to that falling star. Delusions that as with "libertarianism," all wisdom and goodness flows from the idiot belief that "every entity pursuing its own 'interests'" is the Eightfold Path to Enlightenment.
And the best "we" can do is to hold tight to the analytical tools and language of the Great Game that is the manifestation and reason why it appears the species and its body burden of parasites and neoplasms ain't long for the world "we" are so Seriously and busily taking down.
Please, do not "thank me for my service." I sought to "serve" something that was pure imaginary hypocritical Milo Minderbinder bullsh_t. And new generations of young people and the tribal enclaves and shibboleths so carefully woven into the fabric of our relations, which did have some promise, are just keeping it going, decade and "war" after one another, kill people and cultures and the planet for the unregulated, apparently unregulable, conscience- and consequence-free "gain" of so very few...
You presume there is such a monolithic entity as " the government", in Israel and elsewhere? Given all the strange and apparently ungoverned "policy" pseudopodia that appear out of the darkness and complexity? Now THERE is a bit of "worldly wisdom" to cogitate over...
Stop reading (or delete) if you've heard this one before:
In August 1967 my helicopter unit of the First Cav was ordered to Phan Thiet, a fishing town famous for its nuoc mam, an "aromatic" condiment produced by controlled rotting of fish parts. Initially the Viet Cong and townspeople made our presence clearly and noisily unwelcome. As we learned some mutual respect and became a part of the local economy (laundry, beer, prostitutes, black market, etc.) the conflict waned to a kind of jovial, mutually deprecating tolerance. Our chain of command apparently saw no reason to rock the boat.
New CO of the First Cav, and all of a sudden in swoops a new battalion with Custer's old dead unit in its lineage. "Kicking ass and taking names" became de riguer mortis, stirring the Beast on all sides. Don't dare ride downtown to sit under a thatched sunshade on the South China Sea beach, sipping Ba Me Ba and lusting after the young ladies in their cheongsams. Be sure your bunker was up to snuff and you were ready to roll into it at the first sign of "Incoming!" No more dozing in shifts on guard duty, if you wanted to keep breathing. Only mission was to "stir things up" and "kill more gooks," a tally that included water buffalo and "imaginaries."
The mindless, heedless, idiotic roots of "Call of Duty-Star Wars Trooper -- The Movie" go way back, of course. No doubt Titus Germanicus' troops did the same crap, like the stuff documented in "Restrepo" and the other imagery listed here: http://www.imdb.com/list/eTvZIG569Zw/
Anybody starting to see the enormous disconnect between the Main Narrative and the Unfortunate Reality? All that crap about "nation-building" that whoops, we don't call it that this time even though the behavior (violent forced regime change to institute something we call -- and don't practice -- "democracy," which is really just a more subtle kind of colonialism) is indistinguishable? http://www.fas.org/man/eprint/carson.pdf
A pox on all the Great Gamers and their camp followers and "contractors." (Sure seems that the "contractors," just like Milo Minderbinder, actually OWN the game board and the uniformed players and all the resources of the planet...)
Helmand, Wardak, I Corps, FATA -- where euphemism collides with nonsense, spewing out Hellfires, poppy plants, and big blocks of hundred-dollar bills...
Anyone caring to check Bill's and my work can google " arafat polonium poison assassination" or pick your own terms, to judge what is "simply not the case." Looks like a few CT and left-wing rags, and " foreign outlets..."
"In detail?" Really? I don't get the paper edition, but what page was the article (or were the articles) on, again? I can find one from 11/07 and a very few earlier ones about the speculation and exhumation. What about the "paper of record?" Don't see much there either. "Elements of it?" Maybe "elements" as rare as Polonium 210 itself...
Just commenting on a perceived general behavior pattern, Bill. Particularized straw-mannery response in favor of a very different and by my lights very deadly Narrative? Everyone gets to make their own judgment on credibility and wisdom of these little remarks. SP far.
I like how Bill advances the idea that "there's no proof," that "we may never know" by whom, or indeed even whether, Arafat was poisoned. Let's not be hasty, now, everyone, wait for all the facts, in a fact-impaired circumstance...
When it comes to "operations" by the sneaky-petes in the part of the Great Game that is Spy-VS-Spy and assassinations and all that, ALL the Players profit by convincing the rest of us that suffer the pains and instabilities and Democratizing-Socializing-Nation-Building-actually-and-avowedly-equals-forced-regime-change idiocies that "our and their rough men" serve up that "no one ever knows for sure, it could have been any of a number of Players [like, who killed Allende with whose technical assistance, for one small example]. http://www.fas.org/man/eprint/carson.pdf
Ain't no percentage in just "doing the right thing." Especially when that particular kind of darkness, with all the false flags and manufactured crises and inflated uncertainties and ginned-up demands for ACTION, gets done plastering everything with bucketloads of Plausible Deniability and Carefully Scripted Obfuscation and Masterful Misdirection, makes perceiving, let alone doing, "the right thing" just about impossible. Generating that moral fog and mindless darkness is of the things that some of us humans are so unfortunately good at, to the cost and sorrow of so many others...
Of course, it was the "benefits" of Empires and the "inevitable increase of trade" that occasioned the extinction of the dodo -- we humans ate them, for convenience, protein to fuel the sailors who spread the "virtues" of European commercial culture around the world, and the rats and pigs and monkeys imported to that island singularity. http://www.bagheera.com/inthewild/ext_dodobird.htm The poor old dodos, eating and excreting and reproducing in a nice niche, had not much to do with their departure unless, as with the Kochian "vision" of Rand-Space, they were "guilty" of not being vicious enough to protect their turf. Wonder how (longstanding sci fi theme) the kinds of humans likely to afford going spacefaring will be received by any sentience elsewhere?
JW, consider that a person who falls off a cliff "goes a long way," too, and his "progress" also accelerates, at a nominal 9.806 meters per second squared. The sounds he emits probably depend on the reason he's falling (clumsy, or pushed, or base-jumping, "ending it all"), anything from EEEEEEeeeeeeeeee... to AAAAAAAaaaaaa.... to YAHOOOOOOOooooo. How many happen to be wearing, and know how to use, that neat little fanny-pack ram-air wingchute? And even with that Advanced Technology, there's still this kind of outcome: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNa5dcLccS4
Wonder if one could base-jump into a black hole?... ANYthing's possible, right?
Interesting, how we portray our villains in our myths. One I really like is "Independence Day," where a starfaring species of telepathic "monsters" hops from "habitable" planet to planet, killing any potentially complaining life forms and sucking "profit" out of the place before discarding it and moving on to the next space-time-locus with "something" to dominate and extract. Why am I reminded of the Kochs and Krupps and a long list of Robber Baron and Imperial types, who don't even have tentacles or adaptive exoskeletons (yet, other than socially and functionally...)?
One perpetual problem is choosing the right magnification in looking at social pathogens under the macroscope. I can't find it right now, but there was an interesting article, I believe in the old "Economist" that discoursed upon the "business relations," between Palestinians and Israelis, at the higher and also less visible levels. It seems that "side" is meaningless when wealth transfer is afoot -- Palestinian Top Dawgs happy to have "their people" working, with a little trinket received, as serfs for a significant set of Evil Israeli "business interests," Israelis happy to drink tea and shake hands with Evil Palestinians. Not in a "peace process" fraud, but "it's just business."
If one looks close, under higher magnification and less polarized light, and follows the shameless slime trails of money and "relationships" across the map, can one make out any set of "national interests" that mean anything other than that the "ordinary people" get screwed, whichever side of the Line they happen to be born on? There's your true "universal," I think... But then, all "serious policy discussions" just have to be based on the larger personifications, don't they? Given that a paragraph of text can only contain a very few ideas, no matter how misleading?
MK's point was about similarities in behaviors by state security persons against individuals who might be threatening a reduction in level of conflict. Mine was too.
Aside from Bill's usual pseudologic attempts to sidetrack and impeach via his little toolkit, seems to me MK's comment was directed at a pattern of behavior by people like what Bill (less frequently now) implies he stans among: sneaky-petes who "have been present" at many places where efforts to trend roward more stable and egalitarian governance have gotten the Allende treatment with "our" "technical assistance..."
Jeebus, let there not be an outbreak of anything like "comity" or motions in the direction of "good governance." Joe from his anonymous place Inside probably has a dozen asserted "proofs" that Mehsud was just pulling some kind of sneaky scam in a complexity where assassination is FUN! and why "we" the stupid rest of humanity just have to keep up paying in so many ways, including a charge toward our own extinction, continue the fast-paced, short- term-profitable-to-someone-with-"interest" idiotic tail-wags-the-dog Game...
Boy, I feel so much safer now that Meshud and his history with "our" skulduggers is dead (listen to the cheers by the idiot Drone Savants!), and look! The "Taleban" is a bunch of littler groups "we" in our "threat creation" get to personify and clump together, and with any luck whoever succeeds Mehsud will execute his OWN idiocies in keeping with tribal code and long-honed skills and behaviors, keeping the Game ball safely in play to secure the career paths of "our" steely-eyed "patriotoperatives..."
Grumpy -- Double plaudits for not only being observant and informed and cogent on this (among many) issues, but actually doing something to help alleviate some bit of the pain.
An abiding frustration is the use of the pronoun "we" in any kind of "policy discussion." My observation is that there never was much "we-"ism in the world, except as to tribe or narrow parochial interests, right down to "enjoyment" of that perfect Pinot Noir. And there's been a slow and increasing leak from the reservoir. I have no idea any more what causes people to actually care about one another, in the sense of empathy on up to agape, http://rightfromtheheart.org/devo/1567 , or whether the quantum of that kind of care is growing or fast receding. It seems pretty clear that the drivers of behavior and the rationalizations and myths and traditions that support all its bits are pretty much pushing in the direction of selfISH and strongly away from selfLESS. It's not even much about survival any more for the people who have figured out how to institutionalize the REAL "taking," by which, at the direction and to the benefit of a very few, "we" humans are eating ourselves out of house and home.
It scares me that the power of "threat perception" extends so far that "we" are tricked into thinking in terms of "food security," and the kind of enormous insanity that is exemplified in one of my 3x5 rocking horses, the War Department's "strategic thinking" on how to grow its particualr cancer ever bigger and more invasive and malignant on the back of that New Godzilla Threat, "climate change:" http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports/ADA552760.pdf
Yah, it all reads like "just good planning." But with the F-35 as the model, and the kind of thinking that the People of the War Department have shown they are limited to, putting folks from a system that generates the likes of Petraeus and McChrystal and a faceless (until bad crap happens) horde of others "in charge of addressing" that starvation thing and that environmental-calamity thing and those various how-can-"we"-keep-control-of-all-those-resources things seems maybe not like a "winning strategy." Except for those few people who profit off that kind of "threat management."
