Is there a factual basis for the implied "reality" that there is, outside of the "conservative talking point universe," a substantial thingie labeled "birth control abortion"?
Google "abortion as birth control" and see what you find, and please don't limit your scholarship to just the stuff that "social conservative Talibanners" emit...
Are privatized growth-industry prisons, and "convict slave labor," and now the burgeoning business of debtor's prisons for the same folks that Dickens used to write about, and of course the sonorous, Old Testament Death Penalty, all good ideas, in your book?
Needed: a new category and noun to render nugatory and replace the current Chimaera labeled "war." What "we" are doing any more is not what the trumpets-drums-and-banners set has in mind when they blab about "the US needs to go to war against Iran (picking a wild outlier example.)" But "we" still resonate in idiot martial slavering to that old myth that the current reality hides behind. Rather, it's what Smedley Butler named it: A racket, an enormous, self-generating, self-bloating racket. Top to almost-the-bottom, and I would except only those lost souls who enlist in the rosy fog of patriotic macho. So many of whom discover, as several young men in Marines BDUs in various "embedded" videos, speaking from "forward bases" and "outposts" in the infinitely hostile terrain of Notagainistan, have put it, that the only real "mission," among all the dozens that Really Smart Generals and Really Crafty CIA Spooks and Really Dumb Politicians have told them serially are what they are Over There for, is "staying alive, coming home." And who then do whatever it takes, when they are sent out on futile asymmetric patrols to "win hearts and minds by encouraging the Hajjis to shoot at them or blast them with IEDs, and then killing a lot of them," or find themselves in guerrilla-selected ambush battles, to come home alive.
How great can the gulf between the ground-truth reality and the stupid effing myths that so many of "us" believe get, before there's no more money and no more troops and no more oil and no more Shining City on a Hill to come home to? It's a cancer, folks. Don't you see it? A sneaky, aggressive, malignant, metastatic cancer, tricking us into generating ever more and ever larger arteries to sen ever more of our blood and energy off to be converted into just more terminal tumor tissue.
Anyone want to take a stab at coming up with a neologism that better describes what the activity formerly tricked out as "war" actually is, these days?
"I’d prefer a wise and kind leader to all this crap, I really would."
Careful what you wish for.
It should be pretty plain that with every increment of Bigness of institutions, particularly where the main model of human interaction is the "business deal" and its subsidiary, what we carelessly and imprecisely call "war," and where Big Money is used to keep score and facilitate the titillation of the fanciest yearnings of the most jaded, you are very likely t end up with a "leader." The chances of ending up with a "wise and kind" leader? How big, for you mathematicians, can numbers less than zero actually get?
You can bet that our "leaders," in among all the other Strange Attractors and webs of deceit that their PR hacks and message manipulators are generating to attract (or deter) your sacred Vote, are all hoping to to tap into that same emotional pool that Ronnie Raygun siphoned out of -- the vulnerability of most of us to the image of the seemingly competent, avuncular guy who can reassure, and make all seem like, well, "Morning In America." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUKAkm8A9nM (On the other hand, there's this view: http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/09/23/copycats-beware-morning-in-america-cant-be-replicated/ )
Genghis Khan and some guy named Hitler and another fella named "Alexander" were all competent fellas, in their way -- and probably inevitable.
"Ooooh,, rub that little spot over there to the right, will ya? --- Aaaaaaaah, that feeeeels so goooooood...."
On the other hand, there's a virtual plethora of "powerful supporters of war" in both Greater and Lesser Israel. All the contingency plans and attack routes and target lists are in place, all the forward deployment has already been done, and OUR crop of "western warmongers" is pounding the drums and sending out the emissaries to Congress and "our allies," some of whom seem just a little bit leery of getting sucked into another set of doomed, losing, asymmetric, trillion-dollar, dinosaurian "It's MY oil" exercises, with dissolution of the "West" as the likely endpoint.
In the emergency room, the doctors, with their finely honed skills, concentrate on the patient's right arm, shattered in a motorcycle wreck. Some dumb orderly or nurse points out that there's a gallon or two of blood on the floor, bled out of a little slit next to the shoulder blade, and that there hasn't been a palpable pulse in a couple of minutes. Looking up from the neat, highly skilled re-build of the arm bones, one trauma ortho surgeon looks around the table and says, "Who's gonna call it?" The vascular specialist and the neurosurgeon flip a trochar, and the losing neuro guy says "Ok, time of death, 11:11."
Yeah... them Parsees be a rough regime, aye ... the west better keep up its guard... and heaven forbid one might point out the kind of stuff that appears in the Israeli press every day, these days -- sonorously reminiscent of the run-up to Iraqagainistan. Like http://www.haaretz.com/a-double-barreled-solution-to-iran.premium-1.448210#, "A double-barrelled solution to Iran," per an Israeli political scientist: "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran," and try to sucker the other neighbors into making peace with Israel, all on the same weekend.
You presumably know enough about "the west" to not really be even a tiny bit worried about "it" keeping up "its" guard. But it is so satisfying to "talk tough," like real Great Game players, isn't it? And who gives a rip if every iteration and re-re-re-interation of the "it's a jungle out there, and winners never sleep" theme gets us that little bit closer to the Great End Game.
Face it, folks -- "Exceptional America" is nothing more than a myth, and a screwed one at that.
There's an enormous gulf between what "our troops" are mythically supposed to be doing (per the imagery fed into the public mind) and what actually happens on the ground, and in all those contractor trailers and offices scattered with our "bases" across the planet.
What "our troops" are tasked to do, since the Korean War, is take part in a gigantic exercise in futility. All the "wise" noises over this or that strategy and tactical set, whether McChrystal or some other guru has the doctrinal keys to "victory" or "success," are just so much BS. The reality is that the whole Pentacle apparatus has morphed into a gigantic wealth-transfer-and-waste-generating machine. NONE of "our" vaunted grand doctrines have managed even a scintilla of "success" in the reality of asymmetric Global Wars. (Killing a lot of "gooks" and "towelheads" on the way to the latest Khe Sanh or other "Linchpin to the whole war effort, gotta hold it forever, we win all the battles so how can we lose the war" idiocy is not "success." Converting ever-increasing volumes of usable real wealth in the tens of trillions, more than enough to feed everyone and "fix" health care and much more, is not "victory--" except for the post-national, hide-behind-the-Flag-waving, war-toy contractor corporate profitabilities -- see e.g. the many examples of screw-the-nation-ism, like the recent case of United Technologies "knowingly and wilfully" selling advanced technology to "enemy China" just to make a buck and let the Commies develop a "modern" attack helicopter that would pose a threat (requiring, of course, more procurements with more money pumped into the "threat-chasing" pipeline to counter") to "our troops" in any shootin' conflict.
