There's another economics game that always ends the same way: the "Beer Game," a simulation used in business schools and elsewhere to supposedly show the communications faults that plague a "supply chain." Players assume one of the roles in the brewing, distribution and sale of beer. The nominal goal is to establish a steady-state or at least functional balance between supply and demand. But in addition to the ethics that the players bring to the game, there's incentives for maximizing the position of each of the parts in the chain. Every time, despite the knowledge that imbalance and dysfunction, boom and bust, are almost always the outcome, the play goes the same way: Too much production and a crash in price and "bankruptcy." The lesson of the game, it seems to me, is a lot bigger than just the difficulties of creating and maintaining a balance in the thing called the supply chain. It's simply an illustration of competitiveness and greed standing athwart a stable, money-based, personal-reward-driven simple little part of the much larger set of relationships that Experts call "the economy." Even the people who teach the game and run the simulations acknowledge that there's something very broken in the real world: http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2012/manufacturing-beer-game-0503
But of course in iCloudCuckooland, the Big Players say that surprisingly, more information is the key to beer-brewing homeostasis:Winning the Beer Game with The Internet of Things (IoT) http://blogs.cisco.com/ioe/winning-the-beer-game-with-the-internet-of-things-iot/ How you take greed and self-advancement and Bubble-type opportunism out of the cycle isn't very clear....
Will anyone do an inventory and tote up the cost of all the sh_t these "jihadists" acquired by conquest just now? If for no other purpose than to procure a bunch more materiel from our great Contractors?
In the meantime, our geniuses in the foreign-policy-ery and sneaky-pete-ery are doing what they know best how to do, "arranging" the "covert movement" of lots and lots of weapons via "corridors" and "partners" to "moderates" in contiguous parts of one large land mass that on the map has little narrow porous lines that demarcate "nations" as defined by other Big Players in other conflicts, where the Krupps (who have moved on to more sophisticated names like "General Atomics" and games like invading Notagainistan) made out like bandits, selling weapons to most sides ("we" are doubling down on that, by "providing training" and "promoting interoperability," all stuff that costs Real Money and what's the return on THAT investment, again? "Stability" and "Security?" And doing so to both "sides," once again.
And gee, was this rather large war-scale offensive a complete effing surprise? Where is the effing worldwide see-all NSA and where is the CIA and the DIA, and all that crapload of satellite and ELINT espionage and World Situational Networkkk-Centric Interoperatigavitable Batattlespace Awareness stuff "we" the taxpayers are paying out the nose for, with our money and "Freedom (TM)" and the loss of peace of mind that we might have that there will be enough of everything (including un-drowned, un-burned, un-cooked arable land) to go around for our old selves and our grandkids and those people on the other side of all the arbitrary lines and tribal frontiers that are penciled in on the indivisible surface of the only planet we can currently screw up? Did none of that, or the "ass-ets" our Great Rulers might be supposed to have left in place on the ground in that arbitrary demarcated landspace called Iraq(notanationanymore), pick up on the mounting of this operation? One might almost think it was "Excellent! All part of my grand plan!" Or maybe "OOOPS, look what's coming, how can I cover my a__ on this FUBAR?"
By the way, great job of "training the wogs," you generals and colonels and on down the line -- they too now know the strategy of the "withdrawal operation — A planned retrograde operation in which a force in contact disengages from an enemy force and moves in a direction away from the enemy." -- http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/new_pubs/jp1_02.pdf" "Run away! run away," https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92gP2J0CUjc , ain't in the Dictionary... Wonder if the Afghan National Army, or all those random "forces" our Combat Commanders are juicing up in AFRICOM will show the same staunch resolve, or strike off on their own, like so many SWORDmen did during the 14th Century......
What the Beltway Bobbleheads think about all this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/from-iraq-to-syria-splinter-groups-becoming-larger-worry-than-al-qaeda/2014/06/10/28abae1c-f0d6-11e3-914c-1fbd0614e2d4_story.html blahblahI'msoseriousDoofusery... ISIS/ISIL is “a very malevolent terrorist group and one that we’re increasingly focused on.”? Hey, Dix, it's a freakin' HORDE, far as I can see, with the static charge of a looming dust storm, that draws ever more GUNmen to the vision of "taking over" and "being as bossy as I want to be and taking whatever I want and making everyone kowtow and say 'Uncle' or get shot or beheaded because I can," drawing in the worst of the human mess, turning them loose from all the bonds and limits that otherwise bind and restrain us, liberating them to be GUNmen. There's a Genghis among them, you can bet on it -- what are the "civilized," weakened by our Imperial idiocies, going to be able to do about it, or is it just another turn of the great Wheel of History?
Never learn. There is no way to apply enough "overwhelming force" in those "infected countries" (what a line!). Get it straight -- even our "world's best military, bigger, stronger, faster with everything from hotfoot matches and stink bombs up to nuclear weapons has discovered that nationalist and tribal warriors are much more agile and all they have to do is "not lose," the only way to win is not to play the game (unless you suggest nukularly glassifying all them "infected countries" or gassing or REALLY "infecting" them with war bugs and nanoweapons and such. Ask that other Marine general, van Riper, how hard it was to defeat the vaunted Giant Forces of the Empire in various war simulations, like Millenium 2002, http://fabiusmaximus.com/2008/01/14/millennium-challenge/. Our generals are dorks and losers and fatass careerist bureaucrats when it comes to dealing with your "contagion," which in large part is people wanting to be left to their own devices, and in part a result of making it easier for Bad Guys to "take over" and "Start Trouble."
And don't forget that the Big Military has it all planned out, how the giant clumsy bureaucracy, "interoperating" with the militaries of all those Democratic States of Africa and Asia and the Middle East and South and Central America, that have been trained and equipped to Do Military Stuff by the Empire, will Respond To And Run Everything come the advent of Really Bad Times as a result of screwing up our atmosphere and oceans: http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/dod/dsb/climate.pdf
Ask Belgium and Luxembourg and the Netherlands how being a buffer state worked out. Until there's an end to the Great Game and the industrial and financial facilitation and incitement of violence and predation, and our self-inflicted wounds of combustoconsumption and religio- tribalism, not too much chance for species or even surface-life survival...
Goes around, comes around. RED used to be the color of choice of the Marxist/Communist-aligned, and a favorite dismissive epithet of the people that ordinary folks have been tricked or have been blind and stupid enough into labeling as the "Right," as in "correct and proper and on the money and all that." ("Left" being synonymous with "clumsy, minority, treacherous, sinister and all that," in the stuff we learned in school not so long ago.)
Interesting how in so very few years, not even decades, starting during the Reagan Thingie, "RED" was now the color of the True Blue PATRIOTS, a badge of honor, and gee, wasn't Marx all about the eventual "withering away of the State," which lo and behold is the summum bonum of the Right? Old observation, that politics is a circle (increasingly a circular firing squad), where Left and Right kiss up close and tight and indistinguishable on the far arc of the thing...
If you're not doing anything wrong, you got nothing to worry about... Matrix GOOD, Matrix COMFORTABLE!
________________
Just caught part of "The Matrix" again on cable. Where Morpheus is educating Neo on the difference between Reality and The Desert. Blame laid at the feet of Smart People who created this planet-wide net of increasingly "artificial" and synthetic intelligences that didn't have much need for protoplasm, until us humans blackened the sky to keep them from using solar energy. What a ripe fruit for Joseph Campbell to dissect. I see that the Turing Test for credible machine intelligence was just "passed," maybe: "No, A Computer Did Not Just Pass The Turing Test --Sorry everyone." http://www.buzzfeed.com/kellyoakes/no-a-computer-did-not-just-pass-the-turing-test But for all the skeptical comments, including the linked one, lookie at how enthusiastically people are still cheering, rah! Rah! for "success" in creating "true" AI. And how much money and genius are going into the development of nanobots, that may run a better chance of turning the planet into Grey Goo, http://science.howstuffworks.com/gray-goo.htm, than the Trinity event (first nuclear device explosion in the open atmosphere) did of igniting the atmosphere, a much more accelerated version of what we humans are up to via CO2 and methane and stuff: http://www.sciencemusings.com/2005/10/what-didnt-happen.html (Note that Hitler was apparently more concerned about the survival of the planet than our own Exceptional US Imperial War Administration, General Groves and Truman and those dudes... Go figure.)
Two would do for what? Want two words? "Humanity f__led." Your immune system and general physiology are full of words, rich with learning and communication and feedback. Blogging seems to me to be a bit of whatever homeostatic and anti-pathogenic structure there might be... Also part of deadlier processes, too. Brevity is only the soul of wit, not wisdom...
Interesting, both the reminder about how our legislatures and other rulers have been short-changing the education=citizenship part of our culture, and the penurious responses that even "progressive" representatives are putting out there. Warren's little nipping at the corners of "student loan debt" might result in a tiny marginal bump in people being able to take part in the latest housing bubble, but does not really touch the fundamental debt slavery that is built into this piece of the "polittle-ical economy."
For a little more detail, with some examination of location differences in the problem and some correlations like one between employment rate and rate of default on those still crushing loans, there's this article in Financial Times, which includes this telling quote from Sen. Warren:
On the other hand, does anyone who could actually FIX something actually care? Obama has tiny fractional proposals, for stuff like carbon emissions and "ending the war in Notagainistan," and now some prospective student debt morsel. Sen. Warren has another thing that might bleed off some of the building head of steam, too, but not stop the other bleeding and dying. Big whoop.
Let's remember another April Foolishness by that a___ole, here's a link to some nice pix of McCain taking his Sunday stroll through a market area of Baghdad on April 1, 2007, with some commentary on his assertion that the area was so "secure" that you could just stroll and shop. At least if you had a brigade of GIs with armored equipment and air cover and your own personally fitted body armor and point and trail and flank troops and snipers on the rooftops on your route. And you could get the shop owners to, you know, "give" you stuff, little souvenirs like rugs and what have you, for "free." http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/senators-security-circus/2007/04/03/1175366241393.html
From observing people I have known, there's a kind of divide one can cross, where once you do some bad stuff and get away with it, you are freed from those sad constraints of decency and honest that burden most of the rest of us. A wonderfully and terribly liberating feeling, apparently. So many of our rulers, probably including The Only President We've Currently Got, have experienced it...
Dude, in the bigger picture of Imperial decline and fail, my guess is that no one gives a rat's behind what "the US would have been happy with." Particularly with the "happiness" of what implicitly you define "the US" to be, that Brooding Presence, Hulking Idiot on the Great Game board, with its little waning pile of "national interest" tokens... One wonders what that slurb of a phrase, "the Egyptian people," actually uncovers or relates to, either.
Those dudes are no different from the cynical SOBs who rule us. They know us ordinary people, no matter where we live, are wired to feel the need for LEGITIMACY, and some kind of "rule of law" thingie, some sense that there are constraints to arbitrariness and fraud and abuse, some remedies for them to have recourse to. And of course a means for them to advance the interests of themselves and their tribe, sect, family as against the Other. And you know how sophisticated the auteurs and stage managers have gotten at "Wag the Dog" manipulations of great masses of us who are none more noble than any of the rest of us, who love or just get caught up in the EXCITEMENT of it all. Think of those grinning idiots in Styrofoam "straw hats" pumping rahrah signs and screeching at great R and D conventions, as one example. The election give life to the myths of comity, supports the claims of the winners to hegemony, all that stuff. We ain't perceptive enough, individually and collectively, to see how badly we are being had, by those ancient greeds and the institutions that have developed to support them... And we, as a mass, and for our own little slices of Stuff, educate and train and herd ourselves right into the chutes.
Reagan a veteran? He made effing training and propaganda films from Hollywood. As an " automatic officer." Please DO NOT exa!t him, or even John Wayne, as a "veteran." And ask his first wife about his " family values," or ask his kids...
One hopes this does not mark Rohani as "dead meat." Given the way "fundamentalists" manage their continuation in or ascent to power over us ordinary people. Bunch of effing old randy closet-perv men, taking their usual young-mostly-male violence assisted path to the heights of the hierarchy.
For the Iranian case, it may just be Netfoam and wishful memory on my part, recalling a Playboy article from the late '60s. But there's some indications, maybe of course just idiot Islamophobia, http://www.citizenwarrior.com/2009/02/christianity-is-just-as-bad.html, maybe Dr. Cole knows the most likely version, that Khomeini wrote up his set of religiously-approved rules for sex with animals, juveniles, and marrying off daughters, and maybe Sistani has similar texts to his credit: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=74a_1268695569 Obviously, take with a grain of salt, since there's no good sourcing for the original supposed text that I can find. What can easily be found, re Rule By The Rotten Old Men, is all the rules in Leviticus and Numbers. What a great re-read! those Israelites must have had a fun time of it!
From personal prior experience of "religion," in a Methodist church in the South, of all places, the older male head of the lay rulership controlled the agenda by assuring the rest of the faithful that "God has laid it on my heart that..." whatever personal benefit or tribal authoritarianism he wanted imposed was Divinely Mandated. We so want to believe...
If you got a tribal Narrative that pushes the reactive synaptic buttons of your limbic system, http://www.healing-arts.org/n-r-limbic.htm, you don' neeeed no steeeekin' actual HISSStory, based on stuff like verifiable facts and actions and events and all that, the ones that paint the whole picture. Life gets a lot simpler if you just go with that idiot basal limbic flow, that mediates but also shortstops empathy and comity and civility and such, delimiting it to the Tribe and excoriating all Others... Red Solo Cup! http://www.cmt.com/videos/toby-keith/742500/red-solo-cup.jhtml
The Narrative says "we" were the Good Guys, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/06/06/six-rules-for-teaching-world-war-ii/ , and all by themselves in a vacuum the Axis just started that big War on Democracy'n'Freedom (tm) out of the blue, blue sky. There were no "industrial" roots to the whole war thing, and nobody dares think along the lines highlighted by Barbara Tuchman, that dominion for the benefit of the Few and the increase of consumptive industry, and their miscalculations and incompetence and airy consequence-free unconcern, drove the whole thing. There are hints, here and there, in the Narrative purveyors: http://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/history/world-war-ii-causes-outbreak.html And yes, many of Them were "bad people," but of course Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Dresden and were honorable and causative of Goodness, and stuff like Sinchon (Korea) and My Lai, etc, never happened, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinchon_Massacre .
So yes, please remember kindly those many who killed and died in Flanders Fields and on the beaches of Normandy and the Sands of Iwo Jima and down the jungles and plains of many other places. Bit players in the Great Game, consumers of war materiel profitably manufactured and sold into the Game, played for the benefit of what we are starting to call the Elite, up there in their Elysium. Motivated (I speak from my own experience) by Boy Scout Laws (trustworthy, loyal helpful, friendly, courteous kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent, doing one's duty to God and one's country...) and years of juvenile Memorial Day and 4th of July parades and speeches, displaying the coffin flag my uncle "earned by, apparently, being idiotically infected with hepatitis B along with tens of thousands of others, http://www.gulfwarvets.com/jama2.htm. And stuffed up by the well-fed hate and fear of Commies and other Enemies, until the actual experience and some further education turned the lights on in the neocortex, and the Narrative ran dead-stop into the hard wall of What Really Is, as opposed to What We Believe, https://www.google.com/search?q=what+we+believe+america&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&channel=sb...
Speaking of good and bad beards: I think the fellas from that wildly-popular-with-"conservative patriot" TeeVee show, "Duck Dynasty," are all Registered ToiletPaper Reepublicans... as are the dudes on several "reality" shows that feature customizing and rebuilding those most American of machines, Harley Davidsons, and Monster Trucks, and Muscle Cars...
Let's remember that the Netanyahoos over there think of the US as "Uncle Freier." For those who don't remember, a "freier" in unofficial Hebrew-Yiddish parlance is the worst kind of sucker. To frame how the Yahoos think, and how they think of us, one might do worse than review this little article:
Understand your opponent, and don't for a minute think the Likudnik government is anything but. And why does the economic interest of Lockheed-Martin and the other corporations who sell those billions of dollars in war materiel to Israel, paid for by the laundered tax dollars of ordinary US citizens, trump the silly notion of the "general welfare," again?\\
How interesting that "we" will be propping up the Karzai admin via the same mechanisms of wealth transfer that we use to prop up the Israeli rulership...
Recourse to binary labels hardly works in this context. Look again, and you will see that those folks who started all those wars (Vietnam was Eisenhower's, and even Wilson's, maybe, if you look back far enough into colonial imperial history, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role_of_the_United_States_in_the_Vietnam_War , and the Dulles boys who by the way were indubitably "conservative") were basically pushing the politely described as "conservative" agendas of the kleptocrats who have been tightening the screws on all of us for a couple of centuries now. Not enough space here, of course, to rehearse all the real stuff behind the idiot Exceptional Narrative of Exceptionalism...
It's laudable to speak up for one's tribe, of course... You can't go too far wrong if you really want to understand the stuff behind the curtain if you "follow the money" and go from the well established precept that "War is nothing but a racket..."
...and Pat Tillman, who had also apparently discovered the effing rotten fraud at the heart of the Great Imperial War thingie, was reported by the same Brass Gong Show that inveterately and reflexively lies about so much else, was recorded and reported as dying as noble a death as John Wayne died for us in "The Sands of Iwo Jima..." Say again, Charlie Poppa Tango?
Thank you, sir, for this as usual trenchant and thoughtful piece. It would be so nice if the war machine were to be actually dialed down, and not left to go in search of new Areas of Responsibility, like what we so archly call "stabilization" in places like Africa. And as I have noted, the military plans to be the central operator of all responses of the Empire and the various local militaries our leadership plans to be "interoperating with," to Important Stuff like "climate collapse,"on into the far future.
Regarding the number of US troops to continue for how long in Afghanistan, I hope you are correct in your statement that they'll all be out of there by 2017. Having watched the wind-down of Vietnam, as a former participant and "student protestor," I'm maybe less salubrious. Not only are there still troops from other states kicking in doors and training the ANA to prop up the Kabulistas that we will be paying for until at least 2024, there are tens of thousands of "contractors," both paramilitary and semi-civilian, also on the profitable ground, and it may be so for quite a while as "we" take a stab at doing better "this time" in propping up a West-friendly Regime. So, poking around in Google, one finds these bits of context:
And of course there's the "pivots" to remember, to AFRICOM and PACOM and all that. Anyone interested in what else will be shakin', post-Notagainistan, should maybe Google "US military global commands" and set back with a cold one...
So I hope and pray, for the sake of the folks still wearing that ever-expensively-being-replace camo uniform, that we will actually figure out a way to address climate collapse, and the other instabilities that "we" are so much a part of creating, by something other than More Of The Same...
Dare one offer a hardly original idea, that this is naught but a media smokescreen, a ploy to extend the noxious?
A little observation from one who used to be a US EPA enforcement attorney, who actually used to, you know, ENFORCE the Clean Air Act and other environmental protection laws and regulations? At least until the Reagan people took over in 1980 and told us to stop sending them any new enforcement actions, because we were now a “customer service” agency, and our “customer” was INDUSTRY?
First, this is not some "sweeping power gesture" by our Emperor. That "Congress" thing already delegated the power to do this, long ago. The legal authority to regulate greenhouse gases has been in the statutes and basic regulatory framework since at least 1990. And all the Obamites have done, with huge noise, is announce a "proposed rulemaking," which is the first baby step in actually getting an enforceable regulatory tool in place. This is notice-and-comment rulemaking under the Administrative Procedures Act, and when you get to paragraph 30 in the Big News articles, you learn that there's 120 days of "public comment," which is the first place the "regulated industries" can start whacking away at the puny limitations that are actually being announced, and the rest of us can try to defend the weak proposal. Once the rule goes final, in maybe 2015 (EPA has almost NEVER made any of the announced dates for final rule promulgation, due to litigation from all sides and of course LOBBYING which often changes/weakens the rule. Then each state (since under our “states rights” system) has to adopt its own reg structure that has to be reviewed and vetted by EPA for consistency, and then begins the process of drafting all the policies and memoranda that may lead, eventually, to actual enforcement of the sausage that’s produced, that will then have to be incorporated into permits that are also subject to notice, comment and lobbying, and litigation both administrative and judicial.
And here’s a primer on the current Grand Gesture and what it really portends, with the following as the important take-away: On June 2, the EPA proposed a new rule to regulate carbon-dioxide emissions from the nation's existing coal- and gas-fired power plants — the first-ever rule of its kind.
"The proposal comes out on June 2, the final rule goes into effect in 2015"
For now, this is only a proposal. The EPA will spend the next 120 days gathering comments from electric utilities, environmentalists, and anyone else who cares to weigh in. It will then work on a final regulation that takes effect in June 2015. States will then have until June 2016 to draw up plans to implement the rule. [Historically, these "deadlines" are highly "optimistic."]
The EPA will set different emissions targets for each state — which, when taken together, will aim to cut carbon-dioxide emissions from the nation's power sector as much as 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. (That's about 17 percent from 2013 levels.)
States will be given a variety of options for cutting their emissions — using more efficient technology at coal plants, boosting their use of solar or wind or nuclear power, or even joining regional cap-and-trade systems that require companies to pay to emit carbon-dioxide. “A guide to Obama's new rules to cut carbon emissions from power plants", http://www.vox.com/2014/6/1/5770556/EPA-power-plant-rules-explainer
So to me it looks like a nice head fake, to let the f____rs who are bleeding us and poisoning us keep at it until the ones who currently are profiting from all this live out their very special, very comfortable, very excessive lives… Please do not put up the noise about "this is the best that is politically possible."
And I almost forgot one of the fun pieces of Iran-Contra: those Hawk missiles and TOWs and artillery shells (not the ones that we directed to Saddam's military, of course) were laundered through good old Israel! For those who don't want to think about the "complexities" of the bullsh_t that is done sub rosa and "in our names" and for what purposes, again? here's a nice little time line of sorts from the NY TImes, back when it pretended to be the world's greatest newspaper:
For all you folks who believe, or want the rest of us to believe, in Exceptional Imperialism under the Stars and Stripes, I got a bunch of other little snapshots in a plain brown envelope that will curl your toes, in bliss or in shame...
And gee, how did it happen that somehow, in the furious War on Drugs, cocaine and stuff got mixed into the Milo Minderbinder transactions by our burly, foggy Syndicate that conducts War As A Racket?
But wait! There's more! The missiles of Iran Contra were TOW wire guided anti tank weapons, and Hawk antiaircraft missiles. To h3lp the Iranians against the Iraqis who we were also supporting in their mutual Great War. And the Contras that Ollie North and his band of Merry Men wanted to " support" to overthrow a democratically elected Socialist government were called "freedom fighters" for being death squads and terrorist s as bad as any, and our "conservative" rulers not only negotiated with them but armed and funded those oligarchy supporting thugs. Maybe somebody else cares enough to list all the other terrorist bunches, like UNITA or terrorist initiatives like the Phoenix Program, that we Exceptional Empire dudes have raised up, supported, underwritten or conducted. And note how all those stratagems have undercut Democracy (tm) abroad and at home.
"six U.S. soldiers were killed during the searches..." Well, we're into Scandal-land, now aren't we, where the broad view and what, proportionality and balance and all that, go out the window as the yapping dogs of DC get their sharp little puppy teeth into another boot from the mud room.
How many "US soldiers" (and British and French and Canadian and those other Willing Coalition units) were killed kicking in doors in Kandahar and Wardak, those places that their officers assured them (before zipping back to rear areas) would be where they would earn their place in history by "defeating the enemy" and "winning this war?"
No hit on you, Jack, you are just reporting what's been said, but Pat Tillman died on one of a practically uncountable (because buried deep by the System) number of idiotic "missions."( One hint: Obama, and the machine he represents, could care less if you support him/them or not.) How in hell does even "defeating (now reduced to "weakening") the Taliban, that collection of groups of warriors and thugs that we happily bribe and get in bed with when it suits us," advance our security and "national interests?" Let alone the interests of the great mass of ordinary people who pay for all of it? Put a "forward base" or embassy in the middle of a place where you don't really know the human or physical terrain, impose a bunch of rear-area-generated requirements for "missions" and "patrolling" on the troops from a morally bankrupt "doctrine' that is all about EMPIRE and its commercial aspects, and you get Kill Squads and torture and rape and "dead of small arms fire," and "injured by explosion, Wardak, March 15," and the circle of revenge, the pitiful macho dance that warriors do when some of them kill some of us so we kill some of their "side" so they kill some of our "side, and repeat until once again "we," finally and expensively, "move in a direction away from the enemy." Which by the definition we wrote is "out of the country," since "the enemy"as we define it is ALL AROUND YOU.
So now all of a sudden, instead of this being "about" EMPIRE and its futilities (albeit with some of its Rulers getting to live really high on the upside and most of the decline), it's "about" one dude who may just have sickened of the whole thing and tried to walk away -- though given the noise and fraud that our MSM and Rulers can generate, one wonders if we will ever know the "truth". A very few troops walked off into "the economy," and more effectively stood down by stuff like fake patrolling, in the Vietnam thing, especially toward the later stages as the desire not to be the last one to die in futility grew more poignant. So to protect our internal Narrative, we are going to have to make a traitor, a deserter, a nut case out of Bowe Bergdahl, rather than just a human who was maybe too much human and not enough stiff-necked Troop to Man Up and go on with the Idiocy. And now has his Swift Boat moment...
I wonder if those "deaths" that the Narrative wants to hang around Bergdahl's neck will get any detailed attention, with careful interviews of the survivors, gimlet-eyed review of after-action reports (those deep reservoirs of fraud) and so on. 2 to 6 months after? What were the mission parameters and threat environment and all that? Ah, sh_t, it doesn't matter -- it will all be just more of the effing same, more Vietnam, more Grenada, more Panama, more AFRICOM now, more War is nothing but a Racket, now slightly displaced into automation-moderated and -facilitated involvements in killing, for the sake of WHAT, again? The ultimate interoperability of the military caste, all over the planet, so the Brass can take what they want, when they want, but on a more elegant and better PR'd scale than Boko Haram's Gunmen?
...but they don't howl "UNCLE!" when we twist their earlobes, and there are all those Hellfires in and coming into inventory, and dudes who like to order their use on Terra-isurgo-funda-militants!!!
How about Feith and Perle and Yoo and Condi and Powell and Bremer and all those dudes from the Vietnam "Best and Brightest" who have not escaped into comfortable deaths, and on and on and on? How about that smarmy little prig Blair, and check this video on self-help justice? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzFm1ONg9dU
"We" want to pretend, when it's convenient for "our interests," that there's an "international community" that is expected to observe "international law." Hypocritical BS. All about power+wealth. And what you can get away with. None of the Players are really serious about "enforcing" the squishy thing called the Law of War and all that, knowing that it would apply to THEM and "limit their freedom of action." Nothing but BS. Does Wilkerson get to sleep better for "speaking up"? Did McNamara, for sort-of-apologizing? Does their God forgive them for all the pain and misery and bending the direction of Great State and Terrorist behavior to its present course? Protecting the Combustoconsumption Corporation and the Almighty Dollar? Extending and expanding the RACKET called "war?"