Iraq and "the US" are "partners"? By what stretch of language could this possibly be asserted? Maybe people in the US, including that Congress thing, see the futility of throwing more good money and more weapons after stupid and corrupt and bad, with about zero chance of any positive return.
But Maliki and many who have marked the same path know the Imperial ropes, the ones used to separate the Game from anything looking remotely like the general welfare. Anyone for another "Charlie Wilson's War?"
Professor, dare one ask why "giving" or "selling" weapons to al Maliki's set is even up for discussion? How much evidence is needed that adding arms to the witch's brew in that part of the world is simply not subject to any realistic "conditions" or "controls" or monitoring? And that the Game Play that is one strand of the warping and subjugation of so many to the whims and profits of a little set of Overlords and self-serving Idiots is not any kind of "progress?"
Of course the Gamers say, like little kids talking Mom into letting them jump off that bridge, "Everyone else is doing it! If I don't, someone else will!"
This crap is part of why the planet is in such sorry shape - farmers and gardeners, even ones driven by profit, usually take great care of the bits of the planet over which they exercise "dominion": why does that wisdom never spread to the Tapeworms and tumor cells that infest and are killing us and our little habitable patch of the cosmos?
And the Pakistani "government" definition of "civilians," for purposes of counting Bugsplats, is...
Jumping right over, of course, the "wisdom" vel non of shooting up a bunch of people who threaten your inchoate and infinite definition of "US Interests" just how, again? And simply presuming that what "our security forces" are doing is "legal," or "tacitly approved" by a very different and distant bunch of Pakistanis who, like Karzai and alMaliki and other clients, just love infusions of US wealth, "training" and weapons to "subjugate and pacify" those unruly tribesmen who won't even pay the tribute, the baksheesh, to the "central government" that does so much "for" them.
Keep the discussion on body count -- that which-way-the-toilet-paper-hangs debate nicely obscures the other questions... Love your characterization of Ben Emmerson, by the way, so honest, so Serious...
Anyone raise the question whether "the US government," whatever that is, "controls" the US Military, in all its parts and procurements? Pretty clear that the State Security Apparatus is a law unto itself, though one might by careful definitional delineation declare that those "things" are part of "the government" that takes in our ordinary-person wealth and delivers instability and violence and corruption...
WHICH "the Pakistanis" have "tacitly agreed" to the violation of sovereignty, again? Under what "law," again? Bill gets an "A" for consistency at least...
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"He who has eyes, let him see..."
Makes one wonder how to even define the "problem(s)," far less envision the things that can be done to "fix it(them)." I guess the Wise just go about pursuing their "national and/or commercial and/or parochial interests," even if those pursuits make all the other problems ever worser...
Army techs used to say that the guy who designed the mechanical-hydraulic computer that was the fuel-control unit for the Lycoming T-53 turboshaft engine, which powered the Hueys I flew around in and fixed way back when, went insane from figuring out the relatively straightforward problem of getting some 8,000 tiny precision parts to meter JP-4 to the combustion section. Cf. "peace in the Middle East."
For wry smiles, a little divertimento from all the seriousness (though I guess helos were used to deliver barrel bombs, screw over various indigenous populations, and drop "political prisoners" into Disappeared status in the South Atlantic): http://www.airaffair.com/Library/Archive/Part2/heli_humor
Are there joke collections that capture the essence of (presumably grim, if "Allahu Akhbar" ebullient) takfiri humor... or would they shoot you for even asking?
Bill and Joe, from their separate anonymous perches, seem to be, along with a bunch of others in PolicySpace, standing bravely as rear guards fighting a sophisticated, sophistry-weighted holding action to allow the people, the relatively few, who "own" everything and structure the continued play of the Great Game and the "growth" of consumption, to escape consequence-free from any effective action to force or arrange any change in the gross and particular behaviors that have Dr. Cole putting up posts about planetary ecological collapse and the horrors of maybe-post-colonial conditions across so much of the planet.
"For they are honorable men..."
So much detailed and slightly competitive erudition. Kind of diverts from and obscures the bigger picture, the larger human-nature thingie of imperial overlords conquering and manipulating and stirring the pot to keep certain other things from happening. Much of that accomplished by sneaky-petes, including Lawrence and how many of "our" CIA dudes and dude-ettes, who figure out how to catalyze big events with little frauds and gifts and personality games.
"The British, having destabilized Palestine and Syria, went on to leave Iraq with an untenable imperial legacy of Sunni rule over Shiites and Kurds, setting the stage for the current civil war." And now "our" jackals and the tendrils of the Global Interoperabbable Dysnetwork-Centric We Run Everything Battlespace Management Consortium continue that tradition, having been at it pretty consistently and on increasingly grandiose scale since what, the 1920s? 1880s?
Bear in mind the creed of the Kleptocrats who are engineering all this (aided by some really unfortunate and so easily exploitable "features" in the wetware programming of the rest of us): "Apres nous le deluge," or in the argot of what we call "Wall Street," "IBG-YBG" ("I'll be gone -- you'll be gone"). Because there are no consequences for predatory and parasitic behaviors that threaten the rest of us and even the "posterity" of these creatures (not, unfortunately, their "posteriors,") and they can take the attitude that they are immune, for their lifetimes, can get away with all that crap (along with their "people:" who ride along like little remoras), and what are us mopes going to do to them? trash their corpses or ashes? Deface their monuments?
The "grand theory" is actually just an observation that humans, under various flags, banners and excuses, and led by some really cynical and sociopathic SOBs, do serious and futile and self-perpetuating violence to one another. So you contest that al Quaeda is an "identity group?' Really? The way into the franchise is by pledging allegiance and fealty and loyalty and all that to whom, again? And what does the Administration say that Al Quaeda opposes and wants to destroy, as an index of who the adherents actually think they are? And one might be careful about cautioning others to keep the facts straight, and to accurately try to distinguish distinct and different events (while daring to look for larger patterns), after demonstrating some weakness in the same supposed flaws...
One little bit of context: http://www.cfr.org/separatist-terrorism/liberation-tigers-tamil-eelam-aka-tamil-tigers-sri-lanka-separatists/p9242
Just curious, HW -- Was this observation tongue in cheek?
Hmmm: http://www.thedebate.org/thedebate/iraq.asp
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/aug/30/syria-chemical-attack-war-intervention-oil-gas-energy-pipelines
And so forth and so on, beyond the limited case of "Iraq"...
Actually, my "gut" tells me that the pre-Islam Christianization of that area was a complex process that included piggy-backing on the actions of Roman and Byzantine empires, not noted for their kindness, but eventually noted for their corruption-encouraged fading, and being overcome, by the "enthusiasms" of expansive Islam. To clarify my point, the history of that region and most of the rest of the world is replete with and in many ways driven by organized and/or anomic violence of the sort so evident right now. As far as I can tell, there are no "moral claims" to righteousness and territory, except in the myths various groups of us tell ourselves. Your grafting that "gut" misreading onto what I wrote is all invention.
For a tiny bit of the full complex context, on the "Christianizing" of the Levant, for anyone interested, look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Christians There of course is so very much more.
Converts to many new identities tend to be "enthusiastic" in their desire to dominate, decimate or dispossess others... The trick, in my humble estimation, for humans to survive much longer, is to find some common ethical and behavioral structure that puts survival and comity, on a large scale, ahead of personal advancement and profit and the proselyte's monomania. A fool's dream, I know... with so many others finding personal gain, identity or satisfaction of various perversions in doing the usual thing.
And how did "Christendom" come by its "ownership" of the Levant, again?
As an historian, Bill knows that the winners (and Rulers) write the histories, and get to choose the "facts," and insinuate the selected themes and labels, that get injected into our thinking and discourse.
Google and other search engines will load you up with lots of referents to "Christianism." Here's just one cutie:
http://wonkette.com/534454/sundays-with-the-christianists-american-history-textbooks-for-your-homeschooled-imperialist
The dictionaries have even caught up with usage:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=christianist
@DG, Just curious: Do you think "al Quaeda" is about SPREADING IDEOLOGY, as opposed to a macho, crushing paternalism and take-it-all-for-ourselves IDENTITY, an identity that spews out of the worst places in the human psyche and in which there's a horrible race to the bottom? Were the Tamils about "spreading ideology," or the Lord's Resistance Army? Even if you look at it from an organizational standpoint, what are those "militias?" And what do they do? How about the Hutus hacking up the Tutsis?
Too bad "we" can't understand and arrange ourselves better, so that the crap that drives ALL this "extremism" gets finally lost in bad old history...
Maybe "Israel" is so involved in its rulers' destructive paternalism, and of course their heavy and profitable participation in the whole global post-trans-national arms-bazaar consortium, that there's not a lot of money or energy left over to be taking care of ordinary-person needs like water and energy and housing and such. Of course, it's all very complicated and obscured...
As to how and why the people who live behind the mask and shibboleth of "Israel," are the way they are, use your favorite search engine with "Israel corruption" as a search term. Some of the context:
http://www.jpost.com/National-News/Israel-among-most-corrupt-of-OECD-countries-319315
Regarding Israel's military/industrial "leadership," there's this: http://www.timesofisrael.com/topic/corruption-in-israel/
Of course, there's always hope:
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=6213
Those 200 or 400 or 600 nukes, and those Krupp-built submarines, and all that other power-projection stuff that "we" winked at or supplied, sure start to loom large. Wonder what our War Planners have up their sleeves should the "Israelis" go all "USS Liberty" on the 6th Fleet, that is supposedly there to "advance security and stability in Europe and Africa." Bearing in mind that in war games, even a US asymmetric General running the "Arab Force" was able to sink most of that fleet in a few hours...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
No worries, it's all LEGAL. And the "proofs" or "reasonable doubt units" relating that there really were "threats to the national interest" in among the wedding convoy are being generated and disseminated by the Ministry of Truth right now, to provide cover for the continued idiocy... Let the fracking continue...
Short version of the longer response I posted too:
Hi, Bill! You know that is not what I said or was talking about. You are misdirecting, at best. You don't get to put words in my mouth, or hijack the train of thought, unchallenged.
Just curious, though: You got any rebuttal to the notion that that "horror" stuff produced by profitable weaponizing and sneaky-pete exacerbation of social divides, so voluminously cataloged in Death Selfies on youtube and such places these days, is valued at something close to ZERO, in the geoplotical (sic intended) calculus? Or any examples of "successful US or UN humanitarian interventions?"
Hi, Bill! No, you don't get to put words in my mouth.
You never make it clear what your involvement with "the US" that you always pitch for was, or is, but the people who have arrogated to themselves the power to deploy and project the munitions and "policy" of that reification you call "the US," to supposedly serve some chimaerical "national interest," have demonstrated an uncanny ability to destabilize, demolish, destroy, confiscate, divert, dissemble, and generally screw things up and create horror for what our rulers and troopers tend to call "wogs" and "gooks" and "Hajjis," all over the place. Nothing new for Players in the Great Game since at least Hammurabi and Sun Tzu, of course, so no particular opprobrium for "our" Empire there, except maybe as to ambition and scale.
