From the text of Khameini's speeches, it would appear that the Iranian clerical view of nukes is that rejecting them is on a much broader basis than that they incinerate and irradiate more than "non-combatants." It's that bit about being the "symbol of destruction of generations."
There's more than enough want of "justification" for supporting (or being) "militant groups that target non-combatants." Consider the tender mercies of our New American Force, the CIA/Mercenarium, and of course the IDF, and so many others. And that's not "tu quoque," it's the reason that cynical, vicious, selfish people, tiny fractions of the masses of land and people that get personified so casually and dishonestly by those same self-interested SOBs, keep getting away with killing and stealing and dominating...
Faint proffer, Mr. Bill, that one tiny parcel of talking headism on one network contradicts the pretty obvious fact that there is a Narrative, it is cast only in terms of "seriousness," that it's currently tuned to WAR-AGAIN, and there's not enough text space here to "prove" the positive of the negative you so archly sidestep.
Does what you read in the WSJ, the WaPo, the NYT, the Chicago Trib and other Mainstream Media, or on the Network News on whatever channel you happen to favor, or in the slyly warped "reporting" of the various NPR segments since the Bush-Leaguers and the Heritage Foundationers took power, jibe with your worldview and understanding of the great Manichaean Endgame?
And there in a nutshell is the sickness that is at the heart of the Great Game, and the unfortunate reality that even though we are all in this fine mess together, a few of us will kill all of us just to gain some momentary pleasure or win some stupid point.
There is no monad, no entity, honestly identifiable as "Iran," (or "America," for that matter) but the Really Smart Experienced Players get to act as if it's so, along with all their sycophants and profiteers and True Believers... As they force all the rest of us to live with the RISK (tm) they are happy to impose on the rest of us who fund their obnoxiosities.
That's it, Bill? that's the best you can do to "prove" that there's no "Western media conspiracy" to sell a particularly noxious Narrative? "Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus"?
And numerous angels dance on the heads of so many pins.
The bit of language you quote is not that of Khameini, or any other effective Iranian voice, but commentary added by Prof. Cole, which of course people of a certain mindset will pick apart, Breitbartize and pass along as some part of NeoGospel.
It does not appear that "the hated ayatollahs" are looking for "wiggle room" at all.
Seems to me the thing about nukes is that they are weapons of the "elite." If you want to invade or drone-slap somebody, you have to have a huge establishment of contractors, communications, and logistics in place to even get the grunts and Hellfires and other exotica and their horseless carriages within range. There are a whole lot of ordinary people who are our Troops, who have this disconcerting trick of pseudo-patrolling, and declining orders to attack, and then squealing on the Brass-Asses who send them out to do Stupid. (And of course, also, because they are human, peeing on dead "insurgents.")
But the Nuke thing is all about the Football, the SIOP, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Integrated_Operational_Plan , the War Collegiate Big Men on Campus who drive all that Doctrine, and people like Curtis LeMay and his successors, and of course in France de Gall (sic), in N. Korea Kim Ate Dung, and in Israel and Old South Africa, a series of obscure actors. All of whom were about taking charge of the future of their polities and of the species, subject to various faith-based initiatives and personally profitable behaviors.
There's a reason all those action movies, "Broken Arrow," "Thunderball," "Seven Days in May," "War Games" and the like, have such horrific attraction -- we like to be scared, but we like to think that some Hero will avert the catastrophe at the last possible moment. Freddy Krueger and Jason killed, finally, dead, never to return in yet another nonsensical se-pre-quel.
Yes, there are many people involved in bringing deliverable nukes on line, and getting them on target. A bunch of carefully vetted, heavily indoctrinated Slim Pickens types, including the Rapture-Awaiting Armageddonists who work the Pantex plant in Amarillo. http://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/08/books/the-rapture-and-the-bomb.html?pagewanted=all (Reagan featured up front here, the guy who allegedly thought you could recall the missiles, once launched, and joked on a maybe accidentally live mike about letting them fly.) Not nearly as many people as launching Shock&Awe, and the whole thing is, thanks to "rational, logical" human idiocy and Game Theory, on a hair trigger held by a very small Elite, whose driving emotions and doctrines have not a goddam thing to do with the General Welfare.
Khameini may not be what our Policy People think of as a Good Native, but if one takes him at his word (trusted, maybe, but verified of course) he is one heck of a lot less likely to bring us a Nukular Winter (to counteract the Great Global Warming, maybe?) or that Dead End Full Stop War of All Against All.
Not surprised at all. The military machine is a parasite, and it only survives as long as the host does. It creates nothing, converts real wealth into hairtrigger weapon systems and incredibly clumsy bureaucracy (ICB) on an unimaginable scale. Of course, the loonies of the Christianist persuasion who are busily infiltrating and "taking over" (that same evil they accuse the Commies of) are busily pushing every button they can to bring us to the Gates of the New Jerusalem and that longed for Armageddon thingie.
My bet is that some part of "the military," which believe it or not is made up of a very assorted bunch of critters, in various commands with various motivations, all part of that parasitic/cancerous infestation that eats so much of the bread off all our tables, is in fact very much in favor of "going to war" with Iran.
Which, for them, will mean sitting in comfy chairs, looking at large-screen displays, twiddling their joysticks and tickling their keyboards and launching their avatars into the Networked Battlespace, jawing their way through meetings and briefings and conferences, and advancing the parts of "doctrine" that advance their careers or further, in the case of way too many crazy "Christianists," the acceleration of Armageddon.
Maybe you don't know (or you do) about Gens. Douglas MacArthur and Curtis LeMay, or any of their current analogues. Worth a read, about people who think the "mission" is to "bomb those little Asian/Arab/Whatever critters who are the Enemy du Jour back into the stone age." (For a quaint little side trip into how the military really works, read the section in the Wiki LeMay article headed "Japan-Washington Flight.") http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay
There's the comfortable myths, and then there's the Crouching Idiots, Hidden Reality...
For completeness, something like a quarter of the humans in Israel (not the "settled" territorial expansion) are Other Than Jewish. And of course many Israelis have notions that other nominally Jewish Israelis are not, in fact, Jewish, or Not Jewish Enough.
Kind of like so many Americans, who believe that many of their fellows ought to go back where they came from, or if they think things in Commie Pinko Socialilst countries are so hot, then they should just get the hell out of the Real America.
I can't understand how a bar bully can attack a wimp legally, or how a FL Concealed Carry Citizen can shoot a father of three over neighborhood basketball court noise (all kinds of rules.) I guess the US invasion of Iraq and Grenada and Panama and all that had the nominal "sanction" of UN "law," or some other fig leaf. And of course since the Bush II days, the Yoo Tooers have held that all that stuff is "antiquated" and "nugatory." The purpose of power is power. The purpose of violence is violence.
Any of this sound familiar? How much of what the Privileged Oligarchy is up to has anything to do with the small loves and aspirations of the "proles?" Other than stealing the real wealth they create to maintain that giant pyramid scheme?
And might one speculate that Sheik Naim Qassem was adding, as a "sharp player" in the Great Game, via his sonorous statement, some additional cred-cement to his public persona, by showing himself to be a Serious Player deserving of the loyalty and affection of his "people?"
Might I offer that "countries" don't feel ANYthing? Those convenient reifications, so comfortably raised up by Wiser Heads in offering Great Truths about the fundamental nature of the universe according to the Game of RISK! (tm) have no more 'feelings' than large coprorations (sic intentional). It's the 'feelings' of sets of people, which of course are way too complex and ineffable and ineluctable and mutable to account for in even the longest "findings" and "white papers" and such, that drive net behavior. And a very few rotten apples can so easily spoil the whole barrel.
My fave take is the last frames of the last "Planet of the Apes" movie, where Moses Heston, shot, falls across the Lucite (tm) plungers that trigger the Doomsday Machine built by 'humans' in the good old days. Next fave is David Niven, tracing the wire to the explosives set by Early Special Forces in the footings of the Bridge Over The River Kwai, built at such enormous expense of pain, shot and falling on the plunger to the detonator...
Maybe the careful reader would notice this part of the text:
The above considerations are not meant to obscure potential difficulties with this approach. They are intended to underscore that a mature view of national interest might offer an exit from the current impasse. After all, the centuries-long, bloody arch-rivalry between France and Germany has unexpectedly been overcome in the post-war period.
History shows us that the Iranian–Israeli rivalry is of geopolitical nature and as such it is by no means immune to a resolution.
Seems to me that only people who see the future as just more of the present, with more efficient weapons, have put on some pretty dark glasses. But then the current model is so very "profitable" for some of us... So the "neos" in France and Germany (and of course our own set of testosterone-poisoned Epsilon-minuses) are incubating the demon eggs of future ego-(or is it id-)satisfying "conflicts."
Huh? As in KGB, and NKVD, and those charmers? And their contributions to either the stability of their own state, or the wider world? Or was that stealth snark?
And one might add that in the context, the writer has penned a marvelous double (or is it treble?) oxymoron.
Of course, one can be sure that all those "officers," of whatever nominal part of the hierarchy, are and have been "just doing the best they can do, in a hard service..."
How about you, sir? How is your 401k or IRA making out? are you or your financial manager "smart money" enough to be doing well through all the manipulations and explosive decompressions of all those bubbles? Some of us (not me) have a government defined-benefit pension (or one from a government contractor) in the retirement mix somewhere, which of course is a different creature altogether.
Like the information on WMD in Iraq, in the runup to ShocknAwe? Like the after-action reports of the encounter that resulted in the death of Pat Tillman? Like the field reports, which were largely ignored for "policy" reasons and have subsequently been so assiduously fogged and obscured, of Saudis learning how to fly and planning something involving large civil aircraft as weapons of mass destruction, in the months before 9-11? Along the lines of a best-seller 1994 action novel by Dale Brown, "Storming Heaven"? http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/305556.Storming_Heaven
"The only way to win is not to play the game." Unless, of course, there's a nice pension and a revolving-door job at the end of one's tour... or 72 virgins...
The fun part is getting a peek at what a whole lot of the Experienced Players and their former colleagues who have migrated into the State Security apparatus, are really up to, and what they think and believe and sell in the privacy (maybe less so, as time goes on? Go Anonymous, and thank all of you, and blessings be on you, and may you hew firmly to your ethics and honor...) of their little anechoic shells.
Re what happened in Egypt (or anywhere else,) and is ongoing, my bet is we'll never know, and even if "the dry facts" went on display, the spinning apparatus will create that fog that the shadow people swim in.
These aren't washing machines or espresso makers, they're tokens in the Idiot's Game called "War." As our Networked Battlespace Managers keep being shown and never learning, NewTech threat-chasing never gets ahead of the asymmetric skill sets of inventive humans forced to defend their own terrain.
Maybe 9 months ago, to too-too-te-roo fanfare, it was announced that 12 whole M1A2 Abrams tanks were being deployed to Helmand province, and were going to be THE game changer there. http://wn.com/M1A2_Abrams_SEP_MBT The deployers, of course, were bribing the "insurgents" to let the convoys hauling the tanks (which don't run so well on unpaved surfaces) and the munitions and fuel to be moved there.
And toward the end of the Vietnam thing, and toward the end of WW II, desperate losers were pinning hopes of snatching victory from the jaws, and all that, on every kind of freak "threat generator." And the businesses that dreamed up these creations, built in the German case with slave labor, worked their contacts to get contracts for, and then supplied, "did really well."
Most code writers, even the ones that work for the MIC, know how to avoid the futility of endless loops. Some of us humans, however, are stuck in the stage of post-pubescent testosterone-poisoning, capture-the-flagitis.
Re your last paragraph: What a resounding defense of "our" behavior in foreign lands. Just as bad as the colonial French. Heck of a recommendation. But accurate, at least. Or to use your formulation, (correctly.) Ours, of course, is on a much larger scale -- does that count for anything?
And that old Jefferson guy, who spent some time in Europe watching the practices of imperial courts (so similar to our own Modern Beltway Imbroglio), offered this pithy nugget that is anathema to the Experienced Players all busy getting off on their latest jerk-on-it stratagems: "Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none." – Thomas Jefferson
I understand G. Washington seconded the notion, but that of course the perverseness of "bidness interests" has got us all snarled up in a Gordian knot that no one knows how to cut without severing one of their own limbs. And nobody WANTS to cut it, because they live off the proximity and conflict.
That's how (remember the nativity of WW I?) "defending an ally that has been attacked by its neighbor" (with all the ugly, greedy, stupid, venal detail that's obscured by the phony Big Picture BS) is really a war of aggression. And another act of futility. And how many times will the US working stiff have to be run through this particular gauntlet before it's apparent that War, American Style is nothing but a losing proposition? Except for a few of the Senior Warriors, and the people who profit from stuff like replacing, with a "new, improved model," the Battle Dress Uniform, every six months or a year at a cost of a pittance $200 or $300 million or so, on the ground that "our trooooops deserve the best equipment possible"(that we can sucker the people in the street to pay for.) Yeah, those troooops who are getting their numbers chopped and their pay and benefits cut so General Atomic can peddle more freakin' drones, and "we" can keep buying "really good aeroplanes" like the F-22 and F-35.
None of this "war" idiocy produces 'security' or 'stability' or any of the markers of what Hope tells us ought to be the indicia of Advancing Civilization. Just the freakin' opposite.
Interesting recollection. I wonder how many of the "patriots" who were all exercised about "somebody" "losing China" noted or had the tiniest frisson of shame about the parallels to the US-abetted gentle activities of the Kuomintang in invading and taking over Formosa, reducing the Formosans to dispossessed third-class occupants of their own country. http://www.taiwandc.org/228-intr.htm
Oh, well, all's well that ends well, Right? Right?
I'm sure that punctilious scholastics here have a more satisfactory spin to that story...
Lots of different versions, revisions and recollections of what that whole Vietnam "thing" was all about, how it went down (down, down) and who shot Diem.
Other than that huge book, "Vietnam," here's what seems to me a fairly good, short recitation. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB101/index.htm Lots of views on Kennedy's and other elements of the hierarchy's information and involvement, maybe not uniformity on the then Administration's (including Kennedy's) active participation in the coup.
I like the part that begins:
By 1963, about mid-way through America's involvement in the wars of Vietnam, the policymakers of the Kennedy administration felt trapped between the horns of a dilemma. South Vietnam, the part of the former state of Vietnam which the United States supported, remained in the throes of a civil war between the anti-communist government the U.S. favored and communist guerrillas backed by North Vietnam. Government forces could not seem to get a handle on how to cope with the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, as the communist movement was known. American military and intelligence agencies disputed progress in the war. While denying journalists' observations that the United States was slipping into a quagmire in Vietnam, the Kennedy administration was privately well aware of the problems in the war and tried measures of all kinds to energize the South Vietnamese effort.
One big problem was in Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, with the South Vietnamese government itself. Plagued by corruption, political intrigues, and constant internal squabbling, the South Vietnamese were often at loggerheads. With the Americans, whose interest lay in combating the National Liberation Front guerrillas, the South Vietnamese promised cooperation but often delivered very little. There were other difficulties rooted in the way the South Vietnamese government had been created originally, and the way the U.S. had helped organize the South Vietnamese army in the 1950s, but these factors would not be directly relevant to the events of 1963...
And there's this bit:
The first period of intense activity occurred in August 1963, when South Vietnamese military officers initially planned to secure American support for their coup against Ngo Dinh Diem. This period included an incident that became very well-known in U.S. government circles, in which State Department official Roger Hilsman originated a cable giving the South Vietnamese generals the green light for a coup against Diem (Document 2). Much of the succeeding U.S. activity revolved upon making it seem that policy had been rescinded without in fact changing it. The second high point came in October 1963, when final preparations were made for the coup that was carried out.