Even the Free Republic gagged on this one: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2900811/posts. In the real world of world-wide, well-orchestrated military-industrialism, "we" are not supposed to pay any attention to "cross-pollination" like this, and I guess "we" are supposed to be satisfied that UT has paid a $75 million penalty for this egregious bit of sophistry.
Pity the poor troops, people like me who were maybe raised on Presbyterianism and the tenets of Boy Scoutery ("do my duty to God and my country"), who enlisted to "protect America and our sacred way of life," only to learn what the game really is. The game so accurately identified by Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler in his pithy, informed formulation:
WAR is a racket. It always has been.
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives...
In the World War a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows...
Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few – the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill...
And what is this bill?
This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations...
...a war that might well cost us tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives of Americans, and many more hundreds of thousands of physically maimed and mentally unbalanced men.
Of course, for this loss, there would be a compensating profit – fortunes would be made. Millions and billions of dollars would be piled up. By a few. Munitions makers. Bankers. Ship builders. Manufacturers. Meat packers. Speculators. They would fare well.
Yes, they are getting ready for another war. Why shouldn't they? It pays high dividends...
The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes twelve percent. But war-time profits – ah! that is another matter – twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent – the sky is the limit. All that traffic will bear. Uncle Sam has the money. Let's get it...
Of course, it isn't put that crudely in war time. It is dressed into speeches about patriotism, love of country, and "we must all put our shoulders to the wheel," but the profits jump and leap and skyrocket – and are safely pocketed.
I prefer "Kleptocracy" as the best descriptor for the Current State. That's just me, of course.
Another quibble: "leave millions uninsured," as opposed to "leave millions with no regular health care and using the ERs as an expensive necessity, or just dying"? Why is the whole "healthcare" thingie (almost) always framed in terms of "insurance" and "coverage?" I know, the train left the station decades ago, and the PR scum for the "stakeholders" have been banging that drum (and delivering the ca$h) for just as long. But every repeat of that "meme" just adds weight to the idiot notion that "insurance" is the way to think about and "manage" this whole great public issue, turning it into just another other massive wealth redistribution schtick.
"Privatization" of a large public asset -- a nice marker of the kind of militokleptocracy that wracks so much of the former colonial world. There's a lot of words written about the nerve of Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry in daring to challenge what Musharraf and the other kleppers at the center of the corruption and repression matrix were up to -- "disappearing" citizens, blowing off demands for "habeas corpus," and selling public assets to "investors" with some clear problems with kidkbacks. Here's one sample: http://www.loc.gov/law/help/pakistan-justice.php
Given the way "militobusiness interests" operate in places like Libya, Syria, Egypt, Israel, Pakistan and such, with the White Elephants of corruption and baksheesh and immunized naked power hung around the necks of the ordinary people who generate the real wealth that makes any of this possible, one might be a little skeptical about the remarks offered by Mr. Waheed.
Seems to me that ordinary people, particularly in "Arab" places that our Rightsters try to scare us might be the source of the spread of what they peddle as the "disease" of "Sharia law" are yearning for a sense of the legitimacy of their ruling structures and classes. What a surprise that courts and lawyers might be acting to manufacture and validate the little bits of honesty and goodness that are the bricks in that edifice of legitimacy under a real rule of law. What a surprise, also, that John Roberts would apparently choose not to be labeled as the fella who put the stake through the heart of what is left of the mythical rule of law in America.
But the thing about the Kochs is that they just KNOW, rightly or wrongly, that they have wrapped themselves in that "vast indifference of great wealth" that assures them of peaceful deaths after long, well-cared-for, insulated lives with every comfort and indulgence that their "people" can provide for them. And those "people" include a lot of "security specialists," no doubt trained by maybe semi-detached bits of Mossad and the CIA and various "special forces" entities.
So these folks are our Louis XIVs, who know, and live the truth of, that nobless-oblige-free zoning, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noblesse_oblige, to the extent that they can happily and breezily and with the serial miseries of history on their side, observe that "apres nous le deluge..." See http://tradicionclasica.blogspot.com/2006/01/expression-aprs-moi-le-dluge-and-its.html for a nice discussion, in context, of the import and history of that midddle-finger-to-the-middle-class notion. And remember that Wall Street is still open 24/7, and folks there still smirk and wink and reassure each other that before any crap can even come close to hitting the fan, "IBG-YBG!" ("I'll be gone, you'll be gone... so who gives a rat's arse?")
I bet you mean "Iranian" airliner. Another example of how the idiocy of "our" entire current course of human conduct, our "policies" and "interests" and "our" geometrically tumescent "abilities to threaten and project power" and all that other Great Game/Game of RISK! bullshiptery is skating all of us, especially those of us who pay for all this but have zero say-so in how it all goes down, quickly along to the Great (END) Game of our species.
Note the features of the Wiki report on the "shootdown" of Iran Air Flight 655, killing 290 very surprised people: young, dumb, scared, inexperienced "troops" in several levels of "tight space," compressed by geography and time and the expectations of a rather hard-ass bunch of officers, literally working "in the dark," struggling to make sense of a flood of information of a volume that was minute, compared to the bitstorm that flies at them in "our" wonderful new Networked Battlespace, where "we" add data dumps and "features" because "we" can and because they are "really cool." And of course profitable.
One little radar operator, convinced the flight profile and signature were clearly from a CIVILIAN target but unable to correlate and parse the hour's difference between "bridge time" and "civilian time" the civil airline schedules were printed in, the pressure that comes from having to assume everything seemingly "inbound" is a deadly threat, so off go a YAHOOO!! couple of Standard missiles that blew the Enemy Arabs out of the sky. Was there cheering in the Vincennes' CIC when the blip vaporized? Gee, I wonder...
For that, as with a few of the more notorious present "bug-splat booboos" in the current Forever War Follies, "we" ended up paying blood money, to the tune of a mere $132 million. For an "action" that despite everything that was done wrong, despite the loss and waste of our supposed values, still resulted in the "award" of medals to those gallant sailors:
The men of the Vincennes were all awarded Combat Action Ribbons for completion of their tours in a combat zone. Lustig, the air-warfare coordinator, received the Navy Commendation Medal, often given for acts of heroism or meritorious service, but a not-uncommon end-of-tour medal for a second tour division officer. According to the History Channel, the medal citation noted his ability to "quickly and precisely complete the firing procedure."[2] However, in 1990, The Washington Post listed Lustig's awards as one being for his entire tour from 1984 to 1988 and the other for his actions relating to the surface engagement with Iranian gunboats. In 1990, Rogers was awarded the Legion of Merit "for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service as commanding officer ... from April 1987 to May 1989." The award was given for his service as the Commanding Officer of the Vincennes, and the citation made no mention of the downing of Iran Air 655.[34] The Legion of Merit is often awarded to high-ranking officers upon successful completion of especially difficult duty assignments and/or last tours of duty before retirement.
And gee, do you suppose that any of this resulted in any kind of disciplinary or corrective action? Combat Information Centers on today's Navy ships are still full of bugs, with contractors chasing them while trying to lay off blame for malfunctions on the products of their competitors...