And as pointed out by actual Serious Historians, "our" "humanitarian interventions," http://www.thenation.com/search/apachesolr_search/humanitarian%20intervention, like "nation-building" (which the Pentagram acknowledges is code for "regime change," with all that means) tend to be at the best only minutely "humanitarian" and only peripherally about "building."
What "we," or those of you who wield that imperial power, are useless and actively antithetical to are lines of thought and action that lead to silly stuff like dealing with or more wisely trying to amend the behaviors that lead to stuff like "climate change" and the endless round of profitable militarization and crushing "globalization," that shorthand for the triumph of short-term profit maximization and consequence-free Large Living for a tiny few with NO "NATIONAL" LOYALTIES AT ALL.
The "reality" all the Serious Players and Apologists yak about is a mashup of PR spin, selfish little career and bonus-baby interests, and millennia of "ruling elites" preying on everyone else. The Solons and Socrates's get knifed or garrotted or hemlocked before any marking out of pathways and incentives to decency and comity have a chance to mature.
The best thing "WE" could do is keep "OUR" amoral clumsy greedy noses out of other peoples' lives and business, and to instead serve as "WE" sort of did for a few decades as an actual beacon of hope for the aspirations of peoples wanting economic fairness or at least a bigger share, and participation, however attenuated by republic-ism, in their ruling.
You got any challenge to the notion that that "horror" stuff is valued at something close to ZERO, in the geoplotical (sic intended) calculus? You care to make a case for any "successful" "humanitarian intervention" by the overt forces and sneaky-petes marching, steaming, flying or acting under color of the ol' Red, White and Blue? Or for the long-term, species-survival wisdom of all those centuries, now, of "policy?" Or is it not honestly all about grabbing, or getting the lower orders to create or grab for "US," what "WE" can? Grab now, with some nod to maybe keeping the Syndicate in operation long enough for the present Mob to get theirs, and who cares about future generations that can neither vote, hahahahaha, nor object? All in the "national interest," which you wisely never deign to define, of course...
Too bad calculations of "US interests" by the people who get to say what they are, without the inconvenience of asking "the US" or any fear of consequences for "miscalculations," don't include long-view enumerations of what's good for the planet and the people who remain on it. The "realists" who are so good at mouthing the "US national interests" phrase seem mostly interested in preserving old-fashioned if now technically much advanced "freedom of action" for various military and economic factions (much the same thing, any more), regarding control of or just relationship to certain kinds of consumable resources and wealth transfers. The human-pain horror you can see in Syria and so many other places apparently just has a value near "zero" in the complicated formulae. But then the horrors of today are the reconstruction bonanzas of tomorrow, right? Or the seeds of new horrors to come, all of which can be short-term profit centers if one puts one's mind to it...
If you do some math on the costs of "warfighting" in my little war, Vietnam, and accept even the inflated body counts of "effectives killed," it works out to about $400,000 for each "gook" corpse or part thereof taken out of our "exceptional economy" and transferred to the whole complex Great Game machinery. One suggestion that was maybe in "Stars&Stripes" was to mint a bunch of the little gold ingots that people there favored for savings, maybe half the size of a business card, put little parachutes on them, and drop them from those B-52s and FB-111s and A-4s instead of cluster bombs and daisy cutters and Arc Light sexplosive ordnance. Would have done a lot more to change hearts and minds than the other crap...
Rather than just assuming that there's any kind of logic or wisdom to this (relatively puny, though not if you have to depend on "Public Assistance") $1.6 billion chunk of the nation's Real Wealth going into a giant corruption sink like Pakistan (note that this is "OVERT" accounting only, who knows about "other expenditures?"), largely via the cloaca known as the "Pentagon," it seemed worth a minute of futility-reinforcement to look for some context and detail, so here it is for anyone else who give a s__t:
"Direct Overt U.S. Aid Appropriations for and Military Reimbursements to Pakistan, FY2002-FY2014"
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/pakaid.pdf
Nit-pickers and whisperers, add your Narrative here:
.
Please remind us idiots who BELEEEEEVE that all of this has been declared "LEEEGAL" by the institutions that sneer at our cherished shibboleths and faith in "the system" and our sad and desperate need for belief in limits, and Rule of Law...
Here's one part of how it's made "legal," and how idiotic Great Game pseudopodian "programs" get "justified and explained:"
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R41856.pdf
Similar results for Egypt:
"Does the aid require Egypt to meet any specific conditions regarding human rights?
Not really. When an exiled Egyptian dissident called on the U.S. to attach conditions to aid to Egypt in 2008, Francis J. Ricciardone Jr., who had recently stepped down as the U.S. ambassador to Egypt, told the Washington Post the idea was "admirable but not realistic." And then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in 2009 that military aid "should be without conditions" at a Cairo press conference."
http://www.propublica.org/blog/item/f.a.q.-on-u.s.-aid-to-egypt-where-does-the-money-go-who-decides-how-spent
There's always more where that came from. Right?
"All politics is personal."
And this is why the truly organized people, shameless in pursuit of their own idiot "interests," own the rest of us. And why people of good will can so easily be diverted by fortuitous or intentional injections of FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) into the discourse that might otherwise lead to any kind of decent, sensible, sustainable action.
Whose history shall we put the handshake in perspective with?
So "our guy" shakes hands with "their guy." And nobody notes that thanks to the way the tapeworms have entwined in the guts of the world, there really is not a whole lot of difference between what "our guy" "stands for," and what "their guy " "stands for." Either way, the kleptocrats suck ever more of the nutrition and vitality out of the people and the planet, and keep on crapping out more cysts and segments as they grow and multiply. http://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/science/tapeworm-reproduction.html
"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which. "
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/animalfarm/section10.rhtml
Hi, Joe! Maybe not altogether "cosmetic," but then you need to put a lot of lipstick on a pig...
Maybe "chimaerical" is more accurate: How's that Hope and Change crap working out for us ordinary people? Dem or Rep or Nader, join a party and vote all you want, but the "ownership society" owns ever more of everything, and rents it back to the rest of us, and sells us crap at the Company Store, for ever higher prices. What "real material gains," what "large reduction in poverty?" Got some support for that contention? Whether here or in South Africa? The disparity grows apace, as does the consumption of the living planet, for the short-term titillation of the Very Few who bear no costs.
The "right to protest?" That, as Roberts and Scalia and the Kochs and all know, is subject to that old truth that "there are no rights without remedies." Ask the Occupy people how that works -- pepper spray in the eyes, "non-lethal rounds" to the head, coordinated nationwide police repression, "First Amendment Zones" miles from the gatherings of the sneering powerful ...
And don't cite this site as "evidence" of "freedom of speech" -- every keystroke is collected and collated, and can be turned, or turned off, at whim. This stuff, like Tomgram and other "protest" sites and publications, is tolerated by Power, and I think in part because it implicitly teaches anyone with a brain, and eyes to see, the apparent futility of organizing and protest.
Wherever Anonymous Joe sits, and whatever he fronts for, here and in other netspaces where he and such folks sell their pitch, there's plenty of whisperers and shills, really sharp ones, insinuating and interstitializing their little bits of intellectual pathogens.
I am curious if there is a little listing of people, other than our host, of course, who "the government," or that part of the monster that's all about enforcing idiocy and "conformity" and "shut up and eat your dirt-ity" has gone about "getting."
Bless Dr. Cole for having his own presence in the Imperial Capital as technical adviser to parts of "the government," and I hope that was part of the reason the "getting" got exposed, at least, though given the tenacity of bureaucrats in the State Security, you can bet there's still a "dossier" floating around, waiting for another bite at the apple. Not all the people targeted by our own snowballing Stasi for "get"ting have sufficient presence and cachet to hope for the same treatment. And not all of us, mice and sheep that we mostly are, with imaginations that conjure up, from Serious Historical Events and reading and even experience, all the bad stuff that can be visited upon us and those dear to us, have what it takes to persevere in trying to preserve against all the enormous enormity of all that oligopolaholic Bigness, in trying to preserve some whisper of individual and collective rights, for the "masses."
Hang together, if we can, given the inroads the Peeping Toms attracted to "Security Careers" are making in the actual ability to "asssemble and petition for redress of grievances," or hang separately...
Jasper has posited a "right" of the present 7.129-odd billion humans, and the 3-4 billion his assumptions add to the population in the next 40 years, to "expand their energy usage." Apparently with a tacit assumption that all the present indulgences and modes of converting stored to kinetic to waste-heat energy for "consumption" must be allowed to continue and expand, especially for the many humans who have not experience the pleasure of driving a Cadillac Escalade. The present level of combusto-consumption conversion, I bet he agrees, is unsustainable on a living planet, and from wherever he is coming from, politically and socially, I kind of doubt that "nuclear" has a prayer of making the situation any better. Nuke plants are as safe as they are (not very, it appears) largely because of "regulation" (and there's some anecdotal evidence that even with "regulation" in a world plagued with corruption and mischance, that is "not very") and a huge wealth transfer from ratepayers and public sources to the owners and rentiers of those plants. (Here in west FL, we ratepayers are, thanks to regulatory capture, giving Duke Power a $(as yet to be determined number of but at least 4) billion-dollar windfall in "rates" to pay for a nuclear plant that WILL NEVER BE BUILT. http://www.abcactionnews.com/dpp/news/duke-energy-customers-angry-about-money-for-nothing And for a plant at Crystal River that "free enterprise" suits (albeit from the Progress Energy entity that Duke bought to get that unearned profit), in their arrogance, was so badly damaged in "improving" it without benefit of "costly" outside engineering guidance that it is off the grid forever. http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2013-02-05/news/os-progress-energy-nuclear-plant-20130205_1_nuclear-plant-nuclear-power-plant-nuclear-electric-insurance
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/08/15/the-future-of-electric-energy/?myPortfolios_show=true&myPortfolios_open=true&savingsChallenge_show=true&savingsChallenge_open=false&myArticles_show=true&myArticles_open=true
Partisans for "energy options" ought to announce their interest. In the name of that silly myth, "transparency." So the rest of us have a prayer of making choices, that of course includes the choice to "eat drink and be merry," because apres nous le deluge...
Of course, neither the bits of "China" that did those deals with Karzai's gang for the sale of "national" common wealth are hardly more honorable than contractors flying the US imperial colors. Just sharper at the Game of Empire than the Players flying "our" flag...
Hi Jasper! Amazing what one can do with a calculator anda handful of assumptions! Like to establish just what, again? That unless we all go for nuclear power, which with externalities and uncertainties costs HOW much, again? And let's just ignore the rutting bull elephant on the ballroom, and not "factor in" the real costs, in rights, health, stability and the chance our grandchildren won't have to eat Soylent Green, or each other in a much more direct manner? The whole shoot in' match, as constituted, provides a pretty bleak certainty for the little blue planet we collectively had the chance to be stewards of...