Generals with economic interests, whether in ongoing businesses, links to "externlities" like the CIA and Exxon and equivalent, or just the desire to do a little buccaneering for their own accounts, have troops with guns and the habits of obedience, and lots of little and large helpers with Machiavellian skills, to create their own spurious "legitimacy"...
Looks like we actually have some basic agreement-- Democracy has nothing to do with this: “Also polling shows that taliban forces overall have very little support whereas if elections were allowed to prevail in vietnam the communist side likely would have come to power.” And as you point out, it's no secret that Obama and Biden want to maintain 9,800 troops there after “War Over” is effectuated, supposedly on 12/31/2016. So as you note, “we” are going to be propping up a corrupt ruling bunch until at least 2014. Estimates are that just the troops cost a million apiece to field per year, so there's another $20 billion, not counting the cash that disappears into KarzaiLand.
Differences between failed and futile involvements in Vietnam and Afghanistan are primarily the element of supporting French colonialism as an idiotic bulwark against “Communism?” No apparent disagreement that both are imperial adventures, facilitated and exacerbated by a huge and growing military-industrial Godzilla.
The ISI reference, obviously, was to the Pakistani secret service, who had/have parts of the Taliban complex as a client/ally, not to the ISIS, the monstrous Gunmen in Syria and adjoining lands.
As to similarities, beyond the fundamental Game Board and Rules of Play of imperial exercise: Scanty and/or fraudulent casus belli? Check – Gulf of Tonkin/Keep the French in their Colonies vs. somebody there harboring Osama (who “we” failed, miserably, several times, to “take out”). Invasion, bombing, even defoliation of another country, with the barest fig leaf of legal cover and justification? Check. Cover noise about how “we” are going to bring “democracy”? Check. Huge deployment of imperial forces, surged and increased and doubled down on, ultimately struggling to find Narrative cover for the inevitable “rearward advance to previously prepared positions, moving in a direction away from the enemy”? Check. Murdering civilians, instituting huge new conduits of corruption, undercutting popular will, boosting heroin production? Check. Serial misrepresentations of the situation to the paying and voting public at home? Check. Constantly changing “doctrines” and serial declarations that Khe Sanh and Fallujah and Kandahar and Wardak are the Keys To Victory? Check. Destruction or impairment of traditional forms of legitimacy, both at home and in the battlespace? Check. Ugly epithets for the people our troops are to kill in order to save, "gook and slant and Hajji and camel jockey"? Check. Debasement of the moral posture and morale of the troops fighting a hopeless and endless war? Check. Enrichment and empowerment of the militarists and their worldwide industrial involvements? Check. Leaving billions in war materiel and construction for “the enemy” to prosper from? Check. Even making the place safe for other competing nations to do business in? Check.
Do we agree that neither of these, nor Iraq, for example, by your criteria or mine, are in any sense a “just war?” Or even, from the ordinary person's viewpoint, a sensible one for the most of us?
Nice bit of slick impeachment, sport! I'll happily acknowledge that I don't know all the complexities, but some basic repeating forms are very visible. I can pretty well bet that you don't know it all either, given the infinite complexity of the Great Game and the fact that there's hardly an honest player on the board, and the honest ones get knocked off early. You speak for the “administration” view, and as far as I can tell, you have no prescription for any kind of better world than “just let the fellows get on with it.”
Of course, dmol, whoever and wherever you may be, whether you speak for yourself or out of some interested entity, I didn't pose a mathematical identity between the whole Vietnam thing and the whole Afghan I and II thing. Glad you have picked up a little stick to beat me with, your complaint about my “awful prose” and “marks of skepticism.” Lots of nice personal digs, I guess they call them “ad hom” in blogprose, too. Thanks for not addressing the supposed differences, other than that the French wanted to “hang on to Indochina” and the US was about helping them do that, and now we are supposed to believe that the Administration is “serious” about “eventually” detaching us from that Tar Baby over there.
But I do appreciate what I might characterize, as a former attorney, as “admissions against interest” on your part, two of them in one succinct paragraph, to wit:
“As for afghan security it will likely be quite some time before afghan forces can stand by themselves without foreign support, however this does not mean that they will need on the ground forces alongside them. And due to the lack of support for the taliban from the afghan public a taliban re-turn to power is unlikely.”
So the Taliban thingie, you acknowledge, is “unlikely” to “return to power,” because that complicated mixed bunch “lacks support” (though I bet you also hold that ISI is right over the horizon, of course.) And for all your noise about how anxious “we” are to beat a final retreat from an activity that you have not posited any kind of first purpose for, ab initio, or current purpose other than propping up the Kabulistas, you assert from your deep wisdom or special information that “we,” or some part of “we,” will have to continue to “support” the “afghan forces for quite some [unspecified] time.” If I misstate the main points of your argument, please correct me. But a former US administration sold the notion that a huge investment of the nation's guts and wealth, based on lies and political-economic games that were never openly debated, was mandated in SE Asia, toted up at $4 trillion and counting. “International law” was flouted in a pretty egregious manner (Parrot's Beak? Fish Hook?) as the “nation-building” and stuff like the Phoenix Program and all that went on, as the “surge” was played out again and again (“We just need another hundred thousand conscripts and we can WIN this puppy!”) with the same problem that “we” face in Afghanistan: violating the wisdom of Sun Tzu on the waging of extra-territorial wars with no popular support, no Heaven on your side. Not to mention the old chestnut about imperial powers and land wars in Asia...
You tell us, “comfort” us, as they did, that for some indeterminate period, “support” will be needed for what you want us to join you and PRESUME will become a functioning afghan forces that will be able to protect the current government (which seems a little short, as did the US-installed rulers of South Vietnam, of that legitimacy that is the foundation of stability and security.) And tell me all this is not just a reprise of the doomed “Vietnamization” process, that attempt by the Nixonians and a bunch of Generals to save their political asses at home by having dopes like me keep fighting and dying long after they effing knew that they had transferred about as much wealth to the military and its contractors as they were going to get away with.
So now “we” face what, another trillion or two in continued corruption and logistics, paying Afghan warlords not to attack our convoys, paying $400 a gallon to deliver fuel to the “front,” and since when is it up to “us” to stand the afghan administration, a thing that is NEVER going to be able to so stand the way its rulers run the scam, at the forever cost of still more “US” wealth and dead troops?
Not to worry, of course: if you have any kind of vested interest in the power-and-wealth flux in the Game play, momentum and inertia are all on your side, more's the sorrow and pity.
The last time I recall it being made, "Can't Leave Abruptly /Stability/Weaken the Enemy" was in connection with another geopolitical action in the way of what, again? imperialism, continued French colonialism at the start, and "commercial interests"? by a slightly smaller "coalition of the willing," in the Afghanization -- oops, Vietnamization of another Operation Grossly Expensive Idiocy. Please feel free to bullet-point the significant differences between, and improvements over time in, the two situations, and how "we" have learned and are behaving (not just using a different obscure lexicon, and yet another new billion-dollar camouflage pattern, http://www.military.com/daily-news/2014/05/23/army-selects-new-camouflage-pattern.html, the billion estimate is from the cost of the last changeover, http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21600700-expense-and-stupidity-too-big-camouflage-out-sight) and are doing so much better This Time. And the Afghans likely will be still suckering "us," right up to the End of the War As Declared By The President, for baksheesh and "we"'ll be paying some of them not to attack "us", and selling "us" heroin, http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/st/english/article/2005/03/20050304182838ndyblehs0.5067713.html#axzz333ygukV1 , rather than selling us nicely fitting "Made in Vietnam" slacks and shirts through Walmart and Kmart and JCPenney, so there's a starting point for you.
Any ideas when the ANA and Nat'l Police will be ready to produce "security," let alone "rule of law"? Please show how and when the (appropriately lower case) "afghan government" will be "capable of defending itself [as opposed to, and let alone, "taking care of its people"] at a sufficient manner?" Wise-Sounding Strategical Assertions, and fraudulent hope, and another trillion dollars don't seem likely to get "us" there, at least whilst I am still alive to see it.
Please forgive the tone. Just a bitter old guy who is pretty sure he's seen this filmstrip before...
Anyone thinking about Afghanistan and geostrategy and What Happens Next remember what a Sepoy is? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sepoy And how that category might relate to the Afghan National Army/National Police and who is their paymaster and who really directs their troops' activities, for what ends?
"There is likely to be renewed Indo-Pak competition for Afghanistan, now that the Hindu nationalist BJP is ensconced. Does the US want to be in the middle of that?" How comfortable and comforting the familiar Narrative and lexicon of the Great Game. Nations, or whatever you call those centripetal conflagrations like Notagainistan and Pakistan, are little outlines on a Great Game Board, to be fought over like jackals or hyenas fighting over the scraps of the carcass. Dare one ask whether that was a purely rhetorical question, since "the US" is and will be deeply and dirtily involved in all that? While the planet comes to a slow boil, and them with guns and money line up to "take advantage of the change..."
What are The Troops doing there, anyway? Anything besides, as you point out, triggering ambushes, "drawing fire" and taking casualties and doing the stupid and offensive stuff they do in pursuit of "Hajji?" or sitting in safer areas, manning that "switch" and managing the distribution of that $5 billion in illuminating corruption and mercenary payroll? Under the heading "Yeah, right, heard that before," we have this: Do U.S. Troops Really Need to Stay in Afghanistan?" "http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2014/01/do-us-troops-really-need-stay-afghanistan/77468/ How about a little article on the day-to-day activities of our "Presence?" http://www.countdowntodrawdown.org/facts.php
And so solicitous "we" are of the Afghanis that for (top secret) geopolitical reasons "we" just want to keep 5 or 10,000 Imperial Troops on the ground there, because *Taliban*. And to get away with not having to hurry up and remove all the war materiel that cost hundreds of billions to "deploy" and "embed," and do that that "we" must have the sickest, most raddled fig leaf of an excuse, a BSA (interestingly, the acronym for Boy Scouts of America), to keep doing the myriad little idiocies and scams we are doing. Or have to activate that marvelous DoD euphemism for RETREAT!, "withdrawal operation — A planned retrograde operation in which a force in contact disengages from an enemy force and moves in a direction away from the enemy. (JP 3-17) "
Who cares about a "Karzai-Obama rift?" The idiocy happens at vastly other levels, anyway. Karzai, if he doesn't get the "Trujillo treatment," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafael_Trujillo (a nice refresher article for those who forget how the world really works) has a cushy post-partum gig waiting somewhere.
"Whether there are US troops in Afghanistan matters. They could easily be ambushed and the US could be dragged back into a hot war there." Well now, since that "ambush" part is INEVITABLE, would it be fair to speculate that that's part of the design, not a fly in the ointment? What a great way to honor the Troops who will be detecting IEDs with their bodies, "drawing fire" to "justify" aggressive "responses," and continuing to ingratiate themselves with the "host country." And in the meantime, THIS goes on, and on: "Green-on-blue attacks in Afghanistan: the data," http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2012/08/green-on-blue_attack.php#
What we call "war" is also a great way to transfer a whole lot of wealth. All those procurements and logistics have a "profit" and a lot of careers built in. The corpses and casualties are just part of the patriotic window dressing...
There's veterans, and there's veterans. If you were an 0-6, WO-1 or E-8, and leave the service, you are mostly sitting in the catbird seat. Since not only do you have a great pension, medical care and all that, there's probably a comfy new job for you in the Great Inter-Supra-Post-National Security System, so aptly named since the MIC and its tentacles sure provide a secure career path with lots of growth built into the destruction it does, and a gentle landing for those who live large at our horrific expense and can't even win the effing wars they embark on. If you're an ordinary person, doing that “combat” stuff that mostly has ZERO effect on that hallowed “national security,” over there in Kandahar or Mogadishu or the Next Hot Spot That Requires The Imperial Army To Take Action, not so much. Nice set of policy prescriptions, there, but dare I point out that most of the wounding and dying that's been done HAS NOT BEEN DONE “FOR THIS COUNTRY.” The “nation-building,” code for “making the wogs behave properly toward commercial interests and land owners,” has since before the days of Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler was honest enough to characterize it for what it is, been “nothing but a racket.” GI's fight, at the root, for their buddies, to protect one another or get revenge for lost comrades, and to stay alive. And sometimes because it's just a lot of edifying good old FUN.
As to taking care of the vets: A disabled vet who is “entitled” to the max amount that “workers comp for Troopers” allows, for 100% disability, as in “disabled 100%,” which comes to $3300 a month, and VA medical care which is worth “something,” I guess is doing “better” than a lot of folks. And since time leads to discounting of all things monetizable, by a variety of spreadsheet computations, that “better” gets ever smaller. Ooooh, the Deficit! after all. Can't Afford It, not prudent... And then the policy dudes get into it, and work to shrink what's there by adding co-pays and co-insurance and means testing and chained-CPI and whatever other incremental, wedge-issue-divide-and-conquer crap their fecund little brains can come up with to keep the upward migration of all the wealth continuing while us mopes scrabble in the dirt for the untaken trifles.
The first nine items in the post are nice-to-haves but all are built on the tacit assumption that there will be ever more effing “war,” hence ever more dead and wounded, with costs once again pushed out onto the future workers of the Imperium, by people who sneer at the earnest Troops and suffer neither the initial injuries that their “policies” and “national interest” (and I note that phrase seems to be disappearing from the polwonk lexicon in light of “reality”) cause, nor the costs of palliating or repairing where possible the shit they do to enrich themselves and their cadres.
Thanks for the tip, for services rendered, I would offer in reply, but the only point I would wholeheartedly endorse is Number 10: stop the effing war crap. Stop sowing dragons' teeth all over the effing planet, and making more of us “Wounded Warriors.” We all know how likely that is, of course, and I give small chances to “policy success” for the others. Honor me and the rest most kindly, by NOT MAKING ANY MORE OF US. And you don't get to do that by outsourcing to mercenaries, or turning effing autonomous killing machines loose on the planet.
There's more than enough to go around, to provide decency to the Troops and the Worker Bees –too bad the Kleptocracy is so adept at getting us to go to war with each other over the scraps that are left after they are done fighting each other over the carcass... But that ain't how it works, unless the lower orders figure out how to demand and get it, without just turning the wheel of Revolution through another idiot Terror-Napoleon-Restoration-Republic cycle...
But... But... Energy Independence! Jobs! Leveraged Profits! No personal consequences for pesky externalities that won't likely hit until after I'm dead! What's not to go all in for?
Read a lot of the exponentially proliferating War Department (sorry, DoD) documentation, and you get a clearer picture of the enormous bureaucracy with its dysfunctional inefficiencies, idiocies, inertia and momentum. Not surprising that everything, EVERYTHING, has a "military solution" in the minds of the people who fill the ranks, top to bottom. A drunken First Sergeant beerily and confidently assured me, in a bunker in Vietnam, that he had found in his life all the answers to everything could be found in "the book," which when I asked which one (thinking he might mean the Bible), he replied, "Why, the Army Manual, of course!"
Humans are adaptable creatures, if nothing else, and obviously can be trained and "incented" (in Army-ese) to form up in a big range of dispositions, from Amish to Boko Haram to Seal Team to Zulu. Bombs and terror attacks on the ordinary people who pay, in so many senses, for what is being done to them, are so easy to put in play. What a surprise, now that the ascendancy of the Global Military Corporate Thingie is upon us, the answer to everything (especially stuff that might challenge the Orthodoxy of Combustoconsumption Corporatism or the New Opportunism of Climate Disruption) is "drones, special ops, couinter-insurgency, and F-35-class procurements." And of course the careers and Working Groups and civilian-military partnerships that go along with all that. While, of course, other parts of the same Hydra are busily "tactically" and "strategically" and "operativio-dispersing" the smaller-caliber "automatic weapons,' the REAL weapons of mass destruction of comity, civility, decency and sustainable culture, far and wide.
In obstetrical nursing, you learn the phrase "Massage the fundus!" For most post-partum issues, bleeding, pain etc., that's the correct response -- massaging the base of the uterus encourages it to start shrinking, initiating all kinds of good physiological responses. Perceptive nurses, of course, see when more or different attention is required. Our rulers have a nice new set of Big Massage Hammers, which can do a lot of bruising collateral damage and start and extend NEW injuries and disease processes, but like physicians from the age when you treated the "humors," their set of therapies basically consists of cutting without anaesthesia or bacteriostasis, and bleedings...
Maybe people in the West, "people like us," could google "muslim comment on Boko Haram" for a fact check on who's saying what on the subject. To see what kind of criticism and thoughts there are on the subject.
I will second the observation that the examples given don't exactly illustrate "war on religious extremism in the Muslim world." Bearing in mind, among other things, that "war," that fascinating word, is not even a defined term in our War Department's massive Dictionary, http://www.lawfareblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/jp1_02.pdf, (though "weaponeer" is, "An individual who has completed requisite training to determine the quantity and type of lethal or nonlethal means required to create a desired effect on a given target," and look up "threat" in the same source and it's all about "terrorist threats," nothing about China or Russia. And for all their bombast that insists the Fed'rul Gov'mnt is warring on them, does the Imperial Government do "war" on our own home-grown fundamentalist-terrorists? And other than DFHs, who criticizes them folks there in the outback with their camo gear and sniper rifles and all that?
And of course OUR Imperial "war" or whatever you want to call the global procurement program and deployment, aimed at "fundamentalist Islam," or what-everrrr, has been so terribly effective, now hasn't it, at "analyzing" and "neutralizing" the "threat," right? Look what you get for $8 trillion and counting, counting, counting, albeit not auditably...
Great question. One you know the answer to already. Too much chance of "career-limiting leakage" and bureaucreatical debarassment, and you got to keep the beds warm for whatever new crop of "residents" that might be coming down the pipeline... it's an oubliette, after all: http://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/oubliette
Just curious -- "externals" like Saudi Arabian "interests," and the Pak ISI, and the CIA in its various peccant parts, etc., are "more rational?" When they are so often the ones placing burrs under saddles, giving the sandaled ordinary people a hotfoot, whispering lies about who said what, "supporting" creatures like, apparently, "General" Hifter and Karzai, and so forth? Ordinary people, mostly, between spasms of tribalism, want to be sort of left to their own devices in a system of relationships that preserves order, protects against criminal and arbitrary acts, provides education and infrastructure, stuff like that, and are even willing to pay for its cost. Too bad there are so many "externals," and of course internal impulses, that keep the many from just leaning up against the cork tree and enjoying the scent of the flowers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGTVRbpAuRo
What may eventually bring "peace," whatever that means, to Libya, and other areas of conflict, in addition to exhaustion and bleeding out and eventual accommodation of the combatants is, God help us, "business interests." Depending, of course, and among other considerations, on which corporate interests (Lockheed-Martin and General Atomics, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics, e.g., vs BP and Conoco, money from guns and conflict, versus money from oil or other extractables, etc.) end up prevailing on "policy" in "intervention-capable" states or hyperstates -- "New Business Opportunities in Libya," http://www.abcc.org.uk/New_Business_Opportunities_in_Libya .
Nation-building is such a messy, messy business, isn't it? Especially when the real game is "nation-stripping," as part of "Soylent Green"-quality planet-stripping, for the benefit of the Very Few...
Speaking of business plans, Linda, a couple of observations. First, recognizing the "flattening" of the world, per Thomas Friedman and others, I'd note that the US land mass might be a depot and aircraft carrier and refueling station and troop and tax revenue generator for what you refer to as "the U.S.," but those businesses are post-supra-national, parties to the "Trans-Planetary Partnership Free Trade Haw-Haw Deal," with no loyalty to what used to be called America at all. Their money, their livelihoods and their activities are mostly elsewhere, though they keep the big IV lines fully patent, the ones they use to keep sucking what little blood remains out of the dying carcass.
As to the "ground" Game in Libya, here's just one little article that asks who this "General" Hifter is, and wonders just what his connections to the CIA are, and leads one to wonder what the Game actually is in Libya, since nothing, in this world of shadows and euphemisms and universal and inveterate lying to cover and render plausibly deniable, all kinds of horror- and misery-causing behaviors by the kleptocracy Hydra... "CIA At Work In Libya Mess: New General In Charge Of Coup Lived In DC Beltway For Decades On Exactly Whose Payroll?" http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/the-cia-at-work-in-the-libya-mess-new-general-in-charge-lived-in-dc-beltway-for-decades-on-exactly-whose-payroll/ Or at least rendering everything profitably confusing, preserving "freedom of action" for the Players, if not Freedon (TM) for the ordinary people...
A modest (likely futile) proposal: There's so much difficulty in picking the precise word to describe the participants in all these violent episodes where people are busily killing each other with more or less enthusiasm, organization and efficiency. "Militant." "Terrorist." "Paramilitary." "Militia." "Insurgent." "Contra." "Freedom Fighter (TM)." "al Quaeda (R) (or not)." "SunniShiaSettlerChristianKurdMarxistEtc.TakeYourPick to push your framing." They all have one thing in common, if you watch them in action. They are Gun Men. Gun-men. Gunmen. (Though more women are getting in on the fun these days.) With a common ethos, at bottom, leading, in the direction things seem to be heading, to banditry and anomie and warlord-ism, to the infinite advantage of the Very Few post-national Successful Oligarchs. Encouraged, and profited upon, by the folks who supply that "training" and "direction" and weapons and funding, or on the other side fail, due to corruption and idiocy, to do the stuff that civics says governments are supposed to do -- you know, governing, mostly for the general welfare (with the expectation and understanding that a certain amount of corruption, "slack" to grease the gears, is inevitable and even tolerable and maybe necessary.)
Just call them all what they are: GUNMEN, whether they are the testosterone-poisoned types that shoot ordinary people dead in the streets or in their homes, ululating or thanking their God for being so Great and Good, or they are the "leaders" and "rulers" who set up the conditions for the kind of stuff you see at syriavideo.net and in war-porn videos on youtube. See how they handle their weapons, fondle and brandish and randomly shoot exuberantly and triumphantly into the inoffensive sky, careless of where the bullets "stray" to. They are part of a giant cult, whose totems and sacraments are AKs, ammo and ambushes. Nothing to choose between them -- the design and function of the machines they employ draw them, inform them, and drive all of them in the same behavioral direction.
Yes, violent males (and, increasingly females, and even children who can be trained to enthusiastic unaware murderous idiocy without the tiniest pang of immediate conscience) are an inevitable part of human nature. But when it comes to trying to figure out how to reduce the carnage, the horror of random killings or those targeted at Others or to create some kind of spurious "orthodoxy," actually just a front and entry for yet another kind of Syndicate of old hypocritical men lining their pockets and filling their beds, or to establish or maintain another kleptocracy, might it not help to think about the common and fungible characteristics of Gunmen in the wild, as it were? Maybe there's a clue or three about what might be done to smooth the world instead of constantly roughing it up.
Give a man a gun, particularly the ubiquitous AKs and other assault weapons, which some have called the REAL weaopns of mass destruction, and he may defend his home and family with it against other Gun-men, but put him together with a bunch of suddenly powerful Gun-men, add the tiniest smidgen of tribal excuse, and you got a bunch of self-justified idiots telling each other "We're Number One!" or "God is Great! (and didja see the way the back of that dude's head exploded?)"
Just call them what they are, under the other chiaroscuro pseudo-differentiations and camouflage... GUNMEN. Men of the gun.
What gives an interventionist-militarist like the author any credibility at all? The advice to "Yemen" is sto play out the "war on terror" game, with of course lots of "help" from "US interests." To establish and protect its own neoliberal rulership, behind a fog of rhetoric about securing Yemen for the children. This piece is pure propaganda, hitting all the talking points about "global security," AQAP attacks ("while not as kinetic"), and of course the conclusion that "If Yemen’s military fails, Yemen fails." So of course the US empire needs to get in there and "support" the military. Just more of the same seamless web of Imperial military "investment" and direction, across the planet. The stuff that supports the "scholarship" of people like Col. Robert (Bob) Sharpe (ret.) Since when can "the US's" interventions, or those of the "global community," motivated to kill democracy in order to save it and spread the "triumph" of neoliberalism with its theft of public resources, inherent corruption and wealth concentration, dispossession of all those ordinary people and their children, do anything to produce decency, let alone freedom and a chance at a survivable future?
And for those who don't follow the previous comment, here's the reference to "Abraham's New Kaa’ba," talking about the US embassy (as nest of "intervention specialists) in Sana'a: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaaba Bow down and face it, right?
"Isn’t there a point at which you’ve just openly done so many unethical things and gotten so many issues so wrong that they stop putting you on t.v.?"
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA...
And Dr. Cole just put up a post about the "Dark Triad" syndrome, https://www.juancole.com/2014/05/conservatives-likely-sociopaths.html, that most of our Rulership displays, a clear bunch of sort-of-cooperating-if-you-look-closely sociopsychopaths that in effect have syndicated to strip and screw over not only the sad ordinary people of the planet, but the planet itself. Since they know they are immune to consequences (if they are conscious enough to even believe that such things might be possible.) And one might ask about the applicability of that question to Billary, and Pelosi and Reid and Feinstein and a bunch of other people, Rulers, who are supposed to nominally be on the side of The People. I for one cannot stomach watching Barack Obama doing his measured professorial lying with a straight face and distorting left and right in his various televised performances. "Clean coal." "Chained CPI." Geithner and Emanuel and Squealer the Pig Carney, etc. And no, there are no "candidates" on the nominal "Right" (more properly, the "More Wrong" than "Right," of course) that are less worse than the incumbent and any likely successors in the Game of Thrones... They get to f__k things up, steal big chunks of our ordinary-people futures and what little income and wealth we still have, and load up on our backs the task of keeping things going, creating the energy and wealth that keeps their Elysium floating up there in the air, all wrapped cozy in the Imperial bubble, high above the horror...
But let us tell ourselves, comfort ourselves, delude ourselves, that our favorite or at least preferred Rulers, who say stuff publicly (while sneering privately about what schmucks we are, http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2012/03/14/muppet-talk-wall-street-style/ and anything Cheney ever said) that resonates with our own defects, are really all about taking care of the tribe we think we are part of...