And of course the text goes on, and so, sadly, do the Great Game behaviors, hither and yon. See, e.g., the heavily obscured motions of April Glaspie, assuring (on orders) one Saddam Hussein that 'the US takes no position in your intra-Arab squabbles," as in Saddam's pending invasion of Kuwait. http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Iraq/April_Glaspie.html
As I look around the planet, the word "chimera" comes to mind. It sure seems like there are no such creatures as the "liberals" that "conservatives" imagine to exist, and enshrine in their political pantheons. Iraq? Notagainistan? 7,000 Marines in Costa Rica? How many "bases" and "installations?"
Which Not-Cold-War-"liberals" can be identified by name, and how many divisions have they Not deployed across the world?
Enlisted (which shows how dumb I really am) mid '66, Vietnam 1st Cav Aug '67-Aug '68, honorable discharge mid-'69. I have Air Force friends, also Vietnam vets, who share my views on the nature of the "military mindset." I have no idea what you did, of course. Many gung ho people with military experience also spent their tours in air conditioned billets, eating Class A rations, playing golf, swimming, doing black market stuff, going to movie theaters. Even in "war theatres." But since you need no lectures from me, maybe you have similar observations and experiences?
And just because two guys are American, and wear uniforms, that does not mean they are the good guys either. The problem is in the nature of the Great Game, and the importance of money and its surrogacies, and of course "human nature."
"The United States" ain't "my enemy," but there are a whole lot of United States-ans who spend their days stealing the nation's wealth by one scam or another while impoverishing Their Fellow Americans, kicking hornet's nests with the idea of selling bug spray and flamethrowers, all that kind of stuff.
"'My country, right or wrong,' is infamous. 'My country is always right' is imbecile."
Is that truly what the two officers were doing, what the "mission" of all those Troops&Contractors is, and is that what Karzai's Byzantine seraglio is all about?
And those assertions are based on what text, again? Or just "Everybody knows?"
Mr. Bill, was that supposed to be ad hominem impeachment of Mr. McCarthy, based on a sample and set of presumptions and readings-in at least as skinny as the ones you attribute to him?
This Vietvet would venture to state that there is a huge amount of proud evidence in the public record, let alone the stuff "we" don't get to see, about the "military mindset." Look into YouTube -- search for "hellfire missile strikes video," or do it on Google for a wider assortment. Follow a few of the threads into sniper-land and "our" automatic-weapons fixation and nearly-nude babes shooting miniguns, enjoy the comments especially.
And if you haven't already, enlist at military.com for a fascinating daily assortment of fresh new evidence of how "our" military-mindset works. Guess what? There really are a lot of officers, and EMs, who are more than capable, and very culpable, of some pretty nasty stuff, committed nominally "in our names." And "fog of war" is no excuse, though whitewashes are very effective escape&evasion tactics...
Of course, "in this particular case," the accessible evidence is currently skinny, and in the nature of things (barring a Wikileak) unlikely to gain any clarity or substance.
Since a Common Enemy seems to be a Common Denominator in any kind of Big Change, you may be on to something. The US "NATO" Forces here, there and everywhere are sure doing a bang-up job of that, now aren't they?
Of course, for anything stable and sustainable "after," the defeat and ejection of a common enemy has to serve as the growth medium for a healthier strain of interrelationships... And maybe there are just way too many smart, slimy, subtle little SOBs who are only too happy to keep the tribal drums thumping and driving wedges of fear and hate into every already yawning or tiny potential schism and gulf...
So sad that what you get when you soak the house with $400-a-gallon gasoline, fill it full of munitions, stand in the middle of the living room and light a cigarette, is this.
All the huge bureaucracy that "makes war," supposedly commanded by Proud Be-Ribboned Battlespace Managerial Persons, learned in the arts of Sun Tzu and all the other masters of that Game, including the intricacies of interservice combat and stealth procurement, and what they put up, in the sacred shibboleth name of "security," other than securing their fu##ing careers and soft-landing post-"service" gigs, is this. It's too trite, and so incomplete, to just call it the old "all I got is a hammer, so nail them hajjis" spasm.
Other than making some noise about retreating back behind the walls of Fortress America, what has he got that's not Hellfire-worse than the Valley-of-the-Damned Other Reactionaries?
Got even ONE policy plank of the Paulists that is not about making sure everything for most of us will get anything other than worse? Okay, maybe something about decriminalizing drug use, so we can stay stoned without fear of the Police-Narco-Complex kicking our doors in and thus too stupefied to see what happened to the rest of our rights...
And there is no freakin' way that li'l ol' Ron Paul could redirect the MIC away from More-ism, its mantra and only religion.
An article from the early '80s, can't find it unfortunately, tried to figure how much it cost to kill "the Enemy," body count by body count, from WW I to Vietnam.
"Coalition" forces," including US, S. Korean and Australian, in McNamara's War, "run like a business" in the bullshit phrase that our idiot polity mindlessly accepts as the best way to operate a very necessary government, killed several million "gooks," and critics can quibble about the numbers (and do) but that's not far off. As I recall it, the cost to kill one "gook," by procuring, transporting, and logistically "deploying" ordnance, came to about $300,000.
Match that with the current "like a business" estimate of $50 million, and again, quibble all you want: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26521.htm The article I recall concluded that it would have been smarter to use the B-52s to scatter tons of the little gold ingots that Vietnamese covet and save, on little parachutes all over the landscape, as a much more effective way to foment "democracy and regime change."
And then you have the tacit admissions of what "we" are really all about, in Notagainistan:
Snipers are the most cost effective way of killing the enemy. Individual snipers routinely account for more kills than entire battalions operating in the same place at the same time, hit the target almost every time, and each bullet costs around €2. What's more, snipers inflict a psychological terror on an enemy force that restricts its ability to operate effectively – when elite snipers are operating, they are invisible close up, and can strike from enormous distance, so nowhere is safe.
Same question re various items of ordnance "fired indiscriminately" into various parts of the areas our US forces are embedded, or is it "mired," in. And we don't get to pretend that there's any "purity of arms" to what way too many of our troops do. Spend some time following the search term "Hellfire video" around in YouTubeLand. Oh, it is so viscerally exciting, watching the impact and the flying body parts, and then reading the comments of fellow voyeurs.
Sad about "hostages held incommunicado?" Can you say "Guantanamo," where guess what, there are acknowledged innocents who've been there what, TEN years, and others who will be a lot worse Enemies if they are ever finally let go. And who's that Wikileaks kid? Jonathan Pollard? Whoops, that's the other guy, I was thinking of Bradley Manning.
"We" got GIs who piss on dead "hajjis," and some who kill them for sport. Before you get all exercised about "Hamas terrrrrorrrists," you might view a bunch of YouTubes with nice sound tracks of GIs whooping it up over what often turn out to be Oopsies. Our Troops are on a meaningless mission, some refusing to "deploy." Parts of the IDF smash people's houses, have been doing the Hellfire assassination thing for how long now, and some IDF people are even refusing to serve in their occupied terrain, and we have Tim McVeigh and numerous War Lover types and they have their share of desperate and/or sociopathic and/or psychotic critters who get off on whoooshBANG or have no other way to resist displacement and subjugation.
We are a shameful, shameless species. We insist on "analyzing" the conduct of Others by reference to glorious, wonderfully misleading reifications and hypostatisations, applying "logic" to claim privilege and purity for "our" tribe, whatever it happens to be. I'd offer that "calling shame" on someone like Prof. Cole, who works hard at shining a light on truly shameless behavior, and points to ways to do better, is a personal foul.
I think it comes under the heading of "This is what we are all geared up to do, there's billions of dollars in motion, and a few of us are going to get promotions and bonuses and bragging rights for being 'righteously serious' and awarded 'policy positions of great power' in the next Great Venture for our skills at 'managing the Battlespace and that other kind of 'Change'..."
Maybe "They" are stupid, those people we think of as neolithic cavedwellers, or yak so blithely about reducing "Them" to being, with death from the skies, but for the sake of Jesus, how effing stupid are "WE?" Kick in their doors, kill their wedding guests, blow up their houses with a snicker, murder them for kicks, foster rampant corruption, and then get all huffy like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar when this latest insult is offered and "They" respond?
One might think that the Networked Battlespace Managers would have "systems" in place to help them avoid stepping in donkey crap over the trigger of a land mine that most field grunts would KNOW is there. They are supposed to be all up on everything having to do with The Mission and all their Deployables. But for the same reasons the Pentagrammers are now booting the Boots out of the military in favor of Best Buy drones and clones (that damn unreliable "human element",) it appears that our O-class is clueless when gee whiz, they poke a whole people in the eye with a sharp stick and think an "apology" will let them get back to their joysticks and PowerPoints.
I mean, an "apology" is the current cure that Hill&Knowlton, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_%26_Knowlton , advises in lieu of not screwing over the public in the first instance. It works for so many other things -- taking advantage of the decency and trust of the rest of us. Why not with the people our O-class refer to as "hajjis" and other nasty names in the comfort of their offices? Anybody on "our" side even going to get a reprimand or a passing, slightly critical mention in their fitness reports for this little Oopsie?
Looks like the "hearts and minds" bullshit has just finally and completely gotten thrown out the window. (Think anybody noticed, or has been able to slip out of their programming and even cares? I mean, "their only Wogs, fer Chrissake" (sic). In comments elsewhere, some of "us" offer as the least obnoxious of the comments on this story, "Get over it!")
Reminds me of the movie of Earth As It Once Was that Sol Roth (Edward G. Robinson) got to watch as the poison he drank to complete his "assisted suicide" took effect... In the land of "Soylent Green." "It was so beautiful!" Famous last words...
Hey, no fair going against the Narrative! All that effort that's going into de-humanizing the Enemy du Jour, and here we are having our noses rubbed in Real Stuff that might make us think again about turning loose that mercenary Mech Warrior army, that military monstrosity, that Tom Engelhardt does such a striking and futile job of "lighting up."
Since Socrates and de Toqueville and Hobbes and all those other old guys, there have been constant warnings about how "democracy" can get turned into a shell game, or at least a convenient, illusory shell. There's a lot of Experienced Players who are very busy, 24/7, undermining and undercutting and subverting that-there inconvenient, messy, complicated thing we carry in our heads as a mildly comforting myth: "democracy." That shibboleth that goes right along with those other Activating Themes we call "Freedom" and "Liberty." And that so few of us can even define, because there's such a gulf between the Moist-Eyed Patriotic Feeling and the Current Reality.
Do I remember that we came close to civil war of sorts in the early days of the labor movement, when the oligarchs were on the ascendant and grabbing for More? And as a once-GI, I tend to recall the Bonus March and its outcome. And of course people of Bill's apparent persuasion might have it that Kent State and Grant Park and Detroit and Watts and such were indicia of a sort of civil war. And might I ask if what's going on now, as we type away, the thing that Warren Buffett so blandly noted, class warfare or maybe actually "slaughter of the peasants by the guys with the tin suits and sharp quills," could be characterized as "civil war?"
Thank goodness for the wisdom of our Founding Intellects (Abigail Adams was not the only distaff participant,) for providing some damping forces to give the most of us the chance at "A republic, if we can keep it." No wonder the kleptocracy has been hacking away at the Constitution so illiberally all these years...
But on the substance, Bill: Did I misrepresent your views on proper governance? You set up the binary choice:
How can these “unqualified” people be allowed to make vital decisions, like choosing their leaders who might have to make decide on going to war with Iran or not. Is the post Civil War model the best, or is the post-Russian Revolutionary model the best, in order to ensure that only the RIGHT people have power?
Which one do you favor? Or is the whole thing just rhetorical?
The Narrative sails on, straight for the Strait of Hormuz...
And of course "our" regime's motives and actions are models of High Purpose, Clarity, and Honesty. Yoo want to yak about "dry facts," I think there are a whole lot more of those that are what they call "salient" in this context.
Your substance here is a little fuzzy, but it appears to read that you think a kind of Philosopher King model is the way to go, and maybe the "democracy" approach is not well enough "regulated" for your tastes.
Your "qualified electors" from the good old days have studiously, over a few generations, dyseducated all those plain people that you now get to score as "unqualified," via curriculum abuse, management of publicly broadcast information, concentration on turning the most of us into one-trick "consumers" of stuff that's killing the planet and a host of other little scams, many involving waving lots of flags to conceal "profitable" activities.
And now the "qualified," having that always-present fear of the Mob that can grow out of the screwed-up, hyper-tribalized Thing they have created and are sucking the blood out of, are closing off that last little arc, enclosing the last of the commons, and essentially claiming or, to use another word, "arrogating," the whole shootin' match for themselves.
I bet you put yourself up there in the list of "qualified electors," right? You and Bill and Dickless Cheney and the Kochers and their spaniels?
Apologies if I read your comment wrong, of course.
I kind of doubt that our Drone Fleet begins to have the simple payload capacity to deliver enough edibles and drinkables and medical supplies and blankets and all that "humanitarian" stuff to Homs or anywhere else. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-9_Reaper, which can carry MAYBE 1,000 lbs of stuff that hangs on pylons. (A nice side bit of info is the asymptotic curve of procurement of these Really Smart Weapon Platform Systems, at $30 million General Atomic bucks a pop.) Some of the other drones have "bomb bays," but again there would have to be another whole "procurement" to whip up some "combat-qualified" containers to cram the plasma and Evian and Ensure into.
The Berlin Airlift had C-46s, C-47s and C-54s, a lot of them, carrying tons of stuff each. To deliver humanitarian aid in quantity, you are needing a bunch of C-117s and C-130s and suchlike. The last gasp of less specialized warships.
And it's an unfortunate corollary, that many or even most of them deserve to. That was certainly the case for MacArthur and a lot of the McClellan-class "fight the last war-do stupid crap with troops and materiel" stars like Westmoreland and Abrams and all those guys who "managed" Shock'nAwe and the Notagainistan Follies. It's not even the case that the winners write the history any more: http://www.g2mil.com/lost_vietnam.htm
Wow. By your math, that would appear to be a real steal! Maybe even a Doorbuster, in the American commercial lexicon.
On the other hand, there's only 7.8 million people in Israel, 75% of one degree of Jewishness or another, 20% Arab. "Dec 29, 2010 – 75.4 percent of Israeli are Jews, 20.4% are Arab; 16000 immigrated to Israel in 2010; 28% of population under age of 14." http://www.jpost.com/NationalNews/Article.aspx?id=201430
$3 billion in direct money dump into Israeli coffers -- how much in "indirect support" in keeping "our own" Ring of Fire up and running all over the Mideast? Maybe another $10 billion, in "covert ops" and various carrier groups and other deployments that "secure" that area? Maybe more?
Assume a total of $13 billion, ignore the money disappeared into the Fog of War, divide that by (round it up) 8 million, and what do you get?
My Microsoft calculator says $1,625. All assumptions are subject to infinite attenuation and argument, of course... Like all of this stuff.
"You want the truth? You can't handle the truth!" Stay glued to our convenient, so easily manipulable Mythhandles... It's so much SAFER that way.
Not any one that as far as I can see, from the tiny little bit of information about your Weltanschauung that can be gleaned from the structure and content of your comment, leads to a world I would be comfortable consigning to my grandchildren and their offspring. Speaking of credibility and hysteria and jerking knees. And the patent dearth of "rational discourse." And the subtle toxins of tribalism and fragile identity.
"Nuance" and "subtlety" have been added to the Hate-A-Commie-Pinko-Liberal Daily Word List, started by GOPAC Gingrich, who some evangelicals say is one of the Anti-Christs you can read about in Revelation, and thus a harbinger of the Rapture, HOORAY!
Oh, I don't know -- a lot of the world's worst "leaders" put on a nice show for the crowd, for decades and even generations, a show that turns out to be just Rube-o-vision. So many of them then go on to nice comfy quiet retirements, in places like Argentina and Belize and Costa Rica and small, idyllic South Pacific and Caribbean islands. Or maybe in the service of one "great power" or another, teaching their skill sets to new generations of host-killing parasites?
