Save your outrage for the acts of the thousands of "not being swept under the rug" predatory pedophiles and the whole structure that fostered and protected them, who sure look to have created a nice niche for themselves in the folds of the Mother Church. The whole Church sure seems to indeed be getting punished for the acts of those creatures -- how many billions in secret little settlements/blood money, and legal judgments, and finally fines, are having to be made up by parishioners (many of whom are losing their parishes thanks to that cost, and stuff like the difficulty of attracting people to the priesthood, and keeping them, with that recent engraft of "celibacy" and that old-man-discovered teaching that women (after the ancient churches at least) are too something or other to be priests.
This is all about, to my eye, protecting a carefully cultivated and tended identity. That thing that so many of us are willing to die, or more often kill, to hang on to. And it's amazing how artful and subtle we can be, when it comes to arguing the nature of anything that affects that identity.
Islam proselytizing? Got a cite? I sure try to get a "sight" of the Jehovah's Witnesses and Holy Rollers coming up the path to my front door, so I can be, as the old Brits used to have their butlers say, "not at home." At least the "Christian Mailing Listers" have figured out that they are wasting their tax-free postage peppering me with tracts and ads for Holy Spikenard Oil Personally Blesset By Pastor Mealymouth, for my Seed Gift of just $19.99 for four months, that will also get me a 4-CD set of his Blesset Sermons telling me all the reasons I should hate, fear, and hope to exterminate most of the rest of humanity...
And there's a great stirring in the Force in the Mideast, for sure, with a lot of sectarian and tribal killing, likely only to get worse with all the inputs and takeouts there, and gee, all those "Christians" throwing gasoline on the fire and stirring the pot in hopes of bringing one or another form of Armageddon, depending on their Freedom of Religion convictions... Maybe I missed it, but are Muslims all about apocalyptic end times kind of stuff?
Plain as day. Kind of like how priestly celibacy is plain as day in the text of the Holly Bibble, along with a whole lot of other skits in the dogma-and-doctrine show.
But this is about belief, and Revealed Truth, and speaking of revelations, God sure has laid it on my heart that anyone who teaches and demands the eschewing of birth control, and artfully argues that "this" is about "religious freedom" to do as they are told by their paternalistic, self-serving Mitred Ones rather than rendering unto Caesar (who was generally intolerant of exotic religious convictions, preferences and practices, is not aligned with the Will of the Divine.
As someone else asked, do the Quakers have to pay for all those wars? Or do I have to let my tax dollars be given to "charter schools" that preach propaganda and intolerance that I find sickening and deadly to what little is left of commonality and comity and community in our culture?
Congrats, by the way, on creating a nice Jesuitically circumscribed and complete and apparently personally comfortable world view.
Sez you. Others obviously see things very differently, and see the brouhaha for what it is: a gaffe of sorts by the Unitary Presidency, leapt upon by the hypocritical monitor lizards (they're the critters that kill their prey by sneaking up, biting them, and then following them until the unfortunate bite-ee dies from a horrific, painful sepsis caused by the putrescent bacteria that populate the biter's lizard mouths) and yapping dogs on the Wrong side of the political spectrum as a way to "go on the offensive" and protect their privileges and plaisirs...
Religious freedom. That's the "freedom" to do and believe whatever the Bishoprics (or the Pat "Send Me Your Seed Gift" Robertsons, or those Mullahs we hear so much and know so little about, or who was that guy, the one who founded and kilt off "Jonestown?") tell you to do and believe, right?
Speaking of opinions, George Carlin has a few. You can't link to Youtube through this place, apparently, but for Carlin's view of Absolute Truth, you can call up "George Carlin - Religion is bullshit." Though I understand it's a mortal sin to watch stuff like that...
To be complete, one might ask what religion is Islam? Sunni? Shia? Sufi?
Humans seem constructed to only be able to manage fealty and attachment to groups of a certain size and shape. So schism and sectarianism and tribalism and secession and rebellion seem kind of built into our natures. Along with the unfortunate, common recognition that there is, or needs to be, a Divine of some sort, whether just First Cause or that intimate set of Persons and acceptable Goddesses (some call them Saints) wrapped up in a dogma and doctrines that gee whiz, just happen to favor a certain small group of (when you look close) often pure Machiavellian crypto-atheists who use people's touching and deep need for Something To Believe In That's Larger Than Themselves to manipulate the Masses for fun, profit and power...
And where, one wonders, does "the Catholic Church's money" come from? Maybe the earned income of its parishioners, mostly, as opposed to being "earned," or even "made," by the institution? A form of "tax?" With the sanction for non-payment being social and spiritual, as opposed to (maybe) some attention from the IRS and the US Attorney's office?
Can't use "tax money" for abortion or Planned Parenthood, but you can use parisioners' money to not only pay the civil and criminal penalties for the sins and depredations of pedophilic priests (who sure seem a whole lot more organized and better-protected than even the squidges that spermeate the darkling corners of the Internet with their NAMBLA and "baseball card" collections of vulnerable young people being abused...) but to campaign, vigorously and politically, from the Bullpit and the other organs and orifices of the Church hierarchy, for the views of "faith" crafted by subtle, crafty, self-interested old men onto the faithfulness and sense of the divine that most humans are born with?
And Juan, the pedophilia, as far as I can tell, is kind of much bigger than in any other large social institution I can think of, and it extends not only to altar boys but to little and young and pubescent girls, too, with the actuality of pregnancy, that "Holy Life," occurring too. I guess 'cause you can break your vows of celibacy and chastity with impunity, the assurance of Gracious Forgiveness being ready to hand, but OhMyGod do NOT break that late-engrafted abjuration against any kind of barrier contraception.
Anyone know how many of our fellow humans, with the mark of Cain and all on them, also have a nice case of HIV/AIDS as a result of being boogled by some fraud in a frock and collar? I betcha the number is way more than "one."
And YOU are a disingenous casuastrist of the FIRST order. Maybe some Jesuit training in your past? Or is it just another expression of identity politics?
Thank you for the entertaining, enervating string of contra-de-ceptions.
Just another example of why humanity is on the ragged edge of proving beyond peradventure that we are a failed species...
Of course, all this ado is just the latest example of of "mobbing behavior," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobbing_%28animal_behavior%29, or maybe "piling on." And of course diversion and distraction and the deepest form of hypocrisy. The Cardinals flap at the clumsy Unitary President as he makes a mis-step, and the ConservaCrows join in. And all those folks who already have Obama in their sight picture and have the adrenaline on a steady simmer, just waiting for that first bubble to form on the bottom of the pot to trigger another rolling boil and cloud of steam.
Why is there so little hammering on the hypocritical Mitred Ones for centuries of institutionalized sex slavery forced on all those post-partum critters that actually are born, and bleed, and suffer, when what is so often called, and so unfortunately remains, "unspeakable?" Actions that are thought by the vast majority of us to be so far off limits that in many places, there's a death penalty for such horrific abuse?
These "doers" of children have no problem doing what they You have to wonder how many of the many predators in the "priesthood" use protection (other than the cloak and cassock of Silence, and the cowardly hiding behind the touching, durable faith of Believers who lose their parishes and have to double-tithe to pay the fines and judgments and defense costs and PR bucks of the malefactors) when they do what they do in chancel and nave.
And how many of these abusing anointed whining harumphing Bishops are neck-deep in the institutionalization and protection of what sure looks like an organized, long-lived HCPCSC (Holy Catholic Priest-Child Sex Conclave)? Oh, of course, the Sinners repent, and are granted absolution and relocation to a new pool of prey critters...
But no, let's grab that Presumption of Priestly Blessedness and use it to leverage yet another Reason To Defeat Obama.
Though you have to wonder, really wonder, if the Obamites really want another four years, given the degree of political klutziness involved in this and so many other failures in the Art of Presidential PR.
Evil, maybe "timid" "Liberals-progressives?" Whether there's a moral imperative to aid regime change, OR NOT?
I know it's just Wiki, and the article on the Khmer Rouge is pretty poorly written syntactically and grammatically, but there are a few bits that bear remembering:
The US sided with the Khmer Rouge in efforts to overthrow the Vietnamese and the Vietnamese-backed People's Republic of Kampuchea; it [was?] part of the anti-Vietnamese and anti-Soviet attitudes that prevailed, especially in the midst of the Sino-Soviet Split, since the People's Republic of China also supported the Khmer Rouge. The United States aided Khmer Rouge guerrillas who fled to Thailand after the Vietnamese invaded Cambodian territory and ousted the Khmer Rouge from power. The U.S. sided with China in supporting the Khmer Rouge in order to destabilize the Hun Sen Government in Cambodia and its Vietnamese allies.
And of course "our" dedication to "air power" (renascent as the fixation on Drone Wars) gives us this snippet:
[F]rom October 4, 1965, to August 15, 1973, the United States dropped far more ordnance on Cambodia than was previously believed: 2,756,941 tons' worth, dropped in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites. Just over 10 percent of this bombing was indiscriminate, with 3,580 of the sites listed as having "unknown" targets and another 8,238 sites having no target listed at all. . . . [T]he total payload dropped during these years to be nearly five times greater than the generally accepted figure. To put the revised total of 2,756,941 tons into perspective, the Allies dropped just over 2 million tons of bombs during all of World War II, including the bombs that struck Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 15,000 and 20,000 tons, respectively. Cambodia may well be the most heavily bombed country in history. . . . [T]he bombing forced the Vietnamese Communists deeper and deeper into Cambodia, bringing them into greater contact with Khmer Rouge insurgents . . . [and] drove ordinary Cambodians into the arms of the Khmer Rouge, a group that seemed initially to have slim prospects of revolutionary success.
All part of the running of the Great Game, by those Really Astute Experienced Players.
What's the alignment of the spiritual axis of all those Imperial Idiocies, again? And where does it point, except to instability and conflict and kleptocracy?
All the "leaders" and Experienced Players are "playing" everyone else, all the time, because their mothers and kindergarten teachers did not adequately wash their fripping mouths out with soap when they first started with the lying and dissimulation. And teach the unsocialized little beasts not to beat up on their fellows, and to recognize right from wrong, and to at least apologize when they got caught pinching the girls, and pinching all the cookies, and stealing from the milk money jar.
One just has to love the clumping sound of combat boots dancing on the head of a pin.
Pol Pot = Saddam Hussein? Well, clumsy, massive, grotesquely wasteful, murderous US Experienced Player activities had a lot to do with the advent and persistence of both, as I recall. Can't go after Pol Pot because the "gooks" who kicked US out of French Indochina were opposed to his regime and the Khmer Rouge were killing NVA, something like that, right? And Our Troops We Support, and the honest Iraqi yeomen and women who got blowed up wholesale by weapons provided for "good geopolitical reasons" by the US to one Saddam Hussein when he was our FRIEND against the Evil Iranians...
Something seriously wrong at the black heart of all this.
Yeah, but there's nothing to keep one from pointing out the dirt in others' laundry while acknowledging the need to wash one's own pile, and going on down to the rocks at the river's edge with the rest of the village to pound the collective dirt out of the community's clothing.
What a strange notion, that one is constrained to be silent, indeed excused or even barred from any obligation to exclaim, let alone take any kind of palliative or corrective action, about the horrors done by others, on the charmingly excusable notion that one has oneself committed horrors. Of which there is manifest and voluminous evidence.
Would it not make eminent sense to make the effort to reduce the net volume of horrors in the world?
So some of us may be confused by all the Player-talk:
Is what is going on in Syria (and Gaza and the West Bank and Arabia and sub-Saharan Africa all A-OK, then, on the ground of something like "it's none of our bidness," or that "it's worse elsewhere," or maybe that "to keep the Great Game going, you have to break a few eggs and heads and maintain Sovereignty as a primum bonum?" Or some other set of complications that Ordinary People just are not competent to understand or have an opinion about? Such that the fear and pain and dying of others who are as Ordinary as we are do not "count," in the the Great Scheme of Things That Are Profitable and Convenient For the Kleptocracies Just The Way They Are? Because "suppressing" Ordinary People, even ones deprived of voice and opportunity, is just what governments are supposed to do?
I mean, winning arguments about definitions of terms, while the "killing of large numbers of people, some of whom are exercising their G_d-given, inalienable Second Amendment-style Right to Armed Resistance" is happily going on, abetted by arms merchants and geopolitical jerkmeatery by Jackals and Clones and suchlike, is after all the most important thing -- way ahead of concentrated efforts to come up with a set of values and actions that might, if not end (given what humans currently are) but might at least reduce, the carnage and the sowing of the dragons' teeth of revenge and anomie and de-stability-- do I have that right?
Is that the best anyone can do by way of cross-examination and impeachment of Prof. Cole? However much one might prefer his bona fides and contributions to be zeroed out, his Google footprint seems a bit more substantive and honest than, say, your own...
Also made it goddam easy, by some very profitable "transfer of technology" via various routes, to "our next natural opponent." Including, as someone here pointed out, by giving Israel air defense technology that the Israeli military industrialists turned around and sold to the Chinese government. And of course "our" brilliant war toy labs, that seem impervious to larger common sense but porous to espionage by nominal "friends" and of course industrial freebie-seekers and "furriners."
It's just business, you know. And of course "we," for short-term benefits to the careers of a few of us, train and educate and otherwise pump energy into various parts of the complex organism that is the Chinese polity.
It's pretty clear that none of us, taken as a species, can manage to do any better.
Though Saint Reagan and Gorbachev agreed that the Implacable Cold War Foes would make common cause against a common enemy (in the form of some invading alien life form.) http://blog.nationmultimedia.com/print.php?id=715
Why would a presumably "advanced" bunch of aliens, having conquered interstellar travel, INVADE? Why not just wait for us Dumb Effing Humans to reduce ourselves back to impoverished neolithicism, as we sure seem on the path to do?
You gotta love the Great Game, and all the Statecraft that machiavellis along with it.
Dare one ask exactly what, in this text, is so offensive as to be killed by supposed "national interests," or even the "sweet reason," carefully scripted BS excreted by SE Wu Sike?
One might guess that the anathematical part is that the whole notion of one set of "states" telling the dictator of another state and his party and enforcers that they need to stand down and share, might in a tiny way point to and move toward the awakening notions of so many of the 99% of us, that we are being had, big time, and killed and circumscribed and drained of wealth and hope by the activities of Experienced Players, who pay the faintest lip service to the general welfare (as opposed to the Welfare of the Generals) while protecting what are pretty clearly short-term interests of a few Kleptocrats and Oligarchs.
The world may actually be flattening out, in richer ways than the notions of Thomas Friedman and the Vulture Capitalists, and be getting better interconnected. One downbeat of that condition is that there seems to be a spreading basic notion of what constitutes a decent, honorable life and the minimum criteria for sustainability.
Dangerous stuff for the Assads and Arafats and even our own American Kleptocratic Aristocracy to contend with.
But of course there's a nearly infinite set of interactions at play in all this, and so many ways to look through the prism...
Old joke: How do you catch an elephant? Well, you need three things: binoculars, tweezers, and a milk bottle. Go down to the watering hole, get up in a tree, and wait for the elephants to come down to drink. Then you look at an elephant through the wrong end of the binocular, reach out with the tweezers, pick up the elephant and drop it in the milk bottle. Easy, no?
Anyone with a better eye for physiotypes than I have care to offer a better read on where the young lady in the ad may have her antecedents? She does not look "Chinese" to me at all. I wonder if she will have the modern misfortune, having taken a few bucks to pose for the camera, to be "internouted" and scorned for it...
Don't forget to note that the Banksters and their boughtandpaidfor Members of Congress are working toward a massive default on those little pieces of paper, those "special treasuries" that evidence the taking of REAL WAGES (as opposed to "made money" generated, in a huge and brazen act of counterfeiting, out of bitspace ether by the "financial industry") deducted by law from all our W-2 income and a matching 7% out of an employer's account (basically forced savings of actual earned income, in both cases.) Already, $4 trillion in REAL WEALTH has been sucked out of the "Trust Fund" and into the General Reveune stream. Good luck getting it back...
Even supposed liberals go along with the fiction that the "payroll tax cut" is something "good for the middle class," and something other than one little further step toward undoing the New Deal, by stages turning the Social Security intergenerational social contract into "nothing but an 'entitlement program'" to be "cut" along with everything except "tax expenditures for the disgustingly wealthy" and war toy spending and any other wealth-transfer scam that inventive K-Streeters and Wall Streeters can come up with...
The rulers of exceptional nations, any nations, actually, as far as I can see, do not subject themselves, subject their autonomy, to the RuleofLaw, particularly the elastic, Teflon-and-petroleum-grease-coated tenets of that silliness called "international law." Except when it suits the purposes of some Jesuitical casuistrist (as in this little tale, http://homepages.stmartin.edu/fac_staff/gseidel/Fables/89_casuistry.htm ) to invoke some "principled stand" under one of the various Well Known and Agreed Precepts of that chimerical body of jurisprudence, mashed up of various treaties and compacts and agreements which are all subject to being ignored or enforced by decisions that have always been, but in the age of dronewars are ever more frequently, made "on the fly."
"The US" better be better prepared in this circumstance than the USS Liberty and the 5th Fleet were in 1967.
All those hair-trigger, hidden-tripwire, use-it-or-lose-it "assets" floating around out there like a junk full of fireworks with a crew that all smokes...
Agree with the substance. But I wish SOME terms were used only with footnotes or parentheticals or references that might have a prayer of giving them any kind of substantial meaning. Like "defeat." And "victory." Words that resonate in our monkey- and lizard-brains, but other than in the realm of trumpets and flag-waving have no meaning.
Even if the land area known as "Iran" was reduced to smoking rubble and wailing survivors with enormous incentives for revenge, an outcome accomplished (presumably with similar catastrophe to the land area and people claimed to be "Israel") by militarizing the rest of the US society and economy that's not already been suborned that way, in what possible lexicon could that state of affairs be constituted a "victory?"
The only way to win, once again, is not to play that negative-sum game.
It's not like there aren't a zillion more games that are much more likely to have positive-sum outcomes.
Begs the question whether there in fact is some kind of supranational "franchise operation" (like KFC or McDonald's, maybe?) that can honestly be labelled Al-Qaida. And where, again, are Al-Qaidans fighting on the same side as the USA? Would that not be a violation, a very fundamental(ist) violation, of their franchise agreement?
And you do not have to descend very far into pundit.ugh or the comments to any mainstream news story regarding the Middle East to discover the intensity of the full conviction about the Evil Fast-Spreading Extent of Al-Qaidism and its implacable, monolithic intent to DESTROY THE FREEDOM'N'LIBERTY (tm) WE HOLD SO DEAR.
That's why the West, or the Kleptocratic parts thereof, are so closely rationing the little bits of FREEDOM'N'LIBERTY (tm) that are parceled out in piecemeal parsimony to us Ordinary Citizens. Keeping both locked up is the best way to ensure their security...
Gee, are they pushing for some phony "coalition" to go do anything like what the neocons promised, as in steal the Iraqi oil to pay for the invasion and "regime change" that was fer shur going to be met with Iraqis strewing rose petals in the conqueror's path?
What your champion, Bush/Cheney/Wolfowitzetal, did was hegemonic Imperial unilateralism. Seems to me people, ordinary people, maybe everywhere, are kind of waking up to how they are being led by their vulnerable limbic systems down a path that sure looks like it leads off a cliff...
One of your "things" you are equivalentizing sure looks darn little like the "other."
I like Ike, too -- He's the one that reminded us, WARNED us even, against the now manifest triumphalism of the vertically and horizontally integrated, supra-national, eat-a-quarter-of-the-world's-wealth Military-Industrialists. Where devices, and their coteries of enthusiasts and profit-takers, devices that are ever more lethal and complex and interoperable and Jesus H. Christ expensive, in an endless tail-chase of threat and counter-threat, drive not only tactics, but now strategy and doctrine and "policy."
And that brings "security" and "stability" exactly HOW, again? Other than to the career paths of the military industrial door-revolvers and the heavy-attack "think tankers" and the automatic appropriation emitters amongst the Congressional hacks and flacks, etc.?
Oh, of course -- neither "security" or "stability" are any part of the aim of the Game, at all, now are they?