Embassies and consulates and little "diplomatic outposts" are, by nature, militarily indefensible, in the way some are yakking that "we" should ensure. For some context, how about this list, with provocations, of a whole lot of attacks on "missions" going back to 1829: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_attacks_on_diplomatic_missions
Yeah, "diplomacy" has always been high language and punctilious protocol fluttering over dirty deeds. But to expect that you can plunk even a few hundred troops and even larger "ready response forces" down in a fixed position where "diplomacy" has planted endless seeds of blossoming blowback, spots wherefrom issue the sneaky-petes that foment destabilization and overthrow of whole governments, that foster both big and little corruption, that destroy any faith in "legitimacy" that anyone might want to hold, to think one could "protect" that space and the "diplomats" doing what they do every day and night in what is nowadays such a hostile environment thanks to "our" policies and behaviors, is just silly. Best one could do is reduce the threat by increasing the nominal counterthreat and costs, as the Soviets were praised for supposedly doing by our Right, or stop so much of what "we" cheat ourselves into believing is the pursuit of "our," really the Very Few's, "national interest."
Any more, "policy" is "whatever you can pay for or steal and get away with." Organizational boundaries? Pffft. "Finest intentions"? Just what are those -- honestly now, no BS about "spreading democracy." http://www.amazon.com/We-Meant-Well-American-Project/dp/0805096817
And about "Obsession with short-term success has left us blind to longer-term consequences:" The post-supra-trans-national people who plan out the investments in the syndicate called "war" know pretty well by now that concerns about blowback and "consequences" and stuff are just for suckers. Follow the $4 or $5 or $6 or more trillion in Real Wealth being converted just by the US Imperium, albeit the largest player in the Game, into slagged matériel consumed in combat and other stupidities, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l64Wk6KdROQ , and into what they sure hope is a framework for uninterruptible conversion of the subsistence resources of all us ordinary people, in a hot and bleeding world that they are part and parcel of taking down, into that other stuff, that Infinite Weapons Development Programme (IWDP) and Enormous Idiot Bureaucracy (EIB) that feeds them.
I bet the "government" of Pakistan is at least as fragmented and internally dissentational and corrupt as our very own. Which part(s) of that mashup is(are) one supposed to believe, assuming that anything anyone with any power and wealth utters in the world any more is in any way true or honest or worthy of credibility? "We" harbored and transported, and set up in new lives in a lot of places, all kinds of war criminals and horror-makers, like a raft of Nazi and even Japanese Serious War Criminals (not to mention our own, Cheney et al.) and lied about it. Our sneaky-petes and Expeditionary Forces have been "spreading democracy," spreading it very thin and dead indeed, by running over it with heavy trucks and tanks and blasting and suborning the apparent will of ordinary people in regard to their legitimate governance for over a century, teaching the fine arts of torture and repression, arming and payrolling "freedom fighters" like the Contras and even bin Laden and, of course, "enemy of my enemy" Saddam Hussein. Cue up another $4 trillion, Mr. Ordinary Taxpayer...
Gary Trudeau has been lampooning the CIA spooookery for years, to no effect of course. Here's a congruent observation on what the Really Special Field Dudes are doing to Protect The Homeland over there in Yemen: "The CIA's Bro Culture Is Doing Yemen No Favors," https://news.vice.com/article/the-cias-bro-culture-is-doing-yemen-no-favors. Not sure how or what the larger plays the CIA and NSA and related idiocies are doing have anything to do with making the world any healthier or safer for ordinary people anywhere -- seems like mostly it's about prolonging the "success" of Extractive Capitalism or whatever it should properly be called, and upward wealth transfer. But Oakley reflectors ain't remotely related to that ordinary-people concern... "We Meant Well..." http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/08/world/us-envoy-peter-van-buren-takes-caustic-pen-to-iraq-war.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
The Big Things that the War Department and our State Security Thing are doing to, on, over, under and across the planet now "transcend" any kind of "national" concern (except in the Game of "Redefinition," of course) -- off in their own bubble, immune to restraint or consequences, for the benefit of post-supra-transnational corporate "interests," self-promotion and generalized oligarchy.
Yeah. let's cheer for Our Tribe -- we're the Good Guys, right? Or maybe Less Bad? Or maybe not...
The stuff that gets written here, in response to Dr. Cole's posts, gets probably zero notice in the Imperial world (at least as far as any effect on "policy," that is.) What happened to our Apologists, Bill and joe from lowell, who reassured us that this was all "AUMFArticle51legal," and supposedly "effective" in effectuating some executively exercised exercise? "Making the Homeland safer" by blowing up cell phones and the blurry protoplasm attached to them? "Double-tapping" (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-24557333 )?
The people who packaged napalm, the guys and gals who went to work at the Dow and Monsanto chemical plants, making Agent Orange, and those cute Agents Pink and Green -- did they suffer nightmares and other PTSD effects? For those needing Agent Orange context, including its carcinogenic and teratogenic and other toxic properties, look here: http://science.howstuffworks.com/agent-orange.htm (note that careless operation of the plumbing of the chemical synthesis machinery, failure to control flow rates and pressures and temperatures, were what produced the "excessive" amounts of chlorinated dioxins and dibenzofurans that you can read about here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polychlorinated_dibenzodioxins). That was all "legal" too, right? or at least there was no remedy for it...
Technology in search of an application, with secret little cadres of sociopathic monsters claiming to be "patriots" and all "protect the Homeland" and telling the rest of us who pay for their playground and toys "If you knew what we knew, you would cheer us on," when when us ordinary people sometimes find out what "they" claimed to know, we are appalled, disgusted, dismayed, at least until the news cycle is over and the monsters who run this crap can finish up their rope-a-dope "responses" to a "concerned Congress" or whatever, and get back to the Game...
And of course a move is afoot to take the "weak link" out of the loop, turning the machine killing of people on the other side of the planet over completely to the machines, via what is so blandly called battlefield autonomy. You have to wonder what happens when conscience and consciousness of the frail human kind, what exists in those of us who aren't beneficed with sociopathologic unconcern, are removed from "the targeting and kill process." http://www.airforce-technology.com/features/featureroad-to-nowhere-the-us-unmanned-systems-roadmap-4168919/ Do we like the world we are paying to create? Can we live in it?
I'm a Vietnam vet too, and I have to question the assertion that at any time, start to finish, the road to Hell in Vietnam was paved with any kind of what I would accept as good intentions at all. Even those of us who enlisted to do all that Boy Scout crap we learned as young potential warriors, about "trustworthy, loyal, brave, reverent" and all that, and who bought the notion that "we" were "protecting the Nation" or "defeating Communism," were totally suckered and off the beam, by all I have learned since then. I think "Catch-22" had it exactly right, along with Smedley Butler -- it was just a huge Milo Minderbinder Clusterbombf__k, a massive wealth transfer, and the abuse of what should have been decent sentiments and motions of so many of us who did the cannon fodder dance. It was not a debacle for the people who profited from it, and set themselves and their successors up to keep reaping wealth from the rest of us by sowing death among us.. Just a continuation of the long attempt to maintain first France, and then the US Empire, in a colonial-power position over there. And now you can buy Walmart clothes "Made in Vietnam" by Commies, and "we" are talking about a Great Game return to having the 7th Fleet operating out of Cam Ranh Bay again. And in the meantime, the combustoconversion of Carbon to CO2 goes on apace, and generals live in splendor, and "our" MIC forms up and heads out to "take charge" of the whole effing planet.
Facts and reality don't matter, of course. This is "about" feelings and tribe and Momentum, and of course MON$Y. RThe mother's milk of what we here in a dying Empire call "politics." One might hope Dr. Cole's efforts and other still, small voices might shut the mouths of these cynical idiot frauds. But they are as immune as cancer cells all warm and cozy in the intima of a malignant tumor.
It ain't just the construction contractors, though that massive pile of Embasssssy concrete in Baghdad, and Baghram, and all the "bases" with McDonald's and swimming pools and other touches of "home" all over the planet, are a few vaguely visible evidences. Cam Ranh Bay, the port and the air base, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cam_Ranh_Bay, was a billion-dollar gift to the Rooskies in the post-war period, but hey, "we" might recoup some of that! http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-skeptics/the-looming-us-return-cam-ranh-bay-7079, with billions more needed to bring it to current standards, of course! And look at CRB and Da Nang and all our other big airports and installations like Phu Bai where I was stationed for a while, in Google Earth, pics then and now, to see what a huge wealth transfer to "the enemy" (and I include the Commies and "our" contractors in that category) was made.
It's $37 buillion (oops!) and counting for the Littoral Combat Ships that effing "Doctrine" says are "the future of Imperial power projection," that Oops! can't take a punch, or throw one either unless you re-define the specs to say what "successful program" means: http://www.wired.com/2013/01/littoral-combat-ship/ and lots more articles. And the F-22 and F-35? The V-22? The XM-25 "game-changer?" The many rolling iterations, at a billion or so a pop, of new'n'better combat uniforms and web gear? http://www.thedailybeast.com/the-hero-project/articles/2013/10/14/the-army-s-5-billion-new-uniform-already-being-replaced.html And of course the M-113 aluminum-armored armored personnel carrier proved vulnerable to cheap RPG and armor piercing fire that killed vehicle and crew, so we had to have the many expensive iterations of the "
Bradley Fighting Vehicle, with aluminum armor up-armored until it was another kind of vehicle altogether: http://strategypage.com/htmw/htarm/articles/20120305.aspx, the usual effing tail-chase of a procurement in search of a mission.
We get all exercised about GM ignition switches that have killed maybe a couple of dozen of us, thanks to greed and corporate unconcern, and not about faux "wars" that kill hundreds of times that in US GI "Consumers" and millions of Others, "wars" that hide behind the mythology of Call of Duty and that are just huge commercial Milo Minderbinder Enterprises scams transferring enormous ordinary-people wealth, between $600 billion and $1.2 trillion a year in the US depending on who you ask, about a quarter of the planet's wealth overall, to the "military," to a particular set of the Very Few. http://www.shmoop.com/catch-22/milo-minderbinder.html
Sneer at Gen. Smedley Butler all one wants -- he saw it and said it, 80 years ago: "War is nothing but a racket." From my generation, the bit of sardonic wisdom was "War is GOOD BUSINESS -- Invest YOUR Son!" And the Grownups are supposedly in charge. Bunch of effing child abusers and pedophiles, maybe... It's too big, too much, unstoppable... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw2fZOyjcAg
This is the way cancers operate, especially the metastatic and malignant ones, eating the body's resources, tricking it into growing huge new arteries to feed lifeblood directly to the tumor, hiding from the increasingly crippled immune system, behind a fake image of "healthy tissue."
What's that portend for the rest of us, in the ol' Body Politic? Got your Obamacare Card ready?
I'd have to say it sure looks to me like the Obama administration has a very coherent foreign policy: maximize distress, add confusion, foment dissension, overthrow any elected government, foster profitable arms sales as one element of the other elements, keep the sneaky-petes busy in the underbrush, lay a thick layer of military-state-security "Interoperability" slime over the whole, and keep the carboniferous combustibles flowing. And the dollar as the reserve currency, until enough post-trans-supranational corporate entities have settled on how to score a big one by demolishing the dollar and what is left of their "American" launch pad. All on the backs of the ordinary people who once again are funding their own immolation.
And since when has injecting more and more weapons, particularly "dual use" toys like guided antitank and anti-aircraft missiles whether MANPAD or Russia's Best Air Defence Systemme, into a chaos of anomie and identity conflict ever had a prayer in Hell of Making Things Better for those ordinary people? However many angels can be induced, by the fluttering of Position Papers and Briefing Documents and Doctrines and Thinktankery and suchlike, to dance on the pinheads of the people who talk up this or that strategy or policy, like favoring something called the "Free Syrian Army" which if one looks at all closely, can only be called "maybe not as bad as the other dudes, possibly, at the moment."
What "peace process?" Isn't that phrase dead on arrival? Conflicts like this eventually die of exhaustion, but only after the outside players move on. What is the aim of the Game? An FSA "victory?" By what possible means, and with what possible outcomes? What is "won" in this situation, however it turns out, where the rulers and fatass generals of many nations, and the profiteers and contractors stuck to them like chewing gum under the bus station bench, are "free to pursue their National Interest" whatever the hell that means? It's still pretty hard to refute some old wisdom: "War is nothing but a racket." You don't build legitimacy, the kind that undergirds stability and decency, that way. At least as far as I can see, with my cataract-impaired, skeptical vision.
Gee, one can hope that arming the "moderates" with more exotic and profitable weapons from the Imperial arsenal, and recognizing them "diplomatically," will prove to be a "winning strategy." Maybe the Mods just need more Interoperability with the Imperial Battjespace... And the goal, again, is...? Better life for Ordinary People everywhere? Huh. Uhuh.
Just wondering, whether it matters whether the particulars of the battery used to jump-start the battle tank are -- lead-acid or nickel metal hydride or lithium ion, or what color the case is, or what the label says -- the tank is a tank, the possible behaviors are still "kill, rape, steal, intimidate, dominate, destroy." Interesting to study the battery chemistry and hookup, but how do us ordinary people get close enough to pour sugar in the fuel fill and sand in the crankcase, knock some connecting pins out of a couple of treads, and spike the guns? And keep the battery from being connected in the first place? Is it even possible, since whole new battalions of tanks keep popping out of Final Assembly every day, all with the same Fundamental characteristics?
Give the individual groups quaint little names, like BokoHaram and LRA and ISIS and "Taleban" and all that. And try to intellectually analyze and describe and distinguish the nominal differences and create "policy" to address them (whether by military defeat, or by using them in the Great Geopolitical Game by arming them or "recognizing" them, http://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/opinions/letters_to_editor/article_35caa6be-40ac-11e3-ad2f-0019bb2963f4.html ). But if taken with a broad look, they collectively seem like just a broad excrescence of the other phenomenon that's more accurately and generically called "gunmen." Their talismans and ragtag uniforms are hardly differentiating, as against their behaviors. And the salient characteristics are "male dominance," "magical thinking," rape in so many ways, and a hair's-breadth distance from anomie and anarchy.
Humans don't absolutely need guns, all those wonderful REAL weapons of mass destruction of culture and decency, the AKs and other assault weapons, to commit this kind of horror -- machetes and hammers work too, as we have seen. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_Genocide, and other idiocies, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_Genocide But the guns sure help let the Little Lords of the Flies get a leg up on all the people who are disinclined to rabid violence themselves... in a context of capitalist exploitation of common resources, untrammeled corruption, destruction of civic institutions, sneaky-petes sowing dissension and out of idiot habit doing their destabilizing crap, and now our Imperial Troops, acting not as world policemen (not the best frame, anyway, given what "policing" has largely become, e.g., http://news.iafrica.com/sa/894095.html) but pick-a-side thugs, to be "lent by President Obama," out of AFRICOM...
Where's the wisdom on how we humans can head off the serial rise of "charismatic" idiot mostly males, able to attract others whose mothers presumably tried to teach them better than this?
Just curious, where's that billion dollars coming from? Not national tax revenues or petroleum sales... And would there be a bright spot here, that "whoever" is funding non-carbon energy, with a sort of general-benefit rosy glow emanating from wealth that for whatever somebody-profits reason, seems likely to do disinterested good for a lot of people? Presuming the Pharaoh lets the Lower Orders benefit, at all, from all those electrons the benevolent God Ra showers down on the mere mortals and to-be-Gods alike...
The people in Hamas and the IRA and many other wild'n'crazy groups often end up mostly domesticated if they ever get to the point of having to actually govern. What is the disease that infects the Likudniks, and maybe ISIS and suchlike, who seem immune to that domestication process now that they've consolidated? With, of course, nuclear weapons as a final statement of Teh Stupid?
I like a particular science fiction parable that seems to cover the differential diagnosis pretty accurately, albeit awkwardly retitled when moved from "Analog" to book form: from "A Sense of Obligation" to "Planet of the Damned," http://www.has.vcu.edu/for/gj/ebooks/Planet_of_the_Damned.pdf The autopsy starts around page 240 in my download of this no longer copyrighted work.
Speaking of exposure to toxins, the VA hospital I go to has TVs in all the waiting areas, all tuned to FUCHS News, and the vast majority of my fellow vets seem tuned in to the idiocy, nodding their heads, occasionally forming little impromptu flashmobs of disaffected people growling about The Damn Government Obama Socialism while waiting their turn for publicly funded treatment. And in many of the nurse's rooms, you hear the lambent sounds of Limbaugh and Beck and Hannity and other Talkradio Purveyors Of God's Truth To The Masses. How can that be fixed? Or has the disease process passed a critical point of no recovery?
Yeah, I talk too much and obviously like the sound of my own voice -- but most of that post was from the link -- I can't get italics or emphasis to work reliably.
It IS complicated: Congress delegates Commerce Clause-derived power to EPA to regulate air pollution (carefully circumscribed, with exceptions). EPA adopts air quality criteria to "protect health and the environment," and national ambient air quality standards -- NAAQS. Also National Emissions Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants -- NESHAPS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Emissions_Standards_for_Hazardous_Air_Pollutants -- and acid rain (remember that?) and ozone and CFCs (remember them?) and asbestos. The country is inventoried for "attainment," or not, of those standards. The states can apply to run the air programs, under their own regulations that EPA can approve or displace if not equivalent and no less stringent. In addition to permitting particular "sources," from smokestacks to leaks from plant equipment to construction dust, the agencies develop plans to achieve attainment of standards. Economic considerations and "practicability" are built into regulatory considerations and rulemaking, also "Prevention of Significant Deterioration," a no-backsliding notion.
There's a separate provision for interstate air pollution, what the Supreeeeemes were addressing. The opinion actually has a pretty clear exegesis of that program frame. And all the while, the lobbyists and Congress and the sneaky shits that the "conservatives" since before Reagan but mostly since that coup have put in place at all levels of the bureaucracy and enforcement structure.
Sorry if it's complicated -- the majority opinion and the post do a pretty good job of laying out the elements, but there are many, many logical pathways that the Deciders could follow in this and so many of the chunks a bits of "the law" that we ordinary people accede to being governed by, while the rich folks, including corporate "persons," blow it all off and do whatever they damn please... and what are you and/or we going to do about it, other than "be aware," and "bemoan"? While the K Street/Wall Street Commandos eat us alive?
Guess what? He, of course, could not give a crap what anyone, anyone of us progressive types especially, says about him. He's Inside The Bubble Within The Bubble, guaranteed to sit up there and smirk as long as his sorry carcass is able and wants to. "He welcomes your hatred..." -- and laughs all the way to the bank, country club, gatherings of Kleptocrats, maybe even cathedral...
"The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behavior, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services a Compensation which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office."
Grouse all you want -- these Talibanners know how to use our crying need for Legitimacy and Rule of Law and Respect For The Constitution against us, very effectively...
We live in a complicated world. Headlines, anecdotes and sound bites are kind of like "vitals" your nurse collects at the start of a physician office visit. There are any number of complex conditions, including life-threatening ones, that will produce vital signs in the normal range.
The consequences of the EPA losing this case is that ALL emitters would be regulated. As per the article:
...is completely, 100% wrong.
If the Supremes grant any petitioner's request that strikes CO2e from the definition of "Regulated NSR pollutant" under 40 CFR Section 52.21(b)(50) and/or interferes with the definition of 'subject to regulation' under 40 CFR Sec 52.21(b)(49), then all ability to require permits and regulation that limit either the time rate or the process rate of CO2e emissions dies completely.
Even a secondary standard for a CO2e NAAQS would be barred because an NAAQS pollutant must be able to be regulated by the Act as a pollutant before it can be published as an NAAQS.
If my memory is correct, Rick Snyder and Rick Perry are both asking this kind of relief from the Supremes.
Don't make the same bullXXXX mistake that Michael Brune did by saying that granting cert to the Rick/Rick petition to the Supremes was a victory for the Sierra Club.
Any granting of any of the petitions by the Supreme Court in the present tailoring rule case would be a disastrous outcome for the environment and a defeat for President Obama and EPA in defending decades of EPA's historic interpretation of the Clean Air Act.
A bad decision by the Supremes on issues raised in this comment would also create chaos like deregulating hydrogen sulfide and several other airborne toxic pollutants that are not regulated as hazardous air pollutants. Such a decision in this case could thus have the collateral consequence of rendering as federally UN-enforceable all of the hydrogen sulfide and total reduced sulfur air pollution control requirements at all plants in the United States.
There's been a lot of bad media interpretation of this case minimizing its consequences.
Please don't spread more objectionable conflations that a defeat by President Obama in the present greenhouse gas tailoring rule case before the Supreme Court would somehow be good for the environment and is a desireable thing.....because that entire line of thought is totally bogus and without any real understanding of the Clean Air Act and the contested issues and petitions in this case....
In order for a National Ambient Air Quality (7+ / 0-)
Standard for greenhouse gases to be published, the "air pollutant" as defined by 42 USC Sec 7602(g) must be first considered as an 'air pollutant' under the Act before a NAAQS standard can be published under 42 USC 7409(a).
If a substance that was previously considered as an 'air pollutant' in the present case by EPA is struck from being considered as an 'air pollutant' as requested by the Rick/Rick petition to the Supremes and others, then no EPA rulemaking could ever proceed to set a NAAQS standard under the circumstances of an adverse decision by the Supreme Court that had the effect of striking CO2e as a pollutant.
Moreover, if the TPP and its Atlantic analog go into effect, as far as can be determined, there will be NO effective "legal/regulation" way to keep the crappers from crapping, over most of the planet. Obama is still pushing the "free trade" bulls__t cover that is part of the stealth "sell" of our human birthright to "the market..."
I guess the apologists for the Great Game, as played by our lords and masters and their sneaky-petes and as administered by our vaunted military-industrialists and as paid for , in so many ways, by us ordinary people, the apologists who used to be so vigorously present here have moved on. Knowing, as they do, that the Game is rigged, that they are Inside The Gates, that no amount of blogtalk in places where people actually recognize what's going on, no amount even of awareness by the larger polity, will change a jot or a tittle of Teh Stupid Idiocy that the Rulership awards itself such brassy medals and big paydays for.
Can I put in another plug for two sources that give little insights into Teh Stupid? First is a self-paean by one Gary Schroen, one of the more "effective" CIA paramilitaries, bragging up the "effectiveness" of the CIA and US Imperial Exceptional "Covert" Interventionism in Notagainistan, while giving a lesson in how us Westerners and our big blocks of $100 bills and complex-chain-of-command-targeting-decisions-for-smart-weapons-operated-by-dumb-people reached the endpoint and current condition laid out in this post: "First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan," with this from the ironically humorous Amazon patrioblurb -- "While America held its breath in the days immediately following 9/11, a small but determined group of CIA agents covertly began to change history. This is the riveting first-person account of the treacherous top-secret mission inside Afghanistan to set the stage for the defeat of the Taliban and launch the war on terror." http://www.amazon.com/First-In-Insiders-Spearheaded-Afghanistan/dp/0345496612
And Jon Krakauer's "Where Men Win Glory," to read not so much for the material on Pat Tillman, but for the context, the continued, endless, wasteful, careless idiocy of the High Command and the whole idiot structure that has "us" sending troops into places to draw fire or be blown up by IEDs (many of which are built of "NATO"-manufacutred-and-paid-for munitions.
One can't even take any masochisto-schadenfreude pleasure in the kicking of the asses of our own troops, because they bear the pain and the Brass sit on their highly decorated, highly pandered, building-for-that-really-rich-second-career opportunity. Once again, like all the other parasites,, consequence-free -- failure is no stain, fraud is no bar to advancement, fooling around is no disqualification for a Fine Personal Future...
It's just anecdotal bits of video, but if one goes through the stuff at syriavideo.net you will see a lot of anti-tank missiles, both guided and ballistic, being blasted at Syrian army tanks. Using the guided ones requires some training, a calm mind while lining up the target while you are line-of-sight to the tank and its amped-up crew and their own death-dealing devices, and some luck -- both with weather conditions and with the reliability of the devices themselves. Check youtube for videos under "military fails," sometime... The un-actively-guided RPGs and such also require the operator to put himself in an exposed position, vulnerable to snipers as well as tank fire. Google "Syria headshot videos" some time to see what I mean.
Then, you have to hit the tank in a vulnerable spot, which the tankers and war materiel profiteer idiots are constantly making harder to find. And of course you have to also use "diplomacy" or something to cut off the delivery of more tanks, improved tanks, of course, in the interminable game of Armor versus Projectile, into The Enemy's Table of Organization and Equipment. How about a post-phecy about tanks and simple anti-tankery? http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/22/tanks-to-afghanistan-a-soldier-writes/
I would be careful about using the "game changer" phrase without many qualifications. No single weapon or weapon type (other than maybe nuclear, chemical and biological) is really a game changer in this version of 4th generation, outside-player violence. The USNATO warmakers and their suppliers bruited all kinds of "game changers" in our last two BIG imperial conflicts -- and the example is always out there at the BIG scale of the 5th Fleet and a lot of USNATO walking- and driving-around assets being sunk and blasted by the inventive stratagies of a retired Marine general. What the machinery seems to me to be producing is a "consumer war," posited on a balance of violence, with lots of sales opportunities and interstices where schmucks (albeit competent, in their trade) from the CIA and similar organisms can ply their skills and keep everything at a high simmer and low boil -- that keeps the Marches of the Empire from doing what the Germanic tribes did to Rome... spyguy points to a perceptive book, "The Gun," http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/03/books/03book.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 , about the simple and formidable engine of evil known as the AK-47 and its derivatives, called rightly in my mind the REAL weapon of mass destruction, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/03/books/03book.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 People from cultures with pride and revenge and possessory attachment to their landscape will demonstrably kick the asses of, or wear down, Imperial troops who don't resort to a Death Star-type weapon.
Interesting, when you look up the "Iron Dome" thing, one of the torrent of idiot war technologies out there, you read this sentence in the "Jewish Virtual Library -- Everything You Need To Know, From Anti-Semitism to Zionism":
"The Iron Dome missile defense system, designed and developed by Israel and jointly funded through the United States, is a response to the threats Israel faces from short and medium-range rockets and mortar shells fired by Palestinian terrorists in Gaza. " Emphasis emphatically added.
Anyone remember that silly early computer game where you, the player, tried to use your Iron Cursor to intercept a steadily increasing rain of (in that case, nuclear-warheaded) missiles that eventually and inevitably destroyed the Virtual Cities you were charged with protecting? How many of us, as young people, learned the meaning of "futility" from that and similar games where the best you could do was run up the points before "Game Over"? Stupid effing humans...
Maybe since their "revolutions" are a little more recent and a lot more violent, the Rulers there have to pay a tiny bit more attention to keeping the pain level just below the threshold where anarchy and anomie seem preferable. Via oppressive control mechanisms, and "just enough to eat-ism." You can bet that the kleptocratic portion of the Ruling Class is just like our own, knowing the real deep truth that they will live lives of extraordinary luxury and indulgence, and die and be beyond any kind of consequences, retribution or restitution, before the s__t hits the fan... "Apres nous le deluge," "I'll be gone, you'll be gone," all that... http://tradicionclasica.blogspot.com/2006/01/expression-aprs-moi-le-dluge-and-its.html Nothing new here, of course. Very few of us humans, given the option, actually seem to "care about the little guy."