Interesting, the rather more "complicated" nature of the relationship, and similarities, between Arafat and various global and local Experienced Players.
And I do know it's anathema to put certain pairs of things in the same block of text, but how many Third Reich Patriots showed their true colors, their base nature, in zipping out of Europe, with stacks of Great Masters and tons of tooth-gold, for far horizons and "comfortable retirements?" Leaving, as Arafat did, a giant FUBAR mess for ordinary people to try to live with, sort out, and get beyond?
Any wagers on whether Bibi and Lieberman and their cohort would hang around to go down with the ship they are so assiduously steering for that well-charted reef? To really stretch the analogy, that LNG carrier they are sending, full-tilt, into the great Open Port of our commercial Flat World, built six-deep with petroleum and gas storage facilities, headed for a fuel-air explosion to beat any possible comparison?
Glue that back-to-back with I Like Ike Too's Farewell Address, and FDR's speeches about Oligarchs, and gee, you start to have something of substance to think about.
I wish us all luck actually Changing any of the framework, but there's always Hope while there's breath...
Says the defense lawyer, cross-examining the State's chief forensic pathologist, "Then it is possible, isn't it, that the DNA you have stated belongs to my client, to a 99.998% statistical certainty, could in fact belong to someone else altogether? Answer yes or no, it's a simple question."
And are you saying that was what Osama was all about? Nothing to do with Palestine or imperial odysseys into Oil Country?
Yep, the Brilliant Mullah Defense is "not so implausible," I guess. At least it casts Reasonable Doubt on a maybe more likely interpretation of the forensic evidence. The Real Stupid is the idea that fighting "al Quaeda," that conveniently sinister, alien moniker, can only be done by blowing trillions of dollars into sowing the dragons' teeth that are springing up now, when the real effective anti-terrorism has been almost exclusively plain old beat-cop-and-smart-detective police work. All that money, and no more to show for it in "increased security" than all that money smoked up in the Great Prohibition Thingie called so disingenuously the "War on Drugs" has done, damn-squat, to reduce the consumption of recreational chemicals.
The REALLY Real Stupid would be that the Mullahs were actually prompting that sneaky variant of the Game, and OUR Mullahs were stupid enough to bankrupt us, fiscally and morally, by snapping at the gambit to further their own little fiefdom ambitions. Actually, the latter part does not even require the former to be "true."
It will be interesting indeed if it proves to be the case that the Mullahs are as astute at jerking the chain of the Imperial Behemoth as the Israeli leaders (and the C-Suite suits of the MIC) have been.
"other powers...who fear Iran"? What kind of "fear?" What basis -- some kind of change to a personally beneficial status quo? What "interests" (a moral-smokescreen word in its own right) might be "threatened?"
Is there a snowball's chance that all those "interests" might ever develop and grow up and grow past the rather infantile ME-ME-MY-MINE level we humans seem to be stuck at? Rhetorical question, probably...
Seems to me we are, as a species, too dumb to see how mutually vulnerable we have become. A few of us have figured out how to sucker the rest of us into creating a nice profitable powerful little nest for them to operate their little stupid games in and get rich beyond filthy. And the rest of us are waking up, getting an inkling, seeing dimly that we are being had, screwed, maybe feeling a slightly different kind of fear than the one the Kleptocracy foments of "this that or the Other," and beginning to sense that we are being done to, and out of, on a planetary scale.
Likely endpoint? http://www.rachelaaron.net/soylent/history.html I suggest reading all the links from the home page. Satire, fairly well done, with the bit of horror, that fear of the unkillable evil, that's inherent in all good satire.
Too bad there's no power or profit in simple things, like "Do unto others as you would be done to," and "Can't we all just get along?"
Where's Will Rodgers, or George Carlin, when we need 'em? Shut up in Guantanamo?
Yeah, Bill, I guess all those US military assets (more accurately "consumables," since they return about exactly squat bupkis on those trillions of Real Wealth dollars of acquisition and management and operational costs), parts of the various "Commands" that divvy up the world and decide where the Regime Changing and Droning will be done next, located in places like Hawaii and Puerto Rico and across Tamps Bay from me on Davis Island, are not fair game for your putative bugbear New Enemies, China and Russia, because, well, STATE terrorism is legitimate, where state-sponsored terrorism, that of course WE maintain the fiction that WE don't do, is defined in your lexicon, your carefully parsed and pruned lexicon, as "A-OK." It ain't even worth parsing your counter-analogy for its logical disingenuities.
Nice tag-team you got going with ILikeIke (who apparently likes the bellicose Supreme-Commander, cold-warrior part of Ike's image, but prefers to ignore the old sachem's voice when it comes to Ike's Farewell Address... you know, the bit about the dangers to your sainted "democracy" from the "military-industrial complex?")
Too bad there's no wise mother in her apron, standing in the kitchen doorway to call to the kids playing the Great Game on into the twilight, to call the little unsocialized beasties with their rocks and sticks in, to give them a glass of warm milk and a hug, and send them off to bed, to dream of new stratagems for the morrow...
And any idea, Carlos, how many "US" troops are manning the "forward bases" in Costa Rica and so many other "inoffensive little nations in America's Sphere of Influence?" One slightly dated look: http://www.unidir.org/pdf/articles/pdf-art1448.pdf
And how many "littoral combat vessels" are deployed in your back and front yards? Here's one among many discursions on the "necessity" for a couple of BRIGADES of "US" Marines and a couple of hundred helicopters and 70-odd, really odd if you look at the pictures in "Jane's All The World's Warships," combat and support vessels... Too bad US public opinion is all about adrenaline and testosterone, so who gives a toot about "trillions for 'deeeefense,' and not one cent for common sense."
Part of the stuff behind the fig leaf called "the war on drugs," which has its own sui-genesis, now doesn't it?
My bet is that they are expending their energies someplace that is more likely to result in Victory for Their Side... Seeing that the choir here mostly sings a more rational tune.
And Nicaraguans, some of them, and South Vietnamese, some of them, and Chileans, some of them, and so forth, were "not quite innocent" in the "coups" they have lived through. And if you believe some pretty competent scholarship and the testimony of one Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, some "Americans" were not quite innocent in plotting to overthrow the Evil Roosevelt and install a more "business-friendly" regime. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
What's the point of your pithy comment, again? "Collective guilt?" "They got what they deserved?"
The Kleptocrats, across the planet, have gotten smarter and more subtle over the years, about ensuring the ascendancy of their "business interests" in the operation of our "democracy" and other forms of government elsewhere...
It wasn't just "claimed," that bit about "us" taking Iraqi oil. That was one of the principle neocon selling points: That the oil "we" would grab would pay for the cost of the invasion. And as pointed out here, Plan B for most US oil companies, that part about doing that Capitalist thing and bidding on the reserves, did not work out, because they would not have met their profit expectations at the price they would have had to pay.
And what is with these people? Did the neocons give any thought to the politics and energies of the various parts of Iraq? Or how "we" would have arranged to secure all those wellheads and storage tanks and pipelines, especially since "we" were so bonehead stupid as to fail to secure all the millions of pounds of US-made and -supplied Saddamordnance, all the dumbombs and artillery shells "we" gave or sold to him, which "insurgents" defending their territory had the temerity to police up and then use to blow up unarmored Humvees and ground-pounding GIs? And their neighbors of a slightly different belief structure?
But find little corners to work and bits of attempted impeachment to toss up there, and stick with the Narrative -- it's so, aaahh, comfortable, isn't it? Kind of like those fossils the Creationists point to, found in unlikely geologic strata, as "proof" of the Seven Day Theory?
The history continued: ''Roosevelt pointed out that there was no other way by which the government could be changed and the test was now between Mr. Mossadegh and his force and the shah and the army, which was still with him, but which would soon slip away.''
Mr. Roosevelt told the shah that ''failure to act could lead only to a Communist Iran or to a second Korea.''
On Aug. 16, fearing the coup had failed, the shah fled to Baghdad and the C.I.A. urged Mr. Roosevelt to leave Iran immediately. He refused, insisting that there was still ''a slight remaining chance of success.''
After the tide started to turn against Mr. Mossadegh, Mr. Roosevelt got one of the coup leaders, Gen. Fazlollah Zahedi, out of hiding and he made a radio address to the nation that brought the forces over to the shah's side.
It was the C.I.A.'s first successful overthrow of a foreign government, and the shah stayed in power until the Islamic revolution of 1979.
''For an operation to last 25 years is not so bad,'' one of Mr. Roosevelt's C.I.A. colleagues, Samuel Halpern, said today. ''It fell apart. Every operation cannot go on forever.''
And of course US nuke-armed IRBMs and MRBMs deployed on the Soviet borders, with "target times" from launch to Moscow on the order of 10 minutes, had nothing to do with tensions. Nor did Reagan's "Peacekeeper" with its first-strike MIRVs. And of course much after the fact, a few US generals acknowledged that the scary Warsaw Pact troops were so drunk, drugged, mutinous and untrustworthy that they were not even allowed to have maps, and sort of admitted that the "bomber gap" and the "missile gap" and the "window of vulnerability" were just BS, cloaked in complicated text from RANDland, designed to scare or buffalo Congress or give aid and comfort to the war-bride members of it, and the rest of us into giving the War Department what it wanted -- more, of everything.
To say that 'the Soviets brought it on" might be comforting noise, but it sure camouflages the complex reality of the Gamesmanship. "We" are not even close to being able to claim clean hands.
Anyone reading or posting here actually know, and care to share, what actually goes on every day at those "forward bases," and how they fit into the long-term implementation of the changeable but pretty much hegemonical Doctrine that flavors "our" actions and intentions in the Great Game? I remember what most days on "forward bases" I was assigned to in Vietnam were like -- not the stuff of war movies.
Maybe someone can tell us what the "mission" Bill so portentously cites happens to be. Something more than "We kill some of them, so they kill some of us, so we kill some of their neighbors, so they kill some of us..."? Control, maybe?
Seems (to this dilettante) that the most prevalent and effective actions "against terrorists" have largely been POLICE activities -- investigation, stings, arrest and even "Crotch-Bomber" civilian trial and punishment, or as in the case of bin Ladin, a long-deferred LA SWAT-style takedown. Patrolling the valleys of Kandahar and killing Wogs who "we" define as "terrorists" and "insurgents," building a new charge of vengeance, sowing corruption like dragon's teeth, sure does not look like "effective mission" or "success" or "victory" to me.
The whole worldwide Networked Battlespace apparatus looks to me like just a mechanism searching for a "geopolitical" meta-reason to justify a fits-with-the-myths-they-peddle "mission," inventing all those "threats" (and selling them, for fun and profit, to potential competitors or opponents) or exacerbating them by Hellfire and Dumbnation as it tramples along. Gulping down huge amounts of real, usable, potentially stabilizing wealth as it goes, for ZERO increase in "security."
Seems (to this dilettante) that the whole set of State Security "responses to" and "preparedness for" "terrorism, insurgents and threats" is a fumblefisted giant swinging a huge wrecking ball at the houses of anyone who "opposes American dominance," anywhere in the eight or nine "Areas of Responsibility" that the Pentagon has divvied the whole world into and claimed for their own. All at the cost of the "freedoms" and "liberty" we think we have, at the cost of any stability or the chance for any kind of healthy and sustainable relationships to develop across the boundaries that have to exist if the whole Networked Battlespace Thingie is going to have any even colorable "reason" to go on eating all our lunches.
And guess what? "We" walk away, once again, from the mess we augmented in Iraq and Notagainistan and now Yemen and how many other places, like beer-muscled brawlers walking out of the saloon after the bar fight, leaving someone else to clean up and a few of "us" behind to keep breaking the bottles and glasses...
And on the horizon, The NEXT GREAT ENEMY! IRAN!
Hey, "we" have spent all the money and effort to put the whole ongoing Futilitarian exercise in motion -- let's not worry about that adage about throwing good money, and good men and women and children, after bad.
Okay, I'll say "Iran" if you will say "Kermit Roosevelt-Wild Bill Donovan." I'll even go first: "Iran." And add "et cetera." For completeness and accuracy.
Fella, it sure seems to me like "the US" is one of those international troublemakers you are worried about.
I don't read Chomsky, or Trotsky either. It just seems to me that following what might, MIGHT, by the indications from the Prague Spring to the Arab Spring to the Occupy Whateveritis, a chance of developing a new set of organizing principles, a new maybe "spiritual" basis for inter-human relations, maybe even a recognition of the evils of consumergreed and the damage "we all" are doing to the planet. Even birds know better than to crap in their own nests and eat their own young.
But we humans seek our own pleasure and power, aided by the wonders of ratiocination and rationalization, and because we all have a relatively short "use-by" time here, and are mostly pretty sure there are no consequences for what millenia of ethical thinking and bits of our current spiritual guidance say are Bad Acts, we may collectively be too stupid to avoid, eschew, undo, unwind, back out, recant, and/or rectify all the crap we, hiding behind lofty words and the Shield of Shibboleth, are doing to basically please our little selves at the expense of others. Who we can "do unto" because we can conveniently take advantage of those nasty bits of our limbic system's wiring that lets us do anything we care to, to anyone we define as "the enemy." Or because we can claim that "Big Brother Knows Best, and it takes Rough Men to 'protect us' from The Enemy's Rough Men, with whom our Rough Men have a tacit compact to protect and continue their roles and turf."
I have no use for anarchy, friend. One word: Leviathan. We need institutions and structure. It's the evil that comes from what the sneaky, grasping, Machiavellian worst of us do via those unfortunate needs for structure and a "ruleoflaw" and the myth of "democracy" and the things that even old Hammurabi wrote a complex code to address, that I have a bone to pick with.
I would respectfully offer that from what I see and have experienced, every point you claim to exist as proof of this being a better, more "democratic" world, over the last 50 years, is smoke and BS. Comforting, maybe, but not the realities. And any improvements there are are no thanks to "our" sending in troops and jackals to make the world safe for extractive, consumptive, externality-shedding capitalism.
You indicate that you were a Player at some point. My beef is with all the Players, on all the sides, American, RussoSoviet, and Israeli and Chinese and French and British and on and on, who have sloshed weapons into places where people with guns find reasons to kill one another, in an endless cycle of revenge. Sloshing done for, yes, fun, and I should have added, often grim smugness at being able to orchestrate or pretend to "control" the stuff that leads to all that death and dysfunction, and for the egotism of implementing Grand Policy, and yes, even the Russian and Chinese arms manufacturers and intermediaries made a profit somewhere along the way, I know the nominal "US" ones do. And keeping the pot oscillating between simmer and boil, and hopefully just short of meltdown, is "profitable" for all the various "interests," from petro-exploration to Cabbage Patch Kids to you-name-it.
The Game is sick, and it's killing us -- not that we seem to be able to walk away from the table. Morally indefensible in its large form, despite a lot of self-delusion piled on top of casuistry and cynicism that I bet any Player is intimately familiar with.
I know, I'm just a dilettante, and "if only I knew what you and the boys knew," I would be eternally grateful that "we" supported Jonas Savimbi, and the Contras, and any number of other "clients," for "perceived geopolitical advantage," and Russia supported Cuba and its clients. Et cetera.
"Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.
And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on,
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on."
Got any complaints about the accuracy and completeness of the rest of my rough little sketch? Whole volumes have been written, exposing, fecklessly, the same thing...
And now we're being told that maybe the whole Syria-Lebanon "neighborhood" might be headed for an India-Pakistan-Bangladeshish dissolution, along religious-identity lines.
Well, the stage is certainly set, all those weapons having been introduced, for fun and profit, all those politicians and entrepreneurs playing on the fault lines of faith.
And per our US security spokespersons, we are being "informed" that various of the provocational attacks and incidents have an "al Quaeda-in-Iraqish" flavor to them.