Hey, man, if you squint even just a little bit, they're all the same, the dirty central-planning socialist Leftie Commie terrorists... No need for nice distinctions, just put all of 'em up and shoot em. Right?
And Red, which used to be a Very Bad Color until what, 10 years ago, is now the proud banner hue of all Right-thinking, formerly "BetterDeadThanRedders." Go figure...
And on another, minor-key note, there's the continuing if fading interest in how we treat our own "troops:" http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/%3F-older-posts-did-oakland-police-intentionally-shoot-marine-vet-scott-olsen-head Interesting comments in most of the stories reporting this incident -- lots of "patriots" opining that "they" should have killed Scott Olsen, and all the DFHs dirtying up the streets, outright. Bearing in mind that Mr. Olsen, and I and all the other GIs who signed up, take this little oath -- some of us deadly seriously:
I, (NAME), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.
Sure seems to be getting harder to figure out who the "enemies, foreign and domestic" really are... though if you follow the money, you can't go far wrong...
So, is "Al-Quaida" the new boogeyman term to be "deployed" by persons of a certain mindset to activate the national limbic system and justify a "war" that is largely a huge, international, post-national commercial enterprise? How does this nation "wage a war," Constitutionally or even realistically speaking, against a boogeyman, even one raised up by the very tactics and strategies that just HAVE to be followed under the Ruling Doctrine? Scanning the 'net, it sure is hard to get a clear and honest view of the whole panoply of resistant or "insurgent" or self-defending humans reduced by Our Leaders to that convenient reification-personification-hypostatisation simplisticatified moniker, that Evil Incarnate Against Us "thing" that is the convenient if maybe totally dishonest excuse for so much "policy," and so many "oopsie" and "Ooooooh, Kewl!" deaths, and trillions of dollars in wasted wealth transfer. In the Joystick War... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bgX9J_ZBC0&feature=related
How about a scholarly, dispassionate explication on whether there really is a supra-national, planetary, shadowy, evil Franchise Operation that can honestly be called "Al-Quaida," or even "Al Fresco?"
I recall a big old poster from the '70s -- that Apollo image, the "Behold the blue planet, steeped in its dreams" fame. With G_d's hand, from Michelangelo's Sistine masterpiece, coming in from the right, and a G_d-text-balloon with the following Word: "Humans, I'm giving you fifteen minutes to vacate! I've found a much better tenant."
And another one, with G_d's Sistine hand redrawn into that universal flick-the-fly-off-the-table gesture of middle finger sprung in a tight arc, restrained by the pad of the thumb as the sear and trigger, the "fly" being that beautiful blue planet...
And the fracking, and mining, and burning, and chopping, and trips to the mall, and "smart weapon" launches, go on and on and on...
As with War, Imperial Style, we do all that stuff Just Because We Can... What was Stalin's question to his staff about messing with the Pope? Same response to words about our descendants: "How many divisions does Posterity have?"
Does anyone believe, any more, that there's a RuleofLaw that some Congressional committee would actually start in motion by putting the Kochs in any kind of real jeopardy? Maybe some expressions of "grave concern," a little billet doux to the Justice Department, and guess what comes next?
It's only the rag called the "Guardian," but it sure seems like a laydown, [challengable only by obfuscatorialists repeating a Big Lie, Ad Anuseam (typo, but I like it in context),] that Israeli military forces, with "covert" US help and in cooperation with other apartheid "states," or the war-loving fractions thereof, has a preeeeetty beeeg and growing set of deployed Nukular Weapons, which, mirable dictu, the Loonie Toons on "their side" are (or, pace Bill, at least pretty clearly WERE) happy to spread around. To the "Right" people, of course. And what was the Big Experienced Player Plan behind that (among all the other) destabilizing, life-threatening Great Gamery Megaplans? Must have been a real Doozy...
I wonder if "Listen Carefully, Children, And Only Color Inside The Lines" Bill has some Experience that leads him to a conclusion or certitude or even opinion, one way or the other, regarding the existence and maybe even targeting of those nukes. I mean, it's not like the Israeli spy apparatus has not acquired all the latest in Really Smart US Military Contingency Planning Documents covering the Area of Operation that includes their space, and probably the rest of Our Most Secret Stuff too. Jonathan Pollard? And who were the other guys and gals? Do you suppose OUR Experienced Players have the same degree of skill in peeping into the war planning of the IDF? Or do Our Big Brains just go with the assumption that "we're on the same side...?" (Probably not, but you never know with all the Rapturists in the upper ranks.)
Last I checked, there's still no predicting the future positions of even a dozen identical billiards balls interacting via relatively simple collisions. When the numbers of interactions, collisions, frictions, inertias and other relationships get as big as they are today, any condescension and pretense to High Knowledge is hubris in the extreme. Even Malaysia and Algeria are exceptional special cases, compared to the Consumer Combustion Culture that blankets the rest of the planet.
Ah, the voice of sweet reasonable didacticism... Good thing the teacher is not in the room with us, with a long ruler to correct our every excursion from the precise text of the assigned narrative...
And why do I have little hope for our species? Gee, could it have something to do with the nature of our behaviors, displayed small and large, even in "rational" places like this (let alone the comments and text over at Red States and other vigorously partisan webspaces, or even below every Youtube video or every article in Yahoo!space or The Economist or the NYT or you name it)? Or how about them Egyptian soccer fans, hey? Or GIs killing Afghan non-combattants out of boredom, or all those errant Hellfire strikes. Violence is the nature of the beast, and putting a nice condescending pseudo-academic pseudo-diplomatic polish on it hardly conceals the nature of the corroded base metal underneath it all...
Bill, got an issue with the statement that the US and Israel cannot "win" in any land-war-in-Asia spasm involving Iran as the locus belligerentiae? And that there's no way in hell, short of using nukes and other unconventional weapons, or a lot more than 20 to 1 "assets" and likely national US bankruptcy, to "subdue" all those Persians? Or are we just straining after gnats and a spurious definitional perfection in the Great Gamespace as to what the War Department documents say?
Don't know your personal politics or preferences when it comes to lighting the fuse on another Imperial adventure (MY definition, of course,) but if you favor "engagement" of the martial sort with Iran, maybe you could lay out, in layman's terms of course, what might be the US "national interests" involved, and a statement an achievable set of goals for our squirming Generals to apply their Networked Complex Battlespace Competencies to?
And Nixon-China was not also the start of a "one-off" that's keeping the Experienced Players well stocked with lots of opportunities to screw up again? And Iran-Hillaryorwhoever would not also be a "one-off" like China-Nixon and Ho Chi Minh-Johnson, with long-view-subtle on one side and klutz'n'hubris on the other once again? (Looks to me like China, like Vietnam, came out with the long, non-poopy end of the stick, on the Great Game Board...)
They're all "one-off," all subject to chaotic fractal looniness and mischance, driven by myths and huge military establishments banging their be-ribboned chests together, and greedy "interests," all hostage to ego and macho and greed. Elephants trampling the corn fields, and us mice and rabbits, who plant and harvest and see a fourth or more of all we create going to fund Planet Fortress, trying to keep ourselves and our little warrens and offspring from being crushed...
Our DC "leaders" likely remember the last time "we" tried secret, high-level "negotiations" with elements of the Iranian polity. I believe the headline for that activity was "Iran-Contra," complete with delivery of Bibles and Hawk missiles and lots of wealth transfer and once again proof that the Experienced players really have a hard time finding their backsides with both hands. Having once sat on the fire ant hill, yet again.
And remind me how well "we" did in those "negotiations" ol' Henry "Power is the ultimate Aphrodisiac" Kissinger engaged in with Le Duc Tho, over there in Gay Paree? I guess now that Walmart is loaded up with nice shirts and slacks made by Commies in Vietnam, and "our" navy is doing joint maneuvers with the navy that was falsely claimed to have attacked "our" ships in the Gulf of Tonkin, "we" are on the upside, right? After $4 trillion and counting to do THAT stupid, feckless, uncontrolled War thing? To keep the Commies from taking over the Boardwalk at Huntington Beach?
Not picking on you, Charley -- just wondering if there is any way out, at least given "our" rulership, other than the whole bomb-invade-absorb the asymmetric damage-strip-the-wealth-out-of-our-economy thing. "We" seem to be kind of like the Cave Troll in that scene in "The Fellowship of the Rings:" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vi5pdd7xHNI
I wonder how many of my fellow former servicemen with time in a "war zone" are experiencing the other kinds of nightmares, the personal ones, that the runup to and denouement-by-inevitable-"withdrawal"-once-again-without-honor-or-"victory," that every one of the Imperial Assininities of the last five decades has brought so many of us.
Of course, when there's raw red meat being waved in front of the War Beast, the few people still trying to hang on to the leash are also losing their grips. Our Leviathan is actually a Juggernaut, shuddering downhill toward a cliff -- too bad so few have any interest in, or realistic and not Flag-obscured idea of, the scale and inevitable fate of that enormous, clumsy, inertial complexity of the whole bureaucratized, deceptive, military-industrial-commercial-academic-political apparatus. That Behemoth, made up of hundreds of millions of humans, whose "wants" all congregate and conspire to keep all of us skating ever closer to the ragged edge of disaster.
I wonder: Do the Experienced Players think, believe, and sleep on both ears thanks to, the comforting notion that they have this all Under Control? Several of them apparently find what's posted here sufficiently of concern to inject little toxic prions of their own selection or manufacture into the discourse. We are supposed to argue, by their lights, about whether, short term, the price of Iranian oil will go up or down, what "sanctions" might or might not do to achieve unspecified "results" with respect to those Uppity Iranians (forget about the nature of humans, the wisdom of Sun Tzu, and the most effective way to encourage actual asymmetric "terror" retaliations in the Homelands of America and Europe, which would be only the working out of their self-fulfilling "doctrine,") and whether the cost to the American society will be $9 trillion+ or "only" $3 trillion (plus ever tighter State Security thumbscrews,) and how many dead and wounded, on all "sides," does it take to make a Baker's dozen.
May Freddie Kruger visit, terminally, all of those war wimps and chicken hawks and war profiteers and cheerleading go-alongs and oil speculators, et Karma cetera, in THEIR dreams...
Oh, of course "oil, the more-or-less-fungible commodity" is a lot more complicated than a zero-sum game and a little chart, no matter how evocative. I really do wonder what-all would happen to pricing, and "international stability" (sic) in the various corners of that Bazaar, if the Coalition of the "Democratic" Zombies of the West (sic) did get their corporate owners to not buy Iranian petroleum. Directly. For a while.
As to what constitutes an act of war, or maybe casus desperare, maybe, with all the profitable, oversold weapons from all the post-national manufacturers via all the pseudo-nationalisitic military-political mashups that are setting out there on hair triggers and trip-wires, and all that huge, clumsy, inflexible apparatus of power projection overhanging all, who knows whether there's an Archduke riding on down to an assassination? For us movie buffs, we can remember that WOPR found that the only way to win was not to play the game. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOPR
Of course, that all depends on how you define "victory." Raytheon got a nice contract to re-fill all the holes in the "US" cruise missile inventory after all those often errant past-shelf-date units got launched into Libya... "I love the smell of napalm, and megabucks, in the morning... it smells like VICTORY."
And it will be interesting to see what today's "troops" do when "deployed" to activate the ol' Operation Garden Plot contingency plan, and ordered to shoot into the crowds of Their Fellow Americans doing mass disruption. Yeah, "it's just a contingency plan, and our leaders would be remiss if they didn't have it in place." "It's just some CT silliness."
And read it with Sections 1030-1032 of the National Defense Authorization Act. Here's the government lawyers' take on what the detention powers the NDAA that Obama signed "with misgivings" consist of:
Lest the rest of us forget, the principal sin in the Israeli theocratic dogma is to be taken for a "freier." Need an explanation of what that wonderfully illustrative bit of non-approved Yiddish means?
Isn't it fascinating how the clench-jawed, glowering Players on all sides do such a wonderful job of projection? And of mimesis, that amazing capacity to become what they think and hope their Enemy is? Because they just know that were they sitting in the Other's chair, that's just exactly what THEY would be thinking and doing? So they have to get there FIRST, with MORE?
What's the endpoint of the circle? Nuclear Winter, to counteract Global Warming?
Ken, thanks for that link. The Asia Times article on how the Experienced Players are playing out the latest current most pressing scariest has-to-be-dealt-with Threat Scenario has all the elements of what is dead-end wrong with humans-with-guns-and-greed.
I'm just a fantasy-chasing aspirationalist. But I'll take that approach to my grandchildren's future over the moral and intellectual bankruptcy so artfully displayed in the piece you link. "Our" dumbshit enormous clumsy military-political-industrial apparatus once again is selling "us" on the notion that belatedly, after some smartass general whups up on "our" huge, powerful, grotesquely complicated and inertial War Machine in some $250 million World's Biggest War Games Ever, by simply doing what the early mammals did to the dinosaurs (eating their eggs and young) with simple tactics and techonology that is straight out of Sun Tzu, that "we" have to spend trillions more to "field," after the whole profitable runup through the Procurement Process, More and Better Machines to Counter Those Threats that "our" Doctrine du Jour lets us perceive.
Doesn't anyone want to take a stab at getting off the Threat Perception and Klutzy Reaction Treadmill, and maybe figure out how to deal with our fellow humans on a different plane? Where there's a fundamental reality that gets buried in the "success" of Conventional Thinking as proacticed and promoted by the Experienced Players and all the skulch that feeds off the world's wealth that's dumped into the Great Game of Be Afraid and Give Us Infinite Money To Make And Counter Infinite Threats? That place and way of thinking that recognizes that really, actually, there's enough of everything that matters to go all the way around the table, if only we can keep the Pigs in Suits and Uniforms from eating everything off the plate except for one lone cookie that they have tricked the rest of us into focusing on and fighting over and forgetting that they've scarfed up all the rest?
Yeah, I know, that's all just a fantasy. Though is it just me, or does it seem like maybe people who have been suffering the worst of the kleptocratic militarized depredations are maybe saying "NO MAS!" or the Arabic equivalent, maybe "لا أكثر"?
Of course I was pretty sure you could not resist a nice straight line like that, could you?
Thank you for your service -- in reminding all that there are people who "run things," those Experienced Players, who keep the Great Spheres of Influence puffed up and in motion, grinding down the ordinary folks in pursuit of what, again? "Democracyn'freedom tm?" A global market for weapons? A safe place for deposed kleptocrat-dictators to retire to, with their stolen Wealth of Nations? Ensuring that, at whatever cost, The Oil Must Flow? A race-to-the-bottom Flat Earth, where upward wealth transfer and untrammeled selfishness is the ruling scheme?
I've got no idea how you spent your career, or what church you go to, or whether you are now paid, like a lot of former Insters, for "security advice" of one sort or another, but I will claim a little knowledge about what's right and what's wrong for ordinary people like myself and family, where their lives are impacted by the Great Game and other geopolitical chicanery.
So be smug about "expertise." There were a lot of people who were "expert" in alchemy, back in the day, and in rooting out "heresy" via Inquisition, too -- still a lot of the latter around, especially the ones who know all about torture and terror. http://www.tlaxcala.es/pp.asp?reference=5984&lg=en The kind of thinking that seems displayed in your posts here, a small sample to be sure, that unfortunately does not seem to be about stability and sustainability, or even survival. But then folks of the kleptocratic persuasion know that their play is to maximize their personal pleasure and gain, grabbing wealth and influence that insulates them from any consequences for horrific acts, and setting themselves up for nice safe comfortable old age and a quiet, painless passing.
But not to worry, of course -- the Experts are lined up on the Winning Side...
"Israel"? What does that signify, again? The durability and extent of the fallacy of reification/hypostatization?
From what I read in Ha'aretz and stuff, it sure looks like there are a lot of people, likely even a majority, among the the 7.6-odd million Israelis who are unhappy with their reactionary rulers sending them down the rabbit hole of history. But the really tuned-in geopolitical players, of course, apparently are limited to thinking (however nuanced and subtle the backgrounding might be) in terms only of dealing with, through, and by militarized and monomaniacal elites, who in the argot of the trade become "the US" and "Israel" and "Afghanistan," et silly cetera. (And it's not like many "Isreali" rulers don't play the other Great Game, massive corruption and extra-legal shenanigans at the expense of the ordinary folks, maybe not to the scale of a Yasser Arafat but right up there... much like many "US" rulers also do. With a casual, insouciant "Apres moi, le deluge.")
The mostly guys who play those Games do everything they can, consciously or not, to front-load all the "processes" with self-fulfilling expectations that favor the continuation of their version of How Things Are Or At Least How They Want Them To Be. Usually things that are personally profitable and satisfying for them, and for their peers on all sides claiming to act for their respective collectives.
The hope I have, and maybe some others too, is that ordinary people, like the maybe a million or more who went to the streets in "Israel" not so long ago, and the Occupy folks in Oakland who are getting gassed and clubbed and dragnetted out of "kettles" in what sure looks like another police-state kind of action as I write, complete with fraudulent reporting, and the people in Syria who are getting serious about something more than "regime change," and so forth, sense that maybe they are not just little cells in a self-destructive battery, but have some collective power that can demand and work toward a survivable and sustainable future.
The hard part is building expectations and institutions that can resist the implacable efforts of those who want to repeat the Imperial impulse (or just manipulate the tribal impulses we are a long way from evolving past,) for personal power and profit...)
But then I'm just a dilettante observer, not an Experienced Player...
They read (or have their "people" read to them) polls and briefing papers and debate preps, and they absorb videos, all prepared by the worst kinds of interest-holders.
Boooks? They don' need no steenkeeng boooks, especially boooks by humans interested in decency and fairness and honesty and what it takes to counter the blackest of human impulses driving the Grand Titanic of "policy," books and other illuminations that bring light, rather than more darkness and heat straight from the Narrative of Destruction. It's how they pretend to "lead," by charging to the front of the stampede and bellowing "Follow ME! There's clear sailing ahead!"
The function of the captain is to navigate the vessel on a course that gets ship and passengers safely from here to there. Beware following, in idiot bliss at nominal "success," the many Dotted Lines that criss-cross the planet...
Only two comments on this moving subject? The moving finger, having written, moves on...
Too bad there's no analogue of "differential diagnosis" in geopolitics, where way too much of the thinking and posturing and pontificating seem most like how old Procrustes used to treat the people HE robbed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes
"Jeffersonian democracy?" "Madisonian democracy?" Armed revolutionaries in the streets as a fourth perpetual branch of the Model of Government according to Western lights? None of the above models, forms, "ideals?"
One might hope that something might happen here, other than laying down the "frames" into which various persuaders want to force what's happening, which might be something else altogether than what's allowed in the preconceived comfort food and shibboleths of one band or another, by hacking off any bits that stick out, or stretching things to fit (or stuffing conveniently shaped preconceptions into any gaps at the corners and edges, and doing a little or a lot of policy-wonk Photoshopping on the rest to make it "fit the model.")
Maybe what's happening out of Tahrir Square is an aspirational revulsion for being forced onto a dead-end path to militarized parasitic kleptocracy, and a demand for what might be called "normalcy." I don't know, I'm sure, but the Pundits of Predestination sure as hell don't know. And it's too bad they are on stage as "opinion leaders," when what's needed is a little more clarity and honesty and a lot more transparency. Some large majority of nearly 7 billion humans pretty much wants to just live and let live, get along, make a decent life. as long as their tribal buttons aren't covertly pushed and their demands are not manufactured into intolerable and unsustainable "wantsandgottahaves." How you rein in the cancerous minority, I don't know -- maybe ask an Egyptian, or a "Syrian dissident," or an Occupier?
It's a living process, "normalcy," but it needs a spiritual-DNA framework if it's going to grow with any vigor and direction. Especially given the load of toxins that's already in the body, and those guys who are always ready to rack or amputate anyone who doesn't "fit."
I read the "Nine Dot" wiki article, and a few of the few other articles googled up under the main headings. It sure seems like the "well-established, well-known fact" might best be characterized as the same kind of broad, even more ambiguous claim of hegemony that I referred to the US geopoliticians making toward the whole world.