Spy guy, I should have added a snark flag to my comment. Thanks for the additional light on the subject. The Likudniks are indeed suicidal but seem to want to take everyone else down with them. As to "advances in personal armament," it begins to seem that "market forces" are making it ever easier for more of us sick humans to do the same. But of course those Guns are so so sexy, now aren't they? So pleasing to our fantasies ? So freed from restraints of decency ? Yeah,a few of those idiots believe their own myths. Have they studied the videos at syriavideo.net? Stupid humans.
Waalll them folks sure are vaunted about their military hardware and a lot of kill-everything nuclear weapons and various forms of crowd control (snerk snicker )...
Teh Stupid is entrenched, and cannot end well... especially for us ordinary people who just foolishly want to go along and get along in our tiny little lives. Not that the Chinese rulership and oligarchs seem to have any interest in better lives for most people either.
“Is Amerca's future in Asia?” What does that even mean?
The post is a masterful exegesis of various parts of the Current Situation and Some Possibilities. But the underlying frame seems mostly mercantile and commercial, a straight extension of the kinds of institutional behaviors that are killing Freedom'n'Liberty ™ and plain old habitability for ordinary people everywhere. The corporate entities and their “government” appendixes that “Go East” advice is directed to are scarcely “America,” which was only an exceptional dreamstate masking a gestating Empire anyway. That mash-up of corporate power and wealth, “US trade,” is trans- and post- and supra-national, Friedman's “Flat Earth” racing to the bottom. “We” should be happy that Obama’s crew are still trying to shove the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement up our noses? Maybe happy that Abe is feeling his own oats at the moment? http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/04/24/national/politics-diplomacy/abe-secured-only-half-of-key-goals-at-meeting/#.U1pqZaLLLnc
Our votes, and our belief, and trust, and the wealth we create and are compelled to keep creating to pay the debts the Few write against our future, and our resignation, are what create the pool of “legitimacy” that these barstids float their ships on. Where’s the payback for making possible the megayachts and gigabuck CEO wealth transfers and HST and derivatives and this stuff, http://www.alternet.org/economy/super-rich-cnbc ? Where’s the “pivot” toward a sustainable structure that provides Maslow’s basics to all us ordinary people, in Tampa and Ann Arbor and such, who are about to lose our puny-person net access, and may have to pay corporations not to pollute us into sickness and early death? http://www.stchas.edu/faculty/gbowling/survey/TheRightToPollute.html And solar power: how long before that’s a crushing franchise too, with “ownership” and unenforceable “rights” in the mix? http://www.homepower.com/articles/solar-electricity/design-installation/ask-experts-who-owns-my-sunlight
As in Wm. Randolph Hearst and Horace Greeley’ day, the “East” is actually “West.” Right out there on the Horizon of our Manifest Destiny, right? And just who gains from pursuit of that Destiny, again?
The Supreme Court can rule all it wants -- there are huge numbers of precedents for individuals, localities, interest groups, whole states, simply ignoring the rulings. The current crop of majority Supremes patently do not care that they are wasting generations of carefully built legitimacy, that quality that holds polities together and restrains episodes like Bundyworld from descending into Homs and Aleppo and Daraa...http://syriavideo.net/ Like so many other privileged folks, especially inside-the-Imperial-Beltway bobbleheads, THEY DON'T CARE. They know they will live out their snotty, sneaky, arrogant little lives in grand style and comfort, immune to any consequences for their cancerous actions.
One would think that those of us who will be eaten by the Rich might be putting our minds to ways around the faux-legitimacy structures that lead to failures like CitUnited and McCutcheon and the upcoming gift of the Internet to yet other cancers... The people who are stealing from the most of us occasionally go to the trouble, less frequently these days, of having their actions "legitmized" by statutes, regulations and court rulings. But most of their activity of the predatory kind is what people are finally starting to call "post-lega:" straight piracy and highway robbery and smash-and-grab. If they can do things on that basis, why are the rest of us working so hard to maintain and live by the fiction of "ruleoflaw?" It's not like that actually protects us in our persons, http://www.copblock.org/tag/police-abuse/ , and property, http://www.yourlawyer.com/topics/overview/gmac_wrongful_foreclosures_lawyer_lawsuit_attorney, http://www.opednews.com/articles/Bankers-Win-Both-Ways-Now-by-Ellen-Brown-Bail-in_Bailout_Eurozone_Public-Banking-140330-138.html ...
One problem is that what tries to get fulfilled in a consumer-capitalist mess is not "needs," it's "wants:" a much more hugely elastic thing. And from what I read, you are simply wrong, even about "needs" of 7 billion of us. Got some authority?
We ordinary people can hope that some of the buggy riders are starting to put money into wagers on renewable technologies. Not, of course, that injecting vulture financialization and the other elements of business-as-usual into "greening" is guaranteed to produce a net better outcome. Some, of course, like the Kochs, are riding the horse they rode onto the scene, and are doubling down on desolating the planet via consumptive capitalism by betting on profit-making opportunities from the climate change they have induced, on their way to Elysium... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/19/companies-profiting-off-global-warming_n_3756346.html
All depends, of course, on how one defines "normal." In the compendious War Department dictionary, "normal' and its other grammatical forms are used hundreds of times, to characterize and define other terms. The only definition that starts with "normal" is "normal operations," the parsing of which ought to be an education in idiocy all by itself:
normal operations — Generally and collectively, the broad functions that a combatant commander undertakes when assigned responsibility for a given geographic or functional area. Except as otherwise qualified in certain unified command plan paragraphs that relate to particular commands, “normal operations” of a combatant commander include: planning and execution of operations throughout the range of military operations; planning and conduct of cold war activities; planning and administration of military assistance; and maintaining the relationships and exercising the directive or coordinating authority prescribed in JP 0-2 and JP 4-01. http://ra.defense.gov/documents/rtm/jp1_02.pdf [.pdf]
The old "commons" worked, as well as it did, because of social controls that kept the greedy bastards from taking more than their share of grass and turves and gleanings. There seems to be yet another positive-feedback "fail" in play here, amplifying the over-taking by a few from the commons.
Of course, as pointed out by many, first the First People did what they did with the continent, then the forefathers of these nascent Mad Max types came, saw and took, then of course there were the railroads and the taking, theft really, of huge swathes of what was thought to be everyone's "heritage," and of course you have all the Kochers and the dudes that find the seams and bribe-workable pathways to doing stuff like not paying even the pittance for leaseholds and extraction values for all that oil and gas and uranium and other stuff that's on what was sort of supposed to be like a big Commons for all Americans. At least those dudes in suits and string ties and expensive cowboy boots make a show of faux legitimacy by "following the letter of the law," law that they have carefully lobbied into existence over decades, centuries even. Stuff like this: "Vanishing Lake Michigan Sand Dunes: Threats from Mining." http://www.greatlakes.org/Document.Doc?id=119
Use it all up, folks -- Jesus is coming back Real Soon, riding a horse of flame and brandishing the Covenant, the Sword with the Arm of the Lord... And he is going to be REALLY pissed if you haven't used it all up yet, the whole planet over which you tell yourselves he gave you "Dominion..."
And what is with this perpetuation of the idiot notion that all that "wealth" was somehow "earned?" High speed trading is "earning?" Derivative plays are "earning?" Regulatory capture is "Earning?" Carboning up the planet, with the shedding of massive externalities, stripping the oceans and forests, building military massiveness and state-control apparatuses, those are "earning?" Nope, that is just extractive vulture-and-tapeworm action, stealing the commons, and impoverishingkilling ordinary people now and on into the future.
The more the word gets used, of course, in contexts like this, the more too many of us just kind of accept that it's "true" in the way we understand the "earning" that is represented in the increasingly paltry paychecks we get, for actual WORK, adding value that is actually "earned" in the way ordinary people understand the word, and the pittance in "interest" the banksters pay us for the use of our "earnings."
Trillions in self-generating, self-perpetuating Fun Units to feed the insatiable pleasure-seeking of a Fortunate Very Few? "Earned?" My aching a__.
Nervy of me to offer this impression of "Sharia Law" in this spot, but it seems to me that underlying the whole pseudo-Christianist thing is the real reason the banksters and the Kochs and the faker TV preachers are really concerned about "Sharia law" is the economic bits. There's plenty of hypocrisy and horror in implementation of Sharia, it appears (just like the Paulist scam version of Jesus-ism), but there's a nocked arrow aimed at the black heart of Western fiscalility held by the Muslim banking archer.
The Corporatist concepts of debt and usury as Good Business Practices, and of "money" as an ASSET that can be leveraged, are big no-nos. There's a lot of hypocrisy among Muslims, too, when it comes to High Finance and financialization and monetization, just like with drinking alcohol and eating proscribed foods and various other kinds of proscribed profligacy.
But if the Sharia framing of economic relations, particularly what we call "banking" relations, were to catch on, where would Lloyd Blankfein and Timmy Geithner and that Chicago toad Friedman be? Here's a bit of text from one of many primers on Sharia finance:
The Big Picture
Although they have been mandated since the beginnings of Islam in the seventh century, Islamic banking and finance have been formalized gradually since the late 1960s, coincident with and in response to tremendous oil wealth which, fueled renewed interest in and demand for Sharia-compliant products and practice.
Central to Islamic banking and finance is an understanding of the importance of risk sharing as part of raising capital and the avoidance of riba (usury) and gharar (risk or uncertainty). (To see more on risk, read Determining Risk And The Risk Pyramid and Personalizing Risk Tolerance.) [Compare Sharia notions with what rules here, the privatization of gain and "socialization" of loss, risk and externalities... not a pretty sight.]
Islamic law views lending with interest payments as a relationship that favors the lender, who charges interest at the expense of the borrower. Because Islamic law views money as a measuring tool for value and not an 'asset' in itself, it requires that one should not be able to receive income from money (for example, interest or anything that has the genus of money) alone. Deemed riba (literally an increase or growth), such practice is proscribed under Islamic law (haram, which means prohibited) as it is considered usurious and exploitative. By contrast, Islamic banking exists to further the socio-economic goals of Islam.
Accordingly, Sharia-compliant finance (halal, which means permitted) consists of profit banking in which the financial institution shares in the profit and loss of the enterprise that it underwrites. Of equal importance is the concept of gharar. Defined as risk or uncertainty, in a financial context it refers to the sale of items whose existence is not certain. Examples of gharar would be forms of insurance, such as the purchase of premiums to insure against something that may or may not occur or derivatives used to hedge against possible outcomes. (To read more about insurance or hedges, see A Beginner's Guide To Hedging, Understand Your Insurance Contract and Exploring Advanced Insurance Contract Fundamentals.)
The equity financing of companies is permissible, as long as those companies are not engaged in restricted types of business - such as the production of alcohol, pornography or weaponry - and only certain financial ratios meet specified guidelines.
But we "JudeoChristians," who per our holy texts used to benefit from something called "Jubilee," http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/10/05/could-national-debt-forgiveness-help-kickstart-the-american-economy/ as a way to keep debt from becoming slavery, would all have our heads explode if all the soaring idiotic genius of monetization and securitization and derivitization and financialization of EVERYthing were to be, you know, "against the law." Which law is now, you know, written by and for the very people who are supposed to be "regulated" by the Delaware corporation law and the Uniform Commercial Code and the bankruptcy code (especially as relates to discharges of consumer and student and medical debt) and "securities" law, and foreclosure law that no longer often requires the bank to even prove that it owns the note before throwing you into the street, and all that...
One wonders if it's way too much easier to slash and burn, dig and strip, extract and externalize, than to husband and steward and pay forward. One looks at the video record of various "sustainable ecology and agriculture" projects, e.g.,http://sustainableforestgardenfarmproject.weebly.com/ that depend on a long chain of persons with aligned perceptions and motivations to carry life forward, and then at time-lapses of predations like killing the rain forests and "tar sands" extractions, http://climatestate.com/2013/05/11/timelapse-satellite-views-of-human-destruction-of-the-biosphere-over-three-decades/, and one has to wonder, and maybe pray for divine and human intervention, but be just a little bit pessimistic, that the real Takers will inevitably, with all their busy profit- and rent-seeking, and skills at making their activities "legitimate" and "legal," or at least immune to correction, overwhelm and strip the landscapes that "stewards" work so hard to create and maintain...
There's such a smorgasbord of fun stuff about Rand Paul out there, it's hard to pick sensible representative context for him.. Would be all things to all people, so you can pick and choose from a myriad of "inconsistent," often idiotic pronouncements on a whole range of topics that are important to having a future for the species. that he may be "least bad" ain't a criterion I would favor for putting him atop the Kleptocracy. As a low-paid nurse with an interest in the cynical, I would offer this little slightly aged snippet, from a guy who would do away with Medicare and other non-self-reliant selfishness, but is happy to bill Medicare in his practice, like namesake Ayn's "distasteful acceptance" of Social Security.
My offering: "Dr. Paul: Not Board Certified, But Self-Certified." http://www.salon.com/2010/06/14/rand_2/ But there's this wistful cloud of neediness floating around among us ordinary people, wishing for a "real leader" to come and Make Healthy Change, only lacking an appropriate public-relations poly-angulation creation designed to seem like he/she sort of generally seems to fit with the contours of what enough of us think is Right and Honorable and Honest and Wise to get past the electoral hump and into the Imperial Oval.
Probably are a lot of instances in human history when a man has said something altogether different, when his personal priorities and income situation have changed, from what he said a couple of years earlier when he was nominally advising on grave matters of state and had no immediate chance of making a whole lot of money off his advice and pronouncements. Particularly a man who does not give a rip for the opinion of others and has zero respect for honesty.
"Informed voting" at polling places, subject as it is to all the perversions of spinning and hidden persuasion and outright manipulation and fraud and theft, will not halt or undo the processes of monetization described here. People who care whether the species and culture survive are going to have to not only change their own personal behaviors, that include feeling good about OMG! switching to designer LED bulbs with lots of "consumer choices" of Kelvin colors and controllability, yet increasing their total electrical demand, using gasoline-powered yard blowers instead of Ewww! rakes to help "maintain" their monoculture bluegrass lawns by blowing their dog droppings and other detritus onto the neighbors' yards or into public streets, buying SUVs and big trucks, and a host of other "substitutions" and convenient continuations. And organizing to stand in the way of "progress" and "development," like 305's XL protests, the activities of First People in Canada against "tar sands," all that stuff. And voting survival instead of tribal, to add that layer of traditional legitimacy to the parts of actual change that the other nitty-gritty oppositions to Koch-ery that are needed where we Americans live, and elsewhere...
Good news,, maybe! Though if Greening happens to the extent needed to keep billions of us from being cooked and drowned and choked, it will be likely by small-scale stuff -- maybe like the proverbial, likely chimaerical proto-rats that supposedly ate the dinosaur eggs, speeding the saurians' departure. And happen in spite of "our government, the best that money can buy," and the rich folks who are behind "initiatives" like the one described in this AL Monitor article:
US official calls for Lebanon to accelerate oil process
US Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy Diplomacy Amos Hochstein encouraged the Lebanese government to “act quickly to adopt the needed measures for the issue of gas and oil, including passing decrees related to blocks [of the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ)] and permits.” In an interview with As-Safir, he noted, “There is not enough time for the government to move at a slow pace. It has to catch up with neighboring countries.” http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/business/2014/04/lebanon-us-official-call-accelerate-oil-process.html
Yeah, hurry up, you slow-coach Lebanese officials! Get that offshore lease game up to speed, so those Carbon Corps can extract it, excrete their inevitable externalities, and retire to sunnier shores before the s__t hits the fan! Don't you know there's PROFIT in them thar fills?
"secret law, secret surveillance, secret power, and the secret state — are here to stay."
And because all the incentives and momentum are aligned, ask Lockheed Martin and General Atomic and Bechtel and Halliburton...
Wonderful career opportunities in what has come to be so artfully called "national security," and here's a primer for all you young'uns burdened with non-dischargeable-in-bankruptcy student debt, a bent for the technischer volken arbeitung, and no conscience or consciousness of what you will soon be able to do to the rest of us (and at least you will be lined up on the winning side in the new Great Game of Undodgeableball -- maybe you will even be able or allowed to go on living on the f_"_ed-up planet!) For forward-lookers, the last link is to one planning document that, with related excretions and ejaculations of the MIC, will be guiding the future projection of all that power):
© 2024 All Rights Reserved
There's another economics game that always ends the same way: the "Beer Game," a simulation used in business schools and elsewhere to supposedly show the communications faults that plague a "supply chain." Players assume one of the roles in the brewing, distribution and sale of beer. The nominal goal is to establish a steady-state or at least functional balance between supply and demand. But in addition to the ethics that the players bring to the game, there's incentives for maximizing the position of each of the parts in the chain. Every time, despite the knowledge that imbalance and dysfunction, boom and bust, are almost always the outcome, the play goes the same way: Too much production and a crash in price and "bankruptcy." The lesson of the game, it seems to me, is a lot bigger than just the difficulties of creating and maintaining a balance in the thing called the supply chain. It's simply an illustration of competitiveness and greed standing athwart a stable, money-based, personal-reward-driven simple little part of the much larger set of relationships that Experts call "the economy." Even the people who teach the game and run the simulations acknowledge that there's something very broken in the real world: http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2012/manufacturing-beer-game-0503
But of course in iCloudCuckooland, the Big Players say that surprisingly, more information is the key to beer-brewing homeostasis:Winning the Beer Game with The Internet of Things (IoT) http://blogs.cisco.com/ioe/winning-the-beer-game-with-the-internet-of-things-iot/ How you take greed and self-advancement and Bubble-type opportunism out of the cycle isn't very clear....
GUNmen need, er, GUNS. Wonder where this merry band of splinterheads got and is getting theirs?
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-06-10/al-qaeda-militants-capture-us-blackhawk-helicopters-iraq
Will anyone do an inventory and tote up the cost of all the sh_t these "jihadists" acquired by conquest just now? If for no other purpose than to procure a bunch more materiel from our great Contractors?
ISIS/ISIL or whatever they are needed a pretty good set of arms to embark on this little venture in the first place, didn't they? You don't fill up the supply chain and deploy for something like this in a couple of days, and these dudes don't manufacture their own on the necessary scale. http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21604230-extreme-islamist-group-seeks-create-caliphate-and-spread-jihad-across Wonder where those came from?
In the meantime, our geniuses in the foreign-policy-ery and sneaky-pete-ery are doing what they know best how to do, "arranging" the "covert movement" of lots and lots of weapons via "corridors" and "partners" to "moderates" in contiguous parts of one large land mass that on the map has little narrow porous lines that demarcate "nations" as defined by other Big Players in other conflicts, where the Krupps (who have moved on to more sophisticated names like "General Atomics" and games like invading Notagainistan) made out like bandits, selling weapons to most sides ("we" are doubling down on that, by "providing training" and "promoting interoperability," all stuff that costs Real Money and what's the return on THAT investment, again? "Stability" and "Security?" And doing so to both "sides," once again.
And gee, was this rather large war-scale offensive a complete effing surprise? Where is the effing worldwide see-all NSA and where is the CIA and the DIA, and all that crapload of satellite and ELINT espionage and World Situational Networkkk-Centric Interoperatigavitable Batattlespace Awareness stuff "we" the taxpayers are paying out the nose for, with our money and "Freedom (TM)" and the loss of peace of mind that we might have that there will be enough of everything (including un-drowned, un-burned, un-cooked arable land) to go around for our old selves and our grandkids and those people on the other side of all the arbitrary lines and tribal frontiers that are penciled in on the indivisible surface of the only planet we can currently screw up? Did none of that, or the "ass-ets" our Great Rulers might be supposed to have left in place on the ground in that arbitrary demarcated landspace called Iraq(notanationanymore), pick up on the mounting of this operation? One might almost think it was "Excellent! All part of my grand plan!" Or maybe "OOOPS, look what's coming, how can I cover my a__ on this FUBAR?"
By the way, great job of "training the wogs," you generals and colonels and on down the line -- they too now know the strategy of the "withdrawal operation — A planned retrograde operation in which a force in contact disengages from an enemy force and moves in a direction away from the enemy." -- http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/new_pubs/jp1_02.pdf" "Run away! run away," https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92gP2J0CUjc , ain't in the Dictionary... Wonder if the Afghan National Army, or all those random "forces" our Combat Commanders are juicing up in AFRICOM will show the same staunch resolve, or strike off on their own, like so many SWORDmen did during the 14th Century......
What the Beltway Bobbleheads think about all this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/from-iraq-to-syria-splinter-groups-becoming-larger-worry-than-al-qaeda/2014/06/10/28abae1c-f0d6-11e3-914c-1fbd0614e2d4_story.html blahblahI'msoseriousDoofusery... ISIS/ISIL is “a very malevolent terrorist group and one that we’re increasingly focused on.”? Hey, Dix, it's a freakin' HORDE, far as I can see, with the static charge of a looming dust storm, that draws ever more GUNmen to the vision of "taking over" and "being as bossy as I want to be and taking whatever I want and making everyone kowtow and say 'Uncle' or get shot or beheaded because I can," drawing in the worst of the human mess, turning them loose from all the bonds and limits that otherwise bind and restrain us, liberating them to be GUNmen. There's a Genghis among them, you can bet on it -- what are the "civilized," weakened by our Imperial idiocies, going to be able to do about it, or is it just another turn of the great Wheel of History?
Never learn. There is no way to apply enough "overwhelming force" in those "infected countries" (what a line!). Get it straight -- even our "world's best military, bigger, stronger, faster with everything from hotfoot matches and stink bombs up to nuclear weapons has discovered that nationalist and tribal warriors are much more agile and all they have to do is "not lose," the only way to win is not to play the game (unless you suggest nukularly glassifying all them "infected countries" or gassing or REALLY "infecting" them with war bugs and nanoweapons and such. Ask that other Marine general, van Riper, how hard it was to defeat the vaunted Giant Forces of the Empire in various war simulations, like Millenium 2002, http://fabiusmaximus.com/2008/01/14/millennium-challenge/. Our generals are dorks and losers and fatass careerist bureaucrats when it comes to dealing with your "contagion," which in large part is people wanting to be left to their own devices, and in part a result of making it easier for Bad Guys to "take over" and "Start Trouble."
And don't forget that the Big Military has it all planned out, how the giant clumsy bureaucracy, "interoperating" with the militaries of all those Democratic States of Africa and Asia and the Middle East and South and Central America, that have been trained and equipped to Do Military Stuff by the Empire, will Respond To And Run Everything come the advent of Really Bad Times as a result of screwing up our atmosphere and oceans: http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/dod/dsb/climate.pdf
Quotes and /s?
Ask Belgium and Luxembourg and the Netherlands how being a buffer state worked out. Until there's an end to the Great Game and the industrial and financial facilitation and incitement of violence and predation, and our self-inflicted wounds of combustoconsumption and religio- tribalism, not too much chance for species or even surface-life survival...
Goes around, comes around. RED used to be the color of choice of the Marxist/Communist-aligned, and a favorite dismissive epithet of the people that ordinary folks have been tricked or have been blind and stupid enough into labeling as the "Right," as in "correct and proper and on the money and all that." ("Left" being synonymous with "clumsy, minority, treacherous, sinister and all that," in the stuff we learned in school not so long ago.)
Interesting how in so very few years, not even decades, starting during the Reagan Thingie, "RED" was now the color of the True Blue PATRIOTS, a badge of honor, and gee, wasn't Marx all about the eventual "withering away of the State," which lo and behold is the summum bonum of the Right? Old observation, that politics is a circle (increasingly a circular firing squad), where Left and Right kiss up close and tight and indistinguishable on the far arc of the thing...
Trust is for suckers. http://www.haaretz.com/news/features/word-of-the-day/word-of-the-day-freier-1508-1512-1488-1497-1497-1512.premium-1.493882 And speaking of odd link-ups in Google-and-AmazonLand, note the name of a salient player in the nuclearization of Israel, with all that has led and been leading to: http://books.google.com/books?id=oaNXMDn-OekC&pg=PA298&lpg=PA298&dq=freier+haaretz&source=bl&ots=yUtwKrI6lF&sig=n_-3AMrotAKB5kEQoWjfm3PTtII&hl=en&sa=X&ei=jWSXU9rpG8mG8QHdzYH4Dw&ved=0CE0Q6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=freier%20haaretz&f=false What could possibly, ever, go wrong...?
If you're not doing anything wrong, you got nothing to worry about... Matrix GOOD, Matrix COMFORTABLE!
________________
Just caught part of "The Matrix" again on cable. Where Morpheus is educating Neo on the difference between Reality and The Desert. Blame laid at the feet of Smart People who created this planet-wide net of increasingly "artificial" and synthetic intelligences that didn't have much need for protoplasm, until us humans blackened the sky to keep them from using solar energy. What a ripe fruit for Joseph Campbell to dissect. I see that the Turing Test for credible machine intelligence was just "passed," maybe: "No, A Computer Did Not Just Pass The Turing Test --Sorry everyone." http://www.buzzfeed.com/kellyoakes/no-a-computer-did-not-just-pass-the-turing-test But for all the skeptical comments, including the linked one, lookie at how enthusiastically people are still cheering, rah! Rah! for "success" in creating "true" AI. And how much money and genius are going into the development of nanobots, that may run a better chance of turning the planet into Grey Goo, http://science.howstuffworks.com/gray-goo.htm, than the Trinity event (first nuclear device explosion in the open atmosphere) did of igniting the atmosphere, a much more accelerated version of what we humans are up to via CO2 and methane and stuff: http://www.sciencemusings.com/2005/10/what-didnt-happen.html (Note that Hitler was apparently more concerned about the survival of the planet than our own Exceptional US Imperial War Administration, General Groves and Truman and those dudes... Go figure.)
Two would do for what? Want two words? "Humanity f__led." Your immune system and general physiology are full of words, rich with learning and communication and feedback. Blogging seems to me to be a bit of whatever homeostatic and anti-pathogenic structure there might be... Also part of deadlier processes, too. Brevity is only the soul of wit, not wisdom...
Interesting, both the reminder about how our legislatures and other rulers have been short-changing the education=citizenship part of our culture, and the penurious responses that even "progressive" representatives are putting out there. Warren's little nipping at the corners of "student loan debt" might result in a tiny marginal bump in people being able to take part in the latest housing bubble, but does not really touch the fundamental debt slavery that is built into this piece of the "polittle-ical economy."