Any speculation, other than the kind that's going on in oil pricing and other commodity-necessities, on where this is headed? Any anodyne(s) for the human condition, as expressed in all that futility?
If Ron Paul "sneaks in," a most appropriate image, "we" are going to have more problems to worry about than the Volatile MideastcentralfarAsia. You really think Mr. Bringhomethetroops will even have a snowball's chance of even minutely changing the direction of the whole panoply of forces driving Empire 3.0? Against the clout of the Generals, including General Electric and General Atomic, and all those bloodworms and liver flukes in Congress who have cooperated in dispersing the war machinery across the landscape? No need to even "hide things in hollowed-out mountains:" They got constituents (even the Paulists do) who profit or get their paychecks from the MIC apparatus.
You know, as a former (pre-DU ordnance) GI, I gotta say I would be a lot less concerned about the effects of DU incorporated into armored vehicles, which our really smart engineers do a pretty good job of isolating the crew from, that I am about the GIs on the ground who get spattered and get to inhale all the minute little bits and particles of DU fired off (sometimes accidentally or incompetently and "friendly fired" RIGHT AT THEM) and the "Wogs" and "Gooks" and "Towelheads" and farmers and woodcutters and such who get to live with the stuff that the World Health Organization even says ain't real good for you: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs257/en/
I hear "nuanced" is the latest addition to Newt Gingrich's GOPAC list of hate-inducing words, regularly updated by the likes of Karl Rove, up there with "Leftist-progressive" and "Liberal" and "Socialist." For those unfamiliar with it: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4443.htm But whatever you call it, the Reuters article kind of lays out in "nuanced" detail some of the deadly serious bits an Who-knows parts of the scamming and skulduggery that underlies (emphasize 'lies') the Great Game. The one that has the most of us learning futile stuff like "duck and cover," and raising children who say "IF I grow up," not "WHEN I grow up..."
But don't let us grownups depart from the Game we get such jollies and profit and ego-satisfaction out of. That would be IRRESPONSIBLE, in the zero-sum-seeming, negative-sum-actual world we are demolishing, in lieu of maybe deconstructing by way of designing improvements.
And whether you call it "oil sands" or "bituminous sands" or whatever, the key words in the Wiki article are "profitably extracted." Because, of course, since it takes a lot of energy to heat the crap to "extract it" and get it to "flow," and conveniently so little of the externalities, like surface land impacts and greenhouse gas much bigger than "regular crude" and all the rest-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_sands manage to get priced into the stuff and the infrastructure that goes along with this latest extractive consumerism. But of course there are "jobs" at the end of that short rainbow that is supposed to give "us" (though the schmutz is inconveniently in Canada) "energy independence." For some period. Without the slightest chance of retribution or consequences for the few people who will be "profiting" from the "extraction."
But we must be extra special careful to use the approved descriptors... to do what? preserve the Narrative?
As to "overwhelming" evidence from a USAToday AP story, I see a lot of quotes from Israeli warlords, but not much from maybe more reliable sources with less of a history of "having said the thing that is not so" to nail down so uncontrovertibly the Guilt of All Iran.
And when it comes to collective responsibility and punishment, do all Iranians, shopkeepers and physicians and regular-army and police and university populations, get "justly" or even "prudentially" blown up (or all Israelis, or all Somalis, or even all Americans, etc.) in some act of "pretaliation," because of the actual or reputed skulduggery-thuggery of a few Experienced Players, or just sociopaths, so often impossible to accurately attribute or assign, simply because that's the way the Game is designed and played?
And there's this letter from "the Iranians" that supposedly says their leaders are willing to say some kind of "UNcle," and waive some of their sovereignty, and swallow a ration of bitter pride, to maybe keep the lumbering Networked Battlespace Battle Managers from unloading on their nation. What's to be made of that? An item that's seemingly getting little notice in FOXland.
The thing about netversations is that neither of us gets to write the rules. Don't like what I have to say? Find it "tedious?" Maybe don't like or disagree with my notions and points? Then, to borrow an old adage, just change the channel. Or toss some more adjectives my way. After all, simply by virtue of the geography of our births, you and I are nominally "on the same side..."
And I did read the November IAEA report, and various critiques of it, and I would hope "we" don't hang another "yellowcake" multi-trillion-dollar "dysinvestment," with a lot of death and destruction and incalculable consequences, on what many, and by my reading very reasonably, call a partisan document.
It's not about "liking" or "disliking" what the document says. It's about trying to honestly understand what's in the wind, and do, as a little insignificant individual who spends 45 hours a week earning a living, and too many hours doing this peering through the fog of bitwords, what "our" "intelligence analysts" are supposed to do, full-time, for money: to try to figure out what I need to worry about for the sake of my grandchildren, and nudge the Juggernaut a tiny bit away from the cliff.
Curious, for a reality-based person (maybe that phrase is a carry-over from participating over at dailyKos?). Do you have some reality-based, verifiable facts (rather than fear-based speculations) about "facilities," presumably BOMB-BUILDING FACILITIES, in "hollowed out mountains"?
It's easy, isn't it, I know 'cuz I've looked, to find a ton of webbery that "confirms" the Narrative, about how those sneaky Persians are conspiring to Threaten Israel and the Region and the Stability of the Whole World?
Not that the species is not in serious jeopardy from the whole set of mental and emotional and economic and political processes that are at work in the world, profitably getting each little tribal unit or giant nation to arm itself to the teeth and set itself to work constantly seek for that first-strike or "dominance" "edge," in all those "scenarios" being "played out," whether around some campfire or on all that war-gaming software on all those War Department-and-Enemy computers, simulations (with the obvious limitations of same) being quizzed constantly by all those uniformed and contracted hegemonists that are apparently too stupid to figure out what WOPR learned, that the only way to win is not to play the game...
Makes you wonder which American city(ies) might end up getting the Homs treatment, as the ol' Commonwealth works its way down the slippery slope, and schism and secession keep gaining momentum...
Q -- was that tongue in cheek, or do you really believe that's how the world works? Wow. "The reason for retaliation is to force your enemies to protect you from your other enemies." I guess maybe the Warlords in Israel are unclear on that notion? Ever read any Hobbes? Looked up the definition of "anomie?" Run across the history of the Byzantine Empire? Got any notion of allies-of-convenience and the branch of the Great Game called "common enemies?"
Nice set of pejoratives. Gee, friend, how does one determine what "reality" is in this "community" you talk about? The Realists can't even agree on the provenance of the Bad Guys who did the one thing that maybe can be demonstrated to have actually occurred, a couple of explosions in several locations. You "Realists" are happy to assign the plotting and carrying out of whatever actually happened to whoever your favorite suspect is, in aid of pushing your particular views of what's good for your particular tribe. Without waiting for any supposedly dispassionate results of some kind of investigation. And glossing over the immense and kind of hard to dispute history of thousands, maybe millions, of similar "terrorist actions" done under false flags or out of some vengeance or other or just as part of some complex strategem that's aimed at "destabiolization" or "misdirection" or any of dozens of other pages in the Experienced Players' manual of dirty tricks and hacks in the Great Game. And the Realists are all too ready to try to convince each other of one or another set of "facts" as part of ooching along whatever the current Big Play is -- like ginning up another "war of choice," on Iran this time.
So YOU know, or do you just believe you know, how those explosives got to where they detonated, by what impulses and incentives and motives and machinations? Sure seems to be a wide variety of surenesses even in this little corner of webworld.
You got a lot of nerve yakking at ME about fitting "facts" to "pre-existing narratives." And a lot of nerve claiming that what all the gritty-jawed Gamers are foisting on the rest of us, as part of the frikkin' other bigger Murdoch-approved Narrative, is "reality." WMD? "Existential threats?" "National interests?" "World Terrorism?" "The War On Drugs?" "Areas of Operations?" "Rendition?" Bullcrap.
At root, for Realists, it's about power, and money, and the huge bureaucracy and parasitical economy that's all about World of WarCraft and the Game of RISK (tm), with actual bloody carcasses to chortle or pretend to wail over, and with endless, artful attempts to lipstick and paint the pig to make the rest of us, who have to fund and fight your wars of choice and stupidity and convenience, believe we are somehow doing God's work, or at least riding the Grand Tides of History.
Oh yes, obviously, it is indubitably, now, forever, and beyond peradventure, totally and finally established that the "bombers" were IRANIAN! This Sarajevo Moment could not possibly be one of the wag-the-dog things that our Serious Players, and Theirs, and the sociopaths and psychopaths that form those "terrorist organizations" (never forget Timmy McVeigh and his chums) pull every day, and of course there's only one irrefutably logical next step: BOMB BOMB BOMB, BOMB BOMB IRAN!!!! RIGHT?
Because Everyone Knows that if you've seen one Iranian, you've seen them all! They're ALL JUST LIKE THAT! if in fact, at the end of the day, it turns out that the legless carcass was actually born in Iran and sent by the Ayatollahs to provoke US into destroying their country. And was of course part of the current Horrible Threatening-Regioinal-And-World-Stability (per BIBI, and FOX) Great Iranian World Domination and Nose-Tweaking Conspiracy! to take away our Cherished Freedoms To Be Wiretapped And Arrested And Held Without Trial Or Bail! and pollute our Precious Bodily Fluids!
Let us focus all our puny attention on a couple of little incidents among all the violence that's done every day in this sorry human-infested world, incidents of disputable provenance and of an importance that's determined by the FOXiest of us for the rest of us, and decree that despite the Flights of the Reapers and all those Hellfires and cannon fire used to "light up the Wogs" at wedding parties and in the form of families gathering firewood and of political and criminal competitors of "our friends" in Somalia who we, the doofus CIA/"contractor" thugs, "bump off," and myriad other Hot Spots, and all the other shit that's going on every minute of every day, and because we are an evil, stupid, destructive, rapacious species, let's get us another round of World of WarCraft cooking! We got STOCK in the SYNDICATE, remember -- Milo Minderbinder, who got the Army Air Corps to bomb its own troops on contract to the Germans, for cost plus ten percent, is always telling us that everyone has a share! http://norighttobelieve.wordpress.com/2011/06/08/everybody-has-a-share/ See how simple it is?
The table is set, the lamps are lit -- time for the next, great, so-very-profitable feast of death. http://www.firstworldwar.com/index.htm Thank goodness I am old enough that I can just sit back and watch, this time around...
Stupid damn humans. What a waste of good air and water.
Take a deep breath and drop the chips, of course, Yeah, and then bring out the salt shaker and bushwah detectors to try to figure out what really happened, and then apply the color of lipstick chosen by whatever ascendant drivers of "policy" decide is the spin-and-paint job to be applied, for whatever immediate or long-term goals they may have in their sights, to cue the rest of us, or at least our limbic systems and tribal compulsions, what we are supposed to believe, and who we are to hone in on as the Enemy du Moment. Who of course have to be some flavor of "terrorists." To keep the so easily directible flow of fear going strong and fast.
And speaking of the MSM and the Narrative, in the category of Dirty Doings, episode 4,310,595,202, we have a little reminder about how skulduggery and sneakery are so much a part of human nature that even the Holy Universal I know What God Wants Catholic Church's underpants are on fire:
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Call it Conspiracy City. Call it Scandal City. Call it Leak City. These days the holy city has been in the news for anything but holy reasons.
"It is a total mess," said one high-ranking Vatican official who spoke, like all others, on the condition of anonymity.
The Machiavellian maneuvering and machinations that have come to light in the Vatican recently are worthy of a novel about a sinister power struggle at a medieval court.
Senior church officials interviewed this month said almost daily embarrassments that have put the Vatican on the defensive could force Pope Benedict to act to clean up the image of its administration - at a time when the church faces a deeper crisis of authority and relevance in the wider world.
Some of those sources said the outcome of a power struggle inside the Holy See may even have a longer-term effect, on the choice of the man to succeed Benedict when he dies.
From leaked letters by an archbishop who was transferred after he blew the whistle on what he saw as a web of corruption and cronyism, to a leaked poison pen memo which puts a number of cardinals in a bad light, to new suspicions about its bank, Vatican spokesmen have had their work cut out responding.
I'm sure the Old Mitred Guys and the Lean and Hungry Loyolaists have nice doctrinal workarounds to quash any qualms about such patent venality, of course.
Always a question about the real nature of any institution, whether it's the thing that the Founding Fathers' edifice has become, or those other aedificia that take our money and our credulity with a smirk and a sneer...
Anyone have any idea what the nature of any possible goals or aims of "the US" might be in picking this fight with "Iran?" Or is that the kind of question that has the same kind of answer you get to "What are the US national interests here?"
It's amazing, the amount of futile, destructive, de-stabilizing, horrific stuff that "just happens," because the money to pay for it, and the "equipment" that so often seems to define the "mission," is so freely to hand, and it all is so far out of sight. Just because some cowboy or jackal or sociopath-in-power looks around and says, "Hey, we can get away with this!" or maybe "Wow! I can get rich off of this tiny little bit of abusive statecraft, all plausibly deniable, all Ollie North-ish, and there's a well-paid gig for me in the Security Industry once I cop my pension from the Feds."
Cue the stirring, rising, martial music, the Hellfires, and rappelling Secret Troopers...
Not "journalism," fer shur, except in the way that language "grows" by re-definition via usage, but then what is, in the Narrative Flood any more? (You probably know that "sophisticated" used to mean "adulterated, tainted," nothing like the aspirational horror that it has become.)
Thank you for doing a little local fog-dispelling. The interchange in the post on "Catholic beliefs" sure limns a nice selection of what the whole Narrative game is really all about -- Wrong-wingers doing their best to beat the rest of us down into the Good Old Days when serfdom was in flower, and the Powers That Be (secular and religious) could waltz around, taking heads at their pleasure and forcing all the ordinary people to fund their wars and games and ornamentation.
Then do a little posthole digging into the history of the Church's teachings, dogma, doctrine, whatever you want to characterize the angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pinning on the same topics in the Universal Church -- "One Church to Rule them All, One Church to Find Them, One Church to Bring Them All and In The Hark-ness Bind Them..."
Kate, you're a Christian, I would bet you would say. What's with the imagery, then? "Spanking?" and "Bitch slapping?" Do YOU turn the other cheek? More than once?
"You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart... and the second commandment is like unto it: you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." Matthew 22:37. Interesting what a confection has been assembled on top of (and pretty much obscuring) the pretty simple stuff that Jesus is reputed to have said, the bits that have somehow lasted through all the careful edits through the ages, by those Holy Kamoly Old Men who built that magnificent, imposing edifice, gilt and ermine, amassing power in this world and by their claim, the next, and all that scarlet and marble, on that there Rock. Thanks to the wonderful ingenuity of one great Ad Man, Paul. The Golden Rule, not "The Gold Rules."
Remember the story of the Widow's Mite? Mark 12:41-44? The camel and the eye of the needle? Matthew 19:24? Naw, not a universal message of the Roman church, but there's some pretty strong sinews that tie us to the messages of Jesus... at least the ones I hear. But that's the nature of faith and belief, isn't it? We hear what fits with our biases and preferences.
And gee, no doctor, to do what's needed as part of "playing the system" to get the care he has sworn to provide to his patient would EVER, like, you know, maybe put down a diagnosis-of-convenience, now would he or she? Good thing the good ol' Inquisitio Haereticae Pravitatis and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith aren't still driving the truck -- otherwise there might be a First Amendment problem, as in there wouldn't be one to worry about. Right?
And your version of the First Amendment, and your comfortable certitude that Obamaforcedcontraception is "blatantly unconstitutional," may be argumentatively convenient, but it don't sound much like the one I learnt about in Law School, back in the weird '70s, or even read about since then. Bearing in mind that Citizens United is a "First Amendment" piece of what-ever.
Please forgive me if I am stepping on the toes of your identity. That's where we are in the world these days -- coming up with endless old and new reasons to do and say bad things to one another.