Even the wiki article makes it pretty clear that no one seems to know what a set of dashed on a map first put out by Chiang Kai-Shek's notably democratic Kuomintang in 1947 or thereabouts might actually mean or portend. The "security" reflex is of course to assume this is all about "taking over," and to throw a few hundred billion in new hair-trigger warfighting resources into the area. On the assumption that Chinese generals and leaders are just as arrogant and grasping, if maybe, as heirs to Sun Tzu, more subtle and crafty than our own. All of them contributing their little bit to the global game of Risk!, at a rather large cost to the whole planet.
So let's all do like some of the "experts" in the Game have done, and look around for any evidence that "they" are trying to encroach on "our" claims of hegemony. Eleven-dot? Nine-dot? Claims of sovereignty or economic interest, or just certain kinds of humans doing what they do, "perceiving threats" or imagining threats, or issuing dire warnings about dark plots they just know are hatching over the horizon? What, other than "good reasons" to fill the Area of Operation that includes the South China Sea with US "assets," is the substance of that set of dashes on a map? Other than to the suspicions and aspirations of people like the Committee on the Present Danger, which is all about making sure the US does first, fastest and biggest what the Committee is just sure that "terrorists" and now ChiComs are up to? How does bankrupting our economy and culture, fiscally and morally, to "protect the US sphere of influence," get the most of us anywhere good?
First, the Rooskies were gonna try to take us over, and then the Chinese... Gotta be ready. And if that means huge costs to set up the conditions that result in a global conflict, and then the ignition of that conflict, well hey, it was all done with the best patriotic intentions. No profit motive or ego-stoking at all.
A cop stops a guy walking around downtown L.A. with an elephant gun on his shoulder. "What the heck do you think you are doing with that big rifle?" "Keeping the wild elephants away," says the guy. Cop says "There's no wild elephants within 10,000 miles of here, bub!" Says the guy with the big gun, with a smug little smile, "See? It works! Now let me go on about my business."
Not to worry, though -- you guys have the momentum, and all the big guns, and your hands deep in the public pocketbook.
Wow, a careful parsing of "the record" can be made to show a dotted line on some maps (got a link, or is that "secret?",) and the kind of "analysis" of a few "words of diplomacy" that is of the order that used to be applied to analysis of apparatchikia, collected or overheard or simply made up, with respect to the former Soviet Union under the deep, mysterious, faintly fearful heading "Sovietology," in all the skulduggery that led to the militarization and imperialization of America The Beautiful?
"Core interest:" how very "threatening." And what do the Intelligence Estimates make of that? Something that can be best addressed by the other kind of thinking that leads to little snippets like this?
American Navy officers have a line they repeat passionately and often: A nuclear-powered aircraft carrier is an imposing and versatile manifestation of the United States’ power. A ship like the Stennis, they say, which was sending aircraft on missions over Iraq one day and over Afghanistan 36 hours later, allows Washington to project influence, unrestricted by borders or basing rights.
"Influence." Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran. Or wherever. Whenever. Whatever.
Whatever anyone thinks of air power, without munitions and the people who know them, she said, “this ship would just be a floating airport.”
There was something to this. At the end of the long chain of events that puts a carrier near a coastline and Navy strike fighters within range of a ground target, beyond the release point where the aircraft lets go of its ordnance, the final act lies with each missile or bomb descending through the air — which depends on the sailors who assembled it here.
Now the trick is to sell the notion that the Chinese military and civilian rulers are seeking some kind of presence and parity with the US Networked Battlespace, right? Where are the US "core interests?"
The scary part is that people who think this way end up, by preference and application and tendentiousness and persistence, driving the gross behaviors of nations. "Everybody who knows anything, knows that what you say is the reality, and any dissenting or questioning voice is just unsophisticated" is still an unsupported and, looking to species survival rather than short-term hegemony, insupportable assertion.
By the way, one meaning of "sophisticated" is "unduly refined," another is "pretentiously or superficially wise," and in older times (and in a faint, slightly distasteful echo, in the more recent usages) it meant "spoiled or debased," as in "the vintner sophisticated his wine with sugar of lead to make it seem sweeter."
Is that an unsupported assertion, on a really breathtaking scale, straight out of the dead end that is the Great Game of Risk!?
China claims the entire South China Sea? Which part of "China?"
And with 11 carrier groups, and all the SLBMs and ICBMs and B-2 and F-Whatever-deliverable nukes, and Littoral Warfighting Capacity, and soon Scramjets able to hit and "Hellfire" the heck out of tall buildings half way around the world, and over 500 "US bases," and spending nearly half of all the real wealth in the world that gets put into that Advanced Interoperable Networked Battlespace thing, Bill's old buddies in the Great Game are now about "pivoting toward Asia" as a way of providing a "balancing force in the region"? Got nothing to do with neocon wet dreams of perpetual hegemony? Or the apparently unstoppable growing momentum of the grand militarization of everything?
How does "US behavior" stack up against that comfortable fiction, raised pretty much only as a curtain of convenient concealment or flag of convenience when it suits some geopolitical jerkery, called "international law?"
But of course with Ron Paul and his apparent commitment to "reducing defense spending," you also get another whole kettle of rotten social and political and economic fish...
And given the realities of the DC power structure and the size of the MIC Thing, and the fact that Congress, our bought-and-paid-for MIC-AIPAC-etc. monkey house, disposes of our hard-earned money as THEY see fit, just what do the Paulists contend their Hero is going to be able to do to even match the currently maybe possible "slight reduction in the rate of growth" of the Security State and the Grand Army of the Former Republic?
A simple illustration of why nothing of substance is going to change, short of a smaller or larger world conflagration touched off by any one of the idiot hair trigger tripwires that are strung all over, across every major passage and "choke point" and around the necks of all the average schmucks who end up paying for their own mass detonation and/or cremation, thinking they have been buying "security" with all those trillions...
Glad the the Old Guard is happy to tell us what the Occupy phenomenon is all about. Complete with the comfortably persuasive, unsupported assertion that "many of them (probably a majority)" are all about "dismantling capitalism."
Got a cite, from something other than Wiki or Red States or Cato, to support that notion, since that's not what I get from folks who largely seem to want a little economic fairness imposed on what many (probably even most) understand is a basic and sensible (when not torqued by the Gordon Gekko crowd) fundamental way of "doing business?"
And as a lapsed attorney, I also have to ask what kind of support there might be for the assertion that the increasingly "reactionary" courts, increasingly packed by a long string of "conservative" legislatures and executives, slicing edges off the bright-line, four-corners, plain-meaning parts of the Constitution that have to do with the First and Fourth and Fifth Amendments, have done such a great job of protecting the rest of us from "religious zealots?"
The sky may not be falling for some of us, but gee, what are all those heavy objects crashing to the ground here, there and everywhere?
Maybe be a little concerned, if you have some depth of knowledge about the nature of the people leading the charge (RedHeads as well as what many assume about "Islamists," based on the selling points shilled out by our own "conservatives"), and what has any likelihood of coming to pass on the world stage where the survival of the species is maybe at stake, and how narrowly drawn "national interests" (obscuring a pretty clear thrust for impossible hegemony) "inform" the flow of preference and perception about people we hate and fear maybe just because we are wired to need an "enemy," and whether the "Islamists" pose anything of the same order of danger to decency and survival as the Armageddonists and would-be perpetual Kleptocrats in our own polity, who feed on racism and fear.
And whether there, as here, the people you are "concerned about" have been using the tools of politics to trick the many into legitimizing the scams of people like Gingrich and the Kochs by "voting" for them, or whether (among other possibilities) the voting people in Egypt maybe see some hope that there will be aspirational changes in the direction of people being able to live their lives free of fear of State Security and with half a chance of making a sustainable, survivable living in something other than wage slavery.
And no, I don't pretend to any such knowledge, just a dilettante's observations on what seem to me to be common elements of human behavior and my own fear that grim, cynical, hypocritical, violent people will control the future my grandchildren will have to inhabit. I just hate being manipulated, and seeing others being manipulated, by folks like that.
"the rank and file southern does love their country"
"Their" country. Exactly. Not "ours." Not "this." And think of all the people, their fellow citizens, that Stars&Bars rank and file are convinced are not only not part of their country, but actively hate it and hope for its destruction. I mean, other than by Armageddon/Rapture, which is OK.
"and the ‘influences’ Romney would bring into the Oval office many would rather have stay in a foreign nation and not in Washington D.C."
Dare one ask what that might mean? Maybe that there's a sinister link between the sinister LDS structure (I tend to agree on that one) and "sinister Islamists?" Or "sinister AIPAC?" Or what?
Given all that, is there a snowball's chance in hell that the City on the Hill won't implode into a comfortable Old South feudalism, or some other dystopian-for-the-most-of-us form?
My friend the Fundamentalist Christian is convinced, on his reading of Revelation and words from some pastor or other, that Newt Gingrich is the Anti-Christ. Does that mean he's NOT going to vote for that creature if he gets the chance, or oppose his candidacy? Hardly.
Seems his belief structure, that he is so busily, along with a pretty small minority of fellow-travelers, trying to impose on all the rest of us, is all happy that the Slimy Amphibian, whose cousin the Salamander can slither through fire unharmed, may very well be the next Most Powerful Individual On Earth.
Newt in the Oval Office, the most cynical and Machiavellian despoilers of language and comity, will be one giant step closer to the Armageddon the "Christian" so earnestly yearns for, when all that bad stuff starts to happen at a much higher rate, and he can stand outside all day long with the assurance from his reading of his version of the Bible (there being several hundred versions of the Absolute Received Word of the Living God over which True Christians conduct violent but covert sectarian warfare) that the Living God (who is not a Loving God) will reach down and Rapture him up to someplace far, far better just before the crap really hits the fan.
On a smaller scale, Wall Streeters appear to be cashing out and moving out (of the US) in response to the downsizing that's hitting their own "industry," even though there's about zero fear of prosecution or retribution for all the crap they pulled. No need even for repentance; more than enough money to buy all the indulgences, the never-go-to-jail-free cards, that are the hallmark of kleptocracy here, there and in Egypt too.
And we are supposed to worry about the Muslim Brotherhood exactly why, again?
Maybe a slightly different question can be asked, purely rhetorically of course: "What is the matter with US?" as in "us humans, the apparently too-smart-to-survive species?"
Sir, it seems to me that there is just too much "interest" in combustion-based consumption to allow much hope that there can be a significant change in the energy generation part of our infestation of the planet. It would be nice to be wrong about that...
Out on the oceans, where big flag-of-convenience ships with tiny (more profitable) and often marginally competent crews, swoosh along with huge, minimally steerable momentum and inertia, and practically no brakes, and with GPS-driven autopilots at the helm, there are "laws" about responsibilities when vessels meet, with a danger of collision and loss. Everyone is fundamentally supposed to stay out of everyone else's way, and there are positional "rules" that say who is the "stand on" vessel and who is the "give way' vessel.
But at the bottom of all that, as with "international law," the real rule is more simply "Tonnage!" Big ships may play clumsy games of "Chicken," reducing their watchfulness and focusing simply on minimizing fuel use and transit time, and the fact that it's still a big ocean spares a lot of idiot captains from having to explain a big oil spill or how they hit a reef because somebody wanted a better view of the village lights ashore. Little boats are best advised, whatever the "rules" say, to keep out of the way of the Juggernauts.
I guess the rule in the parallel universe of the Great Game is less Tonnage! than Megatonnage!
The cool thing about the nastiest players in the Great Game is that they may do a strategic step sideways, or even slightly backward, from the ragged edge they play along, looking for power and profit. But you can just bet that the motion is just a feint, calculated to reduce an immediate pressure or friction, but not representing any fundamental change in the choreography of their dance-and-advance.
How are those settlements coming along, Ehud and Yahoo? And I hear that your "defence industry" is having another banner year, peddling the devices of destabilization and destruction all over the world. Much like the one nominally headquartered in America, peddling "coolness" and the promise of Interoperable Battlespace Domination and fear in equal measures to would-be hegemons all over the planet.
It's what happens when the individual personal pursuit of power and wealth intersects with the flow that is our species. Individuals, many of them, know that their life spans are limited, that they can live large as predators and parasites without much fear of personal consequences or retribution, and that what happens after they die in comfort and ease means essentially nothing to them -- with the exception that there will be a few generations that recall their names or their parties with fear and disgust and maybe a little awe.
Without some enormous spiritual change, without some sudden new set of notions of stability and comity, without a different organizing principle that trends toward homeostasis rather than an atavistic yearning for the End Times, gee, I wonder what the End Game of the Great Game will look like?
You got the people who think they are the chess players, and then you got the people who hold the strings attached to the limbs of the people who think they are the chess players, and then you got the people who own the stuff that the people who think they control the players and move the pieces sit on and eat and breathe and drink, and who prosper only so long as the chess players have enough pawns and rooks to continue the game, since those mostly-oblivious "pieces" create the real wealth that it all depends on, and provide the stuff of soft targets and collateral damage, with all the emotion that flows from those elements, that can be used to perpetuate the whole cycle.
It is not, as you say, a system that is subject to analysis and prediction. It ain't the special case, with all its constraints and chaos-driven, quantum-effected and -affected, and friction-induced variability, of even Newton's fascinating Cradle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_cradle
It's a tribute to the bits of stability and decency that still inhere in human nature that it hasn't gone to the "Nuclear Winter Will End Global Warming!" stage.
But there's lots of opportunity in the playing, for personal "enrichment" and aggrandizement, especially for the worst and most manipulative and least conscience-bound of the damn cynics who keep adding destructive energy to the machinery.
Speaking of false contrasts, false equivalences and distractions -- could it be that the people in Tahrir Square have something in common with the people in the Park? And of course Bill conveniently ignores the treatment accorded to so many of the folks who are protesting a structure of kleptocracy that may not shoot them dead, but has no qualms about pepper spray in the face of unresisting, witnessing, sitting folks who hope for half a chance at a better life, or how about shooting a GI who "served his country" in the head with a projectile of some sort? One wonders what has NOT been reported about what has been done to people trying to exercise their increasingly hedged and constrained 'rights,' seeking apparently some redress in a polity that is all about concentrating wealth and power.
The test, if I remember my Constitutional Law classes and Civics and such, is not whether your fellow Americans have been "have been absolutely muzzeled from any political speech in the U.S.; and who have been denied any legitimate expression upon fear of death." The text itself reads, in the first instance,
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
And with few exceptions over the last couple of centuries, the notion has been pretty consistent and clear, and it applies to the state and local jurisdictions that are defining tiny "Free Speech Zones" and training cops in Imperial Trooper crowd control. But then that's pretty clear, of course.
Can't hardly wait to see how Tampa and Governor Sick Rott down here in FL "handle" "free speech" and "assembly to petition the government..."
Maybe the same ones not taken by Mohammed Reza Palavi? Oh, that was different. And Notagainistan is not Vietnam. Except maybe in certain "liberal" broad outlines...
Oh, they've noticed the OWSers all right -- and gee, want to bet that there are contingency plans, off the shelf and on the ground, to keep the disease of relatively untrammeled universal rights, in a matrix that just STINKs of the awful old Golden Rule, bringing in the dangerous notion that there are duties and responsibilities and limits that go along with both liberty and power, from spreading to too much of the docile populace? Maybe Mittsy will hold the stakes...
And for any Pursuer Of Absolute Truth who demands incontrovertible proof of such stuff, well, I guess that you will just have to resort to a search on the 'net. Since so far it's still up and running. Or just sit back and wait.
Wait! Wait! Even better, since the risk of harm to the many is so enormous, and the historical and present proofs of the existence of and the tendency toward repressive dictatorial kleptocracy are so compellingly massive, maybe it would be appropriate to assign the burden of proof to the perpetual-professionial-skeptics-on-the-side-of-the-Powers-That-Be, to prove that there's nothing like that in the works!
The truly cynical might also add to that committee "various players in the State Security apparatus," looking for legal cover (that mythical "ruleoflawthingthatPROTECTSus," again) for the legitimization and working out of their impulses to dominate and control and repress.
While hyperlinking is still possible, here's an entry point to formulate an answer to Mr. Bill's wide-eyed-innocent, pseudo-Socratic, voice-of-sweet-reason questions: http://whatblag.com/2012/01/18/whats-wrong-with-sopa/
Wrong tool for a job that may not even make economic sense to do, except, as usual, for a to-this-point privileged few. And as with the NDAA, what a surprise that the taint of suspicion of the possibility of "piracy" (near kin to "terrorism," I guess) would be enough to grant the "legal authority" under archly worded language to "take down" the defined or interpreted malefactors...
I got another question: If the people who want to squelch the difficult-to-control 'net, and related communications tech, as a means to squelch aspirational behaviors award themselves the "legal authority" to do so, is the budding world brain robust enough to circumvent those efforts to strangle the kinds of traffic that enlarge people's understanding of how badly they are being had by the Few?
Hint to the Overlords: If you want to maintain your rule, better get crackin', since the tech you have summoned like a genii to help you Network your freakin' Battlespace might, as in so many myths and fables and fairy tales, turn out to be a Golem that's grown too big for you to reach its forehead and erase the summoning spell... But then I'm sure you know that, and have people working on it...
And while we are remembering acronymic reasons to wonder yet again how quickly "freedom" gets the axe, let's remember (among others) FISA and the recent Obama "I really don't like this legislation I asked for, but trust me, I won't abuse the power I just grabbed" NDAA provisions (Sections 1031 and 1032 being the most egregious,) and that "whatthehelldidhejustsay?" performance, standing in front of the Sacred Constitution and describing how the Three Branches are going to salt the roots of the Liberty Tree by creating a "legitimate legal structure" that is OUTSIDE the scope of the Constitution because, well, "al Quaeda has declared WAR on us, and all's fair in love and war, my fellow Americans!"
Most of us are dumb enough to believe in a magical Justice Department that only goes after "lawbreakers" and is constrained by that other magical construct that Obama yakked about, the "rule of law." Sorry, folks -- that belief in, that need to have, a structure of laws and limited powers is being used by cynical and greedy SOBs to "legitimize" what they are really doing. And I just saw a discussion of these abuses where several participants were all happy with this War on Terror stuff, coming back with that old idiocy "If you're not doing anything illegal, you don't have anything to worry about..."
Does "the herd mentality" include "herd behavior" like us all suddenly being told we have to start getting our knickers in a sudden twist about "Iran" suddenly being as big a danger to "US national interests" as, say, the Japanese in 1940? Or maybe that is not an acceptable analogy -- I'm sure there's one out there somewhere, that's better than that -- maybe the Duchy of Fenwick?
Seems to me that the apparatchiks in our state security apparatus are more than happy to round up the wildebeests and nip and howl them into a stampede for what later prove (at least if the reality comes to light, finally) to be less than honorable or honest purposes. WMD in Iraq? Whodathoughtit?
Nice of you two to confirm each others' assertions. I guess that settles the issue for all of us, then, right?
One of the strongest presumptions in the law is the presumption of continuity. If people do things one way today, they are likely to keep doing them the same way next month. Waddles like a duck, swims like a duck, quacks like a duck? Kind of silly to claim that "this once" the rest of us should believe, in a realm where "plausible deniability" is one touchstone of a good "operation," that "strong terms" from the US state department should settle once and for all the genesis of these murders. "Watch the shiny object as it spins..."
The legalism that "It's not been proved beyond a reasonable doubt" is a nice shield against accountability, especially if there's no Wikileaks or person of conscience to reveal the reality. And even if there's no "direct link" between any of the increasingly large number of Covert Operators on "our" side and what happened to Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan and his driver, and several random other "Wogs," there's a Great Game afoot, "War With Iran," with more than enough complicity to go around. (I gotta ask, obviously with the benefit of hindsight, why these Players did not "do" A.Q. Khan and some of the Pakistani movers and shakers behind the avowedly nuclear weapons program of Pakistan? The existence of Pakistani nukes sure is complicating the Great Game in South Asia, now isn't it? Along with Khan's jovial dissemination of bomb-making skills across the planet.)