For a little context on the fundamentals of the enormous trillion-dollar scam, yet another example of the Few bleeding the life out of the Many, there's this primer from Rolling Stone, with a link to an also illuminating Taibbi article: "Ripping Off Young America: The College-Loan Scandal", http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/ripping-off-young-america-the-college-loan-scandal-20130815
For a little more detail, with some examination of location differences in the problem and some correlations like one between employment rate and rate of default on those still crushing loans, there's this article in Financial Times, which includes this telling quote from Sen. Warren:
"“In other words, the game is still rigged to make the rich and powerful even more rich and powerful,” Warren wrote in a Wednesday letter to her constituents. “And that means we've got more work to do to help make sure the next kid can get ahead and the kid after that and the kid after that.” http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2013/08/15/The-Hidden-Reason-for-the-Student-Loan-Crisis#sthash.TgdgYWkU.dpuf Dare one ask, what about the millions that have been very often suckered into loans that we taxpayers guarantee, made by predatory lending institutions and loan brokers and co-conspiratorial school administrations, to CURRENT debt slaves? http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/jobs/posts/2013/07/05-student-loans-debt-burdens-jobs-greenstone-looney, and this item, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2014/05/14/young-adults-student-debt-and-economic-well-being/
For a picture of the scope of the problem, and link to one of the resources that is looking for REAL remedies, which ought to start with a freakin' Jubilee, http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/10/05/could-national-debt-forgiveness-help-kickstart-the-american-economy/, you might look here: http://projectonstudentdebt.org/state_by_state-data.php And please hold the Puritan noise about "just obligations, that unlike TBTF and other bastards with clout, the 'zombie debtor' must be made to pay, and pay, and pay, with no relief even in bankruptcy," try this view: "Bankruptcy Panel's Proposals Favor Debtors, Anger Creditors", http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB876958483200218000 For a view on the harshness of the 1997 revisions to the Code, and some notes on how buying legislators was a growing racket even way back in 1997, look here: "Bankruptcy Plans Harsh On Debtors", http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1998-09-14/business/9809110093_1_million-bankruptcies-bankruptcy-filers-bankruptcy-lawyers
There are other costs too: https://www.apa.org/gradpsych/2013/01/debt.aspx
On the other hand, does anyone who could actually FIX something actually care? Obama has tiny fractional proposals, for stuff like carbon emissions and "ending the war in Notagainistan," and now some prospective student debt morsel. Sen. Warren has another thing that might bleed off some of the building head of steam, too, but not stop the other bleeding and dying. Big whoop.
Let's remember another April Foolishness by that a___ole, here's a link to some nice pix of McCain taking his Sunday stroll through a market area of Baghdad on April 1, 2007, with some commentary on his assertion that the area was so "secure" that you could just stroll and shop. At least if you had a brigade of GIs with armored equipment and air cover and your own personally fitted body armor and point and trail and flank troops and snipers on the rooftops on your route. And you could get the shop owners to, you know, "give" you stuff, little souvenirs like rugs and what have you, for "free." http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/senators-security-circus/2007/04/03/1175366241393.html
And there's this: http://wonkette.com/249662/mccains-baghdad-market-photo-op-kills-21-people
And this: http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2008/03/mccains-baghdad-market/218849/
Then there's this other episode of palling around with actual terrorists, lampooned by Jon Stewart: http://www.mediaite.com/tv/jon-stewart-rips-mccain-for-syrian-photo-op-oh-my-god-hes-literally-palling-around-with-terrorists/
"Mission Effing Accomplished," eh, McCain?
From observing people I have known, there's a kind of divide one can cross, where once you do some bad stuff and get away with it, you are freed from those sad constraints of decency and honest that burden most of the rest of us. A wonderfully and terribly liberating feeling, apparently. So many of our rulers, probably including The Only President We've Currently Got, have experienced it...
Dude, in the bigger picture of Imperial decline and fail, my guess is that no one gives a rat's behind what "the US would have been happy with." Particularly with the "happiness" of what implicitly you define "the US" to be, that Brooding Presence, Hulking Idiot on the Great Game board, with its little waning pile of "national interest" tokens... One wonders what that slurb of a phrase, "the Egyptian people," actually uncovers or relates to, either.
Those dudes are no different from the cynical SOBs who rule us. They know us ordinary people, no matter where we live, are wired to feel the need for LEGITIMACY, and some kind of "rule of law" thingie, some sense that there are constraints to arbitrariness and fraud and abuse, some remedies for them to have recourse to. And of course a means for them to advance the interests of themselves and their tribe, sect, family as against the Other. And you know how sophisticated the auteurs and stage managers have gotten at "Wag the Dog" manipulations of great masses of us who are none more noble than any of the rest of us, who love or just get caught up in the EXCITEMENT of it all. Think of those grinning idiots in Styrofoam "straw hats" pumping rahrah signs and screeching at great R and D conventions, as one example. The election give life to the myths of comity, supports the claims of the winners to hegemony, all that stuff. We ain't perceptive enough, individually and collectively, to see how badly we are being had, by those ancient greeds and the institutions that have developed to support them... And we, as a mass, and for our own little slices of Stuff, educate and train and herd ourselves right into the chutes.
Reagan a veteran? He made effing training and propaganda films from Hollywood. As an " automatic officer." Please DO NOT exa!t him, or even John Wayne, as a "veteran." And ask his first wife about his " family values," or ask his kids...
One hopes this does not mark Rohani as "dead meat." Given the way "fundamentalists" manage their continuation in or ascent to power over us ordinary people. Bunch of effing old randy closet-perv men, taking their usual young-mostly-male violence assisted path to the heights of the hierarchy.
For the Iranian case, it may just be Netfoam and wishful memory on my part, recalling a Playboy article from the late '60s. But there's some indications, maybe of course just idiot Islamophobia, http://www.citizenwarrior.com/2009/02/christianity-is-just-as-bad.html, maybe Dr. Cole knows the most likely version, that Khomeini wrote up his set of religiously-approved rules for sex with animals, juveniles, and marrying off daughters, and maybe Sistani has similar texts to his credit: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=74a_1268695569 Obviously, take with a grain of salt, since there's no good sourcing for the original supposed text that I can find. What can easily be found, re Rule By The Rotten Old Men, is all the rules in Leviticus and Numbers. What a great re-read! those Israelites must have had a fun time of it!
And just for fun, this little reminder of how the Reaganauts "may have" castrated Carter: "" http://www.wrmea.org/wrmea-archives/104-washington-report-archives-1982-1987/october-1987/848-did-iran-delay-hostages-release-to-ensure-reagans-election.html
From personal prior experience of "religion," in a Methodist church in the South, of all places, the older male head of the lay rulership controlled the agenda by assuring the rest of the faithful that "God has laid it on my heart that..." whatever personal benefit or tribal authoritarianism he wanted imposed was Divinely Mandated. We so want to believe...
If you got a tribal Narrative that pushes the reactive synaptic buttons of your limbic system, http://www.healing-arts.org/n-r-limbic.htm, you don' neeeed no steeeekin' actual HISSStory, based on stuff like verifiable facts and actions and events and all that, the ones that paint the whole picture. Life gets a lot simpler if you just go with that idiot basal limbic flow, that mediates but also shortstops empathy and comity and civility and such, delimiting it to the Tribe and excoriating all Others... Red Solo Cup! http://www.cmt.com/videos/toby-keith/742500/red-solo-cup.jhtml
The Narrative says "we" were the Good Guys, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/06/06/six-rules-for-teaching-world-war-ii/ , and all by themselves in a vacuum the Axis just started that big War on Democracy'n'Freedom (tm) out of the blue, blue sky. There were no "industrial" roots to the whole war thing, and nobody dares think along the lines highlighted by Barbara Tuchman, that dominion for the benefit of the Few and the increase of consumptive industry, and their miscalculations and incompetence and airy consequence-free unconcern, drove the whole thing. There are hints, here and there, in the Narrative purveyors: http://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/history/world-war-ii-causes-outbreak.html And yes, many of Them were "bad people," but of course Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Dresden and were honorable and causative of Goodness, and stuff like Sinchon (Korea) and My Lai, etc, never happened, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinchon_Massacre .
So yes, please remember kindly those many who killed and died in Flanders Fields and on the beaches of Normandy and the Sands of Iwo Jima and down the jungles and plains of many other places. Bit players in the Great Game, consumers of war materiel profitably manufactured and sold into the Game, played for the benefit of what we are starting to call the Elite, up there in their Elysium. Motivated (I speak from my own experience) by Boy Scout Laws (trustworthy, loyal helpful, friendly, courteous kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent, doing one's duty to God and one's country...) and years of juvenile Memorial Day and 4th of July parades and speeches, displaying the coffin flag my uncle "earned by, apparently, being idiotically infected with hepatitis B along with tens of thousands of others, http://www.gulfwarvets.com/jama2.htm. And stuffed up by the well-fed hate and fear of Commies and other Enemies, until the actual experience and some further education turned the lights on in the neocortex, and the Narrative ran dead-stop into the hard wall of What Really Is, as opposed to What We Believe, https://www.google.com/search?q=what+we+believe+america&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&channel=sb...
Speaking of good and bad beards: I think the fellas from that wildly-popular-with-"conservative patriot" TeeVee show, "Duck Dynasty," are all Registered ToiletPaper Reepublicans... as are the dudes on several "reality" shows that feature customizing and rebuilding those most American of machines, Harley Davidsons, and Monster Trucks, and Muscle Cars...
Let's remember that the Netanyahoos over there think of the US as "Uncle Freier." For those who don't remember, a "freier" in unofficial Hebrew-Yiddish parlance is the worst kind of sucker. To frame how the Yahoos think, and how they think of us, one might do worse than review this little article:
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/thou-shalt-not-be-a-freier-1.211247
And this slightly dated pie-in-the-face-chart: http://israelpalestineguide.wordpress.com/2013/10/04/who-gets-your-tax-dollars-for-their-military/
Understand your opponent, and don't for a minute think the Likudnik government is anything but. And why does the economic interest of Lockheed-Martin and the other corporations who sell those billions of dollars in war materiel to Israel, paid for by the laundered tax dollars of ordinary US citizens, trump the silly notion of the "general welfare," again?\\
How interesting that "we" will be propping up the Karzai admin via the same mechanisms of wealth transfer that we use to prop up the Israeli rulership...
You mean drones like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNPJMk2fgJU Check the comments, for a window into our collective soul...
Recourse to binary labels hardly works in this context. Look again, and you will see that those folks who started all those wars (Vietnam was Eisenhower's, and even Wilson's, maybe, if you look back far enough into colonial imperial history, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role_of_the_United_States_in_the_Vietnam_War , and the Dulles boys who by the way were indubitably "conservative") were basically pushing the politely described as "conservative" agendas of the kleptocrats who have been tightening the screws on all of us for a couple of centuries now. Not enough space here, of course, to rehearse all the real stuff behind the idiot Exceptional Narrative of Exceptionalism...
It's laudable to speak up for one's tribe, of course... You can't go too far wrong if you really want to understand the stuff behind the curtain if you "follow the money" and go from the well established precept that "War is nothing but a racket..."
...and Pat Tillman, who had also apparently discovered the effing rotten fraud at the heart of the Great Imperial War thingie, was reported by the same Brass Gong Show that inveterately and reflexively lies about so much else, was recorded and reported as dying as noble a death as John Wayne died for us in "The Sands of Iwo Jima..." Say again, Charlie Poppa Tango?
Thank you, sir, for this as usual trenchant and thoughtful piece. It would be so nice if the war machine were to be actually dialed down, and not left to go in search of new Areas of Responsibility, like what we so archly call "stabilization" in places like Africa. And as I have noted, the military plans to be the central operator of all responses of the Empire and the various local militaries our leadership plans to be "interoperating with," to Important Stuff like "climate collapse,"on into the far future.
Regarding the number of US troops to continue for how long in Afghanistan, I hope you are correct in your statement that they'll all be out of there by 2017. Having watched the wind-down of Vietnam, as a former participant and "student protestor," I'm maybe less salubrious. Not only are there still troops from other states kicking in doors and training the ANA to prop up the Kabulistas that we will be paying for until at least 2024, there are tens of thousands of "contractors," both paramilitary and semi-civilian, also on the profitable ground, and it may be so for quite a while as "we" take a stab at doing better "this time" in propping up a West-friendly Regime. So, poking around in Google, one finds these bits of context:
"White House: U.S. will have 9,800 troops in Afghanistan after 2014", http://www.cbsnews.com/news/white-house-u-s-will-have-9800-troops-in-afghanistan-after-2014/
"15,000 foreign troops likely to stay in Afghanistan beyond 2014 ", http://www.nation.com.pk/international/03-Jun-2014/15-000-foreign-troops-likely-to-stay-in-afghanistan-beyond-2014
For those who get rich off of "services" to the "troops," there's this bit of comfort: "Iraq – Afghanistan Contractor Census, 1st quarter (Oct – Dec 2014) - ", http://www.your-poc.com/iraq-afghanistan-contractor-census-1st-quarter-oct-jan-2014/ There's more in their trade press, too, of course...
And of course there's the "pivots" to remember, to AFRICOM and PACOM and all that. Anyone interested in what else will be shakin', post-Notagainistan, should maybe Google "US military global commands" and set back with a cold one...
So I hope and pray, for the sake of the folks still wearing that ever-expensively-being-replace camo uniform, that we will actually figure out a way to address climate collapse, and the other instabilities that "we" are so much a part of creating, by something other than More Of The Same...
Dare one offer a hardly original idea, that this is naught but a media smokescreen, a ploy to extend the noxious?
A little observation from one who used to be a US EPA enforcement attorney, who actually used to, you know, ENFORCE the Clean Air Act and other environmental protection laws and regulations? At least until the Reagan people took over in 1980 and told us to stop sending them any new enforcement actions, because we were now a “customer service” agency, and our “customer” was INDUSTRY?
First, this is not some "sweeping power gesture" by our Emperor. That "Congress" thing already delegated the power to do this, long ago. The legal authority to regulate greenhouse gases has been in the statutes and basic regulatory framework since at least 1990. And all the Obamites have done, with huge noise, is announce a "proposed rulemaking," which is the first baby step in actually getting an enforceable regulatory tool in place. This is notice-and-comment rulemaking under the Administrative Procedures Act, and when you get to paragraph 30 in the Big News articles, you learn that there's 120 days of "public comment," which is the first place the "regulated industries" can start whacking away at the puny limitations that are actually being announced, and the rest of us can try to defend the weak proposal. Once the rule goes final, in maybe 2015 (EPA has almost NEVER made any of the announced dates for final rule promulgation, due to litigation from all sides and of course LOBBYING which often changes/weakens the rule. Then each state (since under our “states rights” system) has to adopt its own reg structure that has to be reviewed and vetted by EPA for consistency, and then begins the process of drafting all the policies and memoranda that may lead, eventually, to actual enforcement of the sausage that’s produced, that will then have to be incorporated into permits that are also subject to notice, comment and lobbying, and litigation both administrative and judicial.
Here's the Great Big Important Version Of It All, from what usually is a more skeptical source: "Obama unveils historic rules to reduce coal pollution by 30%"!!!!!!!!!! http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/02/obama-rules-coal-climate-change
And here’s a primer on the current Grand Gesture and what it really portends, with the following as the important take-away:
On June 2, the EPA proposed a new rule to regulate carbon-dioxide emissions from the nation's existing coal- and gas-fired power plants — the first-ever rule of its kind.
"The proposal comes out on June 2, the final rule goes into effect in 2015"
For now, this is only a proposal. The EPA will spend the next 120 days gathering comments from electric utilities, environmentalists, and anyone else who cares to weigh in. It will then work on a final regulation that takes effect in June 2015. States will then have until June 2016 to draw up plans to implement the rule. [Historically, these "deadlines" are highly "optimistic."]
The EPA will set different emissions targets for each state — which, when taken together, will aim to cut carbon-dioxide emissions from the nation's power sector as much as 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. (That's about 17 percent from 2013 levels.)
States will be given a variety of options for cutting their emissions — using more efficient technology at coal plants, boosting their use of solar or wind or nuclear power, or even joining regional cap-and-trade systems that require companies to pay to emit carbon-dioxide. “A guide to Obama's new rules to cut carbon emissions from power plants",
http://www.vox.com/2014/6/1/5770556/EPA-power-plant-rules-explainer
And the Wiki article on the Clean Air Act is actually pretty good, given the complexity of the thing, for those who care about the details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Air_Act_%28United_States%29
So to me it looks like a nice head fake, to let the f____rs who are bleeding us and poisoning us keep at it until the ones who currently are profiting from all this live out their very special, very comfortable, very excessive lives… Please do not put up the noise about "this is the best that is politically possible."
And I almost forgot one of the fun pieces of Iran-Contra: those Hawk missiles and TOWs and artillery shells (not the ones that we directed to Saddam's military, of course) were laundered through good old Israel! For those who don't want to think about the "complexities" of the bullsh_t that is done sub rosa and "in our names" and for what purposes, again? here's a nice little time line of sorts from the NY TImes, back when it pretended to be the world's greatest newspaper:
http://www.nytimes.com/1987/11/19/world/iran-contra-report-arms-hostages-contras-secret-foreign-policy-unraveled.html
For all you folks who believe, or want the rest of us to believe, in Exceptional Imperialism under the Stars and Stripes, I got a bunch of other little snapshots in a plain brown envelope that will curl your toes, in bliss or in shame...
And gee, how did it happen that somehow, in the furious War on Drugs, cocaine and stuff got mixed into the Milo Minderbinder transactions by our burly, foggy Syndicate that conducts War As A Racket?
But wait! There's more! The missiles of Iran Contra were TOW wire guided anti tank weapons, and Hawk antiaircraft missiles. To h3lp the Iranians against the Iraqis who we were also supporting in their mutual Great War. And the Contras that Ollie North and his band of Merry Men wanted to " support" to overthrow a democratically elected Socialist government were called "freedom fighters" for being death squads and terrorist s as bad as any, and our "conservative" rulers not only negotiated with them but armed and funded those oligarchy supporting thugs. Maybe somebody else cares enough to list all the other terrorist bunches, like UNITA or terrorist initiatives like the Phoenix Program, that we Exceptional Empire dudes have raised up, supported, underwritten or conducted. And note how all those stratagems have undercut Democracy (tm) abroad and at home.
"six U.S. soldiers were killed during the searches..." Well, we're into Scandal-land, now aren't we, where the broad view and what, proportionality and balance and all that, go out the window as the yapping dogs of DC get their sharp little puppy teeth into another boot from the mud room.
How many "US soldiers" (and British and French and Canadian and those other Willing Coalition units) were killed kicking in doors in Kandahar and Wardak, those places that their officers assured them (before zipping back to rear areas) would be where they would earn their place in history by "defeating the enemy" and "winning this war?"
No hit on you, Jack, you are just reporting what's been said, but Pat Tillman died on one of a practically uncountable (because buried deep by the System) number of idiotic "missions."( One hint: Obama, and the machine he represents, could care less if you support him/them or not.) How in hell does even "defeating (now reduced to "weakening") the Taliban, that collection of groups of warriors and thugs that we happily bribe and get in bed with when it suits us," advance our security and "national interests?" Let alone the interests of the great mass of ordinary people who pay for all of it? Put a "forward base" or embassy in the middle of a place where you don't really know the human or physical terrain, impose a bunch of rear-area-generated requirements for "missions" and "patrolling" on the troops from a morally bankrupt "doctrine' that is all about EMPIRE and its commercial aspects, and you get Kill Squads and torture and rape and "dead of small arms fire," and "injured by explosion, Wardak, March 15," and the circle of revenge, the pitiful macho dance that warriors do when some of them kill some of us so we kill some of their "side" so they kill some of our "side, and repeat until once again "we," finally and expensively, "move in a direction away from the enemy." Which by the definition we wrote is "out of the country," since "the enemy"as we define it is ALL AROUND YOU.
So now all of a sudden, instead of this being "about" EMPIRE and its futilities (albeit with some of its Rulers getting to live really high on the upside and most of the decline), it's "about" one dude who may just have sickened of the whole thing and tried to walk away -- though given the noise and fraud that our MSM and Rulers can generate, one wonders if we will ever know the "truth". A very few troops walked off into "the economy," and more effectively stood down by stuff like fake patrolling, in the Vietnam thing, especially toward the later stages as the desire not to be the last one to die in futility grew more poignant. So to protect our internal Narrative, we are going to have to make a traitor, a deserter, a nut case out of Bowe Bergdahl, rather than just a human who was maybe too much human and not enough stiff-necked Troop to Man Up and go on with the Idiocy. And now has his Swift Boat moment...
I wonder if those "deaths" that the Narrative wants to hang around Bergdahl's neck will get any detailed attention, with careful interviews of the survivors, gimlet-eyed review of after-action reports (those deep reservoirs of fraud) and so on. 2 to 6 months after? What were the mission parameters and threat environment and all that? Ah, sh_t, it doesn't matter -- it will all be just more of the effing same, more Vietnam, more Grenada, more Panama, more AFRICOM now, more War is nothing but a Racket, now slightly displaced into automation-moderated and -facilitated involvements in killing, for the sake of WHAT, again? The ultimate interoperability of the military caste, all over the planet, so the Brass can take what they want, when they want, but on a more elegant and better PR'd scale than Boko Haram's Gunmen?
Seems to me that McChrystal would be about as appropriate as Westmoreland for that spot...
...but they don't howl "UNCLE!" when we twist their earlobes, and there are all those Hellfires in and coming into inventory, and dudes who like to order their use on Terra-isurgo-funda-militants!!!
Looking at the MSM and other parts of blog space, what does Sgt. Bergdahl's trade tell us about ourselves?
At least the prisoner population at Guatabughraib by five souls...
Exactly. Include "whose children fill the ranks of the imperial forces" after "taxes."
How about Feith and Perle and Yoo and Condi and Powell and Bremer and all those dudes from the Vietnam "Best and Brightest" who have not escaped into comfortable deaths, and on and on and on? How about that smarmy little prig Blair, and check this video on self-help justice? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzFm1ONg9dU
"We" want to pretend, when it's convenient for "our interests," that there's an "international community" that is expected to observe "international law." Hypocritical BS. All about power+wealth. And what you can get away with. None of the Players are really serious about "enforcing" the squishy thing called the Law of War and all that, knowing that it would apply to THEM and "limit their freedom of action." Nothing but BS. Does Wilkerson get to sleep better for "speaking up"? Did McNamara, for sort-of-apologizing? Does their God forgive them for all the pain and misery and bending the direction of Great State and Terrorist behavior to its present course? Protecting the Combustoconsumption Corporation and the Almighty Dollar? Extending and expanding the RACKET called "war?"
Generals with economic interests, whether in ongoing businesses, links to "externlities" like the CIA and Exxon and equivalent, or just the desire to do a little buccaneering for their own accounts, have troops with guns and the habits of obedience, and lots of little and large helpers with Machiavellian skills, to create their own spurious "legitimacy"...
"the US as the champion of democracy..." Amazing how durable and tenacious this notion is, in light of the reality.
Here's one discussion of how "we" promote "democracy:" http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3076.htm
And another: http://books.google.com/books?id=7gpr949QV1MC&pg=PA209&lpg=PA209&dq=nation+building+regime+change&source=bl&ots=4F3P8WGkwk&sig=CFgSdqbTR54Djx6laJORl8_agKg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=zjmGU4zVBYThsATyhYLwBg&ved=0CFIQ6AEwBTgK#v=onepage&q=nation%20building%20regime%20change&f=false
But there are whole manuals and guides and handbooks written by policy people who set up huge structures, cloud-cuckoo-castles, devoted to doing just more of the same: http://books.google.com/books?id=o-7YZiZqeHEC&pg=PA249&lpg=PA249&dq=nation+building+dod&source=bl&ots=K9lTSh0mVo&sig=zIfCQcMx1jCDME5hIIgy9VUoL1w&hl=en&sa=X&ei=50GGU_W4AsuvsATE-ID4Cw&ved=0CGIQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=nation%20building%20dod&f=false
Read carefully, and with a jaundiced eye, to see what is really in play...
Looks like we actually have some basic agreement-- Democracy has nothing to do with this: “Also polling shows that taliban forces overall have very little support whereas if elections were allowed to prevail in vietnam the communist side likely would have come to power.” And as you point out, it's no secret that Obama and Biden want to maintain 9,800 troops there after “War Over” is effectuated, supposedly on 12/31/2016. So as you note, “we” are going to be propping up a corrupt ruling bunch until at least 2014. Estimates are that just the troops cost a million apiece to field per year, so there's another $20 billion, not counting the cash that disappears into KarzaiLand.
Differences between failed and futile involvements in Vietnam and Afghanistan are primarily the element of supporting French colonialism as an idiotic bulwark against “Communism?” No apparent disagreement that both are imperial adventures, facilitated and exacerbated by a huge and growing military-industrial Godzilla.
The ISI reference, obviously, was to the Pakistani secret service, who had/have parts of the Taliban complex as a client/ally, not to the ISIS, the monstrous Gunmen in Syria and adjoining lands.
As to similarities, beyond the fundamental Game Board and Rules of Play of imperial exercise: Scanty and/or fraudulent casus belli? Check – Gulf of Tonkin/Keep the French in their Colonies vs. somebody there harboring Osama (who “we” failed, miserably, several times, to “take out”). Invasion, bombing, even defoliation of another country, with the barest fig leaf of legal cover and justification? Check. Cover noise about how “we” are going to bring “democracy”? Check. Huge deployment of imperial forces, surged and increased and doubled down on, ultimately struggling to find Narrative cover for the inevitable “rearward advance to previously prepared positions, moving in a direction away from the enemy”? Check. Murdering civilians, instituting huge new conduits of corruption, undercutting popular will, boosting heroin production? Check. Serial misrepresentations of the situation to the paying and voting public at home? Check. Constantly changing “doctrines” and serial declarations that Khe Sanh and Fallujah and Kandahar and Wardak are the Keys To Victory? Check. Destruction or impairment of traditional forms of legitimacy, both at home and in the battlespace? Check. Ugly epithets for the people our troops are to kill in order to save, "gook and slant and Hajji and camel jockey"? Check. Debasement of the moral posture and morale of the troops fighting a hopeless and endless war? Check. Enrichment and empowerment of the militarists and their worldwide industrial involvements? Check. Leaving billions in war materiel and construction for “the enemy” to prosper from? Check. Even making the place safe for other competing nations to do business in? Check.
Do we agree that neither of these, nor Iraq, for example, by your criteria or mine, are in any sense a “just war?” Or even, from the ordinary person's viewpoint, a sensible one for the most of us?