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From the text of Khameini's speeches, it would appear that the Iranian clerical view of nukes is that rejecting them is on a much broader basis than that they incinerate and irradiate more than "non-combatants." It's that bit about being the "symbol of destruction of generations."
There's more than enough want of "justification" for supporting (or being) "militant groups that target non-combatants." Consider the tender mercies of our New American Force, the CIA/Mercenarium, and of course the IDF, and so many others. And that's not "tu quoque," it's the reason that cynical, vicious, selfish people, tiny fractions of the masses of land and people that get personified so casually and dishonestly by those same self-interested SOBs, keep getting away with killing and stealing and dominating...
Speaking of simplistic analysis...
And how strange that the exemplar you chose was a determination to STOP the bleeding and destruction...
Faint proffer, Mr. Bill, that one tiny parcel of talking headism on one network contradicts the pretty obvious fact that there is a Narrative, it is cast only in terms of "seriousness," that it's currently tuned to WAR-AGAIN, and there's not enough text space here to "prove" the positive of the negative you so archly sidestep.
On the other hand,
http://www.realjournalism.net/marc/
http://motherjones.com/environment/2011/02/koch-brothers-media-beck-greenpeace
And for a little contrasting flavor, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704684604575381083191313448.html
And here's what CBS News has to say on the subject (hint: nothing about Khameini's views on the inherent evil of nuclear weapons, a view at odds with the fundamental faith tenets of our American Experienced Players): http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57390262/ahmadinejad-rivals-win-control-of-parliament/?tag=contentMain;contentBody
Does what you read in the WSJ, the WaPo, the NYT, the Chicago Trib and other Mainstream Media, or on the Network News on whatever channel you happen to favor, or in the slyly warped "reporting" of the various NPR segments since the Bush-Leaguers and the Heritage Foundationers took power, jibe with your worldview and understanding of the great Manichaean Endgame?
And there in a nutshell is the sickness that is at the heart of the Great Game, and the unfortunate reality that even though we are all in this fine mess together, a few of us will kill all of us just to gain some momentary pleasure or win some stupid point.
There is no monad, no entity, honestly identifiable as "Iran," (or "America," for that matter) but the Really Smart Experienced Players get to act as if it's so, along with all their sycophants and profiteers and True Believers... As they force all the rest of us to live with the RISK (tm) they are happy to impose on the rest of us who fund their obnoxiosities.
That's it, Bill? that's the best you can do to "prove" that there's no "Western media conspiracy" to sell a particularly noxious Narrative? "Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus"?
Old habits die hard.
And numerous angels dance on the heads of so many pins.
The bit of language you quote is not that of Khameini, or any other effective Iranian voice, but commentary added by Prof. Cole, which of course people of a certain mindset will pick apart, Breitbartize and pass along as some part of NeoGospel.
It does not appear that "the hated ayatollahs" are looking for "wiggle room" at all.
Interesting and enlightening, as always.
Seems to me the thing about nukes is that they are weapons of the "elite." If you want to invade or drone-slap somebody, you have to have a huge establishment of contractors, communications, and logistics in place to even get the grunts and Hellfires and other exotica and their horseless carriages within range. There are a whole lot of ordinary people who are our Troops, who have this disconcerting trick of pseudo-patrolling, and declining orders to attack, and then squealing on the Brass-Asses who send them out to do Stupid. (And of course, also, because they are human, peeing on dead "insurgents.")
But the Nuke thing is all about the Football, the SIOP, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Integrated_Operational_Plan , the War Collegiate Big Men on Campus who drive all that Doctrine, and people like Curtis LeMay and his successors, and of course in France de Gall (sic), in N. Korea Kim Ate Dung, and in Israel and Old South Africa, a series of obscure actors. All of whom were about taking charge of the future of their polities and of the species, subject to various faith-based initiatives and personally profitable behaviors.
There's a reason all those action movies, "Broken Arrow," "Thunderball," "Seven Days in May," "War Games" and the like, have such horrific attraction -- we like to be scared, but we like to think that some Hero will avert the catastrophe at the last possible moment. Freddy Krueger and Jason killed, finally, dead, never to return in yet another nonsensical se-pre-quel.
Yes, there are many people involved in bringing deliverable nukes on line, and getting them on target. A bunch of carefully vetted, heavily indoctrinated Slim Pickens types, including the Rapture-Awaiting Armageddonists who work the Pantex plant in Amarillo. http://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/08/books/the-rapture-and-the-bomb.html?pagewanted=all (Reagan featured up front here, the guy who allegedly thought you could recall the missiles, once launched, and joked on a maybe accidentally live mike about letting them fly.) Not nearly as many people as launching Shock&Awe, and the whole thing is, thanks to "rational, logical" human idiocy and Game Theory, on a hair trigger held by a very small Elite, whose driving emotions and doctrines have not a goddam thing to do with the General Welfare.
Khameini may not be what our Policy People think of as a Good Native, but if one takes him at his word (trusted, maybe, but verified of course) he is one heck of a lot less likely to bring us a Nukular Winter (to counteract the Great Global Warming, maybe?) or that Dead End Full Stop War of All Against All.
"just a show bidness personality." And Ebola is "just a virus." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_virus And the B-61 is "just a bomb." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B61_nuclear_bomb
Not surprised at all. The military machine is a parasite, and it only survives as long as the host does. It creates nothing, converts real wealth into hairtrigger weapon systems and incredibly clumsy bureaucracy (ICB) on an unimaginable scale. Of course, the loonies of the Christianist persuasion who are busily infiltrating and "taking over" (that same evil they accuse the Commies of) are busily pushing every button they can to bring us to the Gates of the New Jerusalem and that longed for Armageddon thingie.
My bet is that some part of "the military," which believe it or not is made up of a very assorted bunch of critters, in various commands with various motivations, all part of that parasitic/cancerous infestation that eats so much of the bread off all our tables, is in fact very much in favor of "going to war" with Iran.
Which, for them, will mean sitting in comfy chairs, looking at large-screen displays, twiddling their joysticks and tickling their keyboards and launching their avatars into the Networked Battlespace, jawing their way through meetings and briefings and conferences, and advancing the parts of "doctrine" that advance their careers or further, in the case of way too many crazy "Christianists," the acceleration of Armageddon.
Maybe you don't know (or you do) about Gens. Douglas MacArthur and Curtis LeMay, or any of their current analogues. Worth a read, about people who think the "mission" is to "bomb those little Asian/Arab/Whatever critters who are the Enemy du Jour back into the stone age." (For a quaint little side trip into how the military really works, read the section in the Wiki LeMay article headed "Japan-Washington Flight.") http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay
There's the comfortable myths, and then there's the Crouching Idiots, Hidden Reality...
For completeness, something like a quarter of the humans in Israel (not the "settled" territorial expansion) are Other Than Jewish. And of course many Israelis have notions that other nominally Jewish Israelis are not, in fact, Jewish, or Not Jewish Enough.
Kind of like so many Americans, who believe that many of their fellows ought to go back where they came from, or if they think things in Commie Pinko Socialilst countries are so hot, then they should just get the hell out of the Real America.
"and little fleas, and so on..."
I can't understand how a bar bully can attack a wimp legally, or how a FL Concealed Carry Citizen can shoot a father of three over neighborhood basketball court noise (all kinds of rules.) I guess the US invasion of Iraq and Grenada and Panama and all that had the nominal "sanction" of UN "law," or some other fig leaf. And of course since the Bush II days, the Yoo Tooers have held that all that stuff is "antiquated" and "nugatory." The purpose of power is power. The purpose of violence is violence.
In case the reader's education did not include the classic, here's the quickie version of Orwell's "1984." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four
Any of this sound familiar? How much of what the Privileged Oligarchy is up to has anything to do with the small loves and aspirations of the "proles?" Other than stealing the real wealth they create to maintain that giant pyramid scheme?
And might one speculate that Sheik Naim Qassem was adding, as a "sharp player" in the Great Game, via his sonorous statement, some additional cred-cement to his public persona, by showing himself to be a Serious Player deserving of the loyalty and affection of his "people?"
Might I offer that "countries" don't feel ANYthing? Those convenient reifications, so comfortably raised up by Wiser Heads in offering Great Truths about the fundamental nature of the universe according to the Game of RISK! (tm) have no more 'feelings' than large coprorations (sic intentional). It's the 'feelings' of sets of people, which of course are way too complex and ineffable and ineluctable and mutable to account for in even the longest "findings" and "white papers" and such, that drive net behavior. And a very few rotten apples can so easily spoil the whole barrel.
My fave take is the last frames of the last "Planet of the Apes" movie, where Moses Heston, shot, falls across the Lucite (tm) plungers that trigger the Doomsday Machine built by 'humans' in the good old days. Next fave is David Niven, tracing the wire to the explosives set by Early Special Forces in the footings of the Bridge Over The River Kwai, built at such enormous expense of pain, shot and falling on the plunger to the detonator...
Maybe the careful reader would notice this part of the text:
History shows us that the Iranian–Israeli rivalry is of geopolitical nature and as such it is by no means immune to a resolution.
Seems to me that only people who see the future as just more of the present, with more efficient weapons, have put on some pretty dark glasses. But then the current model is so very "profitable" for some of us... So the "neos" in France and Germany (and of course our own set of testosterone-poisoned Epsilon-minuses) are incubating the demon eggs of future ego-(or is it id-)satisfying "conflicts."
Maybe the ordinary people might actually do that, if their "leaders" were not such sh*tes, ruling people by inflaming their passions...
Huh? As in KGB, and NKVD, and those charmers? And their contributions to either the stability of their own state, or the wider world? Or was that stealth snark?
And one might add that in the context, the writer has penned a marvelous double (or is it treble?) oxymoron.
Of course, one can be sure that all those "officers," of whatever nominal part of the hierarchy, are and have been "just doing the best they can do, in a hard service..."
My grandma called those people "sharp." As you know, that's not the same thing as being "smart."
How about you, sir? How is your 401k or IRA making out? are you or your financial manager "smart money" enough to be doing well through all the manipulations and explosive decompressions of all those bubbles? Some of us (not me) have a government defined-benefit pension (or one from a government contractor) in the retirement mix somewhere, which of course is a different creature altogether.
Like the information on WMD in Iraq, in the runup to ShocknAwe? Like the after-action reports of the encounter that resulted in the death of Pat Tillman? Like the field reports, which were largely ignored for "policy" reasons and have subsequently been so assiduously fogged and obscured, of Saudis learning how to fly and planning something involving large civil aircraft as weapons of mass destruction, in the months before 9-11? Along the lines of a best-seller 1994 action novel by Dale Brown, "Storming Heaven"? http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/305556.Storming_Heaven
"The only way to win is not to play the game." Unless, of course, there's a nice pension and a revolving-door job at the end of one's tour... or 72 virgins...
The fun part is getting a peek at what a whole lot of the Experienced Players and their former colleagues who have migrated into the State Security apparatus, are really up to, and what they think and believe and sell in the privacy (maybe less so, as time goes on? Go Anonymous, and thank all of you, and blessings be on you, and may you hew firmly to your ethics and honor...) of their little anechoic shells.
Re what happened in Egypt (or anywhere else,) and is ongoing, my bet is we'll never know, and even if "the dry facts" went on display, the spinning apparatus will create that fog that the shadow people swim in.
These aren't washing machines or espresso makers, they're tokens in the Idiot's Game called "War." As our Networked Battlespace Managers keep being shown and never learning, NewTech threat-chasing never gets ahead of the asymmetric skill sets of inventive humans forced to defend their own terrain.
Maybe 9 months ago, to too-too-te-roo fanfare, it was announced that 12 whole M1A2 Abrams tanks were being deployed to Helmand province, and were going to be THE game changer there. http://wn.com/M1A2_Abrams_SEP_MBT The deployers, of course, were bribing the "insurgents" to let the convoys hauling the tanks (which don't run so well on unpaved surfaces) and the munitions and fuel to be moved there.
And then there's the game changing XM25 grenade launcher, http://www.svtperformance.com/forums/pics-videos-buffet-149/737566-u-s-deploys-game-changer-weapon-xm25-afganistan.html Why are there no helmet-cam videos of this thing "changing the game?"
And toward the end of the Vietnam thing, and toward the end of WW II, desperate losers were pinning hopes of snatching victory from the jaws, and all that, on every kind of freak "threat generator." And the businesses that dreamed up these creations, built in the German case with slave labor, worked their contacts to get contracts for, and then supplied, "did really well."
Most code writers, even the ones that work for the MIC, know how to avoid the futility of endless loops. Some of us humans, however, are stuck in the stage of post-pubescent testosterone-poisoning, capture-the-flagitis.
Is this RedStates? Did I tune in there by mistake? Glad some of us have such nice manufactured enemies to hate, and to produce such revised cognition.
What does the America that Tea Party folks say they "want back" look like, then?
Re your last paragraph: What a resounding defense of "our" behavior in foreign lands. Just as bad as the colonial French. Heck of a recommendation. But accurate, at least. Or to use your formulation, (correctly.) Ours, of course, is on a much larger scale -- does that count for anything?
And that old Jefferson guy, who spent some time in Europe watching the practices of imperial courts (so similar to our own Modern Beltway Imbroglio), offered this pithy nugget that is anathema to the Experienced Players all busy getting off on their latest jerk-on-it stratagems: "Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none." – Thomas Jefferson
I understand G. Washington seconded the notion, but that of course the perverseness of "bidness interests" has got us all snarled up in a Gordian knot that no one knows how to cut without severing one of their own limbs. And nobody WANTS to cut it, because they live off the proximity and conflict.
That's how (remember the nativity of WW I?) "defending an ally that has been attacked by its neighbor" (with all the ugly, greedy, stupid, venal detail that's obscured by the phony Big Picture BS) is really a war of aggression. And another act of futility. And how many times will the US working stiff have to be run through this particular gauntlet before it's apparent that War, American Style is nothing but a losing proposition? Except for a few of the Senior Warriors, and the people who profit from stuff like replacing, with a "new, improved model," the Battle Dress Uniform, every six months or a year at a cost of a pittance $200 or $300 million or so, on the ground that "our trooooops deserve the best equipment possible"(that we can sucker the people in the street to pay for.) Yeah, those troooops who are getting their numbers chopped and their pay and benefits cut so General Atomic can peddle more freakin' drones, and "we" can keep buying "really good aeroplanes" like the F-22 and F-35.
None of this "war" idiocy produces 'security' or 'stability' or any of the markers of what Hope tells us ought to be the indicia of Advancing Civilization. Just the freakin' opposite.
Interesting recollection. I wonder how many of the "patriots" who were all exercised about "somebody" "losing China" noted or had the tiniest frisson of shame about the parallels to the US-abetted gentle activities of the Kuomintang in invading and taking over Formosa, reducing the Formosans to dispossessed third-class occupants of their own country. http://www.taiwandc.org/228-intr.htm
Oh, well, all's well that ends well, Right? Right?
I'm sure that punctilious scholastics here have a more satisfactory spin to that story...
Lots of different versions, revisions and recollections of what that whole Vietnam "thing" was all about, how it went down (down, down) and who shot Diem.
Other than that huge book, "Vietnam," here's what seems to me a fairly good, short recitation. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB101/index.htm Lots of views on Kennedy's and other elements of the hierarchy's information and involvement, maybe not uniformity on the then Administration's (including Kennedy's) active participation in the coup.
I like the part that begins:
And there's this bit:
And of course the text goes on, and so, sadly, do the Great Game behaviors, hither and yon. See, e.g., the heavily obscured motions of April Glaspie, assuring (on orders) one Saddam Hussein that 'the US takes no position in your intra-Arab squabbles," as in Saddam's pending invasion of Kuwait. http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Iraq/April_Glaspie.html
Too bad "we" keep repeating history, no?