Good thing Scahill is more articulate in the promo video and his movie than he was in that Goodman interview. Not that any degree of articulate exposition of the corruption and idiocy at the heart of that Forever War crap will ever even begin to overcome the flood of Apologiae and recitation of shibboleths and that stupid aggressive complacence and arrogance that lies at the heart of the Empire. And of course the wonderful effects of all that self-catalyzing aggregation of Money, flooding around the gates of the Imperial Capital and its outposts...
But of course we all need to remember that according to the Serious Voices, this is all wise and legal and somehow meaningful. Not to mention profitable, and a whole lot of fun, for most of the Players in the Game.
How can ordinary people who pay for, and suffer the depredations of all this crap ,ever overturn the "system," or demand, and GET, a redirection of all that wealth and energy? How can we ordinary people ever defeat this kind of idiotic self-perpetuating and growing corruption? When do the most of us start to realize that there really is an existential threat to us and our families and friends?
For context:
"Retired Generals Hired By Defense Contractors"
http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/segment/retired-generals-hired-by-defense-contractors/50abbbab2b8c2a3fff000478
"Generals, Admirals Live Large on Taxpayer Dollar"
http://concernedveteransforamerica.org/2013/07/29/6478/
"Generals Live Like Kings"
http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/generals-live-like-kings/
"Petraeus scandal puts four-star general lifestyle under scrutiny"
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-11-17/world/35505221_1_robert-m-gates-commanders-joint-chiefs
And it's not like all this crap we are paying so dearly for is actually in any way making the world a better place... Except, seemingly, for those who persevere in the Game of becoming general or admiral...
It grows like a cancer, quietly, out of sight, until it eventually kills the patient.
Speaking of cancer, in the meantime THIS is what's going on vis-a-vis the Actual Warriors and their survivors:
"Adjudicating VA’s Most Complex Disability Claims: Ensuring Quality, Accuracy and Consistency on Complicated Issues"
http://veterans.house.gov/hearing/%E2%80%9Cadjudicating-va%E2%80%99s-most-complex-disability-claims-ensuring-quality-accuracy-and-consistency
BlahblahEffingblah...
He was president at a time when the momentum of the New Deal as well as the whole economic boom we all so fondly want to return to (just needs another global war to get back to?). He may not have "raised taxes on the rich" but on his watch the marginal tax rate for the REAL takers at the top of the heap was 92%, dropping to 91% via CONGRESSIONAL action while he was in office.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-02/1950s-tax-fantasy-is-a-republican-nightmare.html
Here's a little context for the neoliberals to work from:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-02/1950s-tax-fantasy-is-a-republican-nightmare.html
Does not play well with sound bites and drive-by impeachment...
Interesting how the same sort of thing happens to other community organizer/lawyer types, isn't it? Even ones that did not have to do the in-prison martyrdom time to get their "creds..."
Waiting for the pithy riposte that reassures us that all is well in the West Wing, that "(faux) moderation in the pursuit of hegemonoligarchy is no vice..."
As noted in a comment above, most of the institution and institutionalization of Apartheid was the work of the Broederbond, which seems to partake of the same aroma as that Likud thing and parts of the US polity too. http://books.google.com/books?id=UTNhTscJ9m4C&pg=PA96&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false
Too bad there's hardly a smidgen of the kind of people that think about and have the skill and fortitude to act on the notions that push in the direction of decency and comity and stability. And how many of them end up killed off early? Gandhi, Martin Luther King, maybe Jesus of Nazareth, and a relative handful more? Too few, usually, in any era, to counterbalance the Krupps and Kochs and Cheneys, who think of the rest of us, believe it or not, as "masses" to be herded and bled.
And as o=Prof. Cole notes, so many sneaks and apologists and frauds are Johnny-on-the-Spot to ride the emotions and milk the pathos and derail the real messages and print and sell the T-shirts and other memorabilia... Obama pronounces, sonorously and maybe with a sigh of relief that one more possible "threat" to the Empire is off the scene, "Now he belongs to the ages." -sniff--
How many know (or care) what MLK's observations on social justice and wealth distribution were?
The Afrikaners took over South Africa following a playbook that the Roves and Gingriches and Kochs have been reading from for decades. Infiltrate the lower levels of the bureaucracy, local and state, with people sworn to allegiance to the Oligarchy, control the schools and other public and eventually private means of learning, fill the higher levels of the bureaucracies and the courts with fellow travelers, all that stuff. http://books.google.com/books?id=UTNhTscJ9m4C&pg=PA96&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false
All in service to what god, again?
"It's only a movie," actually a franchise as Hollywood calls it, but people wanting clues about Dystroit might go back and enjoy (?) the "Robocop" series.. Not uniformly good theater, but Omni Consumer Products sure looks familiar, as do its principals (and principles, if you can call them that.)
"In the near future, Detroit, Michigan is on the verge of collapse due to financial ruin and overrun by crime. The city has signed a deal with the mega-corporation Omni Consumer Products (OCP) to allow them to run the police force, in exchange for allowing OCP to demolish "Old Detroit" and construct a high-end utopia called "Delta City" to be managed by OCP. This moves angers the police officers as they are now beholden to OCP, and threaten to strike. OCP evaluates other options for law enforcement. OCP senior president Dick Jones (Ronny Cox) offers the ED-209 enforcement droid, but when it kills a board member during a demonstration, the OCP chairman (Dan O'Herlihy) decides to go with the experimental cyborg design titled "Robocop" as suggested by the younger Bob Morton (Miguel Ferrer), infuriating Jones...."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboCop
It's only a movie, of course. So is "Soylent Green..."
Yah, it's all a matter of categories and definitions, isn't it? The Exceptional US and its subsidiaries and affiliates, as pointed out by some of the sneered-at comments, and of course the main post, is run by people who so respect the rule of law and so fear the consequences of its application to them that they went to the trouble of suborning the institutions of legislation, interpretation and enforcement. Defining corruption, that great Leviathan of greed and abuse, out of existence for huge swathes of what people would generally agree, whether or not they click the first link, is the essence of deadly corruption, and criminalizing the trivial, is such a wonderfully Calvinist and hypocritical way of doing business.
And I bet, naw, I'm SURE, it's profitable, under some theories of value, to be flacking for the folks who have figured out how to scam the shibboleths that move the masses...
The trick, from the standpoint of ordinary people who do the work that makes the wealth, and then suffer and bleed thanks to that corruption in all its ugly forms, is to figure out how to limit the inevitable to a tolerable level. In smaller social units, the vulnerability of the Grabbers to correction, from shunning to more violent forms, has a chance of limiting the predation and parasitism. Not so much as the structure gets bigger...
Some students of humanity call it "slack." There's a small area of esoteric erudition where these folks discuss roots, causes, ranges, particular behavior sets and all that, along side some speculative suggestions about ways to control the tapeworms and tumors. http://books.google.com/books?id=ss5eMBkzJkgC&pg=PA41&lpg=PA41&dq=corruption+slack&source=bl&ots=GeloAEoeHQ&sig=Vg4-el8YjGXv7nQdaTonFX73_O0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=B8ChUuW5Bu3gsASfk4CYCA&ved=0CF8Q6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=corruption%20slack&f=false
Them robots and computers might not be bribe-able, might not demand their little mordidas, in any form one could anticipate presently. But until the Machine really becomes electronomechanical, without squishy and corrupt protoplasmic involvement, and develops its own ethics (which might, as some speculate, include killing off all that unpredictable anti-Collective protoplasm), the machines and positronic brains will be imagined, created and built in the first instance by the oh so corrupt and corruptible creatures that give us the NSA computers and bots, the "activities" of the CIA and other Mafias and supra-national corporations, the Global Interoperable Dominate The World Just Like The Commies Were Supposed To Plan To Do Network-centric Battlebabblespace,, complete with its core-value myth of "benevolent supremacy" fronting the reality of Krupp-and-Koch-land and the irrepressible impulses of the would-be and are-already Gilded Agers to own (and rent out and consume and shed externalities everywhere) EVERYTHING, with nice little profitable violent sideshows like Notagainistan and Syria and Angola and the CAR and all that.
In the good-news column, here in FL a pod of 50-odd pilot whales stranded themselves down by the Everglades, apparently led onto the beach by a few diseased individuals. Now, 35 or more of them have turned about and swum back into deeper waters (albeit waters fouled by the whole system "capped" by the BP "Deepwater Horizon incident" with its enormous and growing -- thanks to sloth and greed and other venial and mortal sins -- burden of plastic crap -- oil-based -- and dropping pH).
Anyone care to join them, in the quest for less fouled and healthier seas and survival?
Serious Historians, those dedicated,irrepressible, implacable guardians and disseminators of the National Mythology and protectors of the Powers that Be, tell us the whole Cold War schtick was one of the High Points of US Civilization. My first memory of TV viewing was of one episode of the black-and-white McCarthy "reality TV show" in about 1952, on a friend's early console TV. Scary crap for a little tyke in first grade, starting out in the process of trying to learn how to be a citizen... And of course it's gotten a lot worse. Maybe it will be a relief to finally come to love Big Brother. And if I can also make myself useful to the Matrix, I'll get to decline into senescence with some grace... Seems like past service in the older Imperial Army doesn't count for much.
Milo Minderbinder's "accounting practices?" They sure did in my experience. Under McNamara's Really Smart Zero-Based Budgeting, artillery units in Vietnam had to expend all their rounds every month or risk getting fewer the next month. forget about the idiocy of the whole enterprise, this one little fillip led to end-of-month "fire missions" of lots of ordnance into the nearest "free-fire zones," parts of Vietnam that were designated by the High Command as so irretrievably "gook" that anything in there was presumptively guilty of anti-US-Interest Activity, kind of like the thinking so artfully apologized for by some who post here. Since my unit's tents were pitched just beneath the muzzles of a battery of 155 self-propelled guns, and since Marines have an "artful" sense of humor, once a month these dudes would yell out gleefully so we could anticipate it, "Fire Mission!," level their pieces, out tompions, and fire for effect over us, the muzzle blasts tending to collapse our sun-rotted tents. Blowing who-knows-or-who-cares-who-or-what to flinders some 8 or 10 miles down range. If you read the desiccated Wiki entry, you either get a nice reinforcement of your pro-warlord belief structure, or a peek into the horror at the heart of what we humans do:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M109_howitzer
Here's one tiny example of what the global war marketing people trade in, every effing day:
"The Market for Self-Propelled
Artillery Systems "
http://www.forecastinternational.com/samples/F653_CompleteSample.pdf
Yah, I feel much better with that correction in the air. Don't all the rest of us too? It's just overwhelming, all that "benevolence..."
"We have established what you are madam. We are now just haggling over the price..."