"Italian airliner" sounds so much less disconcerting, almost comforting, if totally inaccurate. Why is that?
There's this expression, "loose cannon," that every day has more meaning.
Weapons increasingly flood the world, and it's a myth that those who deploy and fire them are some kind of supermen and -women who follow orders (except for "bad" ones) and abide by the Law of War and all that crap. More and more of those weapons are on hair-triggers: they are "use-or-lose," like ship-defense and -attack missiles and torpedoes, where the "horizon times" and thus moments available for perception and judgment are measured in minutes to seconds. More and more of them are under the "control" of young people, or of various kinds of 'paths with axes to grind, fearful or tribal or revenge-motivated.
In 1980 or so I was soaking in a large public bath, invoking the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, in a hotel in Beppu, Japan. Several US naval vessels (guided missile frigates and destroyers) were making a port call, at a time when the Japanese Constitution and politics were afire over the US refusal to even state an intention to abide by the US-imposed proscription on ANY nuclear weapons in the country. This was at a time when the US and Soviet Navies were playing bumper-tag and chest thumping and toe-stepping-on, all over that huge ocean area.
So -- three enthusiastic and culturally klutzy US naval officers high-fived their way into the bath area, skipped the obligatory pre-washing, and jumped in the heated pool where I was floating. Drawn to me as a fellow "gaijin," I guess.
We started chatting about this and that, and I had to ask whether there was any truth to the news that their ships were armed with nukes. "Of course!" was the quick reply. The Rooskies have 'em, we'd be fools not to. And two of them were "missile officers," proud of holding the keys and delegated authority to launch nuke-headed missiles, on the apparent incoming approach of Commie missiles, at Commie ships manned by equally grimly fearfully political and enthusiastic Soviet officers with about the same weakness in the C-and-C chain, who might have fired off a few missiles, out of politics, or boredom, or drunkenness, or spite, or just a spastic response to some little glitch in the situation-reporting radar and equipment. Short "horizon times," y'know.
Talking in terms of "Syria" (or some war-loving little band in Syrian uniforms) shooting down a "Turkey" bird kind of misses the point, obscuring what's happening and what's happened at the "tactical" level as a result of decades of building long chains of dominoes, stood on end on a shaky old table that itself is balanced on a house of cards... just waiting for some brat or some klutz to bump the table, or a random gust to jiggle one of those cards...
So very hard to keep the genie in the bottle, with so many curious or foolish or ill-willed people playing with the cork. So impossible to cram him back in, once he gets a toe free.
Speaking of glimpsing freedom, a concept and shibboleth that so many yearn about and moon over, without much attempt at understanding what it means, even to them: You could do worse than read some old stuff by a guy named H. G. Wells, who wrote a book I just came across as part of a Nook gift: "The World Set Free." http://www.online-literature.com/wellshg/worldsetfree/ Took me over the emotional top...
We could all do so much better. Too bad it's so likely that we won't.
In first-year law school courses on "Property" you learn there's no "absolute" in "fee simple absolute," you quickly learn that there is no such thing as a nsupposed exclusive, extreme and total "right" in a parcel of land or any other tangible thing. The fraudulent and ignorant misrepresentational notions of "the movement formerly known as Tea Party" are so far off the beam as to be laughable if they weren't so pernicious.
What a person holds in respect to "property" is not some simple-minded "king of his castle," absolutist "right." Rather, it's a bundle of rights, circumscribed by ancient doctrines and relationships (e.g., no sending your sewage onto your neighbor's "property," and other practical impositions of the Golden Rule) and of course all those constantly shifting laws and regulations that are often justifiable as checks on unbridled greed and abuse, and inevitably are also warped and biased and abused by those with power, including the rich folks who whine the loudest about the supposed horrors of "government compulsion" yet send their little back-door men to neak in with money-stuffed envelopes to add "suggested legislative model language" to "facilitate" stuffing personally profitable statutes and ordinances and rules into the "rights" bundle. And are among the first and worst, when it comes to siccing the "brown-shirted Code Enforcers" on their neighbors.
Without correlative duties and obligations, there's no such thing as "rights."
If you follow the fracking saga, or the planning for the Keystone pipeline, or the history of the railroads, or downtown redevelopment in any urban area, you know how stuff like "eminent domain" and regulatory capture works.
Madison fertilized the TP convention on "property" himself:
This term in its particular application means "that dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in exclusion of every other individual."
There's no such thing as that kind of "exclusion." Before feeding the rather Top-Predator notions of "rights," according to the the Norquist/Koch Right, one might ask for a little careful exegesis of the conundrum and violent interface that Madison kind of feather-dusts over:
In its larger and juster meaning, it embraces every thing to which a man may attach a value and have a right; and which leaves to every one else the like advantage.
Emphasis in the original.
And what is that "juster meaning" morsel supposed to convey, again? That the current huge lobbying to force EPA to "save our economy" by "leaving alone OUR right to burn OUR Clean Coal (sic, ha ha)," and the push to burn all the natural gas and "let nature take its course" as all the sovereign individuals in our combusto-consumer culture keep on with all the behaviors that are killing the planet (slower than the spoilers need to worry at all about, of course), is A-OK? Because under the spoils system, the Reds by consistency of effort have managed to pack the Supreme Court with "business-friendly" people, who have painted over all the principles inscribed on the barn door except "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others"?
O.I.L. would seem to be a somewhat obscurantist acronym for the much broader, more inclusive, more fundamental nature of the Beast: wealth transfer, at a rate that tops the Milo Minderbinder/Smedley Butler scale of unimaginably futile and stupid greed, year after year over year.
This is mostly just all about wealth transfer. From the peasants to the self-perpetuating "elites," to all those dumb-faux Messianic "contractors" and the politicos and officer-corporatists.
What a surprise that the enterprising "generals" are keeping their talons sunk and locked into the body of what might have become what, a "different state"? Any examples out there of a well-entrenched, fortified idustro-military kleptocracy ever "turning power over" before a replacement elite figured out how to starve the fat old beasts out of their caves and fortified cities?
Anybody notice how our own Kleptocrats-General are setting up their own strongpoints, with perimeter defenses aimed outwards, out from the Green Lines around their newly renamed "joint bases," right at the slobs who fund the war-ization of everything and are busily hitching their minutely profitable little techno-wagons to the rapidly accelerating US manifestation of the Juggernaut?
Not to worry though-- like the burning of the last few tons of "clean coal"and "OUR natural gas (sic)" it's a self limiting plague.... eventually.