I'm just so sure that it's never been the case that one hand of the executive was technically ignorant of what another hand was doing or had done, and that "we" or "our" equivalents amongst the Enemy have denied any complicity or actor liability in some bad act. And April Glaspie did not convey to Saddam Hussein that the US took no position on intra-Arab squabbles like Hussein's claim that Kuwait was properly part of Greater Iraq. And the strafing and torpedoing of the USS Liberty was just a case of mistaken identity.
"Wouldn't do any harm to believe them this once." That's sarcasm, right?
But not to worry, the kind of world where such stuff can happen more easily, and with even less concern about accountability, sure seems closer all the time... I bet some of us would feel right at home there.
Re "the military wing of government, as archetypified by the rulers of Egypt and the reality in the US of We Love Our Freedom A:"
Kleptocrats with all the big guns, the end stage of "human civilization" -- the thing that started with the ingenuity of some plodding hunter-gatherer who figured out how to fill out his, or more likely her, caloric needs by growing lots of wild plants that had edible seeds that could over time be stored and had to be protected (the start of the "security state") against the thievery of other bands of hunter-gatherers and then the denizens of other walled enclaves, wherein developed the hierarchical division-of-labor structure with "noble rulers" and "holy priests" and bureaucrats and, of course, Warriors. To provide "security," and contain "freedom," and generate Holy Conflicts and Slave Raids against, or just Resource Thefts from, them Others in their flammable kraals or behind their scalable or mine-able mud or stone walls and battering-rammable gates.
"Good" military-wings-of-government are like successful parasites: bleed the host, but not so much as to kill it. Play to and pump up and exaggerate the tribal mind set. Generate fear -- of the military wing, if you can't find a sufficiently effective Other to flap your flag and wave your tallywacker at at.
The wise human learns one of several coping behaviors: Head-down Yassuh-bossing, if-you-can't-beat-'em-join-'em, staying mouse-sized and inoffensive and as invisible as possible.
"Pakistan’s civilian and military wings of government are furious with each other and with the US military."
A whole lot of reality in one little sentence.
I guess it's ok with a lot of people that "the military" should be added (as it has, de facto and sub rosa, in the Land of the Freeeeeee and the Home of the Braaaave, while visions of Constitutional Republic danced in our heads) as a "wing of government." So as in areas all across the planet, "the military" ends up being part of the Kleptocracy, jealous of any attempt, by the ordinary schmucks who create the wealth that makes their parasitic and predatory fiefdoms possible, to rein them in. Egypt, Syria, maybe Iran, Libya, et bloody cetera. Pakistan. Notagainistan. The United States.
"The military," across the planet, has an organizing principle, a seductive monopoly on the tools of force and power-projection, and a hierarchy that can be filled with like-minded, ambitious, greedy racketeers, able to practice the protection racket, take over civilian productive parts and sectors of the economy, share ideas on how to keep any "democratic" (or even "republican") aspirations in check. What it (and I mark myself down for using a personification in lieu of what otherwise would have to be a treatise, to cover all the parts of the reality) ain't got is a prayer of an idea on how to "govern," as opposed to "rule' or "dictate," in any way that is durable, sustainable, decent, and that spans generations, without trying to force all the sans-uniformes into ranks and files.
At some point, the tapeworm's success means the death of the host.
Query: Is there any way for ordinary people to de-worm themselves, to free themselves from the infestation, renounce the jingoism and tribalism that feeds the feedback that keeps the racketeers in business, and figure out something better to do with a quarter and ever more of all the world's wealth that is sucked up by "the military?"
While we lotus eaters are stumbling around amongst our fellow Eloi, one might hope that other slightly aged facts and myths might enlighten us too --- not ruddy likely but, let us remember "Wag the Dog", and so much else. There's a certain amount of tolerance in any living system for aberrations and disease processes (like the whole MIC sickness), but there's also a limit to the re-stabilizing function. I wonder where we are along the old curve of binding energy...
But like so much in life, important bits of history, and clues in the hunt for a path to species survival and a decent life, in the "fog of forever war," are "so darn hard to remember, and so easy to forget." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DVn6-CURgM
What can ordinary people, who spend their days just struggling, against the predations of metastatic kleptocracy and the drive of their own native tribalisms and learned or imposed loyalties and hatreds, to make a living and provide for their families, do to rein in the jackals and hyenas and giant tapeworms that constitute the team rosters of the Great Game Players? Those relatively few who see the opportunities to create chaos and conflict so very clearly, and whose genius is figuring out ways to instigate and agitate by acts that erode the "security" they pretend to offer? People who have so much more in common with each other, across the arbitrary lines of borders and ethnicity and co-religion, than they do with the plow-horses and milk cows that create the wealth they covet?
Says the War Department:
terrorism — The unlawful use of violence or threat of violence to instill fear and coerce
governments or societies. Terrorism is often motivated by religious, political, or other
ideological beliefs and committed in the pursuit of goals that are usually political.
It will not be remembered by most Americans that the Eisenhower administration imposed a boycott on the sale of Iranian petroleum in 1951-1953, at the end of which Eisenhower sent in the CIA to overthrow the elected Iranian government. The US, having “caused the regime to collapse,” turned Iran into an absolute monarchy under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who instituted an authoritarian, crony-capitalist state that mainly benefited a few billionaires at the top. In 1978-79 an enraged Iranian public overthrew the US-installed Shah and established a government that is zealously independent of Washington.
Rinse, whitewash, and repeat.
There, in a nutshell, is what sure seems, to the moderately attentive US citizen, to be the main thrust of "US foreign policy." Follow the money, and gee, what do you kind of have to see? Maybe that Maj. Gen Smedley Butler was absolutely spot-on when he reported that "War [American-style] is nothing but a racket." Short-term benefits for a very few, and exacerbations of "tensions," the seeds of violence sown in exported oppressions, and "What, me worry?" mindsets by the players in the Game, as immune to fallout as a couple of old codgers knocking chess pieces off the board in a city park.
Our great propagandized National Behaviors sure seem to be about creating opportunities for enormous wealth transfers to a very few, people who have no regard for the future derangements their "plays" render inevitable, and who even diligently create the preconsitions as fertile ground for new wealth extractions, with no regard for present pain of the many. Because they know they can indulge themselves to the nth degree, and like Charlie Wilson and his Texas connections, or "Iran-Contra" (remember that?), start wars and promote violence hither and yon, with no fear that they will suffer any personal consequences before a comfortable, timely death finally takes them. (Among other things: What did April Glaspie really tell Saddam Hussein, and did Madeleine Albright really say that "we" find the "sanctions-"induced deaths of Wog children in Iraq "an acceptable cost?" Enquiring readers would really like to know...)
I wonder if anyone will follow and report, where any effective number of others will hear, the careers of our leading general officers, the Wise Initiators of Grand Doctrines of Warfighting, as they cycle out of uniform and into expensive suits, or make any effort to track the gains of those who profit in money and "careers" from embargoes and "cold conflicts" and active shoot-em-ups.
The career plan and business model sure seems to be to make a nice safe space for those who can manipulate those inevitable levers of power, so they can enjoy their private islands and private jets and the other emoluments of membership in that trans-national club.
Why are fraudulent forensic exercises like the current shiny object, "them hated Iranians," so seductive to people whose real, physical and spiritual interests would seem to be antithetical to hammering the war drums? How stupid are we, as a species? Why do we have to waste so much energy, that could be directed to so many better pursuits that would make life more broadly better for all of us, flinging propaganda mud and "killing insurgents" that turn out to be wedding partiers or oops! political rivals of "our friends" in foreign places, or trying to chip the obscuring crap off the walls? Gee, I wonder...
Recognize what we humans are, and are capable of. And always follow the money. "And that's the way it is." Right?
Sounds like the "libertarian" prescription, with a dash of "I of Newt." Just how, exactly, do "valid laws" come into existence? And how, exactly, do those "valid laws" get "validly enforced?" By Philospher Kings like the Pauls, who suck off the government teats labeled "Medicare" and "Medicaid?" And just love the "benefits" they get as "government employees?"
"Government" is a back-and-forth, usually too much and too little by somebody's lights, the Kochs at one extreme and a wheelchair-bound paraplegic at the other, amenable to perversion and subornation to allow the few to steal from the many, but also to provide an FBI escort to a young black woman into a "whites-only" school in Old Alabama, and to take a stab, however subject to regulatory capture, at controlling pollution and other externalities, and maybe trying to keep nasty stuff out of consumer products like milk and medicines, stuff that the popular-in-Lib-circles notion of "voluntary associations" and "government-like organizations" would not likely be doing. In case you missed the serial: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/11/journey-into-a-libertarian-future-part-i-%E2%80%93the-vision.html I guess the Golden Rule is just for the weak and sissies, as ol' Jesus and others enunciated it -- and the real valid interpretation is that "He who has the gold, rules."
I suggest that the fundamental problem, and opportunity, is that we are all in this together, and a Galtian demand for "unhinderance" might be good for a very few but kind of deadly for the rest. And guess what? How do you get to claim the title of "citizen," without there be a government to define the boundaries of "citizenship?" As in "free white male landowner?" Oh, that's right -- it has to be that wonderful construct, a "VALID government..." which comes to exist, and persist, exactly how, again?
If my "thing" is taking in a lot of money by peddling counterfeit medications, or leaving half the re-bar out of a grade school in a quake zone, or committing serial murder, or producing and selling AK-47s and centrifuge tubes and growth media for cute little bugs like anthrax and smallpox, or generating whole planet-loads of notional-value, counterfeit "dollars" via derivatives "contracts," or starting up a little gang of highway robbers, or carving out an "enclave" where a preacher man can set up a church where his deflowering of all the young maidens is considered in his doctrine to be a holy act, is it a government function in aid of providing infrastructure to "do anything" about any of that, or is that all part and parcel of getting on with, and just a cost that you personally are willing to impose on everyone else, of doing one's own thing?
Human engineers have been smart enough to design "governors" into a lot of machines that otherwise would pretty quickly destroy themselves. Figuring out a way to have "government" without "kleptocracy" and "oppression" seems to me to be what a whole lot of humans have set their minds to for a whole long time. Without finding a durable and homeostatic set of checks and balances and any central organizing principle that has done much to keep YOUR "doing your thing" from planting YOUR hand in my wallet or YOUR boot on my neck.
"Governments" are no more "persons" than "corporations" are. Personifying the whole complex structure is just beclouding and inviting mindless simplistification, to hide the real hard work of making something positive-sum-game-ish out of all the competing hopes and horrors that humans can imagine into existence, and making it into into a set of rules or suggestions or eventually native behaviors that create the conditions for a freedom that is more than the freedom of a few to enslave or en-serf the many and suck the life out of them, while turning them into, or forcing them further along the path to becoming, mindless "Brave New World"-Eloi-and-Morlockity consumers.
The multiplicity we shorthand as the "Arab Spring" (and our local Occupy citizens) seems to have a flavor of something very new, some actual Hope and Change. But there's still a huge amount of elbowing and cross-checking and clipping and slashing going on, and it remains to be seen whether the people who just want a safe and more equitable world for themselves and their families and friends, and appear willing to reach across the old boundaries of tribe and class for a more complete and less competitive interaction, will have the endurance and durability to face down the martial kleptocrats who gain their power by playing off ancient "features" of the human psyche and soma...
This American, raised in the Midwest as a Presbyterian Boy Scout, who enlisted in 1966 in part to protect your "republican form of government," and got to see a bit of a "land war of choice in Asia," and got to see what that "do my duty to God and my Country" is really all about, will gently disagree totally that this Shining City on a Hill has any kind of permanence, however important that notion is to your sense of self, as a place that fits the magical notions that grim-jawed, chicken-hawk, or testosterone-poisoned "patriots" often pretend to or actually do hold as one part of their cognitive dissonance inventory.
The category "United States" may outlive your Iranian (and Chinese and BRIC and whatever) bogeymen, but the place that exists in your mind or your politics ain't there anymore, if it ever was.
There will no doubt be a land mass, maybe still labeled "United States," here, with lines on maps and maybe electrified fences and interlocking fields of fire, maybe with the weapons pointed inward, to mark its boundaries, and maybe even some pro-forma pseudo-"democracy," not much different from what is developing every day, lobbyist by ALEC memo by Christianist general officer, under the wonderful incentives of greed and power, but it ain't gonna be the "land of the free and the home of the brave."
We, unfortunately, are all in this together, whether we want to be or not. There may be loci of privileged wealth in the future, but then there's the underlying story of the Soylent Corporation that ought to inform us what that apotheosis of corporate kleptocracy and consumption really portends for the most of us. We are all in this together, and I'm not so sure we are capable of making much out of that ineluctable reality except as an opportunity to take MORE for our individual selves and our little tribes of ethnicity or cupidity or both.
There is enough, of everything that matters, to go all the way around the whole table, except for the pig-brigands in suits who stuff their faces and eat the plate clean except for one lonely cookie, and then sucker the rest of us into fighting each other to the death over that last, forlorn cookie.
As to the attractions of the US for foreign nationals, it might be worth googling "trends in immigration US" and following some of the links.
By the way, Ronnie Reagan is dead these several years, and was missing for quite a while before that... And in case you have not figured it out yet, NOTHING is ever what you think or believe it is.
Anyone who believes Ron Paul would "Stop the War Machine" or "reduce the Imperial bootprint" has to have been sleeping when "hypocrisy" and "delusion" and Machiavelli were being discussed in class. That theme is nothing but one more table in his franchised game of Three Card Monte. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-card_Monte
May I suggest, if you don't already do so, that you "follow the money," the real path, in my estimation, to understanding what's afoot, with the assistance of people like Matt Taibbi, whose distillations (with style and mordant humor) you can find on the bitstream pages of Rolling Stone Magazine, http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog, and of course in his several recent books.
This is all about creating a system that, like "high speed trading" and "speculation," one part of the game, kind of guarantees a constant and increasing transfer, as in "theft," of the Real Wealth that the world's working people create every day, into the shameless, avaricious paws of a bunch of self-centered smart-asses -- people who are all about self-indulgence to what ought to be an embarrassing extreme, who know, in their meaningless little souls, that they only go around once, that it's just a game, and that there are no consequences in this life, certainly, for activities that, but for their audacity and scale and the ability to pay legislators to have those actions declared "not illegal" and to terrorize prosecutors with "Dream Teams" of hired guns and the pressures of Great Influence, would constitute grounds for incarceration in one of America's privatized prisons, where lesser mortals are jailed and then leased out to various industries that now have really cheap slave labor available, and the pubic treasury to absorb the cost of the "slave quarters" and food.
And yes, there's a derivative "contract" being inked electronically every few minutes of every day, a "bet," and these SOBs are blunt about calling them that in their trade press, in a casino where the guys in tuxes with the titty-babes hanging on them know that the waiters and drink servers will have to slave the rest of their lives to pump up the coffers of REAL money that they can then raid to "make good" the "losses" of the freakin' COUNTERFEIT "notional dollars," losses that are guaranteed to one degree or another in every one of those "transactions."
"We" are mostly too stupid to recognize that a "notional dollar," of the QUADRILLIONS that now "exist" in bitspace, generated by people who proudly proclaim that they literally "MAKE money," is worthless, not "legal tender" of the sort that working people have to actually EARN in order to pay the electric bill or buy gasoline to get to work or for food and shelter and their uniforms. So there's a layer of the economy that is happy to launder that Funny Munny, to take it in exchange for private jets and Paradise Islands and mega-yachts and the rest of the indicia of perfect indulgence, and that is the extent of the "trickle-down" you still hear the shills for the Makers of Money trying to peddle to the rest of us.
We say "Obama," or for that matter "Romney," committing the sad self-defeating serial idiocy of personification and reification and hypostatisation, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_%28fallacy%29, but remember he is just the figurehead for a whole army of people who are their own sub-species of Vampire Squids, wrapped around our faces and sucking the life and vitality and future out of us.
It's too bad that our global mental models, for the mass of us, based on the notion of Nations, so conveniently obscure the reality that across the human population there are the Netanyahoos and Ahmadinejads and a small but likely fatal host of other people, including so many that rise in and profit from the whole global military-hardware-software industry (where "commonality" and "interoperability" are the buzzwords that hide wht should be a scary momentum) and the little and large masters of Big-Lie-ism and tribal button-pushing. People that sure seem to me to constitute not the political pinnacles of individual nations, but rather a set unto themselves, interdependent, "interoperable," and tied by greed and the love of power over the great mass of actually productive humans.
Anybody want to take a crack at laying out why "Sharia Law" is so anathematic. I mean, as opposed to tribal customs and "punishment" that overlie the little I know of "Sharia Law?" And "Well, EVERYbody knows that..." is not an answer of substance. Why some people are so dumb-blind as to let their buttons be pushed by manipulators of the "conservative" stripe, who mostly seem to believe that in THEIR personal idea of what constitutes proper jurisprudence, that seems to include so many of those things they claim are part of "Sharia Law?"
It's "warped thinking" that a blundering, clotted, bloated, "doctrine-" driven War Machine nominally headquartered in the Pentagram can ever manage to "fight and win" an invasion on behalf of the Racketeers that Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler so accurately called out.
And now Our Troops have mostly completed their "strategic rearward advance to previously prepared positions," the euphemism for "retreat" back when I was in the service -- late '60s -- with respect to Iraq, in manifest recognition of the bankruptcy of all that "policy" and the near bankruptcy of the economy off of which the MIC lives as a tenacious and growing parasite, or maybe more simply a metastatic and untreatable cancer.
but it's ok, the Pentagrammers are really good at fighting vicious asymmetric battles in the Procurement Wars now in full swing in the five Rings of Power and the Hallowed Halls of Congress and the fetid bowels of K Street. Even if they have not a clue about how to Achieve Victory, whatever the hell that is supposed to mean, in any of our Wars of Choice.
And enough of us Americans are so dull and uninterested as to not notice that that vaunted Shock&Awe thing has petered out into yet another "declare victory and go home" entry in the Foolish Hall of Fame.
Can anyone here enunciate any relatively brief statement of the nominal and fundamental "national-interest-based policy" that drives all this foolishness? Maybe just "the oil must flow," and "If 'we' build all possible weapon systems, maybe some rational rationale for all of this will magically appear"?
As one who is unfortunately convinced that humans are too stupid for their smarts, and are consequently a dead-end species, whether via global warming or nuclear winter or the creation of a world where autonomous, self-repairing, self-replicating war machines ethnic-cleanse us protoplasmic pests off the planet a la "Terminator," I say to heck with the effete-ism.
This is the time of the Networked Battlsepace, the apparent, self-defeating hegemony of the bureaucratized war-worshipers. It's Pentagon turned Octagon, without any of the rules that say you can't kick 'em in the crotch or gouge their eyes or choke-hold them to death. With no referees, and an avid, violent audience cheering every decapitating blow. A bunch of barflies, pumped up with beer muscles, just aching for a fight, especially this coming one that will let "us" erase the sour taste of multi-trillion-dollar helping of DEFEAT just handed out by them hajji-towelheads in Iraq, and the long slow fade to yet another proof of the futility of the whole MIC and national-security-"diplomacy" apparatus in Notagainistan. Myth of "our" superiority of arms, meet my friend Reality...
So let's get it on, already, and get it over with! The waiting is so damn frustrating, for the closet worshipers of Kali and Shiva and their Christian and Muslim and Jewish analogues...
And for all the goodness and sweetness, there's plenty on the other end of the teeter-totter:
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear --
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.'
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Is "Ozymandias" an arcane, occult anagram for "Dick Cheney?"
On the subject of zulm, and balance, here's a little snippet, with comments that ought to remind us of its immanence and omnipresence and seeming omnipotence:
© 2024 All Rights Reserved
Save your outrage for the acts of the thousands of "not being swept under the rug" predatory pedophiles and the whole structure that fostered and protected them, who sure look to have created a nice niche for themselves in the folds of the Mother Church. The whole Church sure seems to indeed be getting punished for the acts of those creatures -- how many billions in secret little settlements/blood money, and legal judgments, and finally fines, are having to be made up by parishioners (many of whom are losing their parishes thanks to that cost, and stuff like the difficulty of attracting people to the priesthood, and keeping them, with that recent engraft of "celibacy" and that old-man-discovered teaching that women (after the ancient churches at least) are too something or other to be priests.