Nice bit of slick impeachment, sport! I'll happily acknowledge that I don't know all the complexities, but some basic repeating forms are very visible. I can pretty well bet that you don't know it all either, given the infinite complexity of the Great Game and the fact that there's hardly an honest player on the board, and the honest ones get knocked off early. You speak for the “administration” view, and as far as I can tell, you have no prescription for any kind of better world than “just let the fellows get on with it.”
Of course, dmol, whoever and wherever you may be, whether you speak for yourself or out of some interested entity, I didn't pose a mathematical identity between the whole Vietnam thing and the whole Afghan I and II thing. Glad you have picked up a little stick to beat me with, your complaint about my “awful prose” and “marks of skepticism.” Lots of nice personal digs, I guess they call them “ad hom” in blogprose, too. Thanks for not addressing the supposed differences, other than that the French wanted to “hang on to Indochina” and the US was about helping them do that, and now we are supposed to believe that the Administration is “serious” about “eventually” detaching us from that Tar Baby over there.
But I do appreciate what I might characterize, as a former attorney, as “admissions against interest” on your part, two of them in one succinct paragraph, to wit:
“As for afghan security it will likely be quite some time before afghan forces can stand by themselves without foreign support, however this does not mean that they will need on the ground forces alongside them. And due to the lack of support for the taliban from the afghan public a taliban re-turn to power is unlikely.”
So the Taliban thingie, you acknowledge, is “unlikely” to “return to power,” because that complicated mixed bunch “lacks support” (though I bet you also hold that ISI is right over the horizon, of course.) And for all your noise about how anxious “we” are to beat a final retreat from an activity that you have not posited any kind of first purpose for, ab initio, or current purpose other than propping up the Kabulistas, you assert from your deep wisdom or special information that “we,” or some part of “we,” will have to continue to “support” the “afghan forces for quite some [unspecified] time.” If I misstate the main points of your argument, please correct me. But a former US administration sold the notion that a huge investment of the nation's guts and wealth, based on lies and political-economic games that were never openly debated, was mandated in SE Asia, toted up at $4 trillion and counting. “International law” was flouted in a pretty egregious manner (Parrot's Beak? Fish Hook?) as the “nation-building” and stuff like the Phoenix Program and all that went on, as the “surge” was played out again and again (“We just need another hundred thousand conscripts and we can WIN this puppy!”) with the same problem that “we” face in Afghanistan: violating the wisdom of Sun Tzu on the waging of extra-territorial wars with no popular support, no Heaven on your side. Not to mention the old chestnut about imperial powers and land wars in Asia...
You tell us, “comfort” us, as they did, that for some indeterminate period, “support” will be needed for what you want us to join you and PRESUME will become a functioning afghan forces that will be able to protect the current government (which seems a little short, as did the US-installed rulers of South Vietnam, of that legitimacy that is the foundation of stability and security.) And tell me all this is not just a reprise of the doomed “Vietnamization” process, that attempt by the Nixonians and a bunch of Generals to save their political asses at home by having dopes like me keep fighting and dying long after they effing knew that they had transferred about as much wealth to the military and its contractors as they were going to get away with.
So now “we” face what, another trillion or two in continued corruption and logistics, paying Afghan warlords not to attack our convoys, paying $400 a gallon to deliver fuel to the “front,” and since when is it up to “us” to stand the afghan administration, a thing that is NEVER going to be able to so stand the way its rulers run the scam, at the forever cost of still more “US” wealth and dead troops?
Not to worry, of course: if you have any kind of vested interest in the power-and-wealth flux in the Game play, momentum and inertia are all on your side, more's the sorrow and pity.
Nice statement of the Admin case.
The last time I recall it being made, "Can't Leave Abruptly /Stability/Weaken the Enemy" was in connection with another geopolitical action in the way of what, again? imperialism, continued French colonialism at the start, and "commercial interests"? by a slightly smaller "coalition of the willing," in the Afghanization -- oops, Vietnamization of another Operation Grossly Expensive Idiocy. Please feel free to bullet-point the significant differences between, and improvements over time in, the two situations, and how "we" have learned and are behaving (not just using a different obscure lexicon, and yet another new billion-dollar camouflage pattern, http://www.military.com/daily-news/2014/05/23/army-selects-new-camouflage-pattern.html, the billion estimate is from the cost of the last changeover, http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21600700-expense-and-stupidity-too-big-camouflage-out-sight) and are doing so much better This Time. And the Afghans likely will be still suckering "us," right up to the End of the War As Declared By The President, for baksheesh and "we"'ll be paying some of them not to attack "us", and selling "us" heroin, http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/st/english/article/2005/03/20050304182838ndyblehs0.5067713.html#axzz333ygukV1 , rather than selling us nicely fitting "Made in Vietnam" slacks and shirts through Walmart and Kmart and JCPenney, so there's a starting point for you.
Any ideas when the ANA and Nat'l Police will be ready to produce "security," let alone "rule of law"? Please show how and when the (appropriately lower case) "afghan government" will be "capable of defending itself [as opposed to, and let alone, "taking care of its people"] at a sufficient manner?" Wise-Sounding Strategical Assertions, and fraudulent hope, and another trillion dollars don't seem likely to get "us" there, at least whilst I am still alive to see it.
Please forgive the tone. Just a bitter old guy who is pretty sure he's seen this filmstrip before...
Anyone thinking about Afghanistan and geostrategy and What Happens Next remember what a Sepoy is? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sepoy And how that category might relate to the Afghan National Army/National Police and who is their paymaster and who really directs their troops' activities, for what ends?
Maybe the subtle gobbledegook in this link will help clear up the difference without a difference: http://www.isaf.nato.int/article/isaf-news/commander-isafs-afghanistan-update-winter-2014.html
Interesting that our President thinks he can unilaterally declare a 4th Generation "war," http://navsci.berkeley.edu/ma20/Class%2010/Class%2014.%20%204GW_Primer.pdf , will be "over" on December 31, 2016.
"There is likely to be renewed Indo-Pak competition for Afghanistan, now that the Hindu nationalist BJP is ensconced. Does the US want to be in the middle of that?" How comfortable and comforting the familiar Narrative and lexicon of the Great Game. Nations, or whatever you call those centripetal conflagrations like Notagainistan and Pakistan, are little outlines on a Great Game Board, to be fought over like jackals or hyenas fighting over the scraps of the carcass. Dare one ask whether that was a purely rhetorical question, since "the US" is and will be deeply and dirtily involved in all that? While the planet comes to a slow boil, and them with guns and money line up to "take advantage of the change..."
What are The Troops doing there, anyway? Anything besides, as you point out, triggering ambushes, "drawing fire" and taking casualties and doing the stupid and offensive stuff they do in pursuit of "Hajji?" or sitting in safer areas, manning that "switch" and managing the distribution of that $5 billion in illuminating corruption and mercenary payroll? Under the heading "Yeah, right, heard that before," we have this: Do U.S. Troops Really Need to Stay in Afghanistan?" "http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2014/01/do-us-troops-really-need-stay-afghanistan/77468/ How about a little article on the day-to-day activities of our "Presence?" http://www.countdowntodrawdown.org/facts.php
And so solicitous "we" are of the Afghanis that for (top secret) geopolitical reasons "we" just want to keep 5 or 10,000 Imperial Troops on the ground there, because *Taliban*. And to get away with not having to hurry up and remove all the war materiel that cost hundreds of billions to "deploy" and "embed," and do that that "we" must have the sickest, most raddled fig leaf of an excuse, a BSA (interestingly, the acronym for Boy Scouts of America), to keep doing the myriad little idiocies and scams we are doing. Or have to activate that marvelous DoD euphemism for RETREAT!, "withdrawal operation — A planned retrograde operation in which a force in contact disengages from an enemy force and moves in a direction away from the enemy. (JP 3-17) "
Who cares about a "Karzai-Obama rift?" The idiocy happens at vastly other levels, anyway. Karzai, if he doesn't get the "Trujillo treatment," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafael_Trujillo (a nice refresher article for those who forget how the world really works) has a cushy post-partum gig waiting somewhere.
"Whether there are US troops in Afghanistan matters. They could easily be ambushed and the US could be dragged back into a hot war there." Well now, since that "ambush" part is INEVITABLE, would it be fair to speculate that that's part of the design, not a fly in the ointment? What a great way to honor the Troops who will be detecting IEDs with their bodies, "drawing fire" to "justify" aggressive "responses," and continuing to ingratiate themselves with the "host country." And in the meantime, THIS goes on, and on: "Green-on-blue attacks in Afghanistan: the data," http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2012/08/green-on-blue_attack.php#
What we call "war" is also a great way to transfer a whole lot of wealth. All those procurements and logistics have a "profit" and a lot of careers built in. The corpses and casualties are just part of the patriotic window dressing...
There's veterans, and there's veterans. If you were an 0-6, WO-1 or E-8, and leave the service, you are mostly sitting in the catbird seat. Since not only do you have a great pension, medical care and all that, there's probably a comfy new job for you in the Great Inter-Supra-Post-National Security System, so aptly named since the MIC and its tentacles sure provide a secure career path with lots of growth built into the destruction it does, and a gentle landing for those who live large at our horrific expense and can't even win the effing wars they embark on. If you're an ordinary person, doing that “combat” stuff that mostly has ZERO effect on that hallowed “national security,” over there in Kandahar or Mogadishu or the Next Hot Spot That Requires The Imperial Army To Take Action, not so much. Nice set of policy prescriptions, there, but dare I point out that most of the wounding and dying that's been done HAS NOT BEEN DONE “FOR THIS COUNTRY.” The “nation-building,” code for “making the wogs behave properly toward commercial interests and land owners,” has since before the days of Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler was honest enough to characterize it for what it is, been “nothing but a racket.” GI's fight, at the root, for their buddies, to protect one another or get revenge for lost comrades, and to stay alive. And sometimes because it's just a lot of edifying good old FUN.
As to taking care of the vets: A disabled vet who is “entitled” to the max amount that “workers comp for Troopers” allows, for 100% disability, as in “disabled 100%,” which comes to $3300 a month, and VA medical care which is worth “something,” I guess is doing “better” than a lot of folks. And since time leads to discounting of all things monetizable, by a variety of spreadsheet computations, that “better” gets ever smaller. Ooooh, the Deficit! after all. Can't Afford It, not prudent... And then the policy dudes get into it, and work to shrink what's there by adding co-pays and co-insurance and means testing and chained-CPI and whatever other incremental, wedge-issue-divide-and-conquer crap their fecund little brains can come up with to keep the upward migration of all the wealth continuing while us mopes scrabble in the dirt for the untaken trifles.
The first nine items in the post are nice-to-haves but all are built on the tacit assumption that there will be ever more effing “war,” hence ever more dead and wounded, with costs once again pushed out onto the future workers of the Imperium, by people who sneer at the earnest Troops and suffer neither the initial injuries that their “policies” and “national interest” (and I note that phrase seems to be disappearing from the polwonk lexicon in light of “reality”) cause, nor the costs of palliating or repairing where possible the shit they do to enrich themselves and their cadres.
Thanks for the tip, for services rendered, I would offer in reply, but the only point I would wholeheartedly endorse is Number 10: stop the effing war crap. Stop sowing dragons' teeth all over the effing planet, and making more of us “Wounded Warriors.” We all know how likely that is, of course, and I give small chances to “policy success” for the others. Honor me and the rest most kindly, by NOT MAKING ANY MORE OF US. And you don't get to do that by outsourcing to mercenaries, or turning effing autonomous killing machines loose on the planet.
There's more than enough to go around, to provide decency to the Troops and the Worker Bees –too bad the Kleptocracy is so adept at getting us to go to war with each other over the scraps that are left after they are done fighting each other over the carcass... But that ain't how it works, unless the lower orders figure out how to demand and get it, without just turning the wheel of Revolution through another idiot Terror-Napoleon-Restoration-Republic cycle...
But... But... Energy Independence! Jobs! Leveraged Profits! No personal consequences for pesky externalities that won't likely hit until after I'm dead! What's not to go all in for?
Read a lot of the exponentially proliferating War Department (sorry, DoD) documentation, and you get a clearer picture of the enormous bureaucracy with its dysfunctional inefficiencies, idiocies, inertia and momentum. Not surprising that everything, EVERYTHING, has a "military solution" in the minds of the people who fill the ranks, top to bottom. A drunken First Sergeant beerily and confidently assured me, in a bunker in Vietnam, that he had found in his life all the answers to everything could be found in "the book," which when I asked which one (thinking he might mean the Bible), he replied, "Why, the Army Manual, of course!"
Humans are adaptable creatures, if nothing else, and obviously can be trained and "incented" (in Army-ese) to form up in a big range of dispositions, from Amish to Boko Haram to Seal Team to Zulu. Bombs and terror attacks on the ordinary people who pay, in so many senses, for what is being done to them, are so easy to put in play. What a surprise, now that the ascendancy of the Global Military Corporate Thingie is upon us, the answer to everything (especially stuff that might challenge the Orthodoxy of Combustoconsumption Corporatism or the New Opportunism of Climate Disruption) is "drones, special ops, couinter-insurgency, and F-35-class procurements." And of course the careers and Working Groups and civilian-military partnerships that go along with all that. While, of course, other parts of the same Hydra are busily "tactically" and "strategically" and "operativio-dispersing" the smaller-caliber "automatic weapons,' the REAL weapons of mass destruction of comity, civility, decency and sustainable culture, far and wide.
In obstetrical nursing, you learn the phrase "Massage the fundus!" For most post-partum issues, bleeding, pain etc., that's the correct response -- massaging the base of the uterus encourages it to start shrinking, initiating all kinds of good physiological responses. Perceptive nurses, of course, see when more or different attention is required. Our rulers have a nice new set of Big Massage Hammers, which can do a lot of bruising collateral damage and start and extend NEW injuries and disease processes, but like physicians from the age when you treated the "humors," their set of therapies basically consists of cutting without anaesthesia or bacteriostasis, and bleedings...
Being a kleptocratic GUN-MAN means never having to say you're sorry...
Anyone complains, you just shoot 'em.
A spurious, curious kind of "legitimacy," denominated by caliber: 7.62, 12.7, 81, .308...
Maybe people in the West, "people like us," could google "muslim comment on Boko Haram" for a fact check on who's saying what on the subject. To see what kind of criticism and thoughts there are on the subject.
I will second the observation that the examples given don't exactly illustrate "war on religious extremism in the Muslim world." Bearing in mind, among other things, that "war," that fascinating word, is not even a defined term in our War Department's massive Dictionary, http://www.lawfareblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/jp1_02.pdf, (though "weaponeer" is, "An individual who has completed requisite training to determine the quantity and type of lethal or nonlethal means required to create a desired effect on a given target," and look up "threat" in the same source and it's all about "terrorist threats," nothing about China or Russia. And for all their bombast that insists the Fed'rul Gov'mnt is warring on them, does the Imperial Government do "war" on our own home-grown fundamentalist-terrorists? And other than DFHs, who criticizes them folks there in the outback with their camo gear and sniper rifles and all that?
And of course OUR Imperial "war" or whatever you want to call the global procurement program and deployment, aimed at "fundamentalist Islam," or what-everrrr, has been so terribly effective, now hasn't it, at "analyzing" and "neutralizing" the "threat," right? Look what you get for $8 trillion and counting, counting, counting, albeit not auditably...
"Cooperation" should be rendered in "skeptical sarcastic ironical quotes," maybe? "Holy Roman Empire, Batman!"?
Great question. One you know the answer to already. Too much chance of "career-limiting leakage" and bureaucreatical debarassment, and you got to keep the beds warm for whatever new crop of "residents" that might be coming down the pipeline... it's an oubliette, after all: http://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/oubliette
Just curious -- "externals" like Saudi Arabian "interests," and the Pak ISI, and the CIA in its various peccant parts, etc., are "more rational?" When they are so often the ones placing burrs under saddles, giving the sandaled ordinary people a hotfoot, whispering lies about who said what, "supporting" creatures like, apparently, "General" Hifter and Karzai, and so forth? Ordinary people, mostly, between spasms of tribalism, want to be sort of left to their own devices in a system of relationships that preserves order, protects against criminal and arbitrary acts, provides education and infrastructure, stuff like that, and are even willing to pay for its cost. Too bad there are so many "externals," and of course internal impulses, that keep the many from just leaning up against the cork tree and enjoying the scent of the flowers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGTVRbpAuRo
Interesting context:
What may eventually bring "peace," whatever that means, to Libya, and other areas of conflict, in addition to exhaustion and bleeding out and eventual accommodation of the combatants is, God help us, "business interests." Depending, of course, and among other considerations, on which corporate interests (Lockheed-Martin and General Atomics, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics, e.g., vs BP and Conoco, money from guns and conflict, versus money from oil or other extractables, etc.) end up prevailing on "policy" in "intervention-capable" states or hyperstates -- "New Business Opportunities in Libya," http://www.abcc.org.uk/New_Business_Opportunities_in_Libya .
And for those who claim such fear of Shari'ah Law, it looks like the corporatists have no problems just figuring out the rules and customs (and then looking for the seams and scam opportunities and future chances to lean on and tweak Allah's Law to suit their preferences, the way they do under "Western" legal systems): "Shari'ah Compliant Private Equity and Islamic Venture Capital," http://books.google.com/books?id=1Z1vAAAAQBAJ&pg=PT195&lpg=PT195&dq=libya+venture+capital&source=bl&ots=h3Tw4wfdyn&sig=a9a7YisyUfDvQjvn1mo0M4gjBjE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ta58U47IL-zisAS8wYG4CQ&ved=0CIIBEOgBMAk#v=onepage&q=libya%20venture%20capital&f=false , and other similar resources, like this: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=8&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CHUQFjAH&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.elksad.com%2FLaw%2520No7.doc&ei=ta58U47IL-zisAS8wYG4CQ&usg=AFQjCNGJbTuarArBBA4upLAj9a7tUUBl0Q&sig2=-DQ62pz04yxT7WpeN0iosg&bvm=bv.67229260,d.cWc...
And the Vultures are lining up to move in and scrape the unsettled country out like the sub-Saharan gourds they are already active in, like Nigeria... "At Last, I Feel Proud To Be Libyan," http://standpointmag.co.uk/dispatches-october-11-at-last-i-feel-proud-to-be-libyan-justin-marozzi-tripoli-libya-gaddafi-ali-tarhuni-mahmoud-jibril-ntc Conscious irony?
At least some part of "Libya" is not afraid to bite back at the sharks: "Libya’s Sovereign Wealth Fund Sues Goldman Sachs," http://www.ventures-africa.com/2014/02/libyas-sovereign-wealth-fund-sues-goldman-sachs/ But other parts of the political economy are seeing their opportunities, and seizing them with both grasping hands: "The Oligarch Decree is bad for Business," http://english.libyanembassy.org/?p=1747
Nation-building is such a messy, messy business, isn't it? Especially when the real game is "nation-stripping," as part of "Soylent Green"-quality planet-stripping, for the benefit of the Very Few...
Speaking of business plans, Linda, a couple of observations. First, recognizing the "flattening" of the world, per Thomas Friedman and others, I'd note that the US land mass might be a depot and aircraft carrier and refueling station and troop and tax revenue generator for what you refer to as "the U.S.," but those businesses are post-supra-national, parties to the "Trans-Planetary Partnership Free Trade Haw-Haw Deal," with no loyalty to what used to be called America at all. Their money, their livelihoods and their activities are mostly elsewhere, though they keep the big IV lines fully patent, the ones they use to keep sucking what little blood remains out of the dying carcass.
As to the "ground" Game in Libya, here's just one little article that asks who this "General" Hifter is, and wonders just what his connections to the CIA are, and leads one to wonder what the Game actually is in Libya, since nothing, in this world of shadows and euphemisms and universal and inveterate lying to cover and render plausibly deniable, all kinds of horror- and misery-causing behaviors by the kleptocracy Hydra... "CIA At Work In Libya Mess: New General In Charge Of Coup Lived In DC Beltway For Decades On Exactly Whose Payroll?" http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/the-cia-at-work-in-the-libya-mess-new-general-in-charge-lived-in-dc-beltway-for-decades-on-exactly-whose-payroll/ Or at least rendering everything profitably confusing, preserving "freedom of action" for the Players, if not Freedon (TM) for the ordinary people...
A modest (likely futile) proposal: There's so much difficulty in picking the precise word to describe the participants in all these violent episodes where people are busily killing each other with more or less enthusiasm, organization and efficiency. "Militant." "Terrorist." "Paramilitary." "Militia." "Insurgent." "Contra." "Freedom Fighter (TM)." "al Quaeda (R) (or not)." "SunniShiaSettlerChristianKurdMarxistEtc.TakeYourPick to push your framing." They all have one thing in common, if you watch them in action. They are Gun Men. Gun-men. Gunmen. (Though more women are getting in on the fun these days.) With a common ethos, at bottom, leading, in the direction things seem to be heading, to banditry and anomie and warlord-ism, to the infinite advantage of the Very Few post-national Successful Oligarchs. Encouraged, and profited upon, by the folks who supply that "training" and "direction" and weapons and funding, or on the other side fail, due to corruption and idiocy, to do the stuff that civics says governments are supposed to do -- you know, governing, mostly for the general welfare (with the expectation and understanding that a certain amount of corruption, "slack" to grease the gears, is inevitable and even tolerable and maybe necessary.)
Just call them all what they are: GUNMEN, whether they are the testosterone-poisoned types that shoot ordinary people dead in the streets or in their homes, ululating or thanking their God for being so Great and Good, or they are the "leaders" and "rulers" who set up the conditions for the kind of stuff you see at syriavideo.net and in war-porn videos on youtube. See how they handle their weapons, fondle and brandish and randomly shoot exuberantly and triumphantly into the inoffensive sky, careless of where the bullets "stray" to. They are part of a giant cult, whose totems and sacraments are AKs, ammo and ambushes. Nothing to choose between them -- the design and function of the machines they employ draw them, inform them, and drive all of them in the same behavioral direction.
Yes, violent males (and, increasingly females, and even children who can be trained to enthusiastic unaware murderous idiocy without the tiniest pang of immediate conscience) are an inevitable part of human nature. But when it comes to trying to figure out how to reduce the carnage, the horror of random killings or those targeted at Others or to create some kind of spurious "orthodoxy," actually just a front and entry for yet another kind of Syndicate of old hypocritical men lining their pockets and filling their beds, or to establish or maintain another kleptocracy, might it not help to think about the common and fungible characteristics of Gunmen in the wild, as it were? Maybe there's a clue or three about what might be done to smooth the world instead of constantly roughing it up.
Give a man a gun, particularly the ubiquitous AKs and other assault weapons, which some have called the REAL weaopns of mass destruction, and he may defend his home and family with it against other Gun-men, but put him together with a bunch of suddenly powerful Gun-men, add the tiniest smidgen of tribal excuse, and you got a bunch of self-justified idiots telling each other "We're Number One!" or "God is Great! (and didja see the way the back of that dude's head exploded?)"
Just call them what they are, under the other chiaroscuro pseudo-differentiations and camouflage... GUNMEN. Men of the gun.
You forgot to add "female," or maybe "transgender"... And which of "young" or "old" is more appropriate to the list, too?
Interesting that "discriminated" has become an actual word...
What gives an interventionist-militarist like the author any credibility at all? The advice to "Yemen" is sto play out the "war on terror" game, with of course lots of "help" from "US interests." To establish and protect its own neoliberal rulership, behind a fog of rhetoric about securing Yemen for the children. This piece is pure propaganda, hitting all the talking points about "global security," AQAP attacks ("while not as kinetic"), and of course the conclusion that "If Yemen’s military fails, Yemen fails." So of course the US empire needs to get in there and "support" the military. Just more of the same seamless web of Imperial military "investment" and direction, across the planet. The stuff that supports the "scholarship" of people like Col. Robert (Bob) Sharpe (ret.) Since when can "the US's" interventions, or those of the "global community," motivated to kill democracy in order to save it and spread the "triumph" of neoliberalism with its theft of public resources, inherent corruption and wealth concentration, dispossession of all those ordinary people and their children, do anything to produce decency, let alone freedom and a chance at a survivable future?
In case you missed it, the Ukraine ":situation" has a lot to do with a US-sneaky-pete-fomented over-reaching by some of their nascent kleptocrats, of course masked by the usual propaganda and the kind of BS pointed out by Patrick Smith in this short Salon article: http://www.salon.com/2014/05/15/theyre_lying_about_ukraine_again_primitive_prejudice_stupidity_and_the_reflexive_compliance_of_the_new_york_times/
And for those who don't follow the previous comment, here's the reference to "Abraham's New Kaa’ba," talking about the US embassy (as nest of "intervention specialists) in Sana'a:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaaba Bow down and face it, right?
Here's a bit more on the same line:
http://www.salon.com/2014/05/15/theyre_lying_about_ukraine_again_primitive_prejudice_stupidity_and_the_reflexive_compliance_of_the_new_york_times/
"Isn’t there a point at which you’ve just openly done so many unethical things and gotten so many issues so wrong that they stop putting you on t.v.?"
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA...
And Dr. Cole just put up a post about the "Dark Triad" syndrome, https://www.juancole.com/2014/05/conservatives-likely-sociopaths.html, that most of our Rulership displays, a clear bunch of sort-of-cooperating-if-you-look-closely sociopsychopaths that in effect have syndicated to strip and screw over not only the sad ordinary people of the planet, but the planet itself. Since they know they are immune to consequences (if they are conscious enough to even believe that such things might be possible.) And one might ask about the applicability of that question to Billary, and Pelosi and Reid and Feinstein and a bunch of other people, Rulers, who are supposed to nominally be on the side of The People. I for one cannot stomach watching Barack Obama doing his measured professorial lying with a straight face and distorting left and right in his various televised performances. "Clean coal." "Chained CPI." Geithner and Emanuel and Squealer the Pig Carney, etc. And no, there are no "candidates" on the nominal "Right" (more properly, the "More Wrong" than "Right," of course) that are less worse than the incumbent and any likely successors in the Game of Thrones... They get to f__k things up, steal big chunks of our ordinary-people futures and what little income and wealth we still have, and load up on our backs the task of keeping things going, creating the energy and wealth that keeps their Elysium floating up there in the air, all wrapped cozy in the Imperial bubble, high above the horror...
But let us tell ourselves, comfort ourselves, delude ourselves, that our favorite or at least preferred Rulers, who say stuff publicly (while sneering privately about what schmucks we are, http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2012/03/14/muppet-talk-wall-street-style/ and anything Cheney ever said) that resonates with our own defects, are really all about taking care of the tribe we think we are part of...