What these guys do, in the Heart of Darkness, often or usually with the connivance of Sneaky Petes and the jaw-snapping of Jackals from one Great or Lesser Power or another, looks, smells, tastes and bleeds just like the base nature of the whole human enterprise. Drug war, wars of choice, the "war on terror" with its amorphous and asymptotic margins, the whole enthusiastic getting-off on ever-more-seductively-destructive weaponry peddled like washing machines and color TVs to anyone with some money to buy, all the cheap puffing up of "differences" and playing on the tuneful limbic systems of all those individual human brains, just to keep the pot on the boil. The sickly patina of "international legitimacy" on the rotting flesh of culture and civility and now the concatenation of all those manipulative and manufactured "threats" into the truly existential threat to the species. Smacking down or dividing-and-conquering any one or little group that tries to do something different and better.
Facts? or factoids? And the deprecating response falls short of addressing the points I questioned.
Is the "correct" approach to applaud the application of a Band-Aid to a paper cut, when the patient is bleeding out from a bunch of arterial wounds and choking on his own vomit?
Or maybe they made an informed, forward-looking choice? Looking at what the inevitable failures, in the Murphy-space where humans and their machines actually live (not that idealized closed world of Engineer-space), can cost?
Does that not kind of go around the point that "America," especially if you include all the carbon-converting-by-CO2NOxSO2mbustion post-nationals that may have some legacy connection to the good ol' USA, and the MIC worldwide, and all the efforts "we" are putting into keeping the home fires burning, hot and high and producing lots of CO2 and methane and that kind of schmutz, are pretty much "Number One" per capita in "doing unto others," via frackery and chicanery, to support that consumatopian lifestyle and the mythical Liberty&Freedom that characterizes We The People? How many billions, or trillions, of dollars is being "invested" in Who Cares? I'll Be Gone, You'll Be Gone-ism?"
How much are we World Leaders in Everything "investing," in mountaintopping and fracking and nuclear plants that will never be built (like the ones I and my neighborly rate-payers are ponying up $9.5 billion in "pre-expenditures" to pad the balance sheets and jump the bonuses of Florida's Progress "HaHa" Energy and its C-suite? And we are being urged to keep on buying those Chevvies and Fords and building yet more miles of 'superhighway" -- another "investment in the [totally short-term, immediate, who cares about 20 years from now] future?"
Yeah, Joe, and the pro-war people who run the shoot-the-commanders part of the action have such a high rate of success. No mis-fires, no little oopsies that do such a great job of convincing the rest of the world of US superiority in Everything. Especially when they use the occasional "kill," which in many instances is "drone-scamming" where Warlord A just PROMISES that Warlord B (who happens to be a rival in the opium trade or just a competitor for local hegemony) will be will be sitting and plotting the next 9/11 at coordinates such-and-so, to justify trillions of dollars in Military Futility.
What "security" have "we" bought will all those trillions? Oh, I forgot the "elephant gun" proof: The cop stops the dude in camo, stalking the streets of Manhattan with bandoliers of .458-cal soft-points and a big ol' Winchester rifle. "What the heck are you doing, carrying that thing around in the city?" asks the cop. "Protecting us against wild elephants, of course!" says the dude. "There's not a wild elephant within 7,000 miles of here!" replies the cop. "See?" says the dude. "It works! Now leave me alone so I can get back to my Duty Call."
But I acknowledge that atavistic, troglodytic thrill of even the fake green-tinted video of "bin Ladin's Last Moments," and "bin Ladin's funeral swim." Too bad that the vast majority of anti-terrorism is boring old police work, and that some of it looks so much like boring old police entrapment... Nowhere near as exciting as kicking down the door and shooting everyone in the room, or pickling off a couple of Hellfires.
Too bad the reactionaries and "rightists" define out of existence any other kind of approach to security and stability than spending a quarter and more of the world's wealth on war toys and mayhem, incapable of applying anything other than some kind of Big F___in' Hammer to every situation, because that involves the exercise of Big Power, and presents the opportunity to keep the idiotic dead-end sameness of Great Game "policy" going.
And now the shameless try to shame people with consciences into buying into more military BigHammerism, because no one has a clue how to derail, or at least switch off the Main Line, the Dead End Express they have us all riding on.
Tell us, please, what combination of doctrines, drones, bombs, bullets, boots and bushwah will properly effectuate the "Duty to Protect," which mostly gets invoked as a way to suck the rest of us into another gay, mad whirl. Seriously. Duty to Protect? Exactly how do "we" protect the people of Houla, or My Lai, or how many other atrocity-places? If "we" are so smart and rich and powerful, how do we keep the kinds of societies and militaries and kleptocracies that perform them (when it's not OUR troops occasionally doing the deed) from rising to power? But that ain't what it's all about, is it?
Good thing cognitive dissonance is not a painful disability.
Sure looks to me like the "treasured values" that some people used to associate with "America" are nothing but disrespected, to the Nth degree, by them there Neocons and grim-jawed "patriots," who do all these "wars of choice" and are too stupid to even manage to achieve their goals and ends. Or maybe they do -- chaos, violence, destruction...
And the $1- or maybe $15-trillion-a-year question is, what, out of all the devices and demonics of all the hardware, software, wetware, Tupperware and networked battlespacery that the military-industrialists have bought, with our money and blood, what set of the tools of the World of Warcraft are going to be able to answer the Call of Duty and have a prayer of bringing a halt to the present murder? Gonna Send In the Flying Clones?
And out of all those tools and toys, which ones have a prayer of keeping another Assadhole from Assuming Power and accumulating, out of the huge weapons bazaar that our very own US government works so Assiduously to keep flooding the planet with every imaginable kind of threat-creating and threat-answering-by-creating-more-threats weapons, the very weapons (and a whole lot more, stealthier and sneakier and more lethal) like the ones sold by Russians and so many others in that huge sick competition for "Mayhem Market Share," to his uniformed, uninformed "services," who, just like ours, are "protecting the national government from threats and enemies, foreign and domestic?"
What's the way out of the circular firing squad we seem to be all-anxiously-in-line to stand up and take our places in?
The Horror! The Horror! But what is the set of deployments and battlespace managements that will stop the Horror without catalyzing a lot worse? What's the end-game? And given the uniform history of failure of The Brass to do any different than the previous multifarious failures, I would not suggest leaving it up to them to pick and choose, given their obvious interest in keeping the Game that they love and live off of going apace...
You've got an exaggerated notion of what "the drones" are capable of accomplishing. This ain't the climactic battle scene in "The Return of the King," where all the Good People get all excited that "The Eagles are coming! The Eagles are coming!"
The real trick is to keep tabs on all the Saurons out there, and keep them from developing the latest technology for making Rings of Power. Good luck with that, of course... that train left the station long ago.
Maybe if the Olde Englishe equivalents of the neocons and the current financialists and the Smoot-Hawleys of their day had been a little wiser and less interested in short-term personal gain and the playing out of their fantasies on the lives of others, maybe if wiser heads had prevailed, you would not have had the Stamp Act and the other triggers of the REBELLION, or whatever you want to call it, that ended up with Hessians in Manhattan and all the rest.