Yah, I feel much better with th
And for those who maintain or claim or dissemble about "US Benevolence," an alternative bit of context:
'The Ten Commandments' and Benevolent Supremacy - Andrew Covert
http://amcult235spr13.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-ten-commandments-and-benevolent.html
Oh, come on now! I read here, and see endlessly on the TV how benevolent "the US" is! Bearing in mind that "the US" is just a clumsy and obscure personification that covers all the stuff done by nominal "US" corporations (actually and mostly completelly post-national, self-loyal greed and consumption machines) and the various organs and agencies of the Empire (largely the same set as those enormous, in all senses of that word, corporate blobs) that are funded and staffed by "our" populace...
http://www.nationstates.net/nation=futilitarianism
http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/the-futilitarian-heresy
And the individuals who have figured out how to profitably sucker and kill the rest of us, wholesale and retail, will live their really Large lives and pass away free from any consequences...
...and, of course, going at it from the other direction is the former nation of "America." Looks to me like "America" fails in each and every one of the categories of nationhood and presumably "Democracy" cited above. And no, Bill and Joe, it is no longer apparent that "the sainted US" can do ANYTHING "right," except in the movement of Overton windows and suchlike...
Thanks for the accounting entries on one of the many current horrors. No comments? No surprise...
Re Bill's challenge, here is one little piece of context:
http://www.afghanistan-analysts.org/a-yes-a-maybe-and-threat-of-migration-the-bsa-loya-jirgas-last-day
One can read the whole article and step back through the links, or wait for Last-Word Bill to tell us what it actually said...
Maybe Brian can't tell us because, like the excuses given for official secrecy, to do so would reveal sources, methods and actions that risk "security."
"Frankly, the US would be better off withdrawing from the Afghan quagmire..." For once, something to agree with. I might add that wisdom and the national interest might support the same notion regarding a lot of other places where US forces, of all sorts, and nominal "US"-actual-post-supra-national corporate "interests," are busily playing the Game.
But as to the pronouncement about the universality of SOFAs, might I offer this bit of context?
http://digitaljournal.com/article/360737
Good grief indeed, Bill! Did I say or even imply that M. Attaher was a neocon or anything like? I was pointing to the article in question, in context, looking for the source of the quoted words. And then maybe inartfully pointing out how difficult it will be, given all the noisy neocons and what are called, way too kindly and succinctly, "hard-liners," who gain from the Game, people whose lexicon is full of the exact "kill them all, they are less than human" content, people whose facades and dogmas run against comity and accommodation, in pursuit of "national interests" that very clearly are about money (even if the planet burns) and what Bill calls "maximum flexibility." Which in the US case is the high hand of imperialism, with all rights and range of action reserved to our rulers. National sovereignty of others? Treaty rights? "Rule of law?" To be ignored and ridden down with impunity in a fog of "legalisms" and crafty PR.
I'll cop to being angry about the framing of geopolitics that hypersimplifies and artlessly obscures the nature of the Game, including the idiotic personification of nations. If that "nail" is one of the parts of the behaviors of the powerful and those who get rich off of activities that are killing the rest of us, in my so very humble estimation, I'll gladly give Bill more chances to impeach my observations by serial mischaracterization, and to smugly denigrate from his high horse.
Maybe the reader should go look at the "sourcing" and decide for him- or herself the validity of the claimed language. http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/netanyahus-finest-hour%E2%80%94or-not-9468?page=1 And then go spend some time with the neocon "policy" rags in our very own Free Democratic America to see what some of our high officials have to say about "enemies" of one sort or another. And it's been regularly reported here that people on the other side of the ancient divide say and believe and act on notions that are at least as immoderate as the claimed Khameini words.
From that same "National Interest," there's stuff like this, too:
http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/iran-historys-ash-heap-9463
Just a wild guess, but isn't "Mideast peace" a kind of aspirational oxymoron? Even Bill and Joe remind us of the complexities, politely so-called, of that weird and wonderful set of interrelationships, with such a long history of backstabbing, empire building, attachments of convenience, well-bred racial and ethnic and "religious" antipathies, and one strong man after another seeking to follow the advice of 'The Prince' on gaining and holding power over others.
Too bad that there's no common model for stability and "peace" that passes from ruler to ruler through the generations, and there are always the Whisperers at the ears and keyholes of power, seeking advantage and profit... which comes generally from ever closer approaches to chaos.
Dare one point out the counter-narrative context here? The part about the Imperium dodging a bullet (actually a huge number of them) by the narrowest of fortuities, where possible idiocy or possible real sense averted yet another Milo Minderbinder "war racket," as the various "interests" with their oh so very narrow focuses and big-talking geopolitical vocabularies lumbered toward slinging Tomahawks at "targets" of some sort, "just because?" That maybe our grand geopoliticians are actually just caught up in the end-of-habitable-planet scrabble for a larger personal chunk of wealth to stimulate and protect them in the End Times they and their "policies" are apparently bringing about, and terribly aware of, or worse, oblivious to? Or that the whispering class, that tells us every day how wise and deep our Rulers are, or blows smoke in our eyes to keep our shoulders to the great wheels of Commerce, missed a little local triumph or two when accident and error stepped in?
http://www.thenation.com/article/177275/power-down#
Of course, there is always hope, that last hang-by-your-fingernails bit of light at the end of the tunnel...
Anthropologists of a sardonic bent have done some digging and discovered the following:
"Body Ritual Among The Nacerima"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmbJfSdSZbM
"The Mysterious Fall of the Nacirema"
http://people.uncw.edu/robertsonj/SEC210/TheMysteriousFalloftheNacirema.pdf
For those of us who yak about "democracy," and "freedom," (less often flagged, the cognitive dissonance being just too much even for the jingoistiest, maybe) and that idiot fraud, "national interest," that whitewashes so much and regiments the less aware into believing they are really part, and even beneficiaries, of some grand, well-managed "progress."
It ain't a theater, it's oil' Plato's cave...
And yet a little more context, for those who care to read up on SOFAs, those bits of furniture on which our imperial centurions often park their commodious backsides:
https://www.jagcnet.army.mil/DocLibs/TJAGLCSDocLib.nsf/xsp/.ibmmodres/domino/OpenAttachment/doclibs/tjaglcsdoclib.nsf/8400639488825BD385257549006019A4/Body/Chapter%2015%20%20International%20Agreements%20&%20SOFAs.pdf
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL34531.pdf
For anyone serious about understanding SOFAs, attention to this latter link will give a more complete picture than you will get from the presumptions and presumptuous comments found here.
Ms. Marshall, you would need a rather large prayer circle to overcome the incantations of the persistent, dogged, dedicated, driven, indefatigable persons, private, public and corporate, that keep this mythical charade called "geopolitics" erected for their personal benefit, playing on the moral weaknesses and fears of the rest of us.
As you know, Mr. Player, the "countries" do not "agree:" various elites, with more or less legitimacy (usually less, often with "inputs" from our own imperial bureaucracies) go through the motions of ratifying those arrangements. The local yokels who have reason to expect that occupying troops abide by and be subject to local law get screwed. Seems our sainted Forefathers had some problem with occupation troops too, leading to
"No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution And one Forefather, John Adams, represented the British soldiers in COLONIAL LOCAL court against homicide charges, where the colonists had been doing the same stuff that "militant insurgents" are doing in other imperially occupied places.
You wonder, too, if there are not other "inducements to (temporary and convenient) 'loyalty'" in play. Is there a part number for the shrink-wrapper used to brick up those millions in bribe money? "Get out of jail free" cards for the successful opium makers?
Recall that our imperial military is so wedded to the mission du jour that they will bribe "terrorists," or are they "insurgents" or "militants" or "fighters" in the press briefings, to both drive, and "guard," and not to ambush, the convoy trucks delivering through "inactive areass" all that gasoline and diesel and munitions and MREs to whatever is the current Active Scene of Futility Battlespot. Milo Minderbinder LOVES this crap. And how about "Viagra for 'backing'", as a tactic to "reward" the warlords at the Jirga? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/3965138/CIA-give-Afghan-warlords-Viagra-in-exchange-for-information-on-Taliban.html
More context: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/interviews/schroen.html
The CIA let Gary Schroen publish his "what I did on my Summer Vacation" essay, "First In: An Insider's account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War On Terror in Afghanistan," which displays not only the true "fluid" nature of Important Relationships in that territory, but the tricks and tips a CIA field officer would want to know on how to "steer" those relationships and grease them with cash, weapons, whateverittakes to do just what, again? https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol49no4/War_on_Terror_9.htm Written by J. Daniel Moore, who by subtle diction and jingo-enthusiasm could be our own Joe...
Sorry, "Guam" should be "Okinawa." "We" OWN Guam, so locals there are really screwed...
RE money: The BBC report I saw this AM, that could have come straight from one of our own media outlets, had an Afghani talking head talking with the nice Indian lady talking head, and he pointed out that a major selling point for our buddy Karzai was the "billions and billions of dollars that will continue to be poured into the Afghan [sic] economy by continued UN [UN!] presence." Nice B-roll video of the Loya Jirga in action in that great hall built and decorated with what, US money again, all those dudes with their personal interests in their little corners of Traditional Afghanistan, and Karzai doing the Imitation Strong Man hard sell on it all. Talking heads give passing reference to little concerns about how "UN" troops bust into people's homes and do all that other stuff, even (gasp!) a mention that "some think" this "contributes to continued terrorism," along with the killing and raping and stealing and drugs and all that other stuff that invading and occupation armies from other empires have always done as "their due."
Bill says immunity of US [US!] troops from local law is "nothing special." Ask a lot of residents of Guam and Japan and Korea and the Philippines and various central and South American and African places whether they agree. "Nothing special" for the empire, of course... actually, it's more and more apparent that it's more and more of that "racket," extended into really new territory, that ol' Smedley Butler tried to shine a little light on.
For context, once again:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2011/10/us-military-south-korea-status-of-forces-agreement-sofa-rapes-intenational-diplomacy.html
http://www.japanfocus.org/-C__Douglas-Lummis/2933
http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2013/11/us_afghans_work_toward_agreeme.html
And of course if you do your own research, a lot more...
Interesting, on a small sample of course, how seemingly "geopolitically" aware people in the streets of wreckage are "over there," compared to our mall-walking US populace.
Still, why just call the participants in actual violence "government forces" and "rebels?" The narrator did add a segue to "jihadis," seems more accurate and indicates how little political boundaries apparently have to do with the root causes of "ALLAHU AKHBAR!!!" idiotic violence and destruction on the "rebel" side, at least. But spend time with the available images of that set of eruptions, like a bad case of shingles, currently being fed and fomented by nominal US and other players, and the commonalities of idiot cruelty and viciousness across the "battlespace" between all the field forces and their "leadership" seem pretty clear. What would you call it, a "focused nihilism?" With a large dose of anomie? And gee whiz, there is apparently joy and FUN! in "martyrdom!" What's better, becoming a Martyr or Martyring some other dude?