As I look around the planet, the word "chimera" comes to mind. It sure seems like there are no such creatures as the "liberals" that "conservatives" imagine to exist, and enshrine in their political pantheons. Iraq? Notagainistan? 7,000 Marines in Costa Rica? How many "bases" and "installations?"
Which Not-Cold-War-"liberals" can be identified by name, and how many divisions have they Not deployed across the world?
Enlisted (which shows how dumb I really am) mid '66, Vietnam 1st Cav Aug '67-Aug '68, honorable discharge mid-'69. I have Air Force friends, also Vietnam vets, who share my views on the nature of the "military mindset." I have no idea what you did, of course. Many gung ho people with military experience also spent their tours in air conditioned billets, eating Class A rations, playing golf, swimming, doing black market stuff, going to movie theaters. Even in "war theatres." But since you need no lectures from me, maybe you have similar observations and experiences?
And just because two guys are American, and wear uniforms, that does not mean they are the good guys either. The problem is in the nature of the Great Game, and the importance of money and its surrogacies, and of course "human nature."
"The United States" ain't "my enemy," but there are a whole lot of United States-ans who spend their days stealing the nation's wealth by one scam or another while impoverishing Their Fellow Americans, kicking hornet's nests with the idea of selling bug spray and flamethrowers, all that kind of stuff.
"'My country, right or wrong,' is infamous. 'My country is always right' is imbecile."
Is that truly what the two officers were doing, what the "mission" of all those Troops&Contractors is, and is that what Karzai's Byzantine seraglio is all about?
And those assertions are based on what text, again? Or just "Everybody knows?"
Mr. Bill, was that supposed to be ad hominem impeachment of Mr. McCarthy, based on a sample and set of presumptions and readings-in at least as skinny as the ones you attribute to him?
This Vietvet would venture to state that there is a huge amount of proud evidence in the public record, let alone the stuff "we" don't get to see, about the "military mindset." Look into YouTube -- search for "hellfire missile strikes video," or do it on Google for a wider assortment. Follow a few of the threads into sniper-land and "our" automatic-weapons fixation and nearly-nude babes shooting miniguns, enjoy the comments especially.
And if you haven't already, enlist at military.com for a fascinating daily assortment of fresh new evidence of how "our" military-mindset works. Guess what? There really are a lot of officers, and EMs, who are more than capable, and very culpable, of some pretty nasty stuff, committed nominally "in our names." And "fog of war" is no excuse, though whitewashes are very effective escape&evasion tactics...
For fun: http://gyral.blackshell.com/names.html Missing there is one common deprecation: "hajji." The other ones are pretty well covered.
Of course, "in this particular case," the accessible evidence is currently skinny, and in the nature of things (barring a Wikileak) unlikely to gain any clarity or substance.
Speaking of quacking, read the comments and the story here, http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2012/02/afghan-policeman-abdul-saboor-accused-of-shooting-2-americans-in-back-of-the-head/ , to get a little taste of why Things Are Not Going To Get Any Better.
Since a Common Enemy seems to be a Common Denominator in any kind of Big Change, you may be on to something. The US "NATO" Forces here, there and everywhere are sure doing a bang-up job of that, now aren't they?
Of course, for anything stable and sustainable "after," the defeat and ejection of a common enemy has to serve as the growth medium for a healthier strain of interrelationships... And maybe there are just way too many smart, slimy, subtle little SOBs who are only too happy to keep the tribal drums thumping and driving wedges of fear and hate into every already yawning or tiny potential schism and gulf...
So sad that what you get when you soak the house with $400-a-gallon gasoline, fill it full of munitions, stand in the middle of the living room and light a cigarette, is this.
All the huge bureaucracy that "makes war," supposedly commanded by Proud Be-Ribboned Battlespace Managerial Persons, learned in the arts of Sun Tzu and all the other masters of that Game, including the intricacies of interservice combat and stealth procurement, and what they put up, in the sacred shibboleth name of "security," other than securing their fu##ing careers and soft-landing post-"service" gigs, is this. It's too trite, and so incomplete, to just call it the old "all I got is a hammer, so nail them hajjis" spasm.
Ron Paul is at best a "one-trick pony."
Other than making some noise about retreating back behind the walls of Fortress America, what has he got that's not Hellfire-worse than the Valley-of-the-Damned Other Reactionaries?
Got even ONE policy plank of the Paulists that is not about making sure everything for most of us will get anything other than worse? Okay, maybe something about decriminalizing drug use, so we can stay stoned without fear of the Police-Narco-Complex kicking our doors in and thus too stupefied to see what happened to the rest of our rights...
And there is no freakin' way that li'l ol' Ron Paul could redirect the MIC away from More-ism, its mantra and only religion.
An article from the early '80s, can't find it unfortunately, tried to figure how much it cost to kill "the Enemy," body count by body count, from WW I to Vietnam.
"Coalition" forces," including US, S. Korean and Australian, in McNamara's War, "run like a business" in the bullshit phrase that our idiot polity mindlessly accepts as the best way to operate a very necessary government, killed several million "gooks," and critics can quibble about the numbers (and do) but that's not far off. As I recall it, the cost to kill one "gook," by procuring, transporting, and logistically "deploying" ordnance, came to about $300,000.
Match that with the current "like a business" estimate of $50 million, and again, quibble all you want: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26521.htm The article I recall concluded that it would have been smarter to use the B-52s to scatter tons of the little gold ingots that Vietnamese covet and save, on little parachutes all over the landscape, as a much more effective way to foment "democracy and regime change."
And then you have the tacit admissions of what "we" are really all about, in Notagainistan:
http://www.gizmag.com/worlds-longest-sniper-kill-247km/14992/
And then you get to the true nature and ongoing expression of Milo-Minderbinderism, the fella who contracted with the Germans to bomb his own troops for "cost plus 10 percent:" http://blogs.reuters.com/global/2009/08/13/who-is-funding-the-afghan-taliban-you-dont-want-to-know/
"War" is not a damn bit like the popular mind (sic) loves to think it is.
Same question re various items of ordnance "fired indiscriminately" into various parts of the areas our US forces are embedded, or is it "mired," in. And we don't get to pretend that there's any "purity of arms" to what way too many of our troops do. Spend some time following the search term "Hellfire video" around in YouTubeLand. Oh, it is so viscerally exciting, watching the impact and the flying body parts, and then reading the comments of fellow voyeurs.
Glass houses, and stones.
Sad about "hostages held incommunicado?" Can you say "Guantanamo," where guess what, there are acknowledged innocents who've been there what, TEN years, and others who will be a lot worse Enemies if they are ever finally let go. And who's that Wikileaks kid? Jonathan Pollard? Whoops, that's the other guy, I was thinking of Bradley Manning.
"We" got GIs who piss on dead "hajjis," and some who kill them for sport. Before you get all exercised about "Hamas terrrrrorrrists," you might view a bunch of YouTubes with nice sound tracks of GIs whooping it up over what often turn out to be Oopsies. Our Troops are on a meaningless mission, some refusing to "deploy." Parts of the IDF smash people's houses, have been doing the Hellfire assassination thing for how long now, and some IDF people are even refusing to serve in their occupied terrain, and we have Tim McVeigh and numerous War Lover types and they have their share of desperate and/or sociopathic and/or psychotic critters who get off on whoooshBANG or have no other way to resist displacement and subjugation.
We are a shameful, shameless species. We insist on "analyzing" the conduct of Others by reference to glorious, wonderfully misleading reifications and hypostatisations, applying "logic" to claim privilege and purity for "our" tribe, whatever it happens to be. I'd offer that "calling shame" on someone like Prof. Cole, who works hard at shining a light on truly shameless behavior, and points to ways to do better, is a personal foul.
What it's all about?
I think it comes under the heading of "This is what we are all geared up to do, there's billions of dollars in motion, and a few of us are going to get promotions and bonuses and bragging rights for being 'righteously serious' and awarded 'policy positions of great power' in the next Great Venture for our skills at 'managing the Battlespace and that other kind of 'Change'..."
Maybe "They" are stupid, those people we think of as neolithic cavedwellers, or yak so blithely about reducing "Them" to being, with death from the skies, but for the sake of Jesus, how effing stupid are "WE?" Kick in their doors, kill their wedding guests, blow up their houses with a snicker, murder them for kicks, foster rampant corruption, and then get all huffy like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar when this latest insult is offered and "They" respond?
One might think that the Networked Battlespace Managers would have "systems" in place to help them avoid stepping in donkey crap over the trigger of a land mine that most field grunts would KNOW is there. They are supposed to be all up on everything having to do with The Mission and all their Deployables. But for the same reasons the Pentagrammers are now booting the Boots out of the military in favor of Best Buy drones and clones (that damn unreliable "human element",) it appears that our O-class is clueless when gee whiz, they poke a whole people in the eye with a sharp stick and think an "apology" will let them get back to their joysticks and PowerPoints.
I mean, an "apology" is the current cure that Hill&Knowlton, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_%26_Knowlton , advises in lieu of not screwing over the public in the first instance. It works for so many other things -- taking advantage of the decency and trust of the rest of us. Why not with the people our O-class refer to as "hajjis" and other nasty names in the comfort of their offices? Anybody on "our" side even going to get a reprimand or a passing, slightly critical mention in their fitness reports for this little Oopsie?
Looks like the "hearts and minds" bullshit has just finally and completely gotten thrown out the window. (Think anybody noticed, or has been able to slip out of their programming and even cares? I mean, "their only Wogs, fer Chrissake" (sic). In comments elsewhere, some of "us" offer as the least obnoxious of the comments on this story, "Get over it!")
Reminds me of the movie of Earth As It Once Was that Sol Roth (Edward G. Robinson) got to watch as the poison he drank to complete his "assisted suicide" took effect... In the land of "Soylent Green." "It was so beautiful!" Famous last words...
Hey, no fair going against the Narrative! All that effort that's going into de-humanizing the Enemy du Jour, and here we are having our noses rubbed in Real Stuff that might make us think again about turning loose that mercenary Mech Warrior army, that military monstrosity, that Tom Engelhardt does such a striking and futile job of "lighting up."
Hey, it worked for Rome, why not for us?
Spot on, sir.
Since Socrates and de Toqueville and Hobbes and all those other old guys, there have been constant warnings about how "democracy" can get turned into a shell game, or at least a convenient, illusory shell. There's a lot of Experienced Players who are very busy, 24/7, undermining and undercutting and subverting that-there inconvenient, messy, complicated thing we carry in our heads as a mildly comforting myth: "democracy." That shibboleth that goes right along with those other Activating Themes we call "Freedom" and "Liberty." And that so few of us can even define, because there's such a gulf between the Moist-Eyed Patriotic Feeling and the Current Reality.
Do I remember that we came close to civil war of sorts in the early days of the labor movement, when the oligarchs were on the ascendant and grabbing for More? And as a once-GI, I tend to recall the Bonus March and its outcome. And of course people of Bill's apparent persuasion might have it that Kent State and Grant Park and Detroit and Watts and such were indicia of a sort of civil war. And might I ask if what's going on now, as we type away, the thing that Warren Buffett so blandly noted, class warfare or maybe actually "slaughter of the peasants by the guys with the tin suits and sharp quills," could be characterized as "civil war?"
Thank goodness for the wisdom of our Founding Intellects (Abigail Adams was not the only distaff participant,) for providing some damping forces to give the most of us the chance at "A republic, if we can keep it." No wonder the kleptocracy has been hacking away at the Constitution so illiberally all these years...
But on the substance, Bill: Did I misrepresent your views on proper governance? You set up the binary choice:
Which one do you favor? Or is the whole thing just rhetorical?
On the richness or poverty of our language, http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pejorative
The Narrative sails on, straight for the Strait of Hormuz...
And of course "our" regime's motives and actions are models of High Purpose, Clarity, and Honesty. Yoo want to yak about "dry facts," I think there are a whole lot more of those that are what they call "salient" in this context.
Nice little circle.
Your substance here is a little fuzzy, but it appears to read that you think a kind of Philosopher King model is the way to go, and maybe the "democracy" approach is not well enough "regulated" for your tastes.
Your "qualified electors" from the good old days have studiously, over a few generations, dyseducated all those plain people that you now get to score as "unqualified," via curriculum abuse, management of publicly broadcast information, concentration on turning the most of us into one-trick "consumers" of stuff that's killing the planet and a host of other little scams, many involving waving lots of flags to conceal "profitable" activities.
And now the "qualified," having that always-present fear of the Mob that can grow out of the screwed-up, hyper-tribalized Thing they have created and are sucking the blood out of, are closing off that last little arc, enclosing the last of the commons, and essentially claiming or, to use another word, "arrogating," the whole shootin' match for themselves.
I bet you put yourself up there in the list of "qualified electors," right? You and Bill and Dickless Cheney and the Kochers and their spaniels?
Apologies if I read your comment wrong, of course.
I kind of doubt that our Drone Fleet begins to have the simple payload capacity to deliver enough edibles and drinkables and medical supplies and blankets and all that "humanitarian" stuff to Homs or anywhere else. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-9_Reaper, which can carry MAYBE 1,000 lbs of stuff that hangs on pylons. (A nice side bit of info is the asymptotic curve of procurement of these Really Smart Weapon Platform Systems, at $30 million General Atomic bucks a pop.) Some of the other drones have "bomb bays," but again there would have to be another whole "procurement" to whip up some "combat-qualified" containers to cram the plasma and Evian and Ensure into.
The Berlin Airlift had C-46s, C-47s and C-54s, a lot of them, carrying tons of stuff each. To deliver humanitarian aid in quantity, you are needing a bunch of C-117s and C-130s and suchlike. The last gasp of less specialized warships.
Nice thought, though.
Are you a Libertarian, Mark? All those rules...
And it's an unfortunate corollary, that many or even most of them deserve to. That was certainly the case for MacArthur and a lot of the McClellan-class "fight the last war-do stupid crap with troops and materiel" stars like Westmoreland and Abrams and all those guys who "managed" Shock'nAwe and the Notagainistan Follies. It's not even the case that the winners write the history any more: http://www.g2mil.com/lost_vietnam.htm
Wow. By your math, that would appear to be a real steal! Maybe even a Doorbuster, in the American commercial lexicon.
On the other hand, there's only 7.8 million people in Israel, 75% of one degree of Jewishness or another, 20% Arab. "Dec 29, 2010 – 75.4 percent of Israeli are Jews, 20.4% are Arab; 16000 immigrated to Israel in 2010; 28% of population under age of 14." http://www.jpost.com/NationalNews/Article.aspx?id=201430
$3 billion in direct money dump into Israeli coffers -- how much in "indirect support" in keeping "our own" Ring of Fire up and running all over the Mideast? Maybe another $10 billion, in "covert ops" and various carrier groups and other deployments that "secure" that area? Maybe more?
Assume a total of $13 billion, ignore the money disappeared into the Fog of War, divide that by (round it up) 8 million, and what do you get?
My Microsoft calculator says $1,625. All assumptions are subject to infinite attenuation and argument, of course... Like all of this stuff.
"You want the truth? You can't handle the truth!" Stay glued to our convenient, so easily manipulable Mythhandles... It's so much SAFER that way.
Which reality are you living in, RC?
Not any one that as far as I can see, from the tiny little bit of information about your Weltanschauung that can be gleaned from the structure and content of your comment, leads to a world I would be comfortable consigning to my grandchildren and their offspring. Speaking of credibility and hysteria and jerking knees. And the patent dearth of "rational discourse." And the subtle toxins of tribalism and fragile identity.
"Nuance" and "subtlety" have been added to the Hate-A-Commie-Pinko-Liberal Daily Word List, started by GOPAC Gingrich, who some evangelicals say is one of the Anti-Christs you can read about in Revelation, and thus a harbinger of the Rapture, HOORAY!