But then people are always coming up with cute and quaint ideas on how to subjugate and invade and repress and suppress and kill each other, and are really good at putting up judicially and ecclesiastically sanctioned rationales, pretty pasteboard over the simple greed and innate violence of our species.
Patently, there is no "us plan for a nuclear weapons free Middle East," or "Near East," or "Far East." the Big Toys are for the Big Boys, because that "massive retaliation" and "glassification of nations" is fundamental to our rulers' behaviors.
What kind of weapons do you think are in the lockers on the carriers and other major vessels, and of course what's on the noses of all those Trident missiles in all those "silos" in all those submarines, over there in the eastern Med and Persian gulf? And of course the Game is currently dominated by a significant linkage between the keepers and coddlers of the 200 or 400 nukes that parts of the Israeli structure built and keep adding to, and our own "Bomb,bomb Iran-ers."
By the way, anybody seen this little fun item? "Iran To Sue Google Over Dropping Persian gulf Name." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/17/iran-google-suit-persian-gulf_n_1525986.html Kind of like those villages and cities in the Soviet Union that just "disappeared" from one year's version of the national maps to another -- having been either irradiated or gassed or bio-weaponed out of habitability.
Would that, one wonders, involve "EU" (pronounced "EEEewww?", formerly the Band-aid Fig Leaf known as "NATO") attacks on the House of Saud? Which would presumably involve, among other futilities, a chance, finally, to see whether the F-22 (and the F-35, if it's ever allowed to cross the street and go around the block without being tied to a huge tail of contractor dandling) and the missiles attached thereto and "avionics" contained therein, is "better" in aerial combat than the F-16s and other stuff "our" MIC has so lustily sold to the Saudi military? Or can it all be done as a keyboard exercise, by "sanctioning" the sale of "Saudi oil?"
"Justification? We don' neeed no steeenkin' justification!!! Weee dooooes what weee want!"
Want a couple of great examples of how the real "gulf war," the one between careerist and self-aggrandizing neocon "perceptions" and what the sheeple are led to believe and worship, on the one hand, and the reality of GIs killing and being killed and then killing some more and all the while billions and going on trillions of Real Money dollars are just disappearing into the fog of war, on the other? Read, with an ever so slightly jaundiced eye, CIA sneak Gary Schroen's marvelously oblivious tract on his summer vacation in Notagainistan, "First In: An Insider's Account of How The CIA Spearheaded The War On Terror In Afghanistan." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Events_leading_to_the_attack_on_Pearl_Harbor . then maybe read, if you can find it, "Long Rifle," by LeBleu, a "troop's" experience with The Freakin' Brass and dedicated people learning that they are doing stupid stuff decreed by liars and fools. And follow that with Jon Krakauer's "Where Men Win Glory," http://articles.latimes.com/2009/sep/11/entertainment/et-book11 , about the macho and brave life of football notable Pat Tillman, and his idiocy-induced, fraudulently miscast death, on accounta the massive, disgusting inertia and momentum of that enormous bloated grasping bureaucracy that is pulling its branches together to force all of us into a war-ized endgame in the Great Networked Battlespace (here's just one slightly dated pitch that captures a little bit of the whole sick spirit of the thing: http://www.boeing.com/news/releases/1999/news_release_990310b.html )
And this is going to change just how, again? for anything but the worse? because of all those people who are "invested" in More Of The Same Stupid?
At some point, if what I hope to be the case is true, all these folks are going to run out of the last vestiges of "legitimacy," and people are going rear up and say "NO MAS!" Wonder if that will be before or after we run out of petroBTUs, and before or after our current net direction as a species has made the place uninhabitable...
What's our and Israel's and Saudi Arabia's and our Other Global Current Pre-Dominated Partner Nations' excuse, then, and don't say that "we" don't do it, or that "we're exceptinoal."
And Who Freaking Knows what it means? The Great Gamers have so thoroughly soured the milk, spoiled the nest, all that, that nobody can know anything any more, only follow ancient prejudices and tribal interests and the driving beat of the amygdala as it marimbas away on the rest of the notes in the limbic system.
Gen. Curtis LeMay was pressing real hard, for a lot of years, to nuke the Soviet Union, and Vietnam, and any other old place, and here's a good read, complete with lots of verbal saber rattling and all that sneaky-pete, surrogacy-based, "WHAT democracy? That's just a selling point for Hidden Oligarchy" stuff. Robert Scherer's "With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush, and Nuclear War" http://www.amazon.com/With-Enough-Shovels-Reagan-Nuclear/dp/0394414829
Just by way of reminding all of us that 'stupid' is not confined to just a few of us.
Per a recent presentation for Israel Bonds, the investments in those instruments do help with infrastructure and stuff that seems generally beneficial, but also allow the rulers to "invest" in a huge and growing military-industrial establishment. Almost all the start-ups touted at that presentation, which was based on a nationally distributed multi-media pitch piece, were companies making ever-more-sneaky-and-"sophisticated" weapons and related systems.
What's abundantly clear from that presentation is that not only are US taxpayers dumping billions into the Israeli coffers every year (earning the label "Uncle Sucker" for their trouble), people all over the US are adding $600 million in bond purchases, bonds which are paid off presumably out of, in part, that taxpayer money from the rest of us. All supporting an important but increasingly ugly state, with all its offshoots and odd activities.
Nothing particularly new about the reality of a World Military-Industrial "thing," where all the players are attached to all the other players, right straight across the imaginary lines that divide one "people" from another, all just buying and selling war crap to one anothers' oligarchs, and cross-pollinating their fevered brains with dreams of ever-more-efficient and sneaky death-dealing, and selling points labeled "security" and "hegemony" and (sub silentio) "futility," and the goal of the game is extracting wealth from the "real economies" and converting it to careers and dachas and still more deadly rounds of still more deadlier weapons and still more stupid tactics and repeatedly idiotic strategies and doctrines. Like this Really Cool Toy: http://mashable.com/2012/04/23/quadrotor-machine-gun-video/
Yeah, I know -- it's complicated, and I don't understand all the implications and facets... even Super390 doesn't, probably... and I bet, really, that NObody does. Except for maybe a very few, who want to keep it that way. Behind a carefully assembled and artfully maintained shrubbery.
Why no wise, long-view policies in Israel (or hardly anywhere else in the Mideast Bazaar)? Maybe it has to do with the nature of humans, and the reality that there will always be oligarchies (oiligarchies, while the oil lasts) running any organization. And maybe it's what happens to "tribes with flags," who have traditions and shibboleths that force the advancement, over time, of a certain kind of "leader."
Maybe it's just the "odor" of both, but it sure smells to me like there are massive parallels between the Likudnik rulers, like that knowing face on TIME magazine's cover last week, and guys like Yasser Arafat. About whom there is a truly illuminating piece that I keep going back to: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/09/in-a-ruined-country/4167/ Which points out so very clearly the cynical, grasping, faux-patriotic-actual-traitorous nature of not only Arafat but so many others. People who know how to project a great "patriotic" Potemkin front, seemingly just being "all about 'their' people," while compulsively salting away the big bucks, engaging in vigorous and humorous corruption, and laughing with their play-date buddies on the other side of various Green Lines and Walls and Death Zones and Frontiers.