This is all about, to my eye, protecting a carefully cultivated and tended identity. That thing that so many of us are willing to die, or more often kill, to hang on to. And it's amazing how artful and subtle we can be, when it comes to arguing the nature of anything that affects that identity.
Islam proselytizing? Got a cite? I sure try to get a "sight" of the Jehovah's Witnesses and Holy Rollers coming up the path to my front door, so I can be, as the old Brits used to have their butlers say, "not at home." At least the "Christian Mailing Listers" have figured out that they are wasting their tax-free postage peppering me with tracts and ads for Holy Spikenard Oil Personally Blesset By Pastor Mealymouth, for my Seed Gift of just $19.99 for four months, that will also get me a 4-CD set of his Blesset Sermons telling me all the reasons I should hate, fear, and hope to exterminate most of the rest of humanity...
And there's a great stirring in the Force in the Mideast, for sure, with a lot of sectarian and tribal killing, likely only to get worse with all the inputs and takeouts there, and gee, all those "Christians" throwing gasoline on the fire and stirring the pot in hopes of bringing one or another form of Armageddon, depending on their Freedom of Religion convictions... Maybe I missed it, but are Muslims all about apocalyptic end times kind of stuff?
Plain as day. Kind of like how priestly celibacy is plain as day in the text of the Holly Bibble, along with a whole lot of other skits in the dogma-and-doctrine show.
But this is about belief, and Revealed Truth, and speaking of revelations, God sure has laid it on my heart that anyone who teaches and demands the eschewing of birth control, and artfully argues that "this" is about "religious freedom" to do as they are told by their paternalistic, self-serving Mitred Ones rather than rendering unto Caesar (who was generally intolerant of exotic religious convictions, preferences and practices, is not aligned with the Will of the Divine.
As someone else asked, do the Quakers have to pay for all those wars? Or do I have to let my tax dollars be given to "charter schools" that preach propaganda and intolerance that I find sickening and deadly to what little is left of commonality and comity and community in our culture?
Congrats, by the way, on creating a nice Jesuitically circumscribed and complete and apparently personally comfortable world view.
Sounds like a really "Christian" approach to your fellow man, and woman. Informed, too.
Sez you. Others obviously see things very differently, and see the brouhaha for what it is: a gaffe of sorts by the Unitary Presidency, leapt upon by the hypocritical monitor lizards (they're the critters that kill their prey by sneaking up, biting them, and then following them until the unfortunate bite-ee dies from a horrific, painful sepsis caused by the putrescent bacteria that populate the biter's lizard mouths) and yapping dogs on the Wrong side of the political spectrum as a way to "go on the offensive" and protect their privileges and plaisirs...
Religious freedom. That's the "freedom" to do and believe whatever the Bishoprics (or the Pat "Send Me Your Seed Gift" Robertsons, or those Mullahs we hear so much and know so little about, or who was that guy, the one who founded and kilt off "Jonestown?") tell you to do and believe, right?
Speaking of opinions, George Carlin has a few. You can't link to Youtube through this place, apparently, but for Carlin's view of Absolute Truth, you can call up "George Carlin - Religion is bullshit." Though I understand it's a mortal sin to watch stuff like that...
The simple explanation is right there in Youtubeland -- pull up "Every sperm is sacred."
To be complete, one might ask what religion is Islam? Sunni? Shia? Sufi?
Humans seem constructed to only be able to manage fealty and attachment to groups of a certain size and shape. So schism and sectarianism and tribalism and secession and rebellion seem kind of built into our natures. Along with the unfortunate, common recognition that there is, or needs to be, a Divine of some sort, whether just First Cause or that intimate set of Persons and acceptable Goddesses (some call them Saints) wrapped up in a dogma and doctrines that gee whiz, just happen to favor a certain small group of (when you look close) often pure Machiavellian crypto-atheists who use people's touching and deep need for Something To Believe In That's Larger Than Themselves to manipulate the Masses for fun, profit and power...
We are all in this together, more's the pity.
Ron Paul is an ambition-free zone, huh? So the rest of us should let him steer the ship of state, because he is so, so, what again?
And where, one wonders, does "the Catholic Church's money" come from? Maybe the earned income of its parishioners, mostly, as opposed to being "earned," or even "made," by the institution? A form of "tax?" With the sanction for non-payment being social and spiritual, as opposed to (maybe) some attention from the IRS and the US Attorney's office?
Can't use "tax money" for abortion or Planned Parenthood, but you can use parisioners' money to not only pay the civil and criminal penalties for the sins and depredations of pedophilic priests (who sure seem a whole lot more organized and better-protected than even the squidges that spermeate the darkling corners of the Internet with their NAMBLA and "baseball card" collections of vulnerable young people being abused...) but to campaign, vigorously and politically, from the Bullpit and the other organs and orifices of the Church hierarchy, for the views of "faith" crafted by subtle, crafty, self-interested old men onto the faithfulness and sense of the divine that most humans are born with?
And Juan, the pedophilia, as far as I can tell, is kind of much bigger than in any other large social institution I can think of, and it extends not only to altar boys but to little and young and pubescent girls, too, with the actuality of pregnancy, that "Holy Life," occurring too. I guess 'cause you can break your vows of celibacy and chastity with impunity, the assurance of Gracious Forgiveness being ready to hand, but OhMyGod do NOT break that late-engrafted abjuration against any kind of barrier contraception.
Anyone know how many of our fellow humans, with the mark of Cain and all on them, also have a nice case of HIV/AIDS as a result of being boogled by some fraud in a frock and collar? I betcha the number is way more than "one."
That of course was directed to Mr. Kellermeyer, not our host.
And YOU are a disingenous casuastrist of the FIRST order. Maybe some Jesuit training in your past? Or is it just another expression of identity politics?
Thank you for the entertaining, enervating string of contra-de-ceptions.
Just another example of why humanity is on the ragged edge of proving beyond peradventure that we are a failed species...
Of course, all this ado is just the latest example of of "mobbing behavior," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobbing_%28animal_behavior%29, or maybe "piling on." And of course diversion and distraction and the deepest form of hypocrisy. The Cardinals flap at the clumsy Unitary President as he makes a mis-step, and the ConservaCrows join in. And all those folks who already have Obama in their sight picture and have the adrenaline on a steady simmer, just waiting for that first bubble to form on the bottom of the pot to trigger another rolling boil and cloud of steam.
Why is there so little hammering on the hypocritical Mitred Ones for centuries of institutionalized sex slavery forced on all those post-partum critters that actually are born, and bleed, and suffer, when what is so often called, and so unfortunately remains, "unspeakable?" Actions that are thought by the vast majority of us to be so far off limits that in many places, there's a death penalty for such horrific abuse?
These "doers" of children have no problem doing what they You have to wonder how many of the many predators in the "priesthood" use protection (other than the cloak and cassock of Silence, and the cowardly hiding behind the touching, durable faith of Believers who lose their parishes and have to double-tithe to pay the fines and judgments and defense costs and PR bucks of the malefactors) when they do what they do in chancel and nave.
And how many of these abusing anointed whining harumphing Bishops are neck-deep in the institutionalization and protection of what sure looks like an organized, long-lived HCPCSC (Holy Catholic Priest-Child Sex Conclave)? Oh, of course, the Sinners repent, and are granted absolution and relocation to a new pool of prey critters...
But no, let's grab that Presumption of Priestly Blessedness and use it to leverage yet another Reason To Defeat Obama.
Though you have to wonder, really wonder, if the Obamites really want another four years, given the degree of political klutziness involved in this and so many other failures in the Art of Presidential PR.
The physics of politics: Legitimacy = (decency + stability)/(corruption*violence).
(Twinkles) to you.
Evil, maybe "timid" "Liberals-progressives?" Whether there's a moral imperative to aid regime change, OR NOT?
I know it's just Wiki, and the article on the Khmer Rouge is pretty poorly written syntactically and grammatically, but there are a few bits that bear remembering:
And of course "our" dedication to "air power" (renascent as the fixation on Drone Wars) gives us this snippet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge
All part of the running of the Great Game, by those Really Astute Experienced Players.
What's the alignment of the spiritual axis of all those Imperial Idiocies, again? And where does it point, except to instability and conflict and kleptocracy?
All the "leaders" and Experienced Players are "playing" everyone else, all the time, because their mothers and kindergarten teachers did not adequately wash their fripping mouths out with soap when they first started with the lying and dissimulation. And teach the unsocialized little beasts not to beat up on their fellows, and to recognize right from wrong, and to at least apologize when they got caught pinching the girls, and pinching all the cookies, and stealing from the milk money jar.
And are you "playing," too?
Where's that bar of Dial when we need it??
One just has to love the clumping sound of combat boots dancing on the head of a pin.
Pol Pot = Saddam Hussein? Well, clumsy, massive, grotesquely wasteful, murderous US Experienced Player activities had a lot to do with the advent and persistence of both, as I recall. Can't go after Pol Pot because the "gooks" who kicked US out of French Indochina were opposed to his regime and the Khmer Rouge were killing NVA, something like that, right? And Our Troops We Support, and the honest Iraqi yeomen and women who got blowed up wholesale by weapons provided for "good geopolitical reasons" by the US to one Saddam Hussein when he was our FRIEND against the Evil Iranians...
Something seriously wrong at the black heart of all this.
Yeah, but there's nothing to keep one from pointing out the dirt in others' laundry while acknowledging the need to wash one's own pile, and going on down to the rocks at the river's edge with the rest of the village to pound the collective dirt out of the community's clothing.
What a strange notion, that one is constrained to be silent, indeed excused or even barred from any obligation to exclaim, let alone take any kind of palliative or corrective action, about the horrors done by others, on the charmingly excusable notion that one has oneself committed horrors. Of which there is manifest and voluminous evidence.
Would it not make eminent sense to make the effort to reduce the net volume of horrors in the world?
So some of us may be confused by all the Player-talk:
Is what is going on in Syria (and Gaza and the West Bank and Arabia and sub-Saharan Africa all A-OK, then, on the ground of something like "it's none of our bidness," or that "it's worse elsewhere," or maybe that "to keep the Great Game going, you have to break a few eggs and heads and maintain Sovereignty as a primum bonum?" Or some other set of complications that Ordinary People just are not competent to understand or have an opinion about? Such that the fear and pain and dying of others who are as Ordinary as we are do not "count," in the the Great Scheme of Things That Are Profitable and Convenient For the Kleptocracies Just The Way They Are? Because "suppressing" Ordinary People, even ones deprived of voice and opportunity, is just what governments are supposed to do?
I mean, winning arguments about definitions of terms, while the "killing of large numbers of people, some of whom are exercising their G_d-given, inalienable Second Amendment-style Right to Armed Resistance" is happily going on, abetted by arms merchants and geopolitical jerkmeatery by Jackals and Clones and suchlike, is after all the most important thing -- way ahead of concentrated efforts to come up with a set of values and actions that might, if not end (given what humans currently are) but might at least reduce, the carnage and the sowing of the dragons' teeth of revenge and anomie and de-stability-- do I have that right?
Is that the best anyone can do by way of cross-examination and impeachment of Prof. Cole? However much one might prefer his bona fides and contributions to be zeroed out, his Google footprint seems a bit more substantive and honest than, say, your own...
Also made it goddam easy, by some very profitable "transfer of technology" via various routes, to "our next natural opponent." Including, as someone here pointed out, by giving Israel air defense technology that the Israeli military industrialists turned around and sold to the Chinese government. And of course "our" brilliant war toy labs, that seem impervious to larger common sense but porous to espionage by nominal "friends" and of course industrial freebie-seekers and "furriners."
It's just business, you know. And of course "we," for short-term benefits to the careers of a few of us, train and educate and otherwise pump energy into various parts of the complex organism that is the Chinese polity.
It's pretty clear that none of us, taken as a species, can manage to do any better.
Though Saint Reagan and Gorbachev agreed that the Implacable Cold War Foes would make common cause against a common enemy (in the form of some invading alien life form.) http://blog.nationmultimedia.com/print.php?id=715
Why would a presumably "advanced" bunch of aliens, having conquered interstellar travel, INVADE? Why not just wait for us Dumb Effing Humans to reduce ourselves back to impoverished neolithicism, as we sure seem on the path to do?
I bet you know the answer to that one...
You gotta love the Great Game, and all the Statecraft that machiavellis along with it.
Dare one ask exactly what, in this text, is so offensive as to be killed by supposed "national interests," or even the "sweet reason," carefully scripted BS excreted by SE Wu Sike?
One might guess that the anathematical part is that the whole notion of one set of "states" telling the dictator of another state and his party and enforcers that they need to stand down and share, might in a tiny way point to and move toward the awakening notions of so many of the 99% of us, that we are being had, big time, and killed and circumscribed and drained of wealth and hope by the activities of Experienced Players, who pay the faintest lip service to the general welfare (as opposed to the Welfare of the Generals) while protecting what are pretty clearly short-term interests of a few Kleptocrats and Oligarchs.
The world may actually be flattening out, in richer ways than the notions of Thomas Friedman and the Vulture Capitalists, and be getting better interconnected. One downbeat of that condition is that there seems to be a spreading basic notion of what constitutes a decent, honorable life and the minimum criteria for sustainability.
Dangerous stuff for the Assads and Arafats and even our own American Kleptocratic Aristocracy to contend with.
But of course there's a nearly infinite set of interactions at play in all this, and so many ways to look through the prism...
Old joke: How do you catch an elephant? Well, you need three things: binoculars, tweezers, and a milk bottle. Go down to the watering hole, get up in a tree, and wait for the elephants to come down to drink. Then you look at an elephant through the wrong end of the binocular, reach out with the tweezers, pick up the elephant and drop it in the milk bottle. Easy, no?
Anyone with a better eye for physiotypes than I have care to offer a better read on where the young lady in the ad may have her antecedents? She does not look "Chinese" to me at all. I wonder if she will have the modern misfortune, having taken a few bucks to pose for the camera, to be "internouted" and scorned for it...
Don't forget to note that the Banksters and their boughtandpaidfor Members of Congress are working toward a massive default on those little pieces of paper, those "special treasuries" that evidence the taking of REAL WAGES (as opposed to "made money" generated, in a huge and brazen act of counterfeiting, out of bitspace ether by the "financial industry") deducted by law from all our W-2 income and a matching 7% out of an employer's account (basically forced savings of actual earned income, in both cases.) Already, $4 trillion in REAL WEALTH has been sucked out of the "Trust Fund" and into the General Reveune stream. Good luck getting it back...
Even supposed liberals go along with the fiction that the "payroll tax cut" is something "good for the middle class," and something other than one little further step toward undoing the New Deal, by stages turning the Social Security intergenerational social contract into "nothing but an 'entitlement program'" to be "cut" along with everything except "tax expenditures for the disgustingly wealthy" and war toy spending and any other wealth-transfer scam that inventive K-Streeters and Wall Streeters can come up with...
The rulers of exceptional nations, any nations, actually, as far as I can see, do not subject themselves, subject their autonomy, to the RuleofLaw, particularly the elastic, Teflon-and-petroleum-grease-coated tenets of that silliness called "international law." Except when it suits the purposes of some Jesuitical casuistrist (as in this little tale, http://homepages.stmartin.edu/fac_staff/gseidel/Fables/89_casuistry.htm ) to invoke some "principled stand" under one of the various Well Known and Agreed Precepts of that chimerical body of jurisprudence, mashed up of various treaties and compacts and agreements which are all subject to being ignored or enforced by decisions that have always been, but in the age of dronewars are ever more frequently, made "on the fly."
"The US" better be better prepared in this circumstance than the USS Liberty and the 5th Fleet were in 1967.
All those hair-trigger, hidden-tripwire, use-it-or-lose-it "assets" floating around out there like a junk full of fireworks with a crew that all smokes...
Agree with the substance. But I wish SOME terms were used only with footnotes or parentheticals or references that might have a prayer of giving them any kind of substantial meaning. Like "defeat." And "victory." Words that resonate in our monkey- and lizard-brains, but other than in the realm of trumpets and flag-waving have no meaning.
Even if the land area known as "Iran" was reduced to smoking rubble and wailing survivors with enormous incentives for revenge, an outcome accomplished (presumably with similar catastrophe to the land area and people claimed to be "Israel") by militarizing the rest of the US society and economy that's not already been suborned that way, in what possible lexicon could that state of affairs be constituted a "victory?"
The only way to win, once again, is not to play that negative-sum game.
It's not like there aren't a zillion more games that are much more likely to have positive-sum outcomes.
Maybe rather than Saddam, Yahoo's model might be that guy Arafat? http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/09/in-a-ruined-country/4167/
Naaah -- Being a Neocon means NEVER having to say you're sorry. Or were, mmmmpppff, "wrong..."
Begs the question whether there in fact is some kind of supranational "franchise operation" (like KFC or McDonald's, maybe?) that can honestly be labelled Al-Qaida. And where, again, are Al-Qaidans fighting on the same side as the USA? Would that not be a violation, a very fundamental(ist) violation, of their franchise agreement?
And you do not have to descend very far into pundit.ugh or the comments to any mainstream news story regarding the Middle East to discover the intensity of the full conviction about the Evil Fast-Spreading Extent of Al-Qaidism and its implacable, monolithic intent to DESTROY THE FREEDOM'N'LIBERTY (tm) WE HOLD SO DEAR.
That's why the West, or the Kleptocratic parts thereof, are so closely rationing the little bits of FREEDOM'N'LIBERTY (tm) that are parceled out in piecemeal parsimony to us Ordinary Citizens. Keeping both locked up is the best way to ensure their security...
Gee, are they pushing for some phony "coalition" to go do anything like what the neocons promised, as in steal the Iraqi oil to pay for the invasion and "regime change" that was fer shur going to be met with Iraqis strewing rose petals in the conqueror's path?
What your champion, Bush/Cheney/Wolfowitzetal, did was hegemonic Imperial unilateralism. Seems to me people, ordinary people, maybe everywhere, are kind of waking up to how they are being led by their vulnerable limbic systems down a path that sure looks like it leads off a cliff...
One of your "things" you are equivalentizing sure looks darn little like the "other."
I like Ike, too -- He's the one that reminded us, WARNED us even, against the now manifest triumphalism of the vertically and horizontally integrated, supra-national, eat-a-quarter-of-the-world's-wealth Military-Industrialists. Where devices, and their coteries of enthusiasts and profit-takers, devices that are ever more lethal and complex and interoperable and Jesus H. Christ expensive, in an endless tail-chase of threat and counter-threat, drive not only tactics, but now strategy and doctrine and "policy."
And that brings "security" and "stability" exactly HOW, again? Other than to the career paths of the military industrial door-revolvers and the heavy-attack "think tankers" and the automatic appropriation emitters amongst the Congressional hacks and flacks, etc.?
Oh, of course -- neither "security" or "stability" are any part of the aim of the Game, at all, now are they?
Something's happening THERE, too...
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-10-17/europe/30288702_1_putin-protests-social-spending
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2101569,00.html
And of course for a brief and shining moment, even in sacred Israel... http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israels-middle-class-launches-mass-protest-at-rising-cost-of-living-2333615.html In the Israeli case, one wonders how much more (or less) restive and active "the middle class" might be if the American taxpayer, aka "Uncle Freier," was not underwriting most of the cost of all that military industrialism and pugnacity.
Hey, man, if you squint even just a little bit, they're all the same, the dirty central-planning socialist Leftie Commie terrorists... No need for nice distinctions, just put all of 'em up and shoot em. Right?
And Red, which used to be a Very Bad Color until what, 10 years ago, is now the proud banner hue of all Right-thinking, formerly "BetterDeadThanRedders." Go figure...