Good to at least document what's shaking, with serious and wry and sad shakes of the head, but what's the combination of new impulses and changed inputs that will direct all that energy into building, instead of demolishing buildings and lives? Does it just run its inevitable course down into the "relationships" and ruined, meaningless urban landscape of "Call of Duty?"
And those "United States interests" would be just what, again? Not much to do with "stability" or "sustainability" or some sad notion like "general welfare," just more of the same old pursuit of some vain triumph of imperial oligarchy, oiligarchy, hegemony. Not a clue about or smidgen of interest in squishy stuff like "making the world a better place for the most of us rather than a very few of us," just "maximum freedom of action" for some chimaerical "nation" that is just a set of very PRIVATE, for-profit "interests," if it is anything at all...
"rushed to deploy..."
Let's remember how the MIC Battlespace thingie works: Some clique of officers and "contractors" and Players constructs a Doctrine. A set of specs for an "appropriate" bunch of procurements gets under way. The prototype and testing parts lumber into motion, with money infusions from an unaccountable "budget" we taxpayers keep stuffing up. Various add-ons appear, with their own costs. The support systems and personnel and managers become a constituency of "people 'earning' good middle-class incomes" building and managing it all, with clout related to where stuff gets built and the size of the procurement.
And the whole goal is "DEPLOYMENT," at which point the whole shootin' match is no longer even slightly tentative, it's a PROGRAM, with its own logic and politics and momentum that has not a damn thing to do with "civilian control of the military" or any kind of what I at least would call healthy "policy."
Like the F-22, the F-35, more $8 billion aircraft carriers for more surplus admirals to hang their flags on, the V-22, the fast-growing development of "autonomous Terminator-class Warfighting Machines," all that crap.
Enjoy it, people -- you have hardly a prayer of changing any of it, including the inevitable endpoint, as long as you keep buying into the idiot myths, and paying for the stuff that actually is going on...
What's always interesting to me is the reality that there's a "polity" of militarists and supporters and suppliers that lops over all the manipulatable political and social boundaries that incubate all those casi belli. These monsters gather, among other places, at International Arms Shows where they pollinate each others' fecund murderous imaginations to "extend technology" to ever greater Lethality (the US War Department even has a whole Lethality Project that invites even "non-traditional MIC businesses" to come up with more -- and for the "successful bidders," very profitable -- Terminator-class death-dealing devices.)
In the virtual world, forget "national loyalties" 'n the silly stuff the ordinary people believe: English, particularly dry British English, the diction of Janes' All The World's Killing Machines, a quietly enthusiastic kind of Consumer Report-ism for the universe of Forever Warfare, is the lingua franca, for a seamless web of engineers and machinists and their heady managers who are just EXCITED about the POSSIBILITIES, particularly INTERNATIONAL SALES FIGURES! Here's one seminal sample, from one of the largest of the post-national war sellers, Boeing: http://www.boeing.com/news/speeches/2003/roberts_030206.html I really like the "What if--"s down at the bottom of a speech extolling a global infinite-resource-eating warmanaging apparatus and its killing appendages.
As to where that all leads, Barbara Tuchman's "Guns of August" lays out a lot of the seedy and Idiotic crap behind our serial Grand Violence, and to bring it up to date, in this centennial year of the Great War, lookie here: "Behind the Storm: Was World War I the outcome of elite machinations?"
http://www.thenation.com/article/177134/behind-storm And other scholarship, unblinded by jingoist idiocy...
Don't get suckered into believing that an Evil Cabal of Dudes In White Turbans are growing monstrous toadstools like the drone device pictured above, all by themselves in their Secret Laboratories and Manufactories, as a threat to the whole Civilized World. It's more like the engineers and murder managers in the Iranian fraction of the Global Interoperable Network-Centric Battlespace are just one little set of stipes on THIS giant parasitic pathogenic "world's largest organism," http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=strange-but-true-largest-organism-is-fungus a fungus that just grows and grows and grows, older than Christianity or Islam...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armillaria Looks like the General Atomics Squints who dreamed up the Predator and Raptor and progeny have set the model for more of the same from all over... All paid for by those of us who are the future Bugsplats in the sights of those immaculately conceived Weapons Systems...
Fred Hampton, more directly: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-rutberg/nothing-but-a-northern-ly_b_355670.html
Speaking of door knocks, how about Fred Hampton? https://www.google.com/search?q=fred+hampton&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a Sheriff Joe Arpaio's subjects, daring to "look Hispanic?" Freedom Riders, school desegregation/Bull Connor/George Wallace/KKK, Chicago and New York "Red Squads," the "freedoms" and "rights of citizenship accorded to "Occupy," our ever-more-militarized-securitized police presence, any number of NO-knock and "whoops, wrong address, kill the dog and shoot the homeowner and then file false reports and retreat behind that Thin Blue Line" episodes and, for honest serious historians, so very much more. It ain't the "imperfection," it's the sickening hypocrisy. And the nominal goal is what, again? Justice, fairness, equality of persons and opportunity and that Rule of Law that is no respecter of persons? A political process at least more transparent than ALEC and CREEP? All to "Promote The General Welfare?" Or did I miss something in Civics and Polysci 101 and US History?
By that definition, many might question how the US is characterized. Surely not as a "democracy?" Rule of law, full of faked foreclosures, selective enforcement, private prisons, legislation by bribe, all that? I guess by squinting one could say the judicial system "functions," since papers get filed and orders and rulings issued, but "justice" not so much... "Transparent political process?" Hmmm... And "our" history of "spreading democracy" sure looks like "we" have spread a lot of other stuff, but not much of that stuff that in its abstraction makes us all puff-chested and weepy...
Yeah, "risible." Meaning "ridiculously laughable." One wonders if there is a prescription for any actions that might lead to a government with the legitimacy and clout to promote a more general well-being? Maybe another "Competent authoritarian" to instill some "discipline?" "We" apparently are okay with the Afghanistan thing functioning the way it does, with a nice center of opportunity-breeding corruption with a big base and airport in Kabul and a very few "controlled" outlying areas, and warlords and mullahs again running the most of the country in a more "traditional" way, and whoopppee! another record opium harvest!
What are the elements that distinguish "real democracies," again? As inchoate and/or arbitrary as the ones that define "the national interest"?
Gee, another problem exacerbated by the whole "more weapons, everywhere, all the time" schtick that just WHO profits from, again?
And what kind of "training?" Weapons familiarization and marksmanship and sniping techniques? Combat courses in urban warfare? "Crowd control?" The curricula of the "School of the Americas?" Protecting rich and powerful players and their all-important and ever-growing "property?" Surely not squishy crap like "neighborhood policing," or the elements of building a civil society, or conflict reduction, or overcoming tribal biases in favor of a "general welfare" awareness. Or just bribing warlords to stand down for a while...
A context sampler, for your delectation and enjoyment:
http://goang.com/Careers/Security-Forces/3P0X1
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Security-Force-Training-Academy/422051137849393
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=5&cad=rja&ved=0CE8QFjAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.worldwewant2015.org%2Ffile%2F400646%2Fdownload%2F435484&ei=_86IUqqtG-jF2AWt-YFw&usg=AFQjCNE-eQinOv_ZoJSIxfgxHNNMmeRmJg&sig2=OOogd6IRuuXHy7-HeNvNEg&bvm=bv.56643336,d.b2I
There's lots more out there, by "our" and other government and militaries, and of course it's a growth industry! like the privatized-prison business, that profits from what, again?
The pretextual goal is apparently "building a legitimate political structure," the reality is what, again? A "workable" authoritarian ruler? With all the impacts of arms injections, greedy extractable resource seekers, Players of the Game from far and near, etc., how does one go about the task any more? Since it's so complex, and starting from a base of repression and aspirations warped by advantage-seekers at all levels?
Seems press freedom is a necessary condition for decent governance on behalf of the general welfare and in creating real legitimacy. Hence the context:
http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/content/international-press-freedom-group-visit-uk-after-threats-post-snowden-clampdown
http://www.bbg.gov/broadcasters/threats-to-press-freedom-2010-2012/
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/news-room/content/20130906IPR18870/html/MEPs-debate-David-Miranda%27s-detention-and-threats-to-media-freedom
http://www.guyanatimesgy.com/?p=38067
And a whole lot more, in the other "forever war" of oligokleptocrats seeking to make permanent and expand their stranglehold on the rest of us...
Is it impolite to ask, "Did 'WE' really NEED Pakistan?" Which ones of "us," what "elements" of "Pakistan," for what purpose(s) again, and how has that all worked out? So far?
I know, it's just the diction of Grand Geopolitics that "we" are all so used to and apparently comfortable with and, maybe even for some of us, smug in the illusion that using the form puts us in the "inside group," no matter how "it" misleads away from maybe a healthier understanding of the inescapable truth, with the gravity well and our frail physiologies and limbic systems and apparently inexhaustible "consumer demand" and "Call of Duty: End of the World" being what they are, that WE ARE ALL STUCK IN THIS SAME HOLE TOGETHER????
I hear there are actually ways to get out of holes and pits, but they usually involve some kind of altruism and cooperation. Of course, our myths and fables and epics tell a lot about the chances of that working out well... http://www.aesopfables.com/cgi/aesop1.cgi?4&TheScorpionandtheFrog
Incredible. You really maintain that the separate huge developments of nuclear weapons by India and Pakistan were conducted "in secret and presented the US with a fait accompli"? That our vaunted sneaky-petes were caught flat-footed after all the crap that guys like A.Q. Khan pulled? Even the Israeli program -- no one in the burgeoning oligosecuritomilitarindustrial kleptocracy was aware of their "motions," even from the stuff Mr. Koroi referenced? http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/pakistan/nuke/ I like the way "the US" "suspended sanctions" on those programs "in the national interest."
Extra points for your plug for "this President," which of course is in every place you can insert one, from wherever you so furiously post. Really? Obama is more serious than all his predecessors on non-proliferation?
It appears that "Iran-Contra" is still alive, maybe as just "Contra Iran," as a tenet of National Interest Politics among those rulers of ours who appear to be confused and dopey and lost, in the complexity and personal profit-seeking opportunism and ego- and career-building, about all the weird and wonderful and uncontrollably horrible stuff that they and their predecessors have set in motion by all that "grasping" and "pivoting..."
And I see that opium production from Afghanistan reached another record high this last twelvemonth... Way to go, all you Policymakers!
It's so nice to know, from our window into the White House, cracked occasionally by Presidential apologists to give a peek inside but only when the Emperor happens to be fully clothed, so nice to know that dissembling and dysfunction are to be relied on to produce, in one little corner of the powder magazine we have built as the playing field for the Great Game, that maybe in this corner, this time, the dis-dys will not result in some idiocy striking a match or a spark.