"Things just the way they are, getting slightly worse all the time to keep the peasants in line" are the fallow ground where these vigorously toxic seeds fortuitously fall, to prosper and suck all the nutrients out of shallow soil. That others prosper or survive is just fortuity: the rhizomes of the noxious weeds just happen to miss their little patches of dirt, or in the case of the war-and-oil business, cross-fertilize.
Too bad we don't seem to be able to do any better – just a series of negative-sum games masked as zero-sum.
One wonders about whether stuff like this and the bombing of Lebanon and all the other Apartheid horrors produces any significant internal strains and tensions in the Israeli Defence Forces. Not every conscript doing his duty for the fatherland might think what happened was right, or even smart. At some point, cognitive dissonance becomes so painful that there has to be a novation of the spirit.
The dudes in uniform on that hillside might have been situationally, or emotionally, or both, or neither, driven not to make their nominal tribespersons drop their weapons. Reminds me of that scene in "Lawrence of Arabia" where Lawrence and the Bedou catch up to the Turkish gaggle of troops that have just looted and murdered and raped in a village back down the road: "No Quarter!"
It's a human thing, and I doubt we as a species will survive it.
I wonder who's the current holder of the One Ring:
"One Ring to rule them all,
One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all
And in the Darkness bind them.
In the Land of Mordor,
Where the Shadow lies."
Another thing that might happen is that like all really aggressive cancers or really obnoxious parasites, the Bigs, which I would lump together as the Kleptocracy since they steal all the real wealth to fund their pleasures, is that eventually they sap so much of the host's body, strip so much of the stored energy, the lifeblood, that the host organism eventually coughs and dies.
What we got going, what's being done to us for the "life tenure" of the very few who could not care less about whatever might happen after they die, is not maintainable for much longer. http://tradicionclasica.blogspot.com/2006/01/expression-aprs-moi-le-dluge-and-its.html You think the Kochs or Dimon or Blankfein give a rip about what comes after, or next after they leave the stage? Maybe review the back story for that desolate classic, "Soylent Green." http://www.rachelaaron.net/soylent/history.html Where the corporate rulers know that they've facilitated the endstage of climate collapse and the using up of all the available resources, and are having to kill the few corporatists with consciences who might blow the whistle before they blow this joint. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green
Nothing changes. Go back and read the Pentateuch, and on into 1 and 2 Kings. Does Bibi come before or after David? All about "slewing with the edge of the sword," and taking slaves and booty and flocks. And land. By conquest. Or theft. And of course G_d approves... except when His People "fall away."
There's a whole literature, scholarly and otherwise, on how people create and then treat differences between one another, for identity or for personal gain. But a picture is worth at least a thousand words, so how's this for giggles?
Nice if one could actually fix the problem. Dr. Seuss described the fundamental problem in "The butter Battle Book," and had a great, technology-pushing idea on how to fix it as described in "The Sneetches and Other Stories." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Seuss_bibliography
I personally am probably considered "white," though my skin tones are creamish, tannish, yellowish with a hint of pinkish on the palms and soles, etc. Raised Presbyterian, "pure" Scotch-English. "Black" people, most of whom grip their identity as "Black" as fiercely as "white" people grasp theirs, have skin tones including ochre, red, multiple shades of brown and khaki and blues of various hues, all the way to obsidian. And so it goes for the rest of our species.
I wish all of us, especially my grandkids who are pure Melting Pot, ripe with the strength of admixture and alloy, luck in escaping our common inheritance of idiot limbic-system-driven tribal identification.
One might hope that ... (add your own prescription)
One might ask whether human-induced heating, leading to all that gas being released, could honestly be called a "natural" phenomenon. Kind of like acidification of the oceans is "natural," onaccounta what CO2 does when it meets the 'magical microlayer' at the sea's surface. Or all those termite flatulences, on the increase of which one can note that slash-and-burn agriculture and other "natural" human activities opening up new niches for these critters, or McCowflatulence...
From David's link, re: the combusticonsumption (consumibustion?) of what is so euphemistically called "natural gas." Which is actually methane, ethane, propane, butane, sulfur and secret schmutz from the "extraction processes," stuff that most would recognize as an explosive poisonous brew when stated that way. But most will cheer at the idea that "clean" methane will outstrip "dirty" strip-mined coal. And gloss right over the reality, the resulting steady increase in human-excreted slow poisons -- cheering that "this contribution is projected to grow."
We love our comforting euphemisms. "Natural" -- what could be safer and more wholesome than that? Those healing, "surgical" things called "drone strikes." "New! Improved!", which usually means "Crummier! and Less For The Same Or More Money!" Even "consumption" is mostly a good thing, to the point that many people sport their "I'M A BIG-TIME CONSUMER" badges on the T-shirts that say "We're spending our children's inheritance!"
Highlight the word "grow," a euphemism that papers over a huge number of sins. That's probably the worst and most misleading of all. "Growth" is what cancers and parasites are best at, up to the point they kill their host. But almost uniformly, and certainly uninformedly, humans cheer dang near ANYthing that "grows," from fracking, to nuclear power generation, to a patently finite "housing market" and all the efforts to re-inflate that bubble that are now in play -- hey, we HAVE to "grow" jobs in the construction industry, a traditional plow horse for "the growth of the economy.
But all the drivers in the various parts of the planetary ecology, the ones that move-and-shake the movers-and-shakers, are all part of a full set of positive-feedback loops, with nary an effective short-term counterbalance to limit or terminate them. As in, you can win "investment bets" by betting on the growth of frackers, which gives you lots of money to spend on consuming more crap made with methane heat and petroleum feedstocks.
Wish I could figure out how to make a quick buck off all this. Knowing that I'm not gonna be around much more than another 20 or 30 years, so my little bits of badness will be someone else's problem, and there'll be not a damn thing they could to me, or to undo me getting my "growth" now...
I think that referred to "3 million Americans who suffer from or have been diagnosed with schizophrenia," or in the debased language of our times, are "victims" of the disorder, and in the logic of the writer, maybe causatively "victims" of MJ.
Super, it doesn't hurt that all those PO-lice departments, small and large, self-fund with licit and illicit subsidies from drug arrests and seizures of vehicles, homes, boats, aircraft, jewelry, and of course huge amounts of cash that might happen to be lying around when The Man kicks the door in, warrant or not.
Lots of Prohibitionists had a real liking for Jim Beam, as much as Jim Crow...
Booze is legal, tobacco is legal, Xanax and oxycodone are legal, and anyone care to debate that there's a whole bunch more souls, bodies, "family values" and public and private money lost to those indulgences, and more costs, than all the pot problems that some would do the ol' "Reefer Madness, Rebooted, With Subtle New Arguments" schtick on?