A little side note: It appears "Russian Paratroopers," those tough guys sent out by Putin and predecessors in THEIR episodes of Imperial Idiotic Counterinsurgency in places like Chechnya and Notagainistan, are leading the musical part of the charge on Putin's regime (a different kind of Regime Change, possibly?) by what appears to be the Russian version of Occupy. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/russian-paratroopers-unlikely-protest-song-hits-a-chord-with-anti-putin-protesters/2012/02/05/gIQAaP6YrQ_story.html
And on another, minor-key note, there's the continuing if fading interest in how we treat our own "troops:" http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/%3F-older-posts-did-oakland-police-intentionally-shoot-marine-vet-scott-olsen-head Interesting comments in most of the stories reporting this incident -- lots of "patriots" opining that "they" should have killed Scott Olsen, and all the DFHs dirtying up the streets, outright. Bearing in mind that Mr. Olsen, and I and all the other GIs who signed up, take this little oath -- some of us deadly seriously:
Sure seems to be getting harder to figure out who the "enemies, foreign and domestic" really are... though if you follow the money, you can't go far wrong...
So, is "Al-Quaida" the new boogeyman term to be "deployed" by persons of a certain mindset to activate the national limbic system and justify a "war" that is largely a huge, international, post-national commercial enterprise? How does this nation "wage a war," Constitutionally or even realistically speaking, against a boogeyman, even one raised up by the very tactics and strategies that just HAVE to be followed under the Ruling Doctrine? Scanning the 'net, it sure is hard to get a clear and honest view of the whole panoply of resistant or "insurgent" or self-defending humans reduced by Our Leaders to that convenient reification-personification-hypostatisation simplisticatified moniker, that Evil Incarnate Against Us "thing" that is the convenient if maybe totally dishonest excuse for so much "policy," and so many "oopsie" and "Ooooooh, Kewl!" deaths, and trillions of dollars in wasted wealth transfer. In the Joystick War... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bgX9J_ZBC0&feature=related
How about a scholarly, dispassionate explication on whether there really is a supra-national, planetary, shadowy, evil Franchise Operation that can honestly be called "Al-Quaida," or even "Al Fresco?"
I recall a big old poster from the '70s -- that Apollo image, the "Behold the blue planet, steeped in its dreams" fame. With G_d's hand, from Michelangelo's Sistine masterpiece, coming in from the right, and a G_d-text-balloon with the following Word: "Humans, I'm giving you fifteen minutes to vacate! I've found a much better tenant."
And another one, with G_d's Sistine hand redrawn into that universal flick-the-fly-off-the-table gesture of middle finger sprung in a tight arc, restrained by the pad of the thumb as the sear and trigger, the "fly" being that beautiful blue planet...
And the fracking, and mining, and burning, and chopping, and trips to the mall, and "smart weapon" launches, go on and on and on...
As with War, Imperial Style, we do all that stuff Just Because We Can... What was Stalin's question to his staff about messing with the Pope? Same response to words about our descendants: "How many divisions does Posterity have?"
Does anyone believe, any more, that there's a RuleofLaw that some Congressional committee would actually start in motion by putting the Kochs in any kind of real jeopardy? Maybe some expressions of "grave concern," a little billet doux to the Justice Department, and guess what comes next?
Re whether or not Malaysia is the thriving multi-ethnic nice place as portrayed, some apparent actual scholarship:
http://www.eurojournals.com/ejss_12_2_08.pdf
Button, button, who's got the button?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/23/israel-south-africa-nuclear-weapons
It's only the rag called the "Guardian," but it sure seems like a laydown, [challengable only by obfuscatorialists repeating a Big Lie, Ad Anuseam (typo, but I like it in context),] that Israeli military forces, with "covert" US help and in cooperation with other apartheid "states," or the war-loving fractions thereof, has a preeeeetty beeeg and growing set of deployed Nukular Weapons, which, mirable dictu, the Loonie Toons on "their side" are (or, pace Bill, at least pretty clearly WERE) happy to spread around. To the "Right" people, of course. And what was the Big Experienced Player Plan behind that (among all the other) destabilizing, life-threatening Great Gamery Megaplans? Must have been a real Doozy...
I wonder if "Listen Carefully, Children, And Only Color Inside The Lines" Bill has some Experience that leads him to a conclusion or certitude or even opinion, one way or the other, regarding the existence and maybe even targeting of those nukes. I mean, it's not like the Israeli spy apparatus has not acquired all the latest in Really Smart US Military Contingency Planning Documents covering the Area of Operation that includes their space, and probably the rest of Our Most Secret Stuff too. Jonathan Pollard? And who were the other guys and gals? Do you suppose OUR Experienced Players have the same degree of skill in peeping into the war planning of the IDF? Or do Our Big Brains just go with the assumption that "we're on the same side...?" (Probably not, but you never know with all the Rapturists in the upper ranks.)
Last I checked, there's still no predicting the future positions of even a dozen identical billiards balls interacting via relatively simple collisions. When the numbers of interactions, collisions, frictions, inertias and other relationships get as big as they are today, any condescension and pretense to High Knowledge is hubris in the extreme. Even Malaysia and Algeria are exceptional special cases, compared to the Consumer Combustion Culture that blankets the rest of the planet.
WOPR: THE ONLY WAY TO WIN IS NOT TO PLAY THE GAME.
Ah, the voice of sweet reasonable didacticism... Good thing the teacher is not in the room with us, with a long ruler to correct our every excursion from the precise text of the assigned narrative...
And why do I have little hope for our species? Gee, could it have something to do with the nature of our behaviors, displayed small and large, even in "rational" places like this (let alone the comments and text over at Red States and other vigorously partisan webspaces, or even below every Youtube video or every article in Yahoo!space or The Economist or the NYT or you name it)? Or how about them Egyptian soccer fans, hey? Or GIs killing Afghan non-combattants out of boredom, or all those errant Hellfire strikes. Violence is the nature of the beast, and putting a nice condescending pseudo-academic pseudo-diplomatic polish on it hardly conceals the nature of the corroded base metal underneath it all...
What's the plan on this one?
Bill, got an issue with the statement that the US and Israel cannot "win" in any land-war-in-Asia spasm involving Iran as the locus belligerentiae? And that there's no way in hell, short of using nukes and other unconventional weapons, or a lot more than 20 to 1 "assets" and likely national US bankruptcy, to "subdue" all those Persians? Or are we just straining after gnats and a spurious definitional perfection in the Great Gamespace as to what the War Department documents say?
Don't know your personal politics or preferences when it comes to lighting the fuse on another Imperial adventure (MY definition, of course,) but if you favor "engagement" of the martial sort with Iran, maybe you could lay out, in layman's terms of course, what might be the US "national interests" involved, and a statement an achievable set of goals for our squirming Generals to apply their Networked Complex Battlespace Competencies to?
And Nixon-China was not also the start of a "one-off" that's keeping the Experienced Players well stocked with lots of opportunities to screw up again? And Iran-Hillaryorwhoever would not also be a "one-off" like China-Nixon and Ho Chi Minh-Johnson, with long-view-subtle on one side and klutz'n'hubris on the other once again? (Looks to me like China, like Vietnam, came out with the long, non-poopy end of the stick, on the Great Game Board...)
They're all "one-off," all subject to chaotic fractal looniness and mischance, driven by myths and huge military establishments banging their be-ribboned chests together, and greedy "interests," all hostage to ego and macho and greed. Elephants trampling the corn fields, and us mice and rabbits, who plant and harvest and see a fourth or more of all we create going to fund Planet Fortress, trying to keep ourselves and our little warrens and offspring from being crushed...
Our DC "leaders" likely remember the last time "we" tried secret, high-level "negotiations" with elements of the Iranian polity. I believe the headline for that activity was "Iran-Contra," complete with delivery of Bibles and Hawk missiles and lots of wealth transfer and once again proof that the Experienced players really have a hard time finding their backsides with both hands. Having once sat on the fire ant hill, yet again.
And remind me how well "we" did in those "negotiations" ol' Henry "Power is the ultimate Aphrodisiac" Kissinger engaged in with Le Duc Tho, over there in Gay Paree? I guess now that Walmart is loaded up with nice shirts and slacks made by Commies in Vietnam, and "our" navy is doing joint maneuvers with the navy that was falsely claimed to have attacked "our" ships in the Gulf of Tonkin, "we" are on the upside, right? After $4 trillion and counting to do THAT stupid, feckless, uncontrolled War thing? To keep the Commies from taking over the Boardwalk at Huntington Beach?
Not picking on you, Charley -- just wondering if there is any way out, at least given "our" rulership, other than the whole bomb-invade-absorb the asymmetric damage-strip-the-wealth-out-of-our-economy thing. "We" seem to be kind of like the Cave Troll in that scene in "The Fellowship of the Rings:" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vi5pdd7xHNI
I wonder how many of my fellow former servicemen with time in a "war zone" are experiencing the other kinds of nightmares, the personal ones, that the runup to and denouement-by-inevitable-"withdrawal"-once-again-without-honor-or-"victory," that every one of the Imperial Assininities of the last five decades has brought so many of us.
Of course, when there's raw red meat being waved in front of the War Beast, the few people still trying to hang on to the leash are also losing their grips. Our Leviathan is actually a Juggernaut, shuddering downhill toward a cliff -- too bad so few have any interest in, or realistic and not Flag-obscured idea of, the scale and inevitable fate of that enormous, clumsy, inertial complexity of the whole bureaucratized, deceptive, military-industrial-commercial-academic-political apparatus. That Behemoth, made up of hundreds of millions of humans, whose "wants" all congregate and conspire to keep all of us skating ever closer to the ragged edge of disaster.
I wonder: Do the Experienced Players think, believe, and sleep on both ears thanks to, the comforting notion that they have this all Under Control? Several of them apparently find what's posted here sufficiently of concern to inject little toxic prions of their own selection or manufacture into the discourse. We are supposed to argue, by their lights, about whether, short term, the price of Iranian oil will go up or down, what "sanctions" might or might not do to achieve unspecified "results" with respect to those Uppity Iranians (forget about the nature of humans, the wisdom of Sun Tzu, and the most effective way to encourage actual asymmetric "terror" retaliations in the Homelands of America and Europe, which would be only the working out of their self-fulfilling "doctrine,") and whether the cost to the American society will be $9 trillion+ or "only" $3 trillion (plus ever tighter State Security thumbscrews,) and how many dead and wounded, on all "sides," does it take to make a Baker's dozen.
May Freddie Kruger visit, terminally, all of those war wimps and chicken hawks and war profiteers and cheerleading go-alongs and oil speculators, et Karma cetera, in THEIR dreams...
Oh, of course "oil, the more-or-less-fungible commodity" is a lot more complicated than a zero-sum game and a little chart, no matter how evocative. I really do wonder what-all would happen to pricing, and "international stability" (sic) in the various corners of that Bazaar, if the Coalition of the "Democratic" Zombies of the West (sic) did get their corporate owners to not buy Iranian petroleum. Directly. For a while.
As to what constitutes an act of war, or maybe casus desperare, maybe, with all the profitable, oversold weapons from all the post-national manufacturers via all the pseudo-nationalisitic military-political mashups that are setting out there on hair triggers and trip-wires, and all that huge, clumsy, inflexible apparatus of power projection overhanging all, who knows whether there's an Archduke riding on down to an assassination? For us movie buffs, we can remember that WOPR found that the only way to win was not to play the game. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOPR
Of course, that all depends on how you define "victory." Raytheon got a nice contract to re-fill all the holes in the "US" cruise missile inventory after all those often errant past-shelf-date units got launched into Libya... "I love the smell of napalm, and megabucks, in the morning... it smells like VICTORY."
What you said.
And it will be interesting to see what today's "troops" do when "deployed" to activate the ol' Operation Garden Plot contingency plan, and ordered to shoot into the crowds of Their Fellow Americans doing mass disruption. Yeah, "it's just a contingency plan, and our leaders would be remiss if they didn't have it in place." "It's just some CT silliness."
Judge for yourself (.pdf):
http://www.governmentattic.org/2docs/DA-CivilDisturbPlanGardenPlot_1968.pdf
And read it with Sections 1030-1032 of the National Defense Authorization Act. Here's the government lawyers' take on what the detention powers the NDAA that Obama signed "with misgivings" consist of:
http://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=698051
You decide whether to pooh-pooh, or maybe chew-chew your nails some more.
"Please, sir, I want some more..."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZrgxHvNNUc
Lest the rest of us forget, the principal sin in the Israeli theocratic dogma is to be taken for a "freier." Need an explanation of what that wonderfully illustrative bit of non-approved Yiddish means?
"Thou Shalt Not Be A Freier" -- http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/thou-shalt-not-be-a-freier-1.211247
For an application in context, lookie here: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=freier
A lot of the Experienced Players in Israel, it's reported, refer to Us Americans as "Uncle Freier." Not right to most of our faces, of course...
Oh, and speaking of Freiers, want another little glimpse of what the Experienced Players do in the privacy of their own little compartments? See "In the service of the Jewish State," again from Ha'Aretz -- http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/in-the-service-of-the-jewish-state-1.216923
What's the goal of the Game, again? Oh yeah...
Isn't it fascinating how the clench-jawed, glowering Players on all sides do such a wonderful job of projection? And of mimesis, that amazing capacity to become what they think and hope their Enemy is? Because they just know that were they sitting in the Other's chair, that's just exactly what THEY would be thinking and doing? So they have to get there FIRST, with MORE?
What's the endpoint of the circle? Nuclear Winter, to counteract Global Warming?
Ken, thanks for that link. The Asia Times article on how the Experienced Players are playing out the latest current most pressing scariest has-to-be-dealt-with Threat Scenario has all the elements of what is dead-end wrong with humans-with-guns-and-greed.
I'm just a fantasy-chasing aspirationalist. But I'll take that approach to my grandchildren's future over the moral and intellectual bankruptcy so artfully displayed in the piece you link. "Our" dumbshit enormous clumsy military-political-industrial apparatus once again is selling "us" on the notion that belatedly, after some smartass general whups up on "our" huge, powerful, grotesquely complicated and inertial War Machine in some $250 million World's Biggest War Games Ever, by simply doing what the early mammals did to the dinosaurs (eating their eggs and young) with simple tactics and techonology that is straight out of Sun Tzu, that "we" have to spend trillions more to "field," after the whole profitable runup through the Procurement Process, More and Better Machines to Counter Those Threats that "our" Doctrine du Jour lets us perceive.
Doesn't anyone want to take a stab at getting off the Threat Perception and Klutzy Reaction Treadmill, and maybe figure out how to deal with our fellow humans on a different plane? Where there's a fundamental reality that gets buried in the "success" of Conventional Thinking as proacticed and promoted by the Experienced Players and all the skulch that feeds off the world's wealth that's dumped into the Great Game of Be Afraid and Give Us Infinite Money To Make And Counter Infinite Threats? That place and way of thinking that recognizes that really, actually, there's enough of everything that matters to go all the way around the table, if only we can keep the Pigs in Suits and Uniforms from eating everything off the plate except for one lone cookie that they have tricked the rest of us into focusing on and fighting over and forgetting that they've scarfed up all the rest?
Yeah, I know, that's all just a fantasy. Though is it just me, or does it seem like maybe people who have been suffering the worst of the kleptocratic militarized depredations are maybe saying "NO MAS!" or the Arabic equivalent, maybe "لا أكثر"?
Of course I was pretty sure you could not resist a nice straight line like that, could you?
Thank you for your service -- in reminding all that there are people who "run things," those Experienced Players, who keep the Great Spheres of Influence puffed up and in motion, grinding down the ordinary folks in pursuit of what, again? "Democracyn'freedom tm?" A global market for weapons? A safe place for deposed kleptocrat-dictators to retire to, with their stolen Wealth of Nations? Ensuring that, at whatever cost, The Oil Must Flow? A race-to-the-bottom Flat Earth, where upward wealth transfer and untrammeled selfishness is the ruling scheme?
I've got no idea how you spent your career, or what church you go to, or whether you are now paid, like a lot of former Insters, for "security advice" of one sort or another, but I will claim a little knowledge about what's right and what's wrong for ordinary people like myself and family, where their lives are impacted by the Great Game and other geopolitical chicanery.
So be smug about "expertise." There were a lot of people who were "expert" in alchemy, back in the day, and in rooting out "heresy" via Inquisition, too -- still a lot of the latter around, especially the ones who know all about torture and terror. http://www.tlaxcala.es/pp.asp?reference=5984&lg=en The kind of thinking that seems displayed in your posts here, a small sample to be sure, that unfortunately does not seem to be about stability and sustainability, or even survival. But then folks of the kleptocratic persuasion know that their play is to maximize their personal pleasure and gain, grabbing wealth and influence that insulates them from any consequences for horrific acts, and setting themselves up for nice safe comfortable old age and a quiet, painless passing.
But not to worry, of course -- the Experts are lined up on the Winning Side...
"Israel"? What does that signify, again? The durability and extent of the fallacy of reification/hypostatization?
From what I read in Ha'aretz and stuff, it sure looks like there are a lot of people, likely even a majority, among the the 7.6-odd million Israelis who are unhappy with their reactionary rulers sending them down the rabbit hole of history. But the really tuned-in geopolitical players, of course, apparently are limited to thinking (however nuanced and subtle the backgrounding might be) in terms only of dealing with, through, and by militarized and monomaniacal elites, who in the argot of the trade become "the US" and "Israel" and "Afghanistan," et silly cetera. (And it's not like many "Isreali" rulers don't play the other Great Game, massive corruption and extra-legal shenanigans at the expense of the ordinary folks, maybe not to the scale of a Yasser Arafat but right up there... much like many "US" rulers also do. With a casual, insouciant "Apres moi, le deluge.")
The mostly guys who play those Games do everything they can, consciously or not, to front-load all the "processes" with self-fulfilling expectations that favor the continuation of their version of How Things Are Or At Least How They Want Them To Be. Usually things that are personally profitable and satisfying for them, and for their peers on all sides claiming to act for their respective collectives.
The hope I have, and maybe some others too, is that ordinary people, like the maybe a million or more who went to the streets in "Israel" not so long ago, and the Occupy folks in Oakland who are getting gassed and clubbed and dragnetted out of "kettles" in what sure looks like another police-state kind of action as I write, complete with fraudulent reporting, and the people in Syria who are getting serious about something more than "regime change," and so forth, sense that maybe they are not just little cells in a self-destructive battery, but have some collective power that can demand and work toward a survivable and sustainable future.
The hard part is building expectations and institutions that can resist the implacable efforts of those who want to repeat the Imperial impulse (or just manipulate the tribal impulses we are a long way from evolving past,) for personal power and profit...)
But then I'm just a dilettante observer, not an Experienced Player...
They read (or have their "people" read to them) polls and briefing papers and debate preps, and they absorb videos, all prepared by the worst kinds of interest-holders.
Boooks? They don' need no steenkeeng boooks, especially boooks by humans interested in decency and fairness and honesty and what it takes to counter the blackest of human impulses driving the Grand Titanic of "policy," books and other illuminations that bring light, rather than more darkness and heat straight from the Narrative of Destruction. It's how they pretend to "lead," by charging to the front of the stampede and bellowing "Follow ME! There's clear sailing ahead!"
The function of the captain is to navigate the vessel on a course that gets ship and passengers safely from here to there. Beware following, in idiot bliss at nominal "success," the many Dotted Lines that criss-cross the planet...
Only two comments on this moving subject? The moving finger, having written, moves on...
Too bad there's no analogue of "differential diagnosis" in geopolitics, where way too much of the thinking and posturing and pontificating seem most like how old Procrustes used to treat the people HE robbed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes
"Jeffersonian democracy?" "Madisonian democracy?" Armed revolutionaries in the streets as a fourth perpetual branch of the Model of Government according to Western lights? None of the above models, forms, "ideals?"
One might hope that something might happen here, other than laying down the "frames" into which various persuaders want to force what's happening, which might be something else altogether than what's allowed in the preconceived comfort food and shibboleths of one band or another, by hacking off any bits that stick out, or stretching things to fit (or stuffing conveniently shaped preconceptions into any gaps at the corners and edges, and doing a little or a lot of policy-wonk Photoshopping on the rest to make it "fit the model.")
Maybe what's happening out of Tahrir Square is an aspirational revulsion for being forced onto a dead-end path to militarized parasitic kleptocracy, and a demand for what might be called "normalcy." I don't know, I'm sure, but the Pundits of Predestination sure as hell don't know. And it's too bad they are on stage as "opinion leaders," when what's needed is a little more clarity and honesty and a lot more transparency. Some large majority of nearly 7 billion humans pretty much wants to just live and let live, get along, make a decent life. as long as their tribal buttons aren't covertly pushed and their demands are not manufactured into intolerable and unsustainable "wantsandgottahaves." How you rein in the cancerous minority, I don't know -- maybe ask an Egyptian, or a "Syrian dissident," or an Occupier?