Embassies and consulates and little "diplomatic outposts" are, by nature, militarily indefensible, in the way some are yakking that "we" should ensure. For some context, how about this list, with provocations, of a whole lot of attacks on "missions" going back to 1829: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_attacks_on_diplomatic_missions
Yeah, "diplomacy" has always been high language and punctilious protocol fluttering over dirty deeds. But to expect that you can plunk even a few hundred troops and even larger "ready response forces" down in a fixed position where "diplomacy" has planted endless seeds of blossoming blowback, spots wherefrom issue the sneaky-petes that foment destabilization and overthrow of whole governments, that foster both big and little corruption, that destroy any faith in "legitimacy" that anyone might want to hold, to think one could "protect" that space and the "diplomats" doing what they do every day and night in what is nowadays such a hostile environment thanks to "our" policies and behaviors, is just silly. Best one could do is reduce the threat by increasing the nominal counterthreat and costs, as the Soviets were praised for supposedly doing by our Right, or stop so much of what "we" cheat ourselves into believing is the pursuit of "our," really the Very Few's, "national interest."
Any more, "policy" is "whatever you can pay for or steal and get away with." Organizational boundaries? Pffft. "Finest intentions"? Just what are those -- honestly now, no BS about "spreading democracy." http://www.amazon.com/We-Meant-Well-American-Project/dp/0805096817
And about "Obsession with short-term success has left us blind to longer-term consequences:" The post-supra-trans-national people who plan out the investments in the syndicate called "war" know pretty well by now that concerns about blowback and "consequences" and stuff are just for suckers. Follow the $4 or $5 or $6 or more trillion in Real Wealth being converted just by the US Imperium, albeit the largest player in the Game, into slagged matériel consumed in combat and other stupidities, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l64Wk6KdROQ , and into what they sure hope is a framework for uninterruptible conversion of the subsistence resources of all us ordinary people, in a hot and bleeding world that they are part and parcel of taking down, into that other stuff, that Infinite Weapons Development Programme (IWDP) and Enormous Idiot Bureaucracy (EIB) that feeds them.
I bet the "government" of Pakistan is at least as fragmented and internally dissentational and corrupt as our very own. Which part(s) of that mashup is(are) one supposed to believe, assuming that anything anyone with any power and wealth utters in the world any more is in any way true or honest or worthy of credibility? "We" harbored and transported, and set up in new lives in a lot of places, all kinds of war criminals and horror-makers, like a raft of Nazi and even Japanese Serious War Criminals (not to mention our own, Cheney et al.) and lied about it. Our sneaky-petes and Expeditionary Forces have been "spreading democracy," spreading it very thin and dead indeed, by running over it with heavy trucks and tanks and blasting and suborning the apparent will of ordinary people in regard to their legitimate governance for over a century, teaching the fine arts of torture and repression, arming and payrolling "freedom fighters" like the Contras and even bin Laden and, of course, "enemy of my enemy" Saddam Hussein. Cue up another $4 trillion, Mr. Ordinary Taxpayer...
SOMEbody was harboring bin Laden, after our Rulers decided that "getting" him was unimportant, not so very long ago. http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2006/09/14/7472/barnes-osama/ Here's Would-Be President Romney's position(s) on the Osama Issue: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/04/22/1085424/-The-Mother-Of-All-Romney-Flip-Flops-Catching-Bin-Laden-Not-Important. Were you lying then, or are you lying now?
Gary Trudeau has been lampooning the CIA spooookery for years, to no effect of course. Here's a congruent observation on what the Really Special Field Dudes are doing to Protect The Homeland over there in Yemen: "The CIA's Bro Culture Is Doing Yemen No Favors," https://news.vice.com/article/the-cias-bro-culture-is-doing-yemen-no-favors. Not sure how or what the larger plays the CIA and NSA and related idiocies are doing have anything to do with making the world any healthier or safer for ordinary people anywhere -- seems like mostly it's about prolonging the "success" of Extractive Capitalism or whatever it should properly be called, and upward wealth transfer. But Oakley reflectors ain't remotely related to that ordinary-people concern... "We Meant Well..." http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/08/world/us-envoy-peter-van-buren-takes-caustic-pen-to-iraq-war.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
The Big Things that the War Department and our State Security Thing are doing to, on, over, under and across the planet now "transcend" any kind of "national" concern (except in the Game of "Redefinition," of course) -- off in their own bubble, immune to restraint or consequences, for the benefit of post-supra-transnational corporate "interests," self-promotion and generalized oligarchy.
Yeah. let's cheer for Our Tribe -- we're the Good Guys, right? Or maybe Less Bad? Or maybe not...
Sad, isn't it?
The stuff that gets written here, in response to Dr. Cole's posts, gets probably zero notice in the Imperial world (at least as far as any effect on "policy," that is.) What happened to our Apologists, Bill and joe from lowell, who reassured us that this was all "AUMFArticle51legal," and supposedly "effective" in effectuating some executively exercised exercise? "Making the Homeland safer" by blowing up cell phones and the blurry protoplasm attached to them? "Double-tapping" (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-24557333 )?
The people who packaged napalm, the guys and gals who went to work at the Dow and Monsanto chemical plants, making Agent Orange, and those cute Agents Pink and Green -- did they suffer nightmares and other PTSD effects? For those needing Agent Orange context, including its carcinogenic and teratogenic and other toxic properties, look here: http://science.howstuffworks.com/agent-orange.htm (note that careless operation of the plumbing of the chemical synthesis machinery, failure to control flow rates and pressures and temperatures, were what produced the "excessive" amounts of chlorinated dioxins and dibenzofurans that you can read about here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polychlorinated_dibenzodioxins). That was all "legal" too, right? or at least there was no remedy for it...
Technology in search of an application, with secret little cadres of sociopathic monsters claiming to be "patriots" and all "protect the Homeland" and telling the rest of us who pay for their playground and toys "If you knew what we knew, you would cheer us on," when when us ordinary people sometimes find out what "they" claimed to know, we are appalled, disgusted, dismayed, at least until the news cycle is over and the monsters who run this crap can finish up their rope-a-dope "responses" to a "concerned Congress" or whatever, and get back to the Game...
And of course a move is afoot to take the "weak link" out of the loop, turning the machine killing of people on the other side of the planet over completely to the machines, via what is so blandly called battlefield autonomy. You have to wonder what happens when conscience and consciousness of the frail human kind, what exists in those of us who aren't beneficed with sociopathologic unconcern, are removed from "the targeting and kill process." http://www.airforce-technology.com/features/featureroad-to-nowhere-the-us-unmanned-systems-roadmap-4168919/ Do we like the world we are paying to create? Can we live in it?
I'm a Vietnam vet too, and I have to question the assertion that at any time, start to finish, the road to Hell in Vietnam was paved with any kind of what I would accept as good intentions at all. Even those of us who enlisted to do all that Boy Scout crap we learned as young potential warriors, about "trustworthy, loyal, brave, reverent" and all that, and who bought the notion that "we" were "protecting the Nation" or "defeating Communism," were totally suckered and off the beam, by all I have learned since then. I think "Catch-22" had it exactly right, along with Smedley Butler -- it was just a huge Milo Minderbinder Clusterbombf__k, a massive wealth transfer, and the abuse of what should have been decent sentiments and motions of so many of us who did the cannon fodder dance. It was not a debacle for the people who profited from it, and set themselves and their successors up to keep reaping wealth from the rest of us by sowing death among us.. Just a continuation of the long attempt to maintain first France, and then the US Empire, in a colonial-power position over there. And now you can buy Walmart clothes "Made in Vietnam" by Commies, and "we" are talking about a Great Game return to having the 7th Fleet operating out of Cam Ranh Bay again. And in the meantime, the combustoconversion of Carbon to CO2 goes on apace, and generals live in splendor, and "our" MIC forms up and heads out to "take charge" of the whole effing planet.
We hope you are right. Hope so fervently. (Cf. Iraq circa 2000.) And if so, thank you for your part in getting to this point.
Facts and reality don't matter, of course. This is "about" feelings and tribe and Momentum, and of course MON$Y. RThe mother's milk of what we here in a dying Empire call "politics." One might hope Dr. Cole's efforts and other still, small voices might shut the mouths of these cynical idiot frauds. But they are as immune as cancer cells all warm and cozy in the intima of a malignant tumor.
For a little context:
It ain't just the construction contractors, though that massive pile of Embasssssy concrete in Baghdad, and Baghram, and all the "bases" with McDonald's and swimming pools and other touches of "home" all over the planet, are a few vaguely visible evidences. Cam Ranh Bay, the port and the air base, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cam_Ranh_Bay, was a billion-dollar gift to the Rooskies in the post-war period, but hey, "we" might recoup some of that! http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-skeptics/the-looming-us-return-cam-ranh-bay-7079, with billions more needed to bring it to current standards, of course! And look at CRB and Da Nang and all our other big airports and installations like Phu Bai where I was stationed for a while, in Google Earth, pics then and now, to see what a huge wealth transfer to "the enemy" (and I include the Commies and "our" contractors in that category) was made.
It's $37 buillion (oops!) and counting for the Littoral Combat Ships that effing "Doctrine" says are "the future of Imperial power projection," that Oops! can't take a punch, or throw one either unless you re-define the specs to say what "successful program" means: http://www.wired.com/2013/01/littoral-combat-ship/ and lots more articles. And the F-22 and F-35? The V-22? The XM-25 "game-changer?" The many rolling iterations, at a billion or so a pop, of new'n'better combat uniforms and web gear? http://www.thedailybeast.com/the-hero-project/articles/2013/10/14/the-army-s-5-billion-new-uniform-already-being-replaced.html And of course the M-113 aluminum-armored armored personnel carrier proved vulnerable to cheap RPG and armor piercing fire that killed vehicle and crew, so we had to have the many expensive iterations of the "
Bradley Fighting Vehicle, with aluminum armor up-armored until it was another kind of vehicle altogether: http://strategypage.com/htmw/htarm/articles/20120305.aspx, the usual effing tail-chase of a procurement in search of a mission.
Forget about KBR "contractors" idiotically mis-wiring GI's showers so that the GIs get electrocuted, http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/05/28/soldier.electrocutions/, it's Immense, it's Enormous, it's a frikkin' Jobs Program that can't even start to be audited, http://www.businessinsider.com/pentagon-wastes-billions-it-cant-audit-2013-5 and http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/18/5117816/pentagon-guilty-of-billion-dollar-accounting-fraud-reveals-reuters, and a way for generals to live fat, while on "active duty" and after. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/petraeus-scandal-puts-four-star-general-lifestyle-under-scrutiny/2012/11/17/33a14f48-3043-11e2-a30e-5ca76eeec857_story.html We got Raytheon lobbyists and even Saint Kerry of Massachusetts, Post-National Raytheon Corp's nominal home, pushing the Pentagram and Obama's cadre to shoot off a bunch of Tomahawks at "carefully selected targets" in Syria, just to turn over some inventory and pull in a few hundred million more Worker Bucks. http://public-accountability.org/2013/10/conflicts-of-interest-in-the-syria-debate/
We get all exercised about GM ignition switches that have killed maybe a couple of dozen of us, thanks to greed and corporate unconcern, and not about faux "wars" that kill hundreds of times that in US GI "Consumers" and millions of Others, "wars" that hide behind the mythology of Call of Duty and that are just huge commercial Milo Minderbinder Enterprises scams transferring enormous ordinary-people wealth, between $600 billion and $1.2 trillion a year in the US depending on who you ask, about a quarter of the planet's wealth overall, to the "military," to a particular set of the Very Few. http://www.shmoop.com/catch-22/milo-minderbinder.html
And it doesn't seem to matter that all that enormous complexity and "power" can't even crush a bunch of tribesmen in far off places, in fact the Brass sort of acknowledge that they can't actually "win" a 4th generation asymmetric war, even when they cheat: http://fabiusmaximus.com/2008/01/14/millennium-challenge/ The future these assh__es promise us in nothing but more of the same, Orwell's (Un)SecurityState and "forever war." But they've nailed down how they will dominate and guide and control EVERYTHING, in the name of "responding to the threat of climate change," http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/dod/dsb/climate.pdf Now we got the CIA "retrograding" from Notagainistan before the field military forces, from the "graveyard of empires:" http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/04/exclusive-cia-falls-back-in-afghanistan.html, after saying just the other thing: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-digs-in-as-americans-withdraw-from-iraq-afghanistan/2012/02/07/gIQAFNJTxQ_story.html Stupidity squared, cubed, to the infinity power, but the Games! the Wealth transferred! the best year yet for the opium crop!
Sneer at Gen. Smedley Butler all one wants -- he saw it and said it, 80 years ago: "War is nothing but a racket." From my generation, the bit of sardonic wisdom was "War is GOOD BUSINESS -- Invest YOUR Son!" And the Grownups are supposedly in charge. Bunch of effing child abusers and pedophiles, maybe... It's too big, too much, unstoppable... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw2fZOyjcAg
This is the way cancers operate, especially the metastatic and malignant ones, eating the body's resources, tricking it into growing huge new arteries to feed lifeblood directly to the tumor, hiding from the increasingly crippled immune system, behind a fake image of "healthy tissue."
What's that portend for the rest of us, in the ol' Body Politic? Got your Obamacare Card ready?
I'd have to say it sure looks to me like the Obama administration has a very coherent foreign policy: maximize distress, add confusion, foment dissension, overthrow any elected government, foster profitable arms sales as one element of the other elements, keep the sneaky-petes busy in the underbrush, lay a thick layer of military-state-security "Interoperability" slime over the whole, and keep the carboniferous combustibles flowing. And the dollar as the reserve currency, until enough post-trans-supranational corporate entities have settled on how to score a big one by demolishing the dollar and what is left of their "American" launch pad. All on the backs of the ordinary people who once again are funding their own immolation.
And since when has injecting more and more weapons, particularly "dual use" toys like guided antitank and anti-aircraft missiles whether MANPAD or Russia's Best Air Defence Systemme, into a chaos of anomie and identity conflict ever had a prayer in Hell of Making Things Better for those ordinary people? However many angels can be induced, by the fluttering of Position Papers and Briefing Documents and Doctrines and Thinktankery and suchlike, to dance on the pinheads of the people who talk up this or that strategy or policy, like favoring something called the "Free Syrian Army" which if one looks at all closely, can only be called "maybe not as bad as the other dudes, possibly, at the moment."
What "peace process?" Isn't that phrase dead on arrival? Conflicts like this eventually die of exhaustion, but only after the outside players move on. What is the aim of the Game? An FSA "victory?" By what possible means, and with what possible outcomes? What is "won" in this situation, however it turns out, where the rulers and fatass generals of many nations, and the profiteers and contractors stuck to them like chewing gum under the bus station bench, are "free to pursue their National Interest" whatever the hell that means? It's still pretty hard to refute some old wisdom: "War is nothing but a racket." You don't build legitimacy, the kind that undergirds stability and decency, that way. At least as far as I can see, with my cataract-impaired, skeptical vision.
Gee, one can hope that arming the "moderates" with more exotic and profitable weapons from the Imperial arsenal, and recognizing them "diplomatically," will prove to be a "winning strategy." Maybe the Mods just need more Interoperability with the Imperial Battjespace... And the goal, again, is...? Better life for Ordinary People everywhere? Huh. Uhuh.
Just wondering, whether it matters whether the particulars of the battery used to jump-start the battle tank are -- lead-acid or nickel metal hydride or lithium ion, or what color the case is, or what the label says -- the tank is a tank, the possible behaviors are still "kill, rape, steal, intimidate, dominate, destroy." Interesting to study the battery chemistry and hookup, but how do us ordinary people get close enough to pour sugar in the fuel fill and sand in the crankcase, knock some connecting pins out of a couple of treads, and spike the guns? And keep the battery from being connected in the first place? Is it even possible, since whole new battalions of tanks keep popping out of Final Assembly every day, all with the same Fundamental characteristics?
For some fun reading on the Situation, read the SITREPs here: http://peccaviconsulting.wordpress.com/2013/12/
And speaking of "gunmen," and how the social psychology works, look what's coming to a Freedomland (tm) near YOU! http://www.salon.com/2014/05/07/look_at_my_gun_why_nras_scary_open_carry_craze_is_not_about_freedom/
Give the individual groups quaint little names, like BokoHaram and LRA and ISIS and "Taleban" and all that. And try to intellectually analyze and describe and distinguish the nominal differences and create "policy" to address them (whether by military defeat, or by using them in the Great Geopolitical Game by arming them or "recognizing" them, http://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/opinions/letters_to_editor/article_35caa6be-40ac-11e3-ad2f-0019bb2963f4.html ). But if taken with a broad look, they collectively seem like just a broad excrescence of the other phenomenon that's more accurately and generically called "gunmen." Their talismans and ragtag uniforms are hardly differentiating, as against their behaviors. And the salient characteristics are "male dominance," "magical thinking," rape in so many ways, and a hair's-breadth distance from anomie and anarchy.
Humans don't absolutely need guns, all those wonderful REAL weapons of mass destruction of culture and decency, the AKs and other assault weapons, to commit this kind of horror -- machetes and hammers work too, as we have seen. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_Genocide, and other idiocies, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_Genocide But the guns sure help let the Little Lords of the Flies get a leg up on all the people who are disinclined to rabid violence themselves... in a context of capitalist exploitation of common resources, untrammeled corruption, destruction of civic institutions, sneaky-petes sowing dissension and out of idiot habit doing their destabilizing crap, and now our Imperial Troops, acting not as world policemen (not the best frame, anyway, given what "policing" has largely become, e.g., http://news.iafrica.com/sa/894095.html) but pick-a-side thugs, to be "lent by President Obama," out of AFRICOM...
Where's the wisdom on how we humans can head off the serial rise of "charismatic" idiot mostly males, able to attract others whose mothers presumably tried to teach them better than this?
And to show that not much changes under heaven and over Hell, there's this bit of history: http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/people/social_classes.htm
Just curious, where's that billion dollars coming from? Not national tax revenues or petroleum sales... And would there be a bright spot here, that "whoever" is funding non-carbon energy, with a sort of general-benefit rosy glow emanating from wealth that for whatever somebody-profits reason, seems likely to do disinterested good for a lot of people? Presuming the Pharaoh lets the Lower Orders benefit, at all, from all those electrons the benevolent God Ra showers down on the mere mortals and to-be-Gods alike...
The people in Hamas and the IRA and many other wild'n'crazy groups often end up mostly domesticated if they ever get to the point of having to actually govern. What is the disease that infects the Likudniks, and maybe ISIS and suchlike, who seem immune to that domestication process now that they've consolidated? With, of course, nuclear weapons as a final statement of Teh Stupid?
I like a particular science fiction parable that seems to cover the differential diagnosis pretty accurately, albeit awkwardly retitled when moved from "Analog" to book form: from "A Sense of Obligation" to "Planet of the Damned," http://www.has.vcu.edu/for/gj/ebooks/Planet_of_the_Damned.pdf The autopsy starts around page 240 in my download of this no longer copyrighted work.
Netanyahoo = magter = umedvirk!
Speaking of exposure to toxins, the VA hospital I go to has TVs in all the waiting areas, all tuned to FUCHS News, and the vast majority of my fellow vets seem tuned in to the idiocy, nodding their heads, occasionally forming little impromptu flashmobs of disaffected people growling about The Damn Government Obama Socialism while waiting their turn for publicly funded treatment. And in many of the nurse's rooms, you hear the lambent sounds of Limbaugh and Beck and Hannity and other Talkradio Purveyors Of God's Truth To The Masses. How can that be fixed? Or has the disease process passed a critical point of no recovery?
Yeah, I talk too much and obviously like the sound of my own voice -- but most of that post was from the link -- I can't get italics or emphasis to work reliably.
It IS complicated: Congress delegates Commerce Clause-derived power to EPA to regulate air pollution (carefully circumscribed, with exceptions). EPA adopts air quality criteria to "protect health and the environment," and national ambient air quality standards -- NAAQS. Also National Emissions Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants -- NESHAPS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Emissions_Standards_for_Hazardous_Air_Pollutants -- and acid rain (remember that?) and ozone and CFCs (remember them?) and asbestos. The country is inventoried for "attainment," or not, of those standards. The states can apply to run the air programs, under their own regulations that EPA can approve or displace if not equivalent and no less stringent. In addition to permitting particular "sources," from smokestacks to leaks from plant equipment to construction dust, the agencies develop plans to achieve attainment of standards. Economic considerations and "practicability" are built into regulatory considerations and rulemaking, also "Prevention of Significant Deterioration," a no-backsliding notion.
There's a separate provision for interstate air pollution, what the Supreeeeemes were addressing. The opinion actually has a pretty clear exegesis of that program frame. And all the while, the lobbyists and Congress and the sneaky shits that the "conservatives" since before Reagan but mostly since that coup have put in place at all levels of the bureaucracy and enforcement structure.
Sorry if it's complicated -- the majority opinion and the post do a pretty good job of laying out the elements, but there are many, many logical pathways that the Deciders could follow in this and so many of the chunks a bits of "the law" that we ordinary people accede to being governed by, while the rich folks, including corporate "persons," blow it all off and do whatever they damn please... and what are you and/or we going to do about it, other than "be aware," and "bemoan"? While the K Street/Wall Street Commandos eat us alive?
Guess what? He, of course, could not give a crap what anyone, anyone of us progressive types especially, says about him. He's Inside The Bubble Within The Bubble, guaranteed to sit up there and smirk as long as his sorry carcass is able and wants to. "He welcomes your hatred..." -- and laughs all the way to the bank, country club, gatherings of Kleptocrats, maybe even cathedral...
"The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behavior, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services a Compensation which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office."
Grouse all you want -- these Talibanners know how to use our crying need for Legitimacy and Rule of Law and Respect For The Constitution against us, very effectively...
We live in a complicated world. Headlines, anecdotes and sound bites are kind of like "vitals" your nurse collects at the start of a physician office visit. There are any number of complex conditions, including life-threatening ones, that will produce vital signs in the normal range.
As a former EPA enforcement attorney and nasty cynic, I might note that what the Supreeemes did with this particular rule may not be a lay-down for eventual limitation of CO2 emissions. Here's the opinion, for anyone that wants to read it: http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/13pdf/12-1182_bqm1.pdf. Here's a hopeful press release from one interested party: http://www.edf.org/media/supreme-court-win-cross-state-air-pollution-rule And here's a comment from dailykos that captures part of the complexity:
"This claim
The consequences of the EPA losing this case is that ALL emitters would be regulated. As per the article:
...is completely, 100% wrong.
If the Supremes grant any petitioner's request that strikes CO2e from the definition of "Regulated NSR pollutant" under 40 CFR Section 52.21(b)(50) and/or interferes with the definition of 'subject to regulation' under 40 CFR Sec 52.21(b)(49), then all ability to require permits and regulation that limit either the time rate or the process rate of CO2e emissions dies completely.
Even a secondary standard for a CO2e NAAQS would be barred because an NAAQS pollutant must be able to be regulated by the Act as a pollutant before it can be published as an NAAQS.
If my memory is correct, Rick Snyder and Rick Perry are both asking this kind of relief from the Supremes.
Don't make the same bullXXXX mistake that Michael Brune did by saying that granting cert to the Rick/Rick petition to the Supremes was a victory for the Sierra Club.
Any granting of any of the petitions by the Supreme Court in the present tailoring rule case would be a disastrous outcome for the environment and a defeat for President Obama and EPA in defending decades of EPA's historic interpretation of the Clean Air Act.
A bad decision by the Supremes on issues raised in this comment would also create chaos like deregulating hydrogen sulfide and several other airborne toxic pollutants that are not regulated as hazardous air pollutants. Such a decision in this case could thus have the collateral consequence of rendering as federally UN-enforceable all of the hydrogen sulfide and total reduced sulfur air pollution control requirements at all plants in the United States.
There's been a lot of bad media interpretation of this case minimizing its consequences.
Please don't spread more objectionable conflations that a defeat by President Obama in the present greenhouse gas tailoring rule case before the Supreme Court would somehow be good for the environment and is a desireable thing.....because that entire line of thought is totally bogus and without any real understanding of the Clean Air Act and the contested issues and petitions in this case....
In order for a National Ambient Air Quality (7+ / 0-)
Standard for greenhouse gases to be published, the "air pollutant" as defined by 42 USC Sec 7602(g) must be first considered as an 'air pollutant' under the Act before a NAAQS standard can be published under 42 USC 7409(a).
If a substance that was previously considered as an 'air pollutant' in the present case by EPA is struck from being considered as an 'air pollutant' as requested by the Rick/Rick petition to the Supremes and others, then no EPA rulemaking could ever proceed to set a NAAQS standard under the circumstances of an adverse decision by the Supreme Court that had the effect of striking CO2e as a pollutant.
That's all for me for now, Pluto....as I've got to get back to work tonight on a piece of red state air pollution litigation.....republicans are so skilled at warring on the Clean Air Act where-ever they rule." http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/04/29/1295585/-Breathing-will-be-easier-thanks-to-today-s-Supreme-Court-decision-upholding-EPA-authority
Moreover, if the TPP and its Atlantic analog go into effect, as far as can be determined, there will be NO effective "legal/regulation" way to keep the crappers from crapping, over most of the planet. Obama is still pushing the "free trade" bulls__t cover that is part of the stealth "sell" of our human birthright to "the market..."
I guess the apologists for the Great Game, as played by our lords and masters and their sneaky-petes and as administered by our vaunted military-industrialists and as paid for , in so many ways, by us ordinary people, the apologists who used to be so vigorously present here have moved on. Knowing, as they do, that the Game is rigged, that they are Inside The Gates, that no amount of blogtalk in places where people actually recognize what's going on, no amount even of awareness by the larger polity, will change a jot or a tittle of Teh Stupid Idiocy that the Rulership awards itself such brassy medals and big paydays for.
Can I put in another plug for two sources that give little insights into Teh Stupid? First is a self-paean by one Gary Schroen, one of the more "effective" CIA paramilitaries, bragging up the "effectiveness" of the CIA and US Imperial Exceptional "Covert" Interventionism in Notagainistan, while giving a lesson in how us Westerners and our big blocks of $100 bills and complex-chain-of-command-targeting-decisions-for-smart-weapons-operated-by-dumb-people reached the endpoint and current condition laid out in this post: "First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan," with this from the ironically humorous Amazon patrioblurb -- "While America held its breath in the days immediately following 9/11, a small but determined group of CIA agents covertly began to change history. This is the riveting first-person account of the treacherous top-secret mission inside Afghanistan to set the stage for the defeat of the Taliban and launch the war on terror." http://www.amazon.com/First-In-Insiders-Spearheaded-Afghanistan/dp/0345496612
And Jon Krakauer's "Where Men Win Glory," to read not so much for the material on Pat Tillman, but for the context, the continued, endless, wasteful, careless idiocy of the High Command and the whole idiot structure that has "us" sending troops into places to draw fire or be blown up by IEDs (many of which are built of "NATO"-manufacutred-and-paid-for munitions.