Follow the money, people. Money, LARGE, HUGE money, is the hormone, the lubricant, the adhesive, the marker, that drives all this stuff. Love of money, and the way it lets those with no conscience or self-restraint tickle the nerve endings in their limbic systems, and satisfy their amygdalic urges, and accumulate power over others. Drug lords, prison lords, Koch sockers in the various legislatures and palaces and courthouses, et bloody cetera.
And yeah, there's no doing without money, but which flavor of money? The sawbuck in my wallet, or the cloudbloat of little bits and bytes that represents the Funny Munny, in the form of T-full-faith-and-credit-Bills or the "notional dollars" that bids fair, once again, to drive ordinary people back down into servitude and destitution? Maybe the terabucks that flow to the MIC, globally? The money that people EARN by physical labor of various sorts, and the parts of mind-work that are not part of the Great Destruction the Wall Streeters are dropping on us, those really smart SOBs who "make" money, who don't "earn" it in any sense that makes any sense, at least to me, by inflating with laughing gas (they giggle, and the joke's on us) in an enormous act of counterfeiting all those CDSs and CDOs the rest of us have to "make real on" when they go south? Those people whose ethical horizons stop at "So what? I'll be gone and you'll be gone, so f__k the Muppets and Dumb Money! Phillip, bring the Ferrari around to the side door where the Occupiers can't see me..."
Like the lawyer who spews out some "prejudicial inadmissible" tripe in a jury trial before an objection and ruling from the judge can happen, the folks who drum up all this tribal spear-shaking know that no amount of "instruction to disregard" will un-ring the bell, or put the toothpaste back in the tube.
I personally doubt that humans will learn to manage, let alone master, the ugly and destructive parts of their nature, in this and in areas like economy-trashing and planet-demolition, before the active few like the colonel and the rest have catalyzed a reaction that will kill most or all of us.
And maybe they even believe they are "doing God's Work, since He's so dang SLOW at it..."
I bet you even know about Pantex, the private bidness in Amarillo, TX that "maintains" and assembles "our" nuclear weapons. The quotes on "our" are to express my skepticism that all that destructive force is really there for the general welfare, as opposed to the welfare of the Generals. Pantex is staffed by people who beleeeeve it is their duty to advance the Apocalypse and get themselves Raptured. "I got my salvation," sayeth the bomb-building Rapturist-Apocalypticist, "you DESERVE to be incineradiated for your unbelief in my version of All That Is That Matters."
Here's the pallid version, with vague references to a few problems at this plant that handles billions of kilotons worth of naked force: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantex_Plant
And remember: "Our" nukular deterrent is the foundation of Pax Americana. The biggest ones are currently "operated" on all our behalf by those Xtianists in the Air Force.
As my ex-wife used to say to me, "When you do X, it's WRONG. When I do X, it's DIFFERENT." Simple, right?
Say again what in the way of Magic Arrows is left, in the human behavioral quiver, that might leave one with some tiny hope that the species, including my grandchildren, has a prayer of surviving, let alone muddling through?
What is it that drives people like Roy Cohn, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Cohn , and of course all the closeted pontiffs in the Mormon hierarchonate? Not to mention all the other sad, nasty gays who over time have served well the "conservative" side of the Overton Spectrum?
What is it that sorts us roughly into two piles: People with empathy who understand and practice tolerance and forgiveness and forbearance, and Jerry Falwell and Mittsy and that Charmer from Wasilla, and the nasty mullahs, and Likudanyahoos, and the rest over in the musty, fetid, dark corner? The ones who think a notreallyanpology will let them sucker the other pile yet again, getting, like Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker and Tedd Haggard, serial forgiveness and restoration, without penance or even just real contrition?
My personal suspicion is that, taken as a body, the human species has a death wish.
And let's remember who does the "reporting," again, and dare "we" asks against what measure are the "outcomes" of those random "missions" are measured, and how many times have "they" flat-out lied about stuff like that? And of course the "it-worked-ness" of all that torture sure is way open to question, with a pretty strong indication that the whole Gulag-R-US exists, well, just because it exists, and it does a pretty good job of proving, in this generation as in prior millenia, "the purpose of torture is torture." Yeah, let's give a nice secure playpen to "patriotic sociopaths..."
Since when does sowing dragon's teeth constitute any part of "our desired purpose"? I'm sure you know that may not be who you and I are, but there's a lot, too many, of "US" who are something else altogether... shameless, among other descriptors.
One might wonder if the same people who brought ought the "Phoenix Program" during the Vietnam Thing rolled out the whole "Drone Program." For sure, at least the same kind of people. "Fighting terrorists" by "being terrorists."
According to MACV Directive 381-41, the intent of Phoenix was to attack the NLF with a "rifle shot rather than a shotgun approach to target key political leaders, command/control elements and activists in the VCI."
Heavy-handed operations—such as random cordons and searches, large-scale and lengthy detentions of innocent civilians, and excessive use of firepower—had a negative effect on the civilian population. It was also acknowledged that capturing NLF members was more important than killing them.
And then there's the reality:
The problem was, how do you find the people on the blacklist? It's not like you had their address and telephone number. The normal procedure would be to go into a village and just grab someone and say, 'Where's Nguyen so-and-so?' Half the time the people were so afraid they would not say anything. Then a Phoenix team would take the informant, put a sandbag over his head, poke out two holes so he could see, put commo wire around his neck like a long leash, and walk him through the village and say, 'When we go by Nguyen's house scratch your head.' Then that night Phoenix would come back, knock on the door, and say, 'April Fool, motherfu__er.' Whoever answered the door would get wasted. As far as they were concerned whoever answered was a Communist, including family members. Sometimes they'd come back to camp with ears to prove that they killed people.
And what was the outcome of THAT pseudo-war, again? "Made in Vietnam" clothing in our signature American stores, and the US Navy doing joint operations with the Vietnamese Navy?
Ooooh, goodie! Now we've got speculation, coupled with possibly slanted reporting, added into a false syllogism, all of which establishes beyond peradventure that the Forever War just HAS to continue, to "protect us" from the "international CommicalQuaeda conspiracy!" What a wonderful leap of faith!
Other than a convenient, soul-satisfying label, what is an "al Quaeda type?" Did Timmy McVeigh, and for that matter his pals, and The Unabomber guy, and the others, all fall into that "See, they're all like that and they're Oh My God EVERYWHERE!" category that so many of us can't seem to make any sense of the world without reference to? Or who maybe beat the drum loudly for that theme, for various personally profitable reasons? I seem to recall that members, the sociopathic ones at least, of all the various groups in "Baghdad" and the rest of Iraq, and of course in Notagainistan, ALL have "set off bombs" and done all that other murderous stuff to one another. Is the inescapable conclusion that "they" are all "al Quaeda types?"