So comforting, to anyone who puzzles over possible pathways to human survival in a time of universal re-re-re-re-armament and terminal consumption for the benefit of ever fewer, that the future is in such capable hands, ones that but for another idiot fortuity were ready to start flinging Tomahawks at "carefully selected targets" in Syria while adding fuel to the bonfire of horror burning there right now. All while juggling full-bore chain saws, as Really Smart Geopoliticians pull-start ever more saws into motion and toss them into the delicate "balance" that our brilliant President and his men are maintaining to "protect us" and "advance the national interests."
Might I encourage one and all, once again, to drop in at syriavideo.net for more REALITY, and go over to youtube and enjoy what you find by calling up the videos cataloged under "Syria sniper head shot"?
"We can do both."
Pretty clearly, NOT. Thanks, in large part, to the significant fog generated by our "serious historians" and Politburo and Ministries of Truth...
[FURTHER REMARKS CENSORED]
Is it intentional misdirection or just "ahistorical blindness" that compels efforts to obscure MC's point? So sensitive to any criticism of "the US," so protective of the jingoist Narrative and the image of "our" Exceptionalism. Yes, it would be illuminating to have your syllabus and reading list on the subject...
Seems to me MC was pointing out that rebound and blowback effects of Great Powers finally withdrawing, by force or other compulsions of actual "history," their commercial and oppressive instrumentalities of colonial and imperial hegemony from various points on the globe, can be ugly and "uncontrolled." Just like the results of "the US" and "its" clumsy, bullying extractions and "interventions," overt and co-, that pretty clearly have been inconsistent with a truly NATIONAL interest in favor of parochial Gamesmanship and profit- and rent-seeking, and disingenuous hijacking of that potent phrase, "national interest." Oh, and "nation-building" and "democratization."
And do Serious Historians all buy into the Great Game spoofery that the personified "US" has over all these decades just altruistically been acting, through various "Agencies," to "cooperate" with your falsely reified National Entities to "advance mutual interests," as opposed to "controlling" them? The oversimplification and obfuscation almost takes one's breath away...
After my Vietnam "tour," I had more than 6 months left on my enlistment, so I had to serve it out at Ft. Hood, Aug. '68 to June '69, as a personnel clerk in the HQ company of the 2nd Armored Division, old "Hell On Wheels." (The "service" back then would "release" those of us with less than 6 months because we were such a set of "mutinous pains in the a__" to their "orderly rooms."
Nine months of "outprocessing" GIs who were walking-wounded, physically and mentally. And a lot of them "had a problem with authority," after experiencing the idiocy and futility and horror, with undischargable loads of fear and sometimes guilt and really scary reflexes and behaviors. Lots of bad conduct and general discharges, often after courts-martial. There was essentially no "treatment" that I can recall, and of course no parades and nurses in starched uniforms to respond to the urge to, ah, kiss, and end up on the cover of "LIFE." http://www.posterrevolution.com/poster.cfm/kissing-the-war-goodbye-sailor-nurse-art-poster-print-24x36?class=1001&gclid=CLGW0PDQ4LoCFUhk7AodIAMAuQ
It wasn't just officers who hold soldiers in contempt -- the NCO upper ranks were just as bad. Too bad most of us are happy to live with the myths and John Wayne and Ronald Reagan images, whatever it actually costs (Vietnam, all by itself, at least $4 trillion and counting, a lot more if one counts the externalities.) All these "policy-in-the-air, So-Serious, sonorous portentous grand-geopolitical-jerky-eatery tits-for-tats are just so much toxic smoke and fun-house mirrors. For the benefit, only, of the real "winners," the ones at the ends of the money trails...
Yah, speaking of catching up with the rest of the world, think of all those Greek and Persian and Turkish warriors from past Empires, and the "offense with no name" that characterize(s)(d) all those naval gundecks and dark corners of the holds and the officers' quarters of Great Wooden and Steel Warships, and remember there's a reason the Amazons were feared!
And hey, gay, straight, female or other, join the military, go to foreign lands, meet interesting people, and kill them! While raping others in your Band of Siblings. It's an opportunity you can't have in civilian life, unless you work for, like, Xe/Blackwater, whose troops, like other "contractors," get paid TEN TIMES (with great health care and retirement plans) what numbnut GIs get (plus food stamps) for the same work!
I hear that being bisexual doubles your chances of getting a date -- opening the closet doors sure increases the pool of recruits, doesn't it?
Let's remember the real fundamentals, at the heart of all our modern entertainment and mythology: Sex and Death. Naval officers trading top-secret info to corporations for sex, and Tuesday morning DroneDeath lotteries in the Situation Room and how much fun! "Call of Duty!" is! With a lot of ribbons, drums, fooferaws and furbelows added, to "give it all meaning." In the "national interest," of course.
There are probably people in France and England and Greece and Spain and Portugal and those little islands in the Med and elsewhere who are suffering a FISCAL blitzkrieg, a monetary imperialism, who might disagree with the blithe assertion that Germany has been completely remade into a peaceful, productive player in Europe and the world." Selling U-boats to the Israelis? Joining in "UN" conflicts? And do I remember something about providing technology and assistance to folks like Hussein and Assad and Saddam? One little piece of the Game: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/07/trade-imbalances-lead-to-debt-imbalances-or-why-mercantilist-nations-shouldnt-beef-about-their-profligate-customers.html
But then the claimed characteristic is that the personified Serious monolith analyzed as "Germany" is a "player." Would have to agree with that, at least...
JW, that's all just giving a tuneup and a paint job and adding smiley-face stickers to a broke-down, brakeless bus we have been stupid enough to pay for a ride in. As it stands at the top of a hill at the bottom of which is an abrupt cliff. With drivers who get to jump off into a nice cushioned berth, right before it goes over the edge.
But we do just love our idiotic wars, and all the wealth that they transfer, and how puffed up they make us feel...
Gee, I wonder what expressions will be on OUR exceptional faces as we look out the windows on our own towns and cities, down the road...
In the "war argot" in Vietnam, "Numbah 10" meant "really bad." "Numbah 1" meant "really good!" Prof. Cole, dare this aging veteran, once stupid enough to buy into the delusions that are driving so many others to support AGAINST ANY HONORABLE NOTION OF "NATIONAL INTEREST" POLICIES (that ridiculous word) suggest that you have your list upside down? All the other items would fade mostly out if this last bit came first.
Delusions that "our troops" are kicking a__ and blowing sh_t up to "preserve Democracy" or even "preserve our way of life," which is self-limiting and self-destroying (though ego-satisfying and so very "profitable" for a very few) by killing our planetary life systems. Delusions that a huge industry and its pendant "contractor" dongle, based on combustoconsumption and its long history of "enrich-the few-as-THE-national interest," and the thuggery that Smedley Butler acknowledge he took such vivid part in, and the idiot notion that a national policy/military/industrial/sneaky-pete apparatus, is spreading what we so foolishly believe is "democracy," that palest and most obscure of shibboleths, by means of what the war planners clearly understand is "national-building" by forcible regime change, on a global scale. Delusions that all that military "might" might somehow be able to "win" (undefined term) any 4th Generation conflict (can't call 'em "wars" any more) or combined-forces operation in someplace like the Persian Gulf. Delusions that the spindizzy mechanism that has lifted "policy-making" off the ground-truth level to where it's all just "How can we make a buck off this?" and "How can I stir the pot and advance my career on the crest of some latest Dogma initiative?" provides any king of pathway to survival, let alone even spurious "stability" that itself is the Enemy of the Apparatus. Delusions that "Battlespace Managers," who have divvied up the whole globe into their little Commands, can leverage the developing horrors of ecological disaster into career and role and functional aggrandizement via suckering those of us who PAY for all this in so many ways to hand over the keys to the whole Global Interoperable Network-Centric Maserati Thingie, because all the other parasites who see where the money is flowing have hitched their inventive lexicons to that falling star. Delusions that as with "libertarianism," all wisdom and goodness flows from the idiot belief that "every entity pursuing its own 'interests'" is the Eightfold Path to Enlightenment.
And the best "we" can do is to hold tight to the analytical tools and language of the Great Game that is the manifestation and reason why it appears the species and its body burden of parasites and neoplasms ain't long for the world "we" are so Seriously and busily taking down.
Please, do not "thank me for my service." I sought to "serve" something that was pure imaginary hypocritical Milo Minderbinder bullsh_t. And new generations of young people and the tribal enclaves and shibboleths so carefully woven into the fabric of our relations, which did have some promise, are just keeping it going, decade and "war" after one another, kill people and cultures and the planet for the unregulated, apparently unregulable, conscience- and consequence-free "gain" of so very few...
You presume there is such a monolithic entity as " the government", in Israel and elsewhere? Given all the strange and apparently ungoverned "policy" pseudopodia that appear out of the darkness and complexity? Now THERE is a bit of "worldly wisdom" to cogitate over...
While you are busily unpacking, which "Israelis" does the Obama administration consider to be "them?"
Stop reading (or delete) if you've heard this one before:
In August 1967 my helicopter unit of the First Cav was ordered to Phan Thiet, a fishing town famous for its nuoc mam, an "aromatic" condiment produced by controlled rotting of fish parts. Initially the Viet Cong and townspeople made our presence clearly and noisily unwelcome. As we learned some mutual respect and became a part of the local economy (laundry, beer, prostitutes, black market, etc.) the conflict waned to a kind of jovial, mutually deprecating tolerance. Our chain of command apparently saw no reason to rock the boat.
New CO of the First Cav, and all of a sudden in swoops a new battalion with Custer's old dead unit in its lineage. "Kicking ass and taking names" became de riguer mortis, stirring the Beast on all sides. Don't dare ride downtown to sit under a thatched sunshade on the South China Sea beach, sipping Ba Me Ba and lusting after the young ladies in their cheongsams. Be sure your bunker was up to snuff and you were ready to roll into it at the first sign of "Incoming!" No more dozing in shifts on guard duty, if you wanted to keep breathing. Only mission was to "stir things up" and "kill more gooks," a tally that included water buffalo and "imaginaries."
The mindless, heedless, idiotic roots of "Call of Duty-Star Wars Trooper -- The Movie" go way back, of course. No doubt Titus Germanicus' troops did the same crap, like the stuff documented in "Restrepo" and the other imagery listed here: http://www.imdb.com/list/eTvZIG569Zw/
Anybody starting to see the enormous disconnect between the Main Narrative and the Unfortunate Reality? All that crap about "nation-building" that whoops, we don't call it that this time even though the behavior (violent forced regime change to institute something we call -- and don't practice -- "democracy," which is really just a more subtle kind of colonialism) is indistinguishable? http://www.fas.org/man/eprint/carson.pdf
A pox on all the Great Gamers and their camp followers and "contractors." (Sure seems that the "contractors," just like Milo Minderbinder, actually OWN the game board and the uniformed players and all the resources of the planet...)
Helmand, Wardak, I Corps, FATA -- where euphemism collides with nonsense, spewing out Hellfires, poppy plants, and big blocks of hundred-dollar bills...