It's a living process, "normalcy," but it needs a spiritual-DNA framework if it's going to grow with any vigor and direction. Especially given the load of toxins that's already in the body, and those guys who are always ready to rack or amputate anyone who doesn't "fit."
I read the "Nine Dot" wiki article, and a few of the few other articles googled up under the main headings. It sure seems like the "well-established, well-known fact" might best be characterized as the same kind of broad, even more ambiguous claim of hegemony that I referred to the US geopoliticians making toward the whole world.
Even the wiki article makes it pretty clear that no one seems to know what a set of dashed on a map first put out by Chiang Kai-Shek's notably democratic Kuomintang in 1947 or thereabouts might actually mean or portend. The "security" reflex is of course to assume this is all about "taking over," and to throw a few hundred billion in new hair-trigger warfighting resources into the area. On the assumption that Chinese generals and leaders are just as arrogant and grasping, if maybe, as heirs to Sun Tzu, more subtle and crafty than our own. All of them contributing their little bit to the global game of Risk!, at a rather large cost to the whole planet.
So let's all do like some of the "experts" in the Game have done, and look around for any evidence that "they" are trying to encroach on "our" claims of hegemony. Eleven-dot? Nine-dot? Claims of sovereignty or economic interest, or just certain kinds of humans doing what they do, "perceiving threats" or imagining threats, or issuing dire warnings about dark plots they just know are hatching over the horizon? What, other than "good reasons" to fill the Area of Operation that includes the South China Sea with US "assets," is the substance of that set of dashes on a map? Other than to the suspicions and aspirations of people like the Committee on the Present Danger, which is all about making sure the US does first, fastest and biggest what the Committee is just sure that "terrorists" and now ChiComs are up to? How does bankrupting our economy and culture, fiscally and morally, to "protect the US sphere of influence," get the most of us anywhere good?
First, the Rooskies were gonna try to take us over, and then the Chinese... Gotta be ready. And if that means huge costs to set up the conditions that result in a global conflict, and then the ignition of that conflict, well hey, it was all done with the best patriotic intentions. No profit motive or ego-stoking at all.
A cop stops a guy walking around downtown L.A. with an elephant gun on his shoulder. "What the heck do you think you are doing with that big rifle?" "Keeping the wild elephants away," says the guy. Cop says "There's no wild elephants within 10,000 miles of here, bub!" Says the guy with the big gun, with a smug little smile, "See? It works! Now let me go on about my business."
Not to worry, though -- you guys have the momentum, and all the big guns, and your hands deep in the public pocketbook.
Wow, a careful parsing of "the record" can be made to show a dotted line on some maps (got a link, or is that "secret?",) and the kind of "analysis" of a few "words of diplomacy" that is of the order that used to be applied to analysis of apparatchikia, collected or overheard or simply made up, with respect to the former Soviet Union under the deep, mysterious, faintly fearful heading "Sovietology," in all the skulduggery that led to the militarization and imperialization of America The Beautiful?
"Core interest:" how very "threatening." And what do the Intelligence Estimates make of that? Something that can be best addressed by the other kind of thinking that leads to little snippets like this?
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/world/middleeast/on-aircraft-carrier-stennis-sailors-9-decks-down-build-the-bombs.html?_r=1
"Influence." Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran. Or wherever. Whenever. Whatever.
Now the trick is to sell the notion that the Chinese military and civilian rulers are seeking some kind of presence and parity with the US Networked Battlespace, right? Where are the US "core interests?"
The scary part is that people who think this way end up, by preference and application and tendentiousness and persistence, driving the gross behaviors of nations. "Everybody who knows anything, knows that what you say is the reality, and any dissenting or questioning voice is just unsophisticated" is still an unsupported and, looking to species survival rather than short-term hegemony, insupportable assertion.
By the way, one meaning of "sophisticated" is "unduly refined," another is "pretentiously or superficially wise," and in older times (and in a faint, slightly distasteful echo, in the more recent usages) it meant "spoiled or debased," as in "the vintner sophisticated his wine with sugar of lead to make it seem sweeter."
"Guantanamo?" "Guantanamo?" Where have I heard that word before?...
Is that an unsupported assertion, on a really breathtaking scale, straight out of the dead end that is the Great Game of Risk!?
China claims the entire South China Sea? Which part of "China?"
And with 11 carrier groups, and all the SLBMs and ICBMs and B-2 and F-Whatever-deliverable nukes, and Littoral Warfighting Capacity, and soon Scramjets able to hit and "Hellfire" the heck out of tall buildings half way around the world, and over 500 "US bases," and spending nearly half of all the real wealth in the world that gets put into that Advanced Interoperable Networked Battlespace thing, Bill's old buddies in the Great Game are now about "pivoting toward Asia" as a way of providing a "balancing force in the region"? Got nothing to do with neocon wet dreams of perpetual hegemony? Or the apparently unstoppable growing momentum of the grand militarization of everything?
How does "US behavior" stack up against that comfortable fiction, raised pretty much only as a curtain of convenient concealment or flag of convenience when it suits some geopolitical jerkery, called "international law?"
But of course with Ron Paul and his apparent commitment to "reducing defense spending," you also get another whole kettle of rotten social and political and economic fish...
And given the realities of the DC power structure and the size of the MIC Thing, and the fact that Congress, our bought-and-paid-for MIC-AIPAC-etc. monkey house, disposes of our hard-earned money as THEY see fit, just what do the Paulists contend their Hero is going to be able to do to even match the currently maybe possible "slight reduction in the rate of growth" of the Security State and the Grand Army of the Former Republic?
Here's one -- I can't find a nifty pie chart for it.
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS
A simple illustration of why nothing of substance is going to change, short of a smaller or larger world conflagration touched off by any one of the idiot hair trigger tripwires that are strung all over, across every major passage and "choke point" and around the necks of all the average schmucks who end up paying for their own mass detonation and/or cremation, thinking they have been buying "security" with all those trillions...
Glad the the Old Guard is happy to tell us what the Occupy phenomenon is all about. Complete with the comfortably persuasive, unsupported assertion that "many of them (probably a majority)" are all about "dismantling capitalism."
Got a cite, from something other than Wiki or Red States or Cato, to support that notion, since that's not what I get from folks who largely seem to want a little economic fairness imposed on what many (probably even most) understand is a basic and sensible (when not torqued by the Gordon Gekko crowd) fundamental way of "doing business?"
And as a lapsed attorney, I also have to ask what kind of support there might be for the assertion that the increasingly "reactionary" courts, increasingly packed by a long string of "conservative" legislatures and executives, slicing edges off the bright-line, four-corners, plain-meaning parts of the Constitution that have to do with the First and Fourth and Fifth Amendments, have done such a great job of protecting the rest of us from "religious zealots?"
The sky may not be falling for some of us, but gee, what are all those heavy objects crashing to the ground here, there and everywhere?
Maybe be a little concerned, if you have some depth of knowledge about the nature of the people leading the charge (RedHeads as well as what many assume about "Islamists," based on the selling points shilled out by our own "conservatives"), and what has any likelihood of coming to pass on the world stage where the survival of the species is maybe at stake, and how narrowly drawn "national interests" (obscuring a pretty clear thrust for impossible hegemony) "inform" the flow of preference and perception about people we hate and fear maybe just because we are wired to need an "enemy," and whether the "Islamists" pose anything of the same order of danger to decency and survival as the Armageddonists and would-be perpetual Kleptocrats in our own polity, who feed on racism and fear.
And whether there, as here, the people you are "concerned about" have been using the tools of politics to trick the many into legitimizing the scams of people like Gingrich and the Kochs by "voting" for them, or whether (among other possibilities) the voting people in Egypt maybe see some hope that there will be aspirational changes in the direction of people being able to live their lives free of fear of State Security and with half a chance of making a sustainable, survivable living in something other than wage slavery.
And no, I don't pretend to any such knowledge, just a dilettante's observations on what seem to me to be common elements of human behavior and my own fear that grim, cynical, hypocritical, violent people will control the future my grandchildren will have to inhabit. I just hate being manipulated, and seeing others being manipulated, by folks like that.
"the rank and file southern does love their country"
"Their" country. Exactly. Not "ours." Not "this." And think of all the people, their fellow citizens, that Stars&Bars rank and file are convinced are not only not part of their country, but actively hate it and hope for its destruction. I mean, other than by Armageddon/Rapture, which is OK.
Dare one ask what that might mean? Maybe that there's a sinister link between the sinister LDS structure (I tend to agree on that one) and "sinister Islamists?" Or "sinister AIPAC?" Or what?
Given all that, is there a snowball's chance in hell that the City on the Hill won't implode into a comfortable Old South feudalism, or some other dystopian-for-the-most-of-us form?
My friend the Fundamentalist Christian is convinced, on his reading of Revelation and words from some pastor or other, that Newt Gingrich is the Anti-Christ. Does that mean he's NOT going to vote for that creature if he gets the chance, or oppose his candidacy? Hardly.
Seems his belief structure, that he is so busily, along with a pretty small minority of fellow-travelers, trying to impose on all the rest of us, is all happy that the Slimy Amphibian, whose cousin the Salamander can slither through fire unharmed, may very well be the next Most Powerful Individual On Earth.
Newt in the Oval Office, the most cynical and Machiavellian despoilers of language and comity, will be one giant step closer to the Armageddon the "Christian" so earnestly yearns for, when all that bad stuff starts to happen at a much higher rate, and he can stand outside all day long with the assurance from his reading of his version of the Bible (there being several hundred versions of the Absolute Received Word of the Living God over which True Christians conduct violent but covert sectarian warfare) that the Living God (who is not a Loving God) will reach down and Rapture him up to someplace far, far better just before the crap really hits the fan.
On a smaller scale, Wall Streeters appear to be cashing out and moving out (of the US) in response to the downsizing that's hitting their own "industry," even though there's about zero fear of prosecution or retribution for all the crap they pulled. No need even for repentance; more than enough money to buy all the indulgences, the never-go-to-jail-free cards, that are the hallmark of kleptocracy here, there and in Egypt too.
And we are supposed to worry about the Muslim Brotherhood exactly why, again?
Maybe a slightly different question can be asked, purely rhetorically of course: "What is the matter with US?" as in "us humans, the apparently too-smart-to-survive species?"
Sir, it seems to me that there is just too much "interest" in combustion-based consumption to allow much hope that there can be a significant change in the energy generation part of our infestation of the planet. It would be nice to be wrong about that...
"International law?" Is that an oxymoron?
Out on the oceans, where big flag-of-convenience ships with tiny (more profitable) and often marginally competent crews, swoosh along with huge, minimally steerable momentum and inertia, and practically no brakes, and with GPS-driven autopilots at the helm, there are "laws" about responsibilities when vessels meet, with a danger of collision and loss. Everyone is fundamentally supposed to stay out of everyone else's way, and there are positional "rules" that say who is the "stand on" vessel and who is the "give way' vessel.
But at the bottom of all that, as with "international law," the real rule is more simply "Tonnage!" Big ships may play clumsy games of "Chicken," reducing their watchfulness and focusing simply on minimizing fuel use and transit time, and the fact that it's still a big ocean spares a lot of idiot captains from having to explain a big oil spill or how they hit a reef because somebody wanted a better view of the village lights ashore. Little boats are best advised, whatever the "rules" say, to keep out of the way of the Juggernauts.
I guess the rule in the parallel universe of the Great Game is less Tonnage! than Megatonnage!
The cool thing about the nastiest players in the Great Game is that they may do a strategic step sideways, or even slightly backward, from the ragged edge they play along, looking for power and profit. But you can just bet that the motion is just a feint, calculated to reduce an immediate pressure or friction, but not representing any fundamental change in the choreography of their dance-and-advance.
How are those settlements coming along, Ehud and Yahoo? And I hear that your "defence industry" is having another banner year, peddling the devices of destabilization and destruction all over the world. Much like the one nominally headquartered in America, peddling "coolness" and the promise of Interoperable Battlespace Domination and fear in equal measures to would-be hegemons all over the planet.
It's what happens when the individual personal pursuit of power and wealth intersects with the flow that is our species. Individuals, many of them, know that their life spans are limited, that they can live large as predators and parasites without much fear of personal consequences or retribution, and that what happens after they die in comfort and ease means essentially nothing to them -- with the exception that there will be a few generations that recall their names or their parties with fear and disgust and maybe a little awe.
Without some enormous spiritual change, without some sudden new set of notions of stability and comity, without a different organizing principle that trends toward homeostasis rather than an atavistic yearning for the End Times, gee, I wonder what the End Game of the Great Game will look like?
You got the people who think they are the chess players, and then you got the people who hold the strings attached to the limbs of the people who think they are the chess players, and then you got the people who own the stuff that the people who think they control the players and move the pieces sit on and eat and breathe and drink, and who prosper only so long as the chess players have enough pawns and rooks to continue the game, since those mostly-oblivious "pieces" create the real wealth that it all depends on, and provide the stuff of soft targets and collateral damage, with all the emotion that flows from those elements, that can be used to perpetuate the whole cycle.
It is not, as you say, a system that is subject to analysis and prediction. It ain't the special case, with all its constraints and chaos-driven, quantum-effected and -affected, and friction-induced variability, of even Newton's fascinating Cradle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_cradle
It's a tribute to the bits of stability and decency that still inhere in human nature that it hasn't gone to the "Nuclear Winter Will End Global Warming!" stage.
But there's lots of opportunity in the playing, for personal "enrichment" and aggrandizement, especially for the worst and most manipulative and least conscience-bound of the damn cynics who keep adding destructive energy to the machinery.
Speaking of false contrasts, false equivalences and distractions -- could it be that the people in Tahrir Square have something in common with the people in the Park? And of course Bill conveniently ignores the treatment accorded to so many of the folks who are protesting a structure of kleptocracy that may not shoot them dead, but has no qualms about pepper spray in the face of unresisting, witnessing, sitting folks who hope for half a chance at a better life, or how about shooting a GI who "served his country" in the head with a projectile of some sort? One wonders what has NOT been reported about what has been done to people trying to exercise their increasingly hedged and constrained 'rights,' seeking apparently some redress in a polity that is all about concentrating wealth and power.
The test, if I remember my Constitutional Law classes and Civics and such, is not whether your fellow Americans have been "have been absolutely muzzeled from any political speech in the U.S.; and who have been denied any legitimate expression upon fear of death." The text itself reads, in the first instance,
And with few exceptions over the last couple of centuries, the notion has been pretty consistent and clear, and it applies to the state and local jurisdictions that are defining tiny "Free Speech Zones" and training cops in Imperial Trooper crowd control. But then that's pretty clear, of course.
Can't hardly wait to see how Tampa and Governor Sick Rott down here in FL "handle" "free speech" and "assembly to petition the government..."
Maybe the same ones not taken by Mohammed Reza Palavi? Oh, that was different. And Notagainistan is not Vietnam. Except maybe in certain "liberal" broad outlines...
Oh, they've noticed the OWSers all right -- and gee, want to bet that there are contingency plans, off the shelf and on the ground, to keep the disease of relatively untrammeled universal rights, in a matrix that just STINKs of the awful old Golden Rule, bringing in the dangerous notion that there are duties and responsibilities and limits that go along with both liberty and power, from spreading to too much of the docile populace? Maybe Mittsy will hold the stakes...
And for any Pursuer Of Absolute Truth who demands incontrovertible proof of such stuff, well, I guess that you will just have to resort to a search on the 'net. Since so far it's still up and running. Or just sit back and wait.
Wait! Wait! Even better, since the risk of harm to the many is so enormous, and the historical and present proofs of the existence of and the tendency toward repressive dictatorial kleptocracy are so compellingly massive, maybe it would be appropriate to assign the burden of proof to the perpetual-professionial-skeptics-on-the-side-of-the-Powers-That-Be, to prove that there's nothing like that in the works!
And to give it a beat, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hi4kfTah7yI&feature=g-all-lik&context=G2187998FAAAAAAAACAA
The truly cynical might also add to that committee "various players in the State Security apparatus," looking for legal cover (that mythical "ruleoflawthingthatPROTECTSus," again) for the legitimization and working out of their impulses to dominate and control and repress.
While hyperlinking is still possible, here's an entry point to formulate an answer to Mr. Bill's wide-eyed-innocent, pseudo-Socratic, voice-of-sweet-reason questions: http://whatblag.com/2012/01/18/whats-wrong-with-sopa/
Wrong tool for a job that may not even make economic sense to do, except, as usual, for a to-this-point privileged few. And as with the NDAA, what a surprise that the taint of suspicion of the possibility of "piracy" (near kin to "terrorism," I guess) would be enough to grant the "legal authority" under archly worded language to "take down" the defined or interpreted malefactors...
I got another question: If the people who want to squelch the difficult-to-control 'net, and related communications tech, as a means to squelch aspirational behaviors award themselves the "legal authority" to do so, is the budding world brain robust enough to circumvent those efforts to strangle the kinds of traffic that enlarge people's understanding of how badly they are being had by the Few?
Hint to the Overlords: If you want to maintain your rule, better get crackin', since the tech you have summoned like a genii to help you Network your freakin' Battlespace might, as in so many myths and fables and fairy tales, turn out to be a Golem that's grown too big for you to reach its forehead and erase the summoning spell... But then I'm sure you know that, and have people working on it...
And while we are remembering acronymic reasons to wonder yet again how quickly "freedom" gets the axe, let's remember (among others) FISA and the recent Obama "I really don't like this legislation I asked for, but trust me, I won't abuse the power I just grabbed" NDAA provisions (Sections 1031 and 1032 being the most egregious,) and that "whatthehelldidhejustsay?" performance, standing in front of the Sacred Constitution and describing how the Three Branches are going to salt the roots of the Liberty Tree by creating a "legitimate legal structure" that is OUTSIDE the scope of the Constitution because, well, "al Quaeda has declared WAR on us, and all's fair in love and war, my fellow Americans!"
Most of us are dumb enough to believe in a magical Justice Department that only goes after "lawbreakers" and is constrained by that other magical construct that Obama yakked about, the "rule of law." Sorry, folks -- that belief in, that need to have, a structure of laws and limited powers is being used by cynical and greedy SOBs to "legitimize" what they are really doing. And I just saw a discussion of these abuses where several participants were all happy with this War on Terror stuff, coming back with that old idiocy "If you're not doing anything illegal, you don't have anything to worry about..."
Gee, what gets made "illegal" next?
Does "the herd mentality" include "herd behavior" like us all suddenly being told we have to start getting our knickers in a sudden twist about "Iran" suddenly being as big a danger to "US national interests" as, say, the Japanese in 1940? Or maybe that is not an acceptable analogy -- I'm sure there's one out there somewhere, that's better than that -- maybe the Duchy of Fenwick?
Seems to me that the apparatchiks in our state security apparatus are more than happy to round up the wildebeests and nip and howl them into a stampede for what later prove (at least if the reality comes to light, finally) to be less than honorable or honest purposes. WMD in Iraq? Whodathoughtit?
Nice of you two to confirm each others' assertions. I guess that settles the issue for all of us, then, right?
One of the strongest presumptions in the law is the presumption of continuity. If people do things one way today, they are likely to keep doing them the same way next month. Waddles like a duck, swims like a duck, quacks like a duck? Kind of silly to claim that "this once" the rest of us should believe, in a realm where "plausible deniability" is one touchstone of a good "operation," that "strong terms" from the US state department should settle once and for all the genesis of these murders. "Watch the shiny object as it spins..."