Re Arafat, that's http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/09/in-a-ruined-country/4167/
Oh, I don't know -- a lot of the world's worst "leaders" put on a nice show for the crowd, for decades and even generations, a show that turns out to be just Rube-o-vision. So many of them then go on to nice comfy quiet retirements, in places like Argentina and Belize and Costa Rica and small, idyllic South Pacific and Caribbean islands. Or maybe in the service of one "great power" or another, teaching their skill sets to new generations of host-killing parasites?
I bet Yahoo has got a lot in common, from an Erik Erickson perspective, with Yasir Arafat, and I toss out one of my pet bits of reportage here: https://www.google.com/search?q=in+a+ruined+country&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
Interesting, the rather more "complicated" nature of the relationship, and similarities, between Arafat and various global and local Experienced Players.
And I do know it's anathema to put certain pairs of things in the same block of text, but how many Third Reich Patriots showed their true colors, their base nature, in zipping out of Europe, with stacks of Great Masters and tons of tooth-gold, for far horizons and "comfortable retirements?" Leaving, as Arafat did, a giant FUBAR mess for ordinary people to try to live with, sort out, and get beyond?
Any wagers on whether Bibi and Lieberman and their cohort would hang around to go down with the ship they are so assiduously steering for that well-charted reef? To really stretch the analogy, that LNG carrier they are sending, full-tilt, into the great Open Port of our commercial Flat World, built six-deep with petroleum and gas storage facilities, headed for a fuel-air explosion to beat any possible comparison?
Glue that back-to-back with I Like Ike Too's Farewell Address, and FDR's speeches about Oligarchs, and gee, you start to have something of substance to think about.
I wish us all luck actually Changing any of the framework, but there's always Hope while there's breath...
Says the defense lawyer, cross-examining the State's chief forensic pathologist, "Then it is possible, isn't it, that the DNA you have stated belongs to my client, to a 99.998% statistical certainty, could in fact belong to someone else altogether? Answer yes or no, it's a simple question."
And are you saying that was what Osama was all about? Nothing to do with Palestine or imperial odysseys into Oil Country?
Yep, the Brilliant Mullah Defense is "not so implausible," I guess. At least it casts Reasonable Doubt on a maybe more likely interpretation of the forensic evidence. The Real Stupid is the idea that fighting "al Quaeda," that conveniently sinister, alien moniker, can only be done by blowing trillions of dollars into sowing the dragons' teeth that are springing up now, when the real effective anti-terrorism has been almost exclusively plain old beat-cop-and-smart-detective police work. All that money, and no more to show for it in "increased security" than all that money smoked up in the Great Prohibition Thingie called so disingenuously the "War on Drugs" has done, damn-squat, to reduce the consumption of recreational chemicals.
The REALLY Real Stupid would be that the Mullahs were actually prompting that sneaky variant of the Game, and OUR Mullahs were stupid enough to bankrupt us, fiscally and morally, by snapping at the gambit to further their own little fiefdom ambitions. Actually, the latter part does not even require the former to be "true."
It will be interesting indeed if it proves to be the case that the Mullahs are as astute at jerking the chain of the Imperial Behemoth as the Israeli leaders (and the C-Suite suits of the MIC) have been.
"other powers...who fear Iran"? What kind of "fear?" What basis -- some kind of change to a personally beneficial status quo? What "interests" (a moral-smokescreen word in its own right) might be "threatened?"
Is there a snowball's chance that all those "interests" might ever develop and grow up and grow past the rather infantile ME-ME-MY-MINE level we humans seem to be stuck at? Rhetorical question, probably...
Seems to me we are, as a species, too dumb to see how mutually vulnerable we have become. A few of us have figured out how to sucker the rest of us into creating a nice profitable powerful little nest for them to operate their little stupid games in and get rich beyond filthy. And the rest of us are waking up, getting an inkling, seeing dimly that we are being had, screwed, maybe feeling a slightly different kind of fear than the one the Kleptocracy foments of "this that or the Other," and beginning to sense that we are being done to, and out of, on a planetary scale.
Likely endpoint? http://www.rachelaaron.net/soylent/history.html I suggest reading all the links from the home page. Satire, fairly well done, with the bit of horror, that fear of the unkillable evil, that's inherent in all good satire.
Too bad there's no power or profit in simple things, like "Do unto others as you would be done to," and "Can't we all just get along?"
Where's Will Rodgers, or George Carlin, when we need 'em? Shut up in Guantanamo?
Are you sure about that?
Yeah, Bill, I guess all those US military assets (more accurately "consumables," since they return about exactly squat bupkis on those trillions of Real Wealth dollars of acquisition and management and operational costs), parts of the various "Commands" that divvy up the world and decide where the Regime Changing and Droning will be done next, located in places like Hawaii and Puerto Rico and across Tamps Bay from me on Davis Island, are not fair game for your putative bugbear New Enemies, China and Russia, because, well, STATE terrorism is legitimate, where state-sponsored terrorism, that of course WE maintain the fiction that WE don't do, is defined in your lexicon, your carefully parsed and pruned lexicon, as "A-OK." It ain't even worth parsing your counter-analogy for its logical disingenuities.
Nice tag-team you got going with ILikeIke (who apparently likes the bellicose Supreme-Commander, cold-warrior part of Ike's image, but prefers to ignore the old sachem's voice when it comes to Ike's Farewell Address... you know, the bit about the dangers to your sainted "democracy" from the "military-industrial complex?")
Too bad there's no wise mother in her apron, standing in the kitchen doorway to call to the kids playing the Great Game on into the twilight, to call the little unsocialized beasties with their rocks and sticks in, to give them a glass of warm milk and a hug, and send them off to bed, to dream of new stratagems for the morrow...
And any idea, Carlos, how many "US" troops are manning the "forward bases" in Costa Rica and so many other "inoffensive little nations in America's Sphere of Influence?" One slightly dated look: http://www.unidir.org/pdf/articles/pdf-art1448.pdf
And how many "littoral combat vessels" are deployed in your back and front yards? Here's one among many discursions on the "necessity" for a couple of BRIGADES of "US" Marines and a couple of hundred helicopters and 70-odd, really odd if you look at the pictures in "Jane's All The World's Warships," combat and support vessels... Too bad US public opinion is all about adrenaline and testosterone, so who gives a toot about "trillions for 'deeeefense,' and not one cent for common sense."
Part of the stuff behind the fig leaf called "the war on drugs," which has its own sui-genesis, now doesn't it?
My bet is that they are expending their energies someplace that is more likely to result in Victory for Their Side... Seeing that the choir here mostly sings a more rational tune.
Santorum is an Opus Dei blockedhead. http://www.catholicsforchoice.org/news/inthenews/2006/200605cs_breakingtheopusdeicode.asp
C Streeeeet... Where The Oligarchic Crayzeeees Meeet...
"Family" Values and all that (c)rap....
And that "choice" is an index of what, again? "Liberty?" "Freedom of Choice?"
And Nicaraguans, some of them, and South Vietnamese, some of them, and Chileans, some of them, and so forth, were "not quite innocent" in the "coups" they have lived through. And if you believe some pretty competent scholarship and the testimony of one Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, some "Americans" were not quite innocent in plotting to overthrow the Evil Roosevelt and install a more "business-friendly" regime. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
What's the point of your pithy comment, again? "Collective guilt?" "They got what they deserved?"
The Kleptocrats, across the planet, have gotten smarter and more subtle over the years, about ensuring the ascendancy of their "business interests" in the operation of our "democracy" and other forms of government elsewhere...
"Containment worked"? And burning the house down does get rid of some of the roaches...
Blah, blah, Narrative blah...
There's a reason the back story in "Soylent Green" is so compelling...
It wasn't just "claimed," that bit about "us" taking Iraqi oil. That was one of the principle neocon selling points: That the oil "we" would grab would pay for the cost of the invasion. And as pointed out here, Plan B for most US oil companies, that part about doing that Capitalist thing and bidding on the reserves, did not work out, because they would not have met their profit expectations at the price they would have had to pay.
And what is with these people? Did the neocons give any thought to the politics and energies of the various parts of Iraq? Or how "we" would have arranged to secure all those wellheads and storage tanks and pipelines, especially since "we" were so bonehead stupid as to fail to secure all the millions of pounds of US-made and -supplied Saddamordnance, all the dumbombs and artillery shells "we" gave or sold to him, which "insurgents" defending their territory had the temerity to police up and then use to blow up unarmored Humvees and ground-pounding GIs? And their neighbors of a slightly different belief structure?
But find little corners to work and bits of attempted impeachment to toss up there, and stick with the Narrative -- it's so, aaahh, comfortable, isn't it? Kind of like those fossils the Creationists point to, found in unlikely geologic strata, as "proof" of the Seven Day Theory?
And of course there's this little bit of the Great Game that we all ought to bear in mind -- http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/11/us/kermit-roosevelt-leader-of-cia-coup-in-iran-dies-at-84.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
And of course US nuke-armed IRBMs and MRBMs deployed on the Soviet borders, with "target times" from launch to Moscow on the order of 10 minutes, had nothing to do with tensions. Nor did Reagan's "Peacekeeper" with its first-strike MIRVs. And of course much after the fact, a few US generals acknowledged that the scary Warsaw Pact troops were so drunk, drugged, mutinous and untrustworthy that they were not even allowed to have maps, and sort of admitted that the "bomber gap" and the "missile gap" and the "window of vulnerability" were just BS, cloaked in complicated text from RANDland, designed to scare or buffalo Congress or give aid and comfort to the war-bride members of it, and the rest of us into giving the War Department what it wanted -- more, of everything.
To say that 'the Soviets brought it on" might be comforting noise, but it sure camouflages the complex reality of the Gamesmanship. "We" are not even close to being able to claim clean hands.
Anyone reading or posting here actually know, and care to share, what actually goes on every day at those "forward bases," and how they fit into the long-term implementation of the changeable but pretty much hegemonical Doctrine that flavors "our" actions and intentions in the Great Game? I remember what most days on "forward bases" I was assigned to in Vietnam were like -- not the stuff of war movies.
Maybe someone can tell us what the "mission" Bill so portentously cites happens to be. Something more than "We kill some of them, so they kill some of us, so we kill some of their neighbors, so they kill some of us..."? Control, maybe?
Seems (to this dilettante) that the most prevalent and effective actions "against terrorists" have largely been POLICE activities -- investigation, stings, arrest and even "Crotch-Bomber" civilian trial and punishment, or as in the case of bin Ladin, a long-deferred LA SWAT-style takedown. Patrolling the valleys of Kandahar and killing Wogs who "we" define as "terrorists" and "insurgents," building a new charge of vengeance, sowing corruption like dragon's teeth, sure does not look like "effective mission" or "success" or "victory" to me.
The whole worldwide Networked Battlespace apparatus looks to me like just a mechanism searching for a "geopolitical" meta-reason to justify a fits-with-the-myths-they-peddle "mission," inventing all those "threats" (and selling them, for fun and profit, to potential competitors or opponents) or exacerbating them by Hellfire and Dumbnation as it tramples along. Gulping down huge amounts of real, usable, potentially stabilizing wealth as it goes, for ZERO increase in "security."
Seems (to this dilettante) that the whole set of State Security "responses to" and "preparedness for" "terrorism, insurgents and threats" is a fumblefisted giant swinging a huge wrecking ball at the houses of anyone who "opposes American dominance," anywhere in the eight or nine "Areas of Responsibility" that the Pentagon has divvied the whole world into and claimed for their own. All at the cost of the "freedoms" and "liberty" we think we have, at the cost of any stability or the chance for any kind of healthy and sustainable relationships to develop across the boundaries that have to exist if the whole Networked Battlespace Thingie is going to have any even colorable "reason" to go on eating all our lunches.
And guess what? "We" walk away, once again, from the mess we augmented in Iraq and Notagainistan and now Yemen and how many other places, like beer-muscled brawlers walking out of the saloon after the bar fight, leaving someone else to clean up and a few of "us" behind to keep breaking the bottles and glasses...
And on the horizon, The NEXT GREAT ENEMY! IRAN!
Hey, "we" have spent all the money and effort to put the whole ongoing Futilitarian exercise in motion -- let's not worry about that adage about throwing good money, and good men and women and children, after bad.
Okay, I'll say "Iran" if you will say "Kermit Roosevelt-Wild Bill Donovan." I'll even go first: "Iran." And add "et cetera." For completeness and accuracy.
Fella, it sure seems to me like "the US" is one of those international troublemakers you are worried about.
I don't read Chomsky, or Trotsky either. It just seems to me that following what might, MIGHT, by the indications from the Prague Spring to the Arab Spring to the Occupy Whateveritis, a chance of developing a new set of organizing principles, a new maybe "spiritual" basis for inter-human relations, maybe even a recognition of the evils of consumergreed and the damage "we all" are doing to the planet. Even birds know better than to crap in their own nests and eat their own young.
But we humans seek our own pleasure and power, aided by the wonders of ratiocination and rationalization, and because we all have a relatively short "use-by" time here, and are mostly pretty sure there are no consequences for what millenia of ethical thinking and bits of our current spiritual guidance say are Bad Acts, we may collectively be too stupid to avoid, eschew, undo, unwind, back out, recant, and/or rectify all the crap we, hiding behind lofty words and the Shield of Shibboleth, are doing to basically please our little selves at the expense of others. Who we can "do unto" because we can conveniently take advantage of those nasty bits of our limbic system's wiring that lets us do anything we care to, to anyone we define as "the enemy." Or because we can claim that "Big Brother Knows Best, and it takes Rough Men to 'protect us' from The Enemy's Rough Men, with whom our Rough Men have a tacit compact to protect and continue their roles and turf."
I have no use for anarchy, friend. One word: Leviathan. We need institutions and structure. It's the evil that comes from what the sneaky, grasping, Machiavellian worst of us do via those unfortunate needs for structure and a "ruleoflaw" and the myth of "democracy" and the things that even old Hammurabi wrote a complex code to address, that I have a bone to pick with.
I would respectfully offer that from what I see and have experienced, every point you claim to exist as proof of this being a better, more "democratic" world, over the last 50 years, is smoke and BS. Comforting, maybe, but not the realities. And any improvements there are are no thanks to "our" sending in troops and jackals to make the world safe for extractive, consumptive, externality-shedding capitalism.
Picky, picky.
You indicate that you were a Player at some point. My beef is with all the Players, on all the sides, American, RussoSoviet, and Israeli and Chinese and French and British and on and on, who have sloshed weapons into places where people with guns find reasons to kill one another, in an endless cycle of revenge. Sloshing done for, yes, fun, and I should have added, often grim smugness at being able to orchestrate or pretend to "control" the stuff that leads to all that death and dysfunction, and for the egotism of implementing Grand Policy, and yes, even the Russian and Chinese arms manufacturers and intermediaries made a profit somewhere along the way, I know the nominal "US" ones do. And keeping the pot oscillating between simmer and boil, and hopefully just short of meltdown, is "profitable" for all the various "interests," from petro-exploration to Cabbage Patch Kids to you-name-it.
The Game is sick, and it's killing us -- not that we seem to be able to walk away from the table. Morally indefensible in its large form, despite a lot of self-delusion piled on top of casuistry and cynicism that I bet any Player is intimately familiar with.
I know, I'm just a dilettante, and "if only I knew what you and the boys knew," I would be eternally grateful that "we" supported Jonas Savimbi, and the Contras, and any number of other "clients," for "perceived geopolitical advantage," and Russia supported Cuba and its clients. Et cetera.
Got any complaints about the accuracy and completeness of the rest of my rough little sketch? Whole volumes have been written, exposing, fecklessly, the same thing...
And now we're being told that maybe the whole Syria-Lebanon "neighborhood" might be headed for an India-Pakistan-Bangladeshish dissolution, along religious-identity lines.
Well, the stage is certainly set, all those weapons having been introduced, for fun and profit, all those politicians and entrepreneurs playing on the fault lines of faith.