Anyone caring to check Bill's and my work can google " arafat polonium poison assassination" or pick your own terms, to judge what is "simply not the case." Looks like a few CT and left-wing rags, and " foreign outlets..."
"In detail?" Really? I don't get the paper edition, but what page was the article (or were the articles) on, again? I can find one from 11/07 and a very few earlier ones about the speculation and exhumation. What about the "paper of record?" Don't see much there either. "Elements of it?" Maybe "elements" as rare as Polonium 210 itself...
Just commenting on a perceived general behavior pattern, Bill. Particularized straw-mannery response in favor of a very different and by my lights very deadly Narrative? Everyone gets to make their own judgment on credibility and wisdom of these little remarks. SP far.
I like how Bill advances the idea that "there's no proof," that "we may never know" by whom, or indeed even whether, Arafat was poisoned. Let's not be hasty, now, everyone, wait for all the facts, in a fact-impaired circumstance...
When it comes to "operations" by the sneaky-petes in the part of the Great Game that is Spy-VS-Spy and assassinations and all that, ALL the Players profit by convincing the rest of us that suffer the pains and instabilities and Democratizing-Socializing-Nation-Building-actually-and-avowedly-equals-forced-regime-change idiocies that "our and their rough men" serve up that "no one ever knows for sure, it could have been any of a number of Players [like, who killed Allende with whose technical assistance, for one small example]. http://www.fas.org/man/eprint/carson.pdf
Of course, Arafat and his "business partners" in Israel, Europe, the US and elsewhere, were a bucket of pernicious slime too: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/09/in-a-ruined-country/304167/
Ain't no percentage in just "doing the right thing." Especially when that particular kind of darkness, with all the false flags and manufactured crises and inflated uncertainties and ginned-up demands for ACTION, gets done plastering everything with bucketloads of Plausible Deniability and Carefully Scripted Obfuscation and Masterful Misdirection, makes perceiving, let alone doing, "the right thing" just about impossible. Generating that moral fog and mindless darkness is of the things that some of us humans are so unfortunately good at, to the cost and sorrow of so many others...
Of course, it was the "benefits" of Empires and the "inevitable increase of trade" that occasioned the extinction of the dodo -- we humans ate them, for convenience, protein to fuel the sailors who spread the "virtues" of European commercial culture around the world, and the rats and pigs and monkeys imported to that island singularity. http://www.bagheera.com/inthewild/ext_dodobird.htm The poor old dodos, eating and excreting and reproducing in a nice niche, had not much to do with their departure unless, as with the Kochian "vision" of Rand-Space, they were "guilty" of not being vicious enough to protect their turf. Wonder how (longstanding sci fi theme) the kinds of humans likely to afford going spacefaring will be received by any sentience elsewhere?
JW, consider that a person who falls off a cliff "goes a long way," too, and his "progress" also accelerates, at a nominal 9.806 meters per second squared. The sounds he emits probably depend on the reason he's falling (clumsy, or pushed, or base-jumping, "ending it all"), anything from EEEEEEeeeeeeeeee... to AAAAAAAaaaaaa.... to YAHOOOOOOOooooo. How many happen to be wearing, and know how to use, that neat little fanny-pack ram-air wingchute? And even with that Advanced Technology, there's still this kind of outcome: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNa5dcLccS4
Wonder if one could base-jump into a black hole?... ANYthing's possible, right?
Interesting, how we portray our villains in our myths. One I really like is "Independence Day," where a starfaring species of telepathic "monsters" hops from "habitable" planet to planet, killing any potentially complaining life forms and sucking "profit" out of the place before discarding it and moving on to the next space-time-locus with "something" to dominate and extract. Why am I reminded of the Kochs and Krupps and a long list of Robber Baron and Imperial types, who don't even have tentacles or adaptive exoskeletons (yet, other than socially and functionally...)?
"Both sides will lose."
One perpetual problem is choosing the right magnification in looking at social pathogens under the macroscope. I can't find it right now, but there was an interesting article, I believe in the old "Economist" that discoursed upon the "business relations," between Palestinians and Israelis, at the higher and also less visible levels. It seems that "side" is meaningless when wealth transfer is afoot -- Palestinian Top Dawgs happy to have "their people" working, with a little trinket received, as serfs for a significant set of Evil Israeli "business interests," Israelis happy to drink tea and shake hands with Evil Palestinians. Not in a "peace process" fraud, but "it's just business."
If one looks close, under higher magnification and less polarized light, and follows the shameless slime trails of money and "relationships" across the map, can one make out any set of "national interests" that mean anything other than that the "ordinary people" get screwed, whichever side of the Line they happen to be born on? There's your true "universal," I think... But then, all "serious policy discussions" just have to be based on the larger personifications, don't they? Given that a paragraph of text can only contain a very few ideas, no matter how misleading?
Do Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein "steal only what they need"? Merkel? Our various military officers caught (or not) with their hands in the till, or outstretched for a little gratuity or whatever? http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/navy-commander-swaps-secrets-lady-gaga-tickets-feds-article-1.1492746
What they NEEEEED? or what they WANT? With a certain insatiability, across the Game Board...
MK's point was about similarities in behaviors by state security persons against individuals who might be threatening a reduction in level of conflict. Mine was too.
Not even a general denial of the other bits?
Aside from Bill's usual pseudologic attempts to sidetrack and impeach via his little toolkit, seems to me MK's comment was directed at a pattern of behavior by people like what Bill (less frequently now) implies he stans among: sneaky-petes who "have been present" at many places where efforts to trend roward more stable and egalitarian governance have gotten the Allende treatment with "our" "technical assistance..."
"Ain't no money in peace. Nor opprtunity, neither." Peace = F-35 x 0.
And it's all perfectly legal, right?
Jeebus, let there not be an outbreak of anything like "comity" or motions in the direction of "good governance." Joe from his anonymous place Inside probably has a dozen asserted "proofs" that Mehsud was just pulling some kind of sneaky scam in a complexity where assassination is FUN! and why "we" the stupid rest of humanity just have to keep up paying in so many ways, including a charge toward our own extinction, continue the fast-paced, short- term-profitable-to-someone-with-"interest" idiotic tail-wags-the-dog Game...
Boy, I feel so much safer now that Meshud and his history with "our" skulduggers is dead (listen to the cheers by the idiot Drone Savants!), and look! The "Taleban" is a bunch of littler groups "we" in our "threat creation" get to personify and clump together, and with any luck whoever succeeds Mehsud will execute his OWN idiocies in keeping with tribal code and long-honed skills and behaviors, keeping the Game ball safely in play to secure the career paths of "our" steely-eyed "patriotoperatives..."
For my two cents, I'd bet more on something like the end-state portrayed in H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine"-- Eloi and Morlochs...
Grumpy -- Double plaudits for not only being observant and informed and cogent on this (among many) issues, but actually doing something to help alleviate some bit of the pain.
An abiding frustration is the use of the pronoun "we" in any kind of "policy discussion." My observation is that there never was much "we-"ism in the world, except as to tribe or narrow parochial interests, right down to "enjoyment" of that perfect Pinot Noir. And there's been a slow and increasing leak from the reservoir. I have no idea any more what causes people to actually care about one another, in the sense of empathy on up to agape, http://rightfromtheheart.org/devo/1567 , or whether the quantum of that kind of care is growing or fast receding. It seems pretty clear that the drivers of behavior and the rationalizations and myths and traditions that support all its bits are pretty much pushing in the direction of selfISH and strongly away from selfLESS. It's not even much about survival any more for the people who have figured out how to institutionalize the REAL "taking," by which, at the direction and to the benefit of a very few, "we" humans are eating ourselves out of house and home.
It scares me that the power of "threat perception" extends so far that "we" are tricked into thinking in terms of "food security," and the kind of enormous insanity that is exemplified in one of my 3x5 rocking horses, the War Department's "strategic thinking" on how to grow its particualr cancer ever bigger and more invasive and malignant on the back of that New Godzilla Threat, "climate change:" http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports/ADA552760.pdf
Yah, it all reads like "just good planning." But with the F-35 as the model, and the kind of thinking that the People of the War Department have shown they are limited to, putting folks from a system that generates the likes of Petraeus and McChrystal and a faceless (until bad crap happens) horde of others "in charge of addressing" that starvation thing and that environmental-calamity thing and those various how-can-"we"-keep-control-of-all-those-resources things seems maybe not like a "winning strategy." Except for those few people who profit off that kind of "threat management."
You available for cloning?
Iraq and "the US" are "partners"? By what stretch of language could this possibly be asserted? Maybe people in the US, including that Congress thing, see the futility of throwing more good money and more weapons after stupid and corrupt and bad, with about zero chance of any positive return.
But Maliki and many who have marked the same path know the Imperial ropes, the ones used to separate the Game from anything looking remotely like the general welfare. Anyone for another "Charlie Wilson's War?"
Professor, dare one ask why "giving" or "selling" weapons to al Maliki's set is even up for discussion? How much evidence is needed that adding arms to the witch's brew in that part of the world is simply not subject to any realistic "conditions" or "controls" or monitoring? And that the Game Play that is one strand of the warping and subjugation of so many to the whims and profits of a little set of Overlords and self-serving Idiots is not any kind of "progress?"
Of course the Gamers say, like little kids talking Mom into letting them jump off that bridge, "Everyone else is doing it! If I don't, someone else will!"
This crap is part of why the planet is in such sorry shape - farmers and gardeners, even ones driven by profit, usually take great care of the bits of the planet over which they exercise "dominion": why does that wisdom never spread to the Tapeworms and tumor cells that infest and are killing us and our little habitable patch of the cosmos?
In addition to other talents, Bill is now a retroactive mind-reader. And persistent purveyor of that narrow, jingoist version of "winners' history..."
And the Pakistani "government" definition of "civilians," for purposes of counting Bugsplats, is...
Jumping right over, of course, the "wisdom" vel non of shooting up a bunch of people who threaten your inchoate and infinite definition of "US Interests" just how, again? And simply presuming that what "our security forces" are doing is "legal," or "tacitly approved" by a very different and distant bunch of Pakistanis who, like Karzai and alMaliki and other clients, just love infusions of US wealth, "training" and weapons to "subjugate and pacify" those unruly tribesmen who won't even pay the tribute, the baksheesh, to the "central government" that does so much "for" them.
Keep the discussion on body count -- that which-way-the-toilet-paper-hangs debate nicely obscures the other questions... Love your characterization of Ben Emmerson, by the way, so honest, so Serious...
Anyone raise the question whether "the US government," whatever that is, "controls" the US Military, in all its parts and procurements? Pretty clear that the State Security Apparatus is a law unto itself, though one might by careful definitional delineation declare that those "things" are part of "the government" that takes in our ordinary-person wealth and delivers instability and violence and corruption...
WHICH "the Pakistanis" have "tacitly agreed" to the violation of sovereignty, again? Under what "law," again? Bill gets an "A" for consistency at least...