The legalism that "It's not been proved beyond a reasonable doubt" is a nice shield against accountability, especially if there's no Wikileaks or person of conscience to reveal the reality. And even if there's no "direct link" between any of the increasingly large number of Covert Operators on "our" side and what happened to Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan and his driver, and several random other "Wogs," there's a Great Game afoot, "War With Iran," with more than enough complicity to go around. (I gotta ask, obviously with the benefit of hindsight, why these Players did not "do" A.Q. Khan and some of the Pakistani movers and shakers behind the avowedly nuclear weapons program of Pakistan? The existence of Pakistani nukes sure is complicating the Great Game in South Asia, now isn't it? Along with Khan's jovial dissemination of bomb-making skills across the planet.)
I'm just so sure that it's never been the case that one hand of the executive was technically ignorant of what another hand was doing or had done, and that "we" or "our" equivalents amongst the Enemy have denied any complicity or actor liability in some bad act. And April Glaspie did not convey to Saddam Hussein that the US took no position on intra-Arab squabbles like Hussein's claim that Kuwait was properly part of Greater Iraq. And the strafing and torpedoing of the USS Liberty was just a case of mistaken identity.
"Wouldn't do any harm to believe them this once." That's sarcasm, right?
But not to worry, the kind of world where such stuff can happen more easily, and with even less concern about accountability, sure seems closer all the time... I bet some of us would feel right at home there.
Re "the military wing of government, as archetypified by the rulers of Egypt and the reality in the US of We Love Our Freedom A:"
Kleptocrats with all the big guns, the end stage of "human civilization" -- the thing that started with the ingenuity of some plodding hunter-gatherer who figured out how to fill out his, or more likely her, caloric needs by growing lots of wild plants that had edible seeds that could over time be stored and had to be protected (the start of the "security state") against the thievery of other bands of hunter-gatherers and then the denizens of other walled enclaves, wherein developed the hierarchical division-of-labor structure with "noble rulers" and "holy priests" and bureaucrats and, of course, Warriors. To provide "security," and contain "freedom," and generate Holy Conflicts and Slave Raids against, or just Resource Thefts from, them Others in their flammable kraals or behind their scalable or mine-able mud or stone walls and battering-rammable gates.
"Good" military-wings-of-government are like successful parasites: bleed the host, but not so much as to kill it. Play to and pump up and exaggerate the tribal mind set. Generate fear -- of the military wing, if you can't find a sufficiently effective Other to flap your flag and wave your tallywacker at at.
The wise human learns one of several coping behaviors: Head-down Yassuh-bossing, if-you-can't-beat-'em-join-'em, staying mouse-sized and inoffensive and as invisible as possible.
Ask Bill how it works.
"Pakistan’s civilian and military wings of government are furious with each other and with the US military."
A whole lot of reality in one little sentence.
I guess it's ok with a lot of people that "the military" should be added (as it has, de facto and sub rosa, in the Land of the Freeeeeee and the Home of the Braaaave, while visions of Constitutional Republic danced in our heads) as a "wing of government." So as in areas all across the planet, "the military" ends up being part of the Kleptocracy, jealous of any attempt, by the ordinary schmucks who create the wealth that makes their parasitic and predatory fiefdoms possible, to rein them in. Egypt, Syria, maybe Iran, Libya, et bloody cetera. Pakistan. Notagainistan. The United States.
"The military," across the planet, has an organizing principle, a seductive monopoly on the tools of force and power-projection, and a hierarchy that can be filled with like-minded, ambitious, greedy racketeers, able to practice the protection racket, take over civilian productive parts and sectors of the economy, share ideas on how to keep any "democratic" (or even "republican") aspirations in check. What it (and I mark myself down for using a personification in lieu of what otherwise would have to be a treatise, to cover all the parts of the reality) ain't got is a prayer of an idea on how to "govern," as opposed to "rule' or "dictate," in any way that is durable, sustainable, decent, and that spans generations, without trying to force all the sans-uniformes into ranks and files.
At some point, the tapeworm's success means the death of the host.
Query: Is there any way for ordinary people to de-worm themselves, to free themselves from the infestation, renounce the jingoism and tribalism that feeds the feedback that keeps the racketeers in business, and figure out something better to do with a quarter and ever more of all the world's wealth that is sucked up by "the military?"
While we lotus eaters are stumbling around amongst our fellow Eloi, one might hope that other slightly aged facts and myths might enlighten us too --- not ruddy likely but, let us remember "Wag the Dog", and so much else. There's a certain amount of tolerance in any living system for aberrations and disease processes (like the whole MIC sickness), but there's also a limit to the re-stabilizing function. I wonder where we are along the old curve of binding energy...
But like so much in life, important bits of history, and clues in the hunt for a path to species survival and a decent life, in the "fog of forever war," are "so darn hard to remember, and so easy to forget." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DVn6-CURgM
What can ordinary people, who spend their days just struggling, against the predations of metastatic kleptocracy and the drive of their own native tribalisms and learned or imposed loyalties and hatreds, to make a living and provide for their families, do to rein in the jackals and hyenas and giant tapeworms that constitute the team rosters of the Great Game Players? Those relatively few who see the opportunities to create chaos and conflict so very clearly, and whose genius is figuring out ways to instigate and agitate by acts that erode the "security" they pretend to offer? People who have so much more in common with each other, across the arbitrary lines of borders and ethnicity and co-religion, than they do with the plow-horses and milk cows that create the wealth they covet?
Says the War Department:
http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/new_pubs/jp1_02.pdf
I guess it all turns on what's the definition of "unlawful."
Rinse, whitewash, and repeat.
There, in a nutshell, is what sure seems, to the moderately attentive US citizen, to be the main thrust of "US foreign policy." Follow the money, and gee, what do you kind of have to see? Maybe that Maj. Gen Smedley Butler was absolutely spot-on when he reported that "War [American-style] is nothing but a racket." Short-term benefits for a very few, and exacerbations of "tensions," the seeds of violence sown in exported oppressions, and "What, me worry?" mindsets by the players in the Game, as immune to fallout as a couple of old codgers knocking chess pieces off the board in a city park.
Our great propagandized National Behaviors sure seem to be about creating opportunities for enormous wealth transfers to a very few, people who have no regard for the future derangements their "plays" render inevitable, and who even diligently create the preconsitions as fertile ground for new wealth extractions, with no regard for present pain of the many. Because they know they can indulge themselves to the nth degree, and like Charlie Wilson and his Texas connections, or "Iran-Contra" (remember that?), start wars and promote violence hither and yon, with no fear that they will suffer any personal consequences before a comfortable, timely death finally takes them. (Among other things: What did April Glaspie really tell Saddam Hussein, and did Madeleine Albright really say that "we" find the "sanctions-"induced deaths of Wog children in Iraq "an acceptable cost?" Enquiring readers would really like to know...)
I wonder if anyone will follow and report, where any effective number of others will hear, the careers of our leading general officers, the Wise Initiators of Grand Doctrines of Warfighting, as they cycle out of uniform and into expensive suits, or make any effort to track the gains of those who profit in money and "careers" from embargoes and "cold conflicts" and active shoot-em-ups.
The career plan and business model sure seems to be to make a nice safe space for those who can manipulate those inevitable levers of power, so they can enjoy their private islands and private jets and the other emoluments of membership in that trans-national club.
Why are fraudulent forensic exercises like the current shiny object, "them hated Iranians," so seductive to people whose real, physical and spiritual interests would seem to be antithetical to hammering the war drums? How stupid are we, as a species? Why do we have to waste so much energy, that could be directed to so many better pursuits that would make life more broadly better for all of us, flinging propaganda mud and "killing insurgents" that turn out to be wedding partiers or oops! political rivals of "our friends" in foreign places, or trying to chip the obscuring crap off the walls? Gee, I wonder...
Recognize what we humans are, and are capable of. And always follow the money. "And that's the way it is." Right?
Sounds like the "libertarian" prescription, with a dash of "I of Newt." Just how, exactly, do "valid laws" come into existence? And how, exactly, do those "valid laws" get "validly enforced?" By Philospher Kings like the Pauls, who suck off the government teats labeled "Medicare" and "Medicaid?" And just love the "benefits" they get as "government employees?"
"Government" is a back-and-forth, usually too much and too little by somebody's lights, the Kochs at one extreme and a wheelchair-bound paraplegic at the other, amenable to perversion and subornation to allow the few to steal from the many, but also to provide an FBI escort to a young black woman into a "whites-only" school in Old Alabama, and to take a stab, however subject to regulatory capture, at controlling pollution and other externalities, and maybe trying to keep nasty stuff out of consumer products like milk and medicines, stuff that the popular-in-Lib-circles notion of "voluntary associations" and "government-like organizations" would not likely be doing. In case you missed the serial: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/11/journey-into-a-libertarian-future-part-i-%E2%80%93the-vision.html I guess the Golden Rule is just for the weak and sissies, as ol' Jesus and others enunciated it -- and the real valid interpretation is that "He who has the gold, rules."
I suggest that the fundamental problem, and opportunity, is that we are all in this together, and a Galtian demand for "unhinderance" might be good for a very few but kind of deadly for the rest. And guess what? How do you get to claim the title of "citizen," without there be a government to define the boundaries of "citizenship?" As in "free white male landowner?" Oh, that's right -- it has to be that wonderful construct, a "VALID government..." which comes to exist, and persist, exactly how, again?
The Golden Rule and the Golden Mean:
If my "thing" is taking in a lot of money by peddling counterfeit medications, or leaving half the re-bar out of a grade school in a quake zone, or committing serial murder, or producing and selling AK-47s and centrifuge tubes and growth media for cute little bugs like anthrax and smallpox, or generating whole planet-loads of notional-value, counterfeit "dollars" via derivatives "contracts," or starting up a little gang of highway robbers, or carving out an "enclave" where a preacher man can set up a church where his deflowering of all the young maidens is considered in his doctrine to be a holy act, is it a government function in aid of providing infrastructure to "do anything" about any of that, or is that all part and parcel of getting on with, and just a cost that you personally are willing to impose on everyone else, of doing one's own thing?
Human engineers have been smart enough to design "governors" into a lot of machines that otherwise would pretty quickly destroy themselves. Figuring out a way to have "government" without "kleptocracy" and "oppression" seems to me to be what a whole lot of humans have set their minds to for a whole long time. Without finding a durable and homeostatic set of checks and balances and any central organizing principle that has done much to keep YOUR "doing your thing" from planting YOUR hand in my wallet or YOUR boot on my neck.
"Governments" are no more "persons" than "corporations" are. Personifying the whole complex structure is just beclouding and inviting mindless simplistification, to hide the real hard work of making something positive-sum-game-ish out of all the competing hopes and horrors that humans can imagine into existence, and making it into into a set of rules or suggestions or eventually native behaviors that create the conditions for a freedom that is more than the freedom of a few to enslave or en-serf the many and suck the life out of them, while turning them into, or forcing them further along the path to becoming, mindless "Brave New World"-Eloi-and-Morlockity consumers.
The multiplicity we shorthand as the "Arab Spring" (and our local Occupy citizens) seems to have a flavor of something very new, some actual Hope and Change. But there's still a huge amount of elbowing and cross-checking and clipping and slashing going on, and it remains to be seen whether the people who just want a safe and more equitable world for themselves and their families and friends, and appear willing to reach across the old boundaries of tribe and class for a more complete and less competitive interaction, will have the endurance and durability to face down the martial kleptocrats who gain their power by playing off ancient "features" of the human psyche and soma...
Touching faith, Bill.
This American, raised in the Midwest as a Presbyterian Boy Scout, who enlisted in 1966 in part to protect your "republican form of government," and got to see a bit of a "land war of choice in Asia," and got to see what that "do my duty to God and my Country" is really all about, will gently disagree totally that this Shining City on a Hill has any kind of permanence, however important that notion is to your sense of self, as a place that fits the magical notions that grim-jawed, chicken-hawk, or testosterone-poisoned "patriots" often pretend to or actually do hold as one part of their cognitive dissonance inventory.
The category "United States" may outlive your Iranian (and Chinese and BRIC and whatever) bogeymen, but the place that exists in your mind or your politics ain't there anymore, if it ever was.
There will no doubt be a land mass, maybe still labeled "United States," here, with lines on maps and maybe electrified fences and interlocking fields of fire, maybe with the weapons pointed inward, to mark its boundaries, and maybe even some pro-forma pseudo-"democracy," not much different from what is developing every day, lobbyist by ALEC memo by Christianist general officer, under the wonderful incentives of greed and power, but it ain't gonna be the "land of the free and the home of the brave."
We, unfortunately, are all in this together, whether we want to be or not. There may be loci of privileged wealth in the future, but then there's the underlying story of the Soylent Corporation that ought to inform us what that apotheosis of corporate kleptocracy and consumption really portends for the most of us. We are all in this together, and I'm not so sure we are capable of making much out of that ineluctable reality except as an opportunity to take MORE for our individual selves and our little tribes of ethnicity or cupidity or both.
There is enough, of everything that matters, to go all the way around the whole table, except for the pig-brigands in suits who stuff their faces and eat the plate clean except for one lonely cookie, and then sucker the rest of us into fighting each other to the death over that last, forlorn cookie.
As to the attractions of the US for foreign nationals, it might be worth googling "trends in immigration US" and following some of the links.
By the way, Ronnie Reagan is dead these several years, and was missing for quite a while before that... And in case you have not figured it out yet, NOTHING is ever what you think or believe it is.
Super, sing it loud. You got the beat and the tune just right.
Anyone who believes Ron Paul would "Stop the War Machine" or "reduce the Imperial bootprint" has to have been sleeping when "hypocrisy" and "delusion" and Machiavelli were being discussed in class. That theme is nothing but one more table in his franchised game of Three Card Monte. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-card_Monte
John, you got the essence.
May I suggest, if you don't already do so, that you "follow the money," the real path, in my estimation, to understanding what's afoot, with the assistance of people like Matt Taibbi, whose distillations (with style and mordant humor) you can find on the bitstream pages of Rolling Stone Magazine, http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog, and of course in his several recent books.
This is all about creating a system that, like "high speed trading" and "speculation," one part of the game, kind of guarantees a constant and increasing transfer, as in "theft," of the Real Wealth that the world's working people create every day, into the shameless, avaricious paws of a bunch of self-centered smart-asses -- people who are all about self-indulgence to what ought to be an embarrassing extreme, who know, in their meaningless little souls, that they only go around once, that it's just a game, and that there are no consequences in this life, certainly, for activities that, but for their audacity and scale and the ability to pay legislators to have those actions declared "not illegal" and to terrorize prosecutors with "Dream Teams" of hired guns and the pressures of Great Influence, would constitute grounds for incarceration in one of America's privatized prisons, where lesser mortals are jailed and then leased out to various industries that now have really cheap slave labor available, and the pubic treasury to absorb the cost of the "slave quarters" and food.
And yes, there's a derivative "contract" being inked electronically every few minutes of every day, a "bet," and these SOBs are blunt about calling them that in their trade press, in a casino where the guys in tuxes with the titty-babes hanging on them know that the waiters and drink servers will have to slave the rest of their lives to pump up the coffers of REAL money that they can then raid to "make good" the "losses" of the freakin' COUNTERFEIT "notional dollars," losses that are guaranteed to one degree or another in every one of those "transactions."
"We" are mostly too stupid to recognize that a "notional dollar," of the QUADRILLIONS that now "exist" in bitspace, generated by people who proudly proclaim that they literally "MAKE money," is worthless, not "legal tender" of the sort that working people have to actually EARN in order to pay the electric bill or buy gasoline to get to work or for food and shelter and their uniforms. So there's a layer of the economy that is happy to launder that Funny Munny, to take it in exchange for private jets and Paradise Islands and mega-yachts and the rest of the indicia of perfect indulgence, and that is the extent of the "trickle-down" you still hear the shills for the Makers of Money trying to peddle to the rest of us.
We say "Obama," or for that matter "Romney," committing the sad self-defeating serial idiocy of personification and reification and hypostatisation, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_%28fallacy%29, but remember he is just the figurehead for a whole army of people who are their own sub-species of Vampire Squids, wrapped around our faces and sucking the life and vitality and future out of us.
Gee, why would Any Sane Person compare the conditions in Israel at present to what used to exist in South Africa in the Good Old Days?
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/israel-s-apartheid-is-worse-than-south-africa-s-1.4590
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Global_Secrets_Lies/Israel_SAfrica.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/23/israel-south-africa-nuclear-weapons
It's too bad that our global mental models, for the mass of us, based on the notion of Nations, so conveniently obscure the reality that across the human population there are the Netanyahoos and Ahmadinejads and a small but likely fatal host of other people, including so many that rise in and profit from the whole global military-hardware-software industry (where "commonality" and "interoperability" are the buzzwords that hide wht should be a scary momentum) and the little and large masters of Big-Lie-ism and tribal button-pushing. People that sure seem to me to constitute not the political pinnacles of individual nations, but rather a set unto themselves, interdependent, "interoperable," and tied by greed and the love of power over the great mass of actually productive humans.
But that's just me, of course...
Anybody want to take a crack at laying out why "Sharia Law" is so anathematic. I mean, as opposed to tribal customs and "punishment" that overlie the little I know of "Sharia Law?" And "Well, EVERYbody knows that..." is not an answer of substance. Why some people are so dumb-blind as to let their buttons be pushed by manipulators of the "conservative" stripe, who mostly seem to believe that in THEIR personal idea of what constitutes proper jurisprudence, that seems to include so many of those things they claim are part of "Sharia Law?"
It's "warped thinking" that a blundering, clotted, bloated, "doctrine-" driven War Machine nominally headquartered in the Pentagram can ever manage to "fight and win" an invasion on behalf of the Racketeers that Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler so accurately called out.
And now Our Troops have mostly completed their "strategic rearward advance to previously prepared positions," the euphemism for "retreat" back when I was in the service -- late '60s -- with respect to Iraq, in manifest recognition of the bankruptcy of all that "policy" and the near bankruptcy of the economy off of which the MIC lives as a tenacious and growing parasite, or maybe more simply a metastatic and untreatable cancer.
but it's ok, the Pentagrammers are really good at fighting vicious asymmetric battles in the Procurement Wars now in full swing in the five Rings of Power and the Hallowed Halls of Congress and the fetid bowels of K Street. Even if they have not a clue about how to Achieve Victory, whatever the hell that is supposed to mean, in any of our Wars of Choice.
And enough of us Americans are so dull and uninterested as to not notice that that vaunted Shock&Awe thing has petered out into yet another "declare victory and go home" entry in the Foolish Hall of Fame.
Can anyone here enunciate any relatively brief statement of the nominal and fundamental "national-interest-based policy" that drives all this foolishness? Maybe just "the oil must flow," and "If 'we' build all possible weapon systems, maybe some rational rationale for all of this will magically appear"?
As one who is unfortunately convinced that humans are too stupid for their smarts, and are consequently a dead-end species, whether via global warming or nuclear winter or the creation of a world where autonomous, self-repairing, self-replicating war machines ethnic-cleanse us protoplasmic pests off the planet a la "Terminator," I say to heck with the effete-ism.
This is the time of the Networked Battlsepace, the apparent, self-defeating hegemony of the bureaucratized war-worshipers. It's Pentagon turned Octagon, without any of the rules that say you can't kick 'em in the crotch or gouge their eyes or choke-hold them to death. With no referees, and an avid, violent audience cheering every decapitating blow. A bunch of barflies, pumped up with beer muscles, just aching for a fight, especially this coming one that will let "us" erase the sour taste of multi-trillion-dollar helping of DEFEAT just handed out by them hajji-towelheads in Iraq, and the long slow fade to yet another proof of the futility of the whole MIC and national-security-"diplomacy" apparatus in Notagainistan. Myth of "our" superiority of arms, meet my friend Reality...
So let's get it on, already, and get it over with! The waiting is so damn frustrating, for the closet worshipers of Kali and Shiva and their Christian and Muslim and Jewish analogues...
And for all the goodness and sweetness, there's plenty on the other end of the teeter-totter:
On the subject of zulm, and balance, here's a little snippet, with comments that ought to remind us of its immanence and omnipresence and seeming omnipotence:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfz2u-ZILXA
And then there's this, also with illuminating comments:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfV7RJdTleI&feature=related
To the person (or persons) who figures out a way to overcome the mindsets that the comments so charmingly limn ought to go the keys to the kingdom.
Not much danger of that happening, of course. The way things are is obviously too much darn fun.