And per our US security spokespersons, we are being "informed" that various of the provocational attacks and incidents have an "al Quaeda-in-Iraqish" flavor to them.
Any speculation, other than the kind that's going on in oil pricing and other commodity-necessities, on where this is headed? Any anodyne(s) for the human condition, as expressed in all that futility?
Good job! Hit all the talking points and shibboleths right square on the head! or is it square on the Right head?
If Ron Paul "sneaks in," a most appropriate image, "we" are going to have more problems to worry about than the Volatile MideastcentralfarAsia. You really think Mr. Bringhomethetroops will even have a snowball's chance of even minutely changing the direction of the whole panoply of forces driving Empire 3.0? Against the clout of the Generals, including General Electric and General Atomic, and all those bloodworms and liver flukes in Congress who have cooperated in dispersing the war machinery across the landscape? No need to even "hide things in hollowed-out mountains:" They got constituents (even the Paulists do) who profit or get their paychecks from the MIC apparatus.
You know, as a former (pre-DU ordnance) GI, I gotta say I would be a lot less concerned about the effects of DU incorporated into armored vehicles, which our really smart engineers do a pretty good job of isolating the crew from, that I am about the GIs on the ground who get spattered and get to inhale all the minute little bits and particles of DU fired off (sometimes accidentally or incompetently and "friendly fired" RIGHT AT THEM) and the "Wogs" and "Gooks" and "Towelheads" and farmers and woodcutters and such who get to live with the stuff that the World Health Organization even says ain't real good for you: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs257/en/
As to the utter certainty that "Iran" is behind this Wave of Terrorist Bombings, here's a quick cite for all the Careful Readers here to discount or leverage off of: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/16/us-iran-israel-security-idUSTRE81F1E720120216
I hear "nuanced" is the latest addition to Newt Gingrich's GOPAC list of hate-inducing words, regularly updated by the likes of Karl Rove, up there with "Leftist-progressive" and "Liberal" and "Socialist." For those unfamiliar with it: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4443.htm But whatever you call it, the Reuters article kind of lays out in "nuanced" detail some of the deadly serious bits an Who-knows parts of the scamming and skulduggery that underlies (emphasize 'lies') the Great Game. The one that has the most of us learning futile stuff like "duck and cover," and raising children who say "IF I grow up," not "WHEN I grow up..."
But don't let us grownups depart from the Game we get such jollies and profit and ego-satisfaction out of. That would be IRRESPONSIBLE, in the zero-sum-seeming, negative-sum-actual world we are demolishing, in lieu of maybe deconstructing by way of designing improvements.
And whether you call it "oil sands" or "bituminous sands" or whatever, the key words in the Wiki article are "profitably extracted." Because, of course, since it takes a lot of energy to heat the crap to "extract it" and get it to "flow," and conveniently so little of the externalities, like surface land impacts and greenhouse gas much bigger than "regular crude" and all the rest-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_sands manage to get priced into the stuff and the infrastructure that goes along with this latest extractive consumerism. But of course there are "jobs" at the end of that short rainbow that is supposed to give "us" (though the schmutz is inconveniently in Canada) "energy independence." For some period. Without the slightest chance of retribution or consequences for the few people who will be "profiting" from the "extraction."
But we must be extra special careful to use the approved descriptors... to do what? preserve the Narrative?
As to "overwhelming" evidence from a USAToday AP story, I see a lot of quotes from Israeli warlords, but not much from maybe more reliable sources with less of a history of "having said the thing that is not so" to nail down so uncontrovertibly the Guilt of All Iran.
And when it comes to collective responsibility and punishment, do all Iranians, shopkeepers and physicians and regular-army and police and university populations, get "justly" or even "prudentially" blown up (or all Israelis, or all Somalis, or even all Americans, etc.) in some act of "pretaliation," because of the actual or reputed skulduggery-thuggery of a few Experienced Players, or just sociopaths, so often impossible to accurately attribute or assign, simply because that's the way the Game is designed and played?
And there's this letter from "the Iranians" that supposedly says their leaders are willing to say some kind of "UNcle," and waive some of their sovereignty, and swallow a ration of bitter pride, to maybe keep the lumbering Networked Battlespace Battle Managers from unloading on their nation. What's to be made of that? An item that's seemingly getting little notice in FOXland.
The thing about netversations is that neither of us gets to write the rules. Don't like what I have to say? Find it "tedious?" Maybe don't like or disagree with my notions and points? Then, to borrow an old adage, just change the channel. Or toss some more adjectives my way. After all, simply by virtue of the geography of our births, you and I are nominally "on the same side..."
And I did read the November IAEA report, and various critiques of it, and I would hope "we" don't hang another "yellowcake" multi-trillion-dollar "dysinvestment," with a lot of death and destruction and incalculable consequences, on what many, and by my reading very reasonably, call a partisan document.
It's not about "liking" or "disliking" what the document says. It's about trying to honestly understand what's in the wind, and do, as a little insignificant individual who spends 45 hours a week earning a living, and too many hours doing this peering through the fog of bitwords, what "our" "intelligence analysts" are supposed to do, full-time, for money: to try to figure out what I need to worry about for the sake of my grandchildren, and nudge the Juggernaut a tiny bit away from the cliff.
Curious, for a reality-based person (maybe that phrase is a carry-over from participating over at dailyKos?). Do you have some reality-based, verifiable facts (rather than fear-based speculations) about "facilities," presumably BOMB-BUILDING FACILITIES, in "hollowed out mountains"?
It's easy, isn't it, I know 'cuz I've looked, to find a ton of webbery that "confirms" the Narrative, about how those sneaky Persians are conspiring to Threaten Israel and the Region and the Stability of the Whole World?
Not that the species is not in serious jeopardy from the whole set of mental and emotional and economic and political processes that are at work in the world, profitably getting each little tribal unit or giant nation to arm itself to the teeth and set itself to work constantly seek for that first-strike or "dominance" "edge," in all those "scenarios" being "played out," whether around some campfire or on all that war-gaming software on all those War Department-and-Enemy computers, simulations (with the obvious limitations of same) being quizzed constantly by all those uniformed and contracted hegemonists that are apparently too stupid to figure out what WOPR learned, that the only way to win is not to play the game...
Makes you wonder which American city(ies) might end up getting the Homs treatment, as the ol' Commonwealth works its way down the slippery slope, and schism and secession keep gaining momentum...
Q -- was that tongue in cheek, or do you really believe that's how the world works? Wow. "The reason for retaliation is to force your enemies to protect you from your other enemies." I guess maybe the Warlords in Israel are unclear on that notion? Ever read any Hobbes? Looked up the definition of "anomie?" Run across the history of the Byzantine Empire? Got any notion of allies-of-convenience and the branch of the Great Game called "common enemies?"
Nice set of pejoratives. Gee, friend, how does one determine what "reality" is in this "community" you talk about? The Realists can't even agree on the provenance of the Bad Guys who did the one thing that maybe can be demonstrated to have actually occurred, a couple of explosions in several locations. You "Realists" are happy to assign the plotting and carrying out of whatever actually happened to whoever your favorite suspect is, in aid of pushing your particular views of what's good for your particular tribe. Without waiting for any supposedly dispassionate results of some kind of investigation. And glossing over the immense and kind of hard to dispute history of thousands, maybe millions, of similar "terrorist actions" done under false flags or out of some vengeance or other or just as part of some complex strategem that's aimed at "destabiolization" or "misdirection" or any of dozens of other pages in the Experienced Players' manual of dirty tricks and hacks in the Great Game. And the Realists are all too ready to try to convince each other of one or another set of "facts" as part of ooching along whatever the current Big Play is -- like ginning up another "war of choice," on Iran this time.
So YOU know, or do you just believe you know, how those explosives got to where they detonated, by what impulses and incentives and motives and machinations? Sure seems to be a wide variety of surenesses even in this little corner of webworld.
You got a lot of nerve yakking at ME about fitting "facts" to "pre-existing narratives." And a lot of nerve claiming that what all the gritty-jawed Gamers are foisting on the rest of us, as part of the frikkin' other bigger Murdoch-approved Narrative, is "reality." WMD? "Existential threats?" "National interests?" "World Terrorism?" "The War On Drugs?" "Areas of Operations?" "Rendition?" Bullcrap.
At root, for Realists, it's about power, and money, and the huge bureaucracy and parasitical economy that's all about World of WarCraft and the Game of RISK (tm), with actual bloody carcasses to chortle or pretend to wail over, and with endless, artful attempts to lipstick and paint the pig to make the rest of us, who have to fund and fight your wars of choice and stupidity and convenience, believe we are somehow doing God's work, or at least riding the Grand Tides of History.
Oh yes, obviously, it is indubitably, now, forever, and beyond peradventure, totally and finally established that the "bombers" were IRANIAN! This Sarajevo Moment could not possibly be one of the wag-the-dog things that our Serious Players, and Theirs, and the sociopaths and psychopaths that form those "terrorist organizations" (never forget Timmy McVeigh and his chums) pull every day, and of course there's only one irrefutably logical next step: BOMB BOMB BOMB, BOMB BOMB IRAN!!!! RIGHT?
Because Everyone Knows that if you've seen one Iranian, you've seen them all! They're ALL JUST LIKE THAT! if in fact, at the end of the day, it turns out that the legless carcass was actually born in Iran and sent by the Ayatollahs to provoke US into destroying their country. And was of course part of the current Horrible Threatening-Regioinal-And-World-Stability (per BIBI, and FOX) Great Iranian World Domination and Nose-Tweaking Conspiracy! to take away our Cherished Freedoms To Be Wiretapped And Arrested And Held Without Trial Or Bail! and pollute our Precious Bodily Fluids!
Let us focus all our puny attention on a couple of little incidents among all the violence that's done every day in this sorry human-infested world, incidents of disputable provenance and of an importance that's determined by the FOXiest of us for the rest of us, and decree that despite the Flights of the Reapers and all those Hellfires and cannon fire used to "light up the Wogs" at wedding parties and in the form of families gathering firewood and of political and criminal competitors of "our friends" in Somalia who we, the doofus CIA/"contractor" thugs, "bump off," and myriad other Hot Spots, and all the other shit that's going on every minute of every day, and because we are an evil, stupid, destructive, rapacious species, let's get us another round of World of WarCraft cooking! We got STOCK in the SYNDICATE, remember -- Milo Minderbinder, who got the Army Air Corps to bomb its own troops on contract to the Germans, for cost plus ten percent, is always telling us that everyone has a share! http://norighttobelieve.wordpress.com/2011/06/08/everybody-has-a-share/ See how simple it is?
The table is set, the lamps are lit -- time for the next, great, so-very-profitable feast of death. http://www.firstworldwar.com/index.htm Thank goodness I am old enough that I can just sit back and watch, this time around...
Stupid damn humans. What a waste of good air and water.
Take a deep breath and drop the chips, of course, Yeah, and then bring out the salt shaker and bushwah detectors to try to figure out what really happened, and then apply the color of lipstick chosen by whatever ascendant drivers of "policy" decide is the spin-and-paint job to be applied, for whatever immediate or long-term goals they may have in their sights, to cue the rest of us, or at least our limbic systems and tribal compulsions, what we are supposed to believe, and who we are to hone in on as the Enemy du Moment. Who of course have to be some flavor of "terrorists." To keep the so easily directible flow of fear going strong and fast.
And speaking of the MSM and the Narrative, in the category of Dirty Doings, episode 4,310,595,202, we have a little reminder about how skulduggery and sneakery are so much a part of human nature that even the Holy Universal I know What God Wants Catholic Church's underpants are on fire:
There's more juicy details at http://news.yahoo.com/monsignors-mutiny-revealed-vatican-leaks-140524856.html, and elsewhere on google.
I'm sure the Old Mitred Guys and the Lean and Hungry Loyolaists have nice doctrinal workarounds to quash any qualms about such patent venality, of course.
Always a question about the real nature of any institution, whether it's the thing that the Founding Fathers' edifice has become, or those other aedificia that take our money and our credulity with a smirk and a sneer...
Anyone have any idea what the nature of any possible goals or aims of "the US" might be in picking this fight with "Iran?" Or is that the kind of question that has the same kind of answer you get to "What are the US national interests here?"
It's amazing, the amount of futile, destructive, de-stabilizing, horrific stuff that "just happens," because the money to pay for it, and the "equipment" that so often seems to define the "mission," is so freely to hand, and it all is so far out of sight. Just because some cowboy or jackal or sociopath-in-power looks around and says, "Hey, we can get away with this!" or maybe "Wow! I can get rich off of this tiny little bit of abusive statecraft, all plausibly deniable, all Ollie North-ish, and there's a well-paid gig for me in the Security Industry once I cop my pension from the Feds."
Cue the stirring, rising, martial music, the Hellfires, and rappelling Secret Troopers...
Not "journalism," fer shur, except in the way that language "grows" by re-definition via usage, but then what is, in the Narrative Flood any more? (You probably know that "sophisticated" used to mean "adulterated, tainted," nothing like the aspirational horror that it has become.)
Thank you for doing a little local fog-dispelling. The interchange in the post on "Catholic beliefs" sure limns a nice selection of what the whole Narrative game is really all about -- Wrong-wingers doing their best to beat the rest of us down into the Good Old Days when serfdom was in flower, and the Powers That Be (secular and religious) could waltz around, taking heads at their pleasure and forcing all the ordinary people to fund their wars and games and ornamentation.
Please keep on swimming against the flood...
Nothing like that would ever happen here, in OUR democracy... such as it is...
Have a little fun and look up a bit of history on contraception and abortion, like OLD history -- Starting point: http://womenshistory.about.com/od/abortion/a/ancientabortion.htm
Then do a little posthole digging into the history of the Church's teachings, dogma, doctrine, whatever you want to characterize the angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pinning on the same topics in the Universal Church -- "One Church to Rule them All, One Church to Find Them, One Church to Bring Them All and In The Hark-ness Bind Them..."
Kate, you're a Christian, I would bet you would say. What's with the imagery, then? "Spanking?" and "Bitch slapping?" Do YOU turn the other cheek? More than once?
"You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart... and the second commandment is like unto it: you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." Matthew 22:37. Interesting what a confection has been assembled on top of (and pretty much obscuring) the pretty simple stuff that Jesus is reputed to have said, the bits that have somehow lasted through all the careful edits through the ages, by those Holy Kamoly Old Men who built that magnificent, imposing edifice, gilt and ermine, amassing power in this world and by their claim, the next, and all that scarlet and marble, on that there Rock. Thanks to the wonderful ingenuity of one great Ad Man, Paul. The Golden Rule, not "The Gold Rules."
Remember the story of the Widow's Mite? Mark 12:41-44? The camel and the eye of the needle? Matthew 19:24? Naw, not a universal message of the Roman church, but there's some pretty strong sinews that tie us to the messages of Jesus... at least the ones I hear. But that's the nature of faith and belief, isn't it? We hear what fits with our biases and preferences.
And gee, no doctor, to do what's needed as part of "playing the system" to get the care he has sworn to provide to his patient would EVER, like, you know, maybe put down a diagnosis-of-convenience, now would he or she? Good thing the good ol' Inquisitio Haereticae Pravitatis and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith aren't still driving the truck -- otherwise there might be a First Amendment problem, as in there wouldn't be one to worry about. Right?
And your version of the First Amendment, and your comfortable certitude that Obamaforcedcontraception is "blatantly unconstitutional," may be argumentatively convenient, but it don't sound much like the one I learnt about in Law School, back in the weird '70s, or even read about since then. Bearing in mind that Citizens United is a "First Amendment" piece of what-ever.
Please forgive me if I am stepping on the toes of your identity. That's where we are in the world these days -- coming up with endless old and new reasons to do and say bad things to one another.
I second the motion.