One can't even take any masochisto-schadenfreude pleasure in the kicking of the asses of our own troops, because they bear the pain and the Brass sit on their highly decorated, highly pandered, building-for-that-really-rich-second-career opportunity. Once again, like all the other parasites,, consequence-free -- failure is no stain, fraud is no bar to advancement, fooling around is no disqualification for a Fine Personal Future...
It's just anecdotal bits of video, but if one goes through the stuff at syriavideo.net you will see a lot of anti-tank missiles, both guided and ballistic, being blasted at Syrian army tanks. Using the guided ones requires some training, a calm mind while lining up the target while you are line-of-sight to the tank and its amped-up crew and their own death-dealing devices, and some luck -- both with weather conditions and with the reliability of the devices themselves. Check youtube for videos under "military fails," sometime... The un-actively-guided RPGs and such also require the operator to put himself in an exposed position, vulnerable to snipers as well as tank fire. Google "Syria headshot videos" some time to see what I mean.
Then, you have to hit the tank in a vulnerable spot, which the tankers and war materiel profiteer idiots are constantly making harder to find. And of course you have to also use "diplomacy" or something to cut off the delivery of more tanks, improved tanks, of course, in the interminable game of Armor versus Projectile, into The Enemy's Table of Organization and Equipment. How about a post-phecy about tanks and simple anti-tankery? http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/22/tanks-to-afghanistan-a-soldier-writes/
I would be careful about using the "game changer" phrase without many qualifications. No single weapon or weapon type (other than maybe nuclear, chemical and biological) is really a game changer in this version of 4th generation, outside-player violence. The USNATO warmakers and their suppliers bruited all kinds of "game changers" in our last two BIG imperial conflicts -- and the example is always out there at the BIG scale of the 5th Fleet and a lot of USNATO walking- and driving-around assets being sunk and blasted by the inventive stratagies of a retired Marine general. What the machinery seems to me to be producing is a "consumer war," posited on a balance of violence, with lots of sales opportunities and interstices where schmucks (albeit competent, in their trade) from the CIA and similar organisms can ply their skills and keep everything at a high simmer and low boil -- that keeps the Marches of the Empire from doing what the Germanic tribes did to Rome... spyguy points to a perceptive book, "The Gun," http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/03/books/03book.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 , about the simple and formidable engine of evil known as the AK-47 and its derivatives, called rightly in my mind the REAL weapon of mass destruction, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/03/books/03book.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 People from cultures with pride and revenge and possessory attachment to their landscape will demonstrably kick the asses of, or wear down, Imperial troops who don't resort to a Death Star-type weapon.
One wonders if ordinary people have a snowball's chance that these effing Game of Risk players will leave off weaponizing everything and turning the whole planet into just a series of Grand Globular Network-Centric Interopababble Battlespace Commands... Oh, wait, that's already happened, hasn't it? What your tax dollars and debt are buying: https://www.google.com/search?q=global+battlespace+command+structure&start=10&client=firefox-a&hs=eUe&sa=N&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&channel=sb&biw=1280&bih=634&tbm=isch&imgil=XFZY738vswTJkM%253A%253Bhttps%253A%252F%252Fencrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com%252Fimages%253Fq%253Dtbn%253AANd9GcTFGiJRO9ke_pdT_aUEubLscp9NvUGMBxgd95z85sIt1Y_qtNKN_w%253B538%253B492%253BDtL1Aza7Ih3udM%253Bhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Fwww.fas.org%25252Fspp%25252Fmilitary%25252Fdocops%25252Fdefense%25252F97_jwstp%25252Fjw4a.htm&source=iu&usg=__kk3CB636oCRHpbgpy1of5GQcnBQ%3D&ei=TAlfU6SFLavgsASyp4KgDw&ved=0CEcQ9QEwBTgK#facrc=_&imgdii=_&imgrc=XFZY738vswTJkM%253A%3BDtL1Aza7Ih3udM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.fas.org%252Fspp%252Fmilitary%252Fdocops%252Fdefense%252F97_jwstp%252Ffig4a01.gif%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.fas.org%252Fspp%252Fmilitary%252Fdocops%252Fdefense%252F97_jwstp%252Fjw4a.htm%3B538%3B492
And which set of Players is happiest about things trending toward a regional conflagration, again? Follow the money, follow the idiocy...
Interesting, when you look up the "Iron Dome" thing, one of the torrent of idiot war technologies out there, you read this sentence in the "Jewish Virtual Library -- Everything You Need To Know, From Anti-Semitism to Zionism":
"The Iron Dome missile defense system, designed and developed by Israel and jointly funded through the United States, is a response to the threats Israel faces from short and medium-range rockets and mortar shells fired by Palestinian terrorists in Gaza. " Emphasis emphatically added.
Anyone remember that silly early computer game where you, the player, tried to use your Iron Cursor to intercept a steadily increasing rain of (in that case, nuclear-warheaded) missiles that eventually and inevitably destroyed the Virtual Cities you were charged with protecting? How many of us, as young people, learned the meaning of "futility" from that and similar games where the best you could do was run up the points before "Game Over"? Stupid effing humans...
Maybe since their "revolutions" are a little more recent and a lot more violent, the Rulers there have to pay a tiny bit more attention to keeping the pain level just below the threshold where anarchy and anomie seem preferable. Via oppressive control mechanisms, and "just enough to eat-ism." You can bet that the kleptocratic portion of the Ruling Class is just like our own, knowing the real deep truth that they will live lives of extraordinary luxury and indulgence, and die and be beyond any kind of consequences, retribution or restitution, before the s__t hits the fan... "Apres nous le deluge," "I'll be gone, you'll be gone," all that... http://tradicionclasica.blogspot.com/2006/01/expression-aprs-moi-le-dluge-and-its.html Nothing new here, of course. Very few of us humans, given the option, actually seem to "care about the little guy."
Spy guy, I should have added a snark flag to my comment. Thanks for the additional light on the subject. The Likudniks are indeed suicidal but seem to want to take everyone else down with them. As to "advances in personal armament," it begins to seem that "market forces" are making it ever easier for more of us sick humans to do the same. But of course those Guns are so so sexy, now aren't they? So pleasing to our fantasies ? So freed from restraints of decency ? Yeah,a few of those idiots believe their own myths. Have they studied the videos at syriavideo.net? Stupid humans.
Waalll them folks sure are vaunted about their military hardware and a lot of kill-everything nuclear weapons and various forms of crowd control (snerk snicker )...
Teh Stupid is entrenched, and cannot end well... especially for us ordinary people who just foolishly want to go along and get along in our tiny little lives. Not that the Chinese rulership and oligarchs seem to have any interest in better lives for most people either.
“Is Amerca's future in Asia?” What does that even mean?
The post is a masterful exegesis of various parts of the Current Situation and Some Possibilities. But the underlying frame seems mostly mercantile and commercial, a straight extension of the kinds of institutional behaviors that are killing Freedom'n'Liberty ™ and plain old habitability for ordinary people everywhere. The corporate entities and their “government” appendixes that “Go East” advice is directed to are scarcely “America,” which was only an exceptional dreamstate masking a gestating Empire anyway. That mash-up of corporate power and wealth, “US trade,” is trans- and post- and supra-national, Friedman's “Flat Earth” racing to the bottom. “We” should be happy that Obama’s crew are still trying to shove the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement up our noses? Maybe happy that Abe is feeling his own oats at the moment? http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/04/24/national/politics-diplomacy/abe-secured-only-half-of-key-goals-at-meeting/#.U1pqZaLLLnc
And the US military-state-security thingie, busily linking up “interoperably” with local militaries and security-police forces, http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/213201.pdf, is beyond national loyalty and into hegemonics that serve corporate interests first and foremost (“War – the REAL nature of the Enterprise -- is a racket,” remember?), and the advancement and clout-building and second-career interests of its Battlespace Managers. http://www.dau.mil/MiscDocs/1stQTR2014FinalNEW.pdf?Mobile=1&Source=%2F_layouts%2Fmobile%2Fview.aspx%3FList%3D84cf7a0c-4012-493c-abdb-115d98dd581a%26View%3D20aac672-3ddc-47db-8d80-c23f1dfc22c2%26CurrentPage%3D1
“America” has taken runs at Asia before, on various models that have helped build war-based economies and massive consumption and prolongation of the Great Game in all its forms. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/he-yun-byungse/northeast-asia-history_b_5192463.html What part of “America,” particularly the part where ordinary people live and too often go along with or feel powerless to resist the Giant Squeeze Play being run by the wider post-national kleptocracy, http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/intentchopra/2011/12/its-time-to-change-kleptocracy-to-democracy.html# ,will benefit from a “pivot” or “re-balancing” or other BS euphemism cover for the cancer that is Business As Usual?
Our votes, and our belief, and trust, and the wealth we create and are compelled to keep creating to pay the debts the Few write against our future, and our resignation, are what create the pool of “legitimacy” that these barstids float their ships on. Where’s the payback for making possible the megayachts and gigabuck CEO wealth transfers and HST and derivatives and this stuff, http://www.alternet.org/economy/super-rich-cnbc ? Where’s the “pivot” toward a sustainable structure that provides Maslow’s basics to all us ordinary people, in Tampa and Ann Arbor and such, who are about to lose our puny-person net access, and may have to pay corporations not to pollute us into sickness and early death? http://www.stchas.edu/faculty/gbowling/survey/TheRightToPollute.html And solar power: how long before that’s a crushing franchise too, with “ownership” and unenforceable “rights” in the mix? http://www.homepower.com/articles/solar-electricity/design-installation/ask-experts-who-owns-my-sunlight
As in Wm. Randolph Hearst and Horace Greeley’ day, the “East” is actually “West.” Right out there on the Horizon of our Manifest Destiny, right? And just who gains from pursuit of that Destiny, again?
The Supreme Court can rule all it wants -- there are huge numbers of precedents for individuals, localities, interest groups, whole states, simply ignoring the rulings. The current crop of majority Supremes patently do not care that they are wasting generations of carefully built legitimacy, that quality that holds polities together and restrains episodes like Bundyworld from descending into Homs and Aleppo and Daraa...http://syriavideo.net/ Like so many other privileged folks, especially inside-the-Imperial-Beltway bobbleheads, THEY DON'T CARE. They know they will live out their snotty, sneaky, arrogant little lives in grand style and comfort, immune to any consequences for their cancerous actions.
One would think that those of us who will be eaten by the Rich might be putting our minds to ways around the faux-legitimacy structures that lead to failures like CitUnited and McCutcheon and the upcoming gift of the Internet to yet other cancers... The people who are stealing from the most of us occasionally go to the trouble, less frequently these days, of having their actions "legitmized" by statutes, regulations and court rulings. But most of their activity of the predatory kind is what people are finally starting to call "post-lega:" straight piracy and highway robbery and smash-and-grab. If they can do things on that basis, why are the rest of us working so hard to maintain and live by the fiction of "ruleoflaw?" It's not like that actually protects us in our persons, http://www.copblock.org/tag/police-abuse/ , and property, http://www.yourlawyer.com/topics/overview/gmac_wrongful_foreclosures_lawyer_lawsuit_attorney, http://www.opednews.com/articles/Bankers-Win-Both-Ways-Now-by-Ellen-Brown-Bail-in_Bailout_Eurozone_Public-Banking-140330-138.html ...
Maybe you want to check your math and sources? http://www.energymatters.com.au/index.php?main_page=news_article&article_id=741
One problem is that what tries to get fulfilled in a consumer-capitalist mess is not "needs," it's "wants:" a much more hugely elastic thing. And from what I read, you are simply wrong, even about "needs" of 7 billion of us. Got some authority?
We ordinary people can hope that some of the buggy riders are starting to put money into wagers on renewable technologies. Not, of course, that injecting vulture financialization and the other elements of business-as-usual into "greening" is guaranteed to produce a net better outcome. Some, of course, like the Kochs, are riding the horse they rode onto the scene, and are doubling down on desolating the planet via consumptive capitalism by betting on profit-making opportunities from the climate change they have induced, on their way to Elysium... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/19/companies-profiting-off-global-warming_n_3756346.html
Now, don't go messing with the Exceptional Narrative...
One hopes they won't get the same treatment accorded an earlier oppositional action by other Native Americans:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_Movement
And the Rulership's response to its most notorious action (.pdf):
http://cisupa.proquest.com/ksc_assets/catalog/2141_FBIAmIndMovWoKnee.pdf
All depends, of course, on how one defines "normal." In the compendious War Department dictionary, "normal' and its other grammatical forms are used hundreds of times, to characterize and define other terms. The only definition that starts with "normal" is "normal operations," the parsing of which ought to be an education in idiocy all by itself:
normal operations — Generally and collectively, the broad functions that a combatant commander undertakes when assigned responsibility for a given geographic or functional area. Except as otherwise qualified in certain unified command plan paragraphs that relate to particular commands, “normal operations” of a combatant commander include: planning and execution of operations throughout the range of military operations; planning and conduct of cold war activities; planning and administration of military assistance; and maintaining the relationships and exercising the directive or coordinating authority prescribed in JP 0-2 and JP 4-01. http://ra.defense.gov/documents/rtm/jp1_02.pdf [.pdf]
I wonder if this is how army ants think...
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The old "commons" worked, as well as it did, because of social controls that kept the greedy bastards from taking more than their share of grass and turves and gleanings. There seems to be yet another positive-feedback "fail" in play here, amplifying the over-taking by a few from the commons.
Of course, as pointed out by many, first the First People did what they did with the continent, then the forefathers of these nascent Mad Max types came, saw and took, then of course there were the railroads and the taking, theft really, of huge swathes of what was thought to be everyone's "heritage," and of course you have all the Kochers and the dudes that find the seams and bribe-workable pathways to doing stuff like not paying even the pittance for leaseholds and extraction values for all that oil and gas and uranium and other stuff that's on what was sort of supposed to be like a big Commons for all Americans. At least those dudes in suits and string ties and expensive cowboy boots make a show of faux legitimacy by "following the letter of the law," law that they have carefully lobbied into existence over decades, centuries even. Stuff like this: "Vanishing Lake Michigan Sand Dunes: Threats from Mining." http://www.greatlakes.org/Document.Doc?id=119
Use it all up, folks -- Jesus is coming back Real Soon, riding a horse of flame and brandishing the Covenant, the Sword with the Arm of the Lord... And he is going to be REALLY pissed if you haven't used it all up yet, the whole planet over which you tell yourselves he gave you "Dominion..."
And what is with this perpetuation of the idiot notion that all that "wealth" was somehow "earned?" High speed trading is "earning?" Derivative plays are "earning?" Regulatory capture is "Earning?" Carboning up the planet, with the shedding of massive externalities, stripping the oceans and forests, building military massiveness and state-control apparatuses, those are "earning?" Nope, that is just extractive vulture-and-tapeworm action, stealing the commons, and impoverishingkilling ordinary people now and on into the future.
The more the word gets used, of course, in contexts like this, the more too many of us just kind of accept that it's "true" in the way we understand the "earning" that is represented in the increasingly paltry paychecks we get, for actual WORK, adding value that is actually "earned" in the way ordinary people understand the word, and the pittance in "interest" the banksters pay us for the use of our "earnings."
Trillions in self-generating, self-perpetuating Fun Units to feed the insatiable pleasure-seeking of a Fortunate Very Few? "Earned?" My aching a__.
Nervy of me to offer this impression of "Sharia Law" in this spot, but it seems to me that underlying the whole pseudo-Christianist thing is the real reason the banksters and the Kochs and the faker TV preachers are really concerned about "Sharia law" is the economic bits. There's plenty of hypocrisy and horror in implementation of Sharia, it appears (just like the Paulist scam version of Jesus-ism), but there's a nocked arrow aimed at the black heart of Western fiscalility held by the Muslim banking archer.
The Corporatist concepts of debt and usury as Good Business Practices, and of "money" as an ASSET that can be leveraged, are big no-nos. There's a lot of hypocrisy among Muslims, too, when it comes to High Finance and financialization and monetization, just like with drinking alcohol and eating proscribed foods and various other kinds of proscribed profligacy.
But if the Sharia framing of economic relations, particularly what we call "banking" relations, were to catch on, where would Lloyd Blankfein and Timmy Geithner and that Chicago toad Friedman be? Here's a bit of text from one of many primers on Sharia finance:
The Big Picture
Although they have been mandated since the beginnings of Islam in the seventh century, Islamic banking and finance have been formalized gradually since the late 1960s, coincident with and in response to tremendous oil wealth which, fueled renewed interest in and demand for Sharia-compliant products and practice.
Central to Islamic banking and finance is an understanding of the importance of risk sharing as part of raising capital and the avoidance of riba (usury) and gharar (risk or uncertainty). (To see more on risk, read Determining Risk And The Risk Pyramid and Personalizing Risk Tolerance.) [Compare Sharia notions with what rules here, the privatization of gain and "socialization" of loss, risk and externalities... not a pretty sight.]
Islamic law views lending with interest payments as a relationship that favors the lender, who charges interest at the expense of the borrower. Because Islamic law views money as a measuring tool for value and not an 'asset' in itself, it requires that one should not be able to receive income from money (for example, interest or anything that has the genus of money) alone. Deemed riba (literally an increase or growth), such practice is proscribed under Islamic law (haram, which means prohibited) as it is considered usurious and exploitative. By contrast, Islamic banking exists to further the socio-economic goals of Islam.
Accordingly, Sharia-compliant finance (halal, which means permitted) consists of profit banking in which the financial institution shares in the profit and loss of the enterprise that it underwrites. Of equal importance is the concept of gharar. Defined as risk or uncertainty, in a financial context it refers to the sale of items whose existence is not certain. Examples of gharar would be forms of insurance, such as the purchase of premiums to insure against something that may or may not occur or derivatives used to hedge against possible outcomes. (To read more about insurance or hedges, see A Beginner's Guide To Hedging, Understand Your Insurance Contract and Exploring Advanced Insurance Contract Fundamentals.)
The equity financing of companies is permissible, as long as those companies are not engaged in restricted types of business - such as the production of alcohol, pornography or weaponry - and only certain financial ratios meet specified guidelines.
[emphasis added] http://www.investopedia.com/articles/07/islamic_investing.asp
But we "JudeoChristians," who per our holy texts used to benefit from something called "Jubilee," http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/10/05/could-national-debt-forgiveness-help-kickstart-the-american-economy/ as a way to keep debt from becoming slavery, would all have our heads explode if all the soaring idiotic genius of monetization and securitization and derivitization and financialization of EVERYthing were to be, you know, "against the law." Which law is now, you know, written by and for the very people who are supposed to be "regulated" by the Delaware corporation law and the Uniform Commercial Code and the bankruptcy code (especially as relates to discharges of consumer and student and medical debt) and "securities" law, and foreclosure law that no longer often requires the bank to even prove that it owns the note before throwing you into the street, and all that...
For those who construct their truth from selected bits of serially edited text from the Bible to match their hateful dark dreams, here's a place to extract and misappropriate some salient quotes: http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Bible-Verses-About-The-Year-of-Jubilee/
OMG! NO SHARIA LAW HERE!
One wonders if it's way too much easier to slash and burn, dig and strip, extract and externalize, than to husband and steward and pay forward. One looks at the video record of various "sustainable ecology and agriculture" projects, e.g.,http://sustainableforestgardenfarmproject.weebly.com/ that depend on a long chain of persons with aligned perceptions and motivations to carry life forward, and then at time-lapses of predations like killing the rain forests and "tar sands" extractions, http://climatestate.com/2013/05/11/timelapse-satellite-views-of-human-destruction-of-the-biosphere-over-three-decades/, and one has to wonder, and maybe pray for divine and human intervention, but be just a little bit pessimistic, that the real Takers will inevitably, with all their busy profit- and rent-seeking, and skills at making their activities "legitimate" and "legal," or at least immune to correction, overwhelm and strip the landscapes that "stewards" work so hard to create and maintain...
What's a tree really worth? Depends, I guess... This, http://www.timberbuyer.net/treevalue.htm, versus maybe this: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/16007/is-the-value-of-a-tree-193-250
What it looks like it is all going to come down to:
https://www.google.com/search?q=gahan+wilson+i+think+i+won&client=firefox-a&hs=phI&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&channel=sb&tbm=isch&imgil=YztX7wqVD3owOM%253A%253Bhttps%253A%252F%252Fencrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com%252Fimages%253Fq%253Dtbn%253AANd9GcQX9GQSJGUWZE4QW5e5MnbEfUXDs-9Mhz-d_PJwYjDSWyoHCe5nXQ%253B406%253B574%253BgJuOb48qRzvH5M%253Bhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Fnoprisonersnomercy.com%25252F2009%25252F10%25252Fpower-trip%25252F&source=iu&usg=__VB98DYcZM_80nlIkzRCjQygMvqU%3D&sa=X&ei=NrpGU4KhMLbJsQSiwoGADg&ved=0CCsQ9QEwAA#facrc=_&imgrc=YztX7wqVD3owOM%253A%3B2vMxM1u8C-O6nM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252F37.media.tumblr.com%252Ftumblr_lzwamh77o21qart8to1_500.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fmana-junkie.tumblr.com%252Fpost%252F18843214034%252Fi-think-i-won-by-gahan-wilson%3B406%3B574
Funny, with a sob...
There's such a smorgasbord of fun stuff about Rand Paul out there, it's hard to pick sensible representative context for him.. Would be all things to all people, so you can pick and choose from a myriad of "inconsistent," often idiotic pronouncements on a whole range of topics that are important to having a future for the species. that he may be "least bad" ain't a criterion I would favor for putting him atop the Kleptocracy. As a low-paid nurse with an interest in the cynical, I would offer this little slightly aged snippet, from a guy who would do away with Medicare and other non-self-reliant selfishness, but is happy to bill Medicare in his practice, like namesake Ayn's "distasteful acceptance" of Social Security.
My offering: "Dr. Paul: Not Board Certified, But Self-Certified." http://www.salon.com/2010/06/14/rand_2/ But there's this wistful cloud of neediness floating around among us ordinary people, wishing for a "real leader" to come and Make Healthy Change, only lacking an appropriate public-relations poly-angulation creation designed to seem like he/she sort of generally seems to fit with the contours of what enough of us think is Right and Honorable and Honest and Wise to get past the electoral hump and into the Imperial Oval.
Is He The One?
Probably are a lot of instances in human history when a man has said something altogether different, when his personal priorities and income situation have changed, from what he said a couple of years earlier when he was nominally advising on grave matters of state and had no immediate chance of making a whole lot of money off his advice and pronouncements. Particularly a man who does not give a rip for the opinion of others and has zero respect for honesty.
Rand Paul is just a different kind of self-interested evil soulless obnoxious fool, maybe one of the 24 kinds of Libertarians illustrated here: http://leftycartoons.com/the-24-types-of-libertarian/. Interesting how people of that sort tend to rise in the ranks and realms of power and wealth... "Stupid bandits" are the worst kind of Stupid Human: http://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidity/ . All of which is discussed in geopolitical terms by Barbara Tuchman in "The March of Folly," which is not perfect but is nicely illustrative... http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10302.The_March_of_Folly
"Informed voting" at polling places, subject as it is to all the perversions of spinning and hidden persuasion and outright manipulation and fraud and theft, will not halt or undo the processes of monetization described here. People who care whether the species and culture survive are going to have to not only change their own personal behaviors, that include feeling good about OMG! switching to designer LED bulbs with lots of "consumer choices" of Kelvin colors and controllability, yet increasing their total electrical demand, using gasoline-powered yard blowers instead of Ewww! rakes to help "maintain" their monoculture bluegrass lawns by blowing their dog droppings and other detritus onto the neighbors' yards or into public streets, buying SUVs and big trucks, and a host of other "substitutions" and convenient continuations. And organizing to stand in the way of "progress" and "development," like 305's XL protests, the activities of First People in Canada against "tar sands," all that stuff. And voting survival instead of tribal, to add that layer of traditional legitimacy to the parts of actual change that the other nitty-gritty oppositions to Koch-ery that are needed where we Americans live, and elsewhere...
Good news,, maybe! Though if Greening happens to the extent needed to keep billions of us from being cooked and drowned and choked, it will be likely by small-scale stuff -- maybe like the proverbial, likely chimaerical proto-rats that supposedly ate the dinosaur eggs, speeding the saurians' departure. And happen in spite of "our government, the best that money can buy," and the rich folks who are behind "initiatives" like the one described in this AL Monitor article:
US official calls for Lebanon to accelerate oil process
US Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy Diplomacy Amos Hochstein encouraged the Lebanese government to “act quickly to adopt the needed measures for the issue of gas and oil, including passing decrees related to blocks [of the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ)] and permits.” In an interview with As-Safir, he noted, “There is not enough time for the government to move at a slow pace. It has to catch up with neighboring countries.” http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/business/2014/04/lebanon-us-official-call-accelerate-oil-process.html
Yeah, hurry up, you slow-coach Lebanese officials! Get that offshore lease game up to speed, so those Carbon Corps can extract it, excrete their inevitable externalities, and retire to sunnier shores before the s__t hits the fan! Don't you know there's PROFIT in them thar fills?
Stupid effing humans...
Context, anyone?
"secret law, secret surveillance, secret power, and the secret state — are here to stay."
And because all the incentives and momentum are aligned, ask Lockheed Martin and General Atomic and Bechtel and Halliburton...
Wonderful career opportunities in what has come to be so artfully called "national security," and here's a primer for all you young'uns burdened with non-dischargeable-in-bankruptcy student debt, a bent for the technischer volken arbeitung, and no conscience or consciousness of what you will soon be able to do to the rest of us (and at least you will be lined up on the winning side in the new Great Game of Undodgeableball -- maybe you will even be able or allowed to go on living on the f_"_ed-up planet!) For forward-lookers, the last link is to one planning document that, with related excretions and ejaculations of the MIC, will be guiding the future projection of all that power):
Start young, start NOW! http://www.envisionexperience.com/explore-our-programs/careers-in-national-security
For the ordinary, and gifted, there's a "secure" job! http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/archive/2011/July/Pages/TheJobsoftheFutureinNationalSecurityandIntelligence.aspx
All you need is a security clearance, which one can expect will eventually be like Communist Party credentials, the passkey to a comfortable personal future, and available to the connected and those who can pay the entry bribes, er, fees: http://www.clearancejobs.com/?action=quick_register&ref=sem&gclid=CPaJ9YaTzL0CFbTm7AodQHUAzQ
http://www.nsa.gov/careers/ --yeah, "shape the course of the world..."
Take personally beneficial part in the End Game of your species! http://www.sra.com/careers/
See? The War Department has it all under control! or at least has a profitable contingency plan or operational plan in place! http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/dod/dsb/climate.pdf