There's this word, "discrimination," and I don't mean that in the racism sense at all...
I mean, it's never happened that bombings like this have been false-flaggy in the extreme, now has it? Or just dumb-ass random?
That's the whole thing about our great human culture set -- we've got it so goobered up and complicated that no one can ever be sure about anything, and it's so easy (just ask the CIA spooks and the Mossad and Savak and ISI and MI-(shhhhh) and NKVD and Stasi and all the rest of those shits-in-the-shadows, http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x2182790) to fire up the ol' limbic systems of a lot of fellow humans and get them to shooting and torturing and consigning others to Hellfire and demagogic damnation. Not to mention sending whole nations of humans into idiot tizzies that nonetheless "feel right" on accounta how our little brains operate. As a way to keep the most of us slaving away to make the few of us ever more "comfortable."
Seems to me that the anonymous bombs, and many of the ones for which "responsibility" (what a sick choice of nouns) is claimed, are more about blowing up any bits of "community" and "commonality" and "commensalism" that might be starting to develop, in any subset of our population, than about any kind of tactical advantage. Too many of us humans get off on chaos -- or, if I remember right, as in Iraq maybe up to the present, ordinary people with no particular axe to grind but who have no income thanks to geopolitical jerkymeatery like Operation Enduring Futility, get paid by the crazies or plotters to plant those roadsiders or pack the trucks and minibikes and briefcases and park them where a lot of other ordinary people are milling around.
Too much "you never know" to ever be "absolutely honestly sure" about ANYthing. And all the "experts say" and "sources tell" and the rest of the freakin' fog just make it ever more convoluted and worse.
One wonders if there's maybe a reason why "tribe" and "terror" both start with the letter "t."
When they look like they are about to, then we get it together & shoot first, but until that happens everybody should just go home & clean up their own homes.
You've got the right idea about people minding their own business. But there's something very wrong with the first clause: it "looked like" Saddam was on a Yellow Cake Road to nuclear parity with the US and Israel, or maybe ready to deploy nasty bugs like the ones "our" and "our friends" are "studying" and stockpiling, or so we were told.
We are told it "looks like" some of Iran's leaders, just like their opposite numbers in Pakistan and Israel actually were, on a path to assembling nukes. "They" don't hold referenda on these things, any more than "we" all voted for all-out Cold War or even thingies like invading Vietnam (though "we" were told of an incident in the Gulfo of Tonkin...) and Notagain?istan. And your formulation, that just assumes that Israeli rulers and all of the US are on the same fire team, takes a giant leap past what ought to be not only a Current Situation assessment of REAL US "national interests," which is not what the paid shills tell us over and over and over, but an ongoing holding of our "leaders'feet to a very hot fire to induce them to do the things that day to day and over time actually reduce the trend toward a dead end for the whole species. Encouraging healthy economies. Increasing the participation in government. Obviating the need for hunger strikes and intifadas and for people like Nelson Mandela and Aung Son Suu Kyi and even Gandhi, and on a different scale, Bradley ("Who?") Manning, to shame us and "them" into doing better.
The trouble with leaving the "shoot first" machinery in place is of course that it encourages those Iranians who see how "we" play the Great Game to set up their own Doomsday Machine. And then you got the generals and colonels and "pundits" in their bunkers with their itchy tougher-than-you shiny pants, and a bunch of jumpy, testosterone-and-adrenlaline-pumped youngsters just ready to LAUNCH whatever weapons on whatever predetermined paths in response to whatever pre-programmed stimuli, given how short the horizon times are for anti-ship missiles and how invisible mines and submarines have become and how easy it was for a RETIRED Marine General, Paul Riper, to sink the 5th Fleet (in the 2002 Millenium Chllenge Game of "Battleship" -- http://www.cuttingedge.org/news/n2026.cfm). Use it or lose it? Lose WHAT, again? Our whole species?
"great Persia?" Ooooh, Scary! that sounds like the Caliphate!!! Ooooh, wait – that's an AYrab notion, not Persian!!! Ooooh, wait, that sounds just like the Dirty Red (remember how recently "conservatives" were supposed to rather be DEAD than RED?) Commyanists, who wanted to TAKE US OVER, just like the Pod People in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers!!!" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_the_Body_Snatchers
And back in the early '80s, I attended a meeting of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, where Tariq Aziz spoke (anyone remember him?) and, to loud "American" applause, he told of the marvelous dream of a "Greater Iraq, "with somewhat elastic limits, destined to spread beyond the arbitrary colonialist straight lines in the sand. (This is back when "we" were sending "him" arms of all kinds, and other encouragements.) Ever heard of a lady named April Glaspie, carrying a Message from US to Saddam that "we take no position in your little Arab squabbles," so help yourself to the oil fields of Kuwait? (Wiki has a nice loyalist take on that bit of history, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War, which includes, in passing, the following sentence:
The U.S. was concerned with Iraq's position on Israeli–Palestinian politics, and its disapproval of the nature of the peace between Israel and Egypt.
Huh.)
And of course OUR sneaky-petes and other Great Gamers don't have ambitions to spread the umbra of "American" hegemony, the "New American Century" thing, over not only the near and far east, but north and south too. The "end of history." Maybe you heard of that "vision?" Maybe your tribal sense of belonging trumps any incentive to kind of see all the fine details in the Game board and all the actual moves in the play?
Fellow citizen, "we" need to refine the terminology, and look up the word "reification," which comes right after "hypostatization." There's a set of "they"s that run the international activities of this country, and a set of "theys" in Iran and the "People's Republic of China" and Israel and North Korea and most every other one of the atavistic nation-state thingies that the real "they," the Great Gamers, use to front their fallacies and fund their follies. "We" in our own glass house do not have a leg to stand on when it comes to throwing stones at others, given all the "initiatives" and "stratagems" that "we" or at least our "theys" have pulled off in service of corporate extensions and that the taking of that oldest and, in Henry "Great Gamiest" Kissinger's immor(t)al phrase, "ultimate aphrodisiac," power. "They" is not "us," except via tacit, stupid, blindly enthusiastic and/or fearful acceptance and ratification. Not there, and not here.
You got any idea how many sides of the polygon the Pod People in Rings of Power in the Pentagram, or down in Foggy Bottom, or at Langley, are on, in any one of the various "conflicts" that are running up the enormous MICtab, all across the planet? How often "our" Players have had weapons and "advisors" on both sides of murderous little wars and insurgencies? Care to review the bidding on "the US's" military-political-economic involvement in Afghanistan, or Iran for that matter? Or do you have any problem with having "them," stupidly, trying to buy the loyalty of Pashtun warlords with bottles of Viagra and crates of cash? Tell me why there's thousands of Marines and dozens of US warships virtually invading Costa Rica, yet again? There's a zillion examples of that kind of "they-ism."
You got kids? What kind of world do you want them to live in? An "American" world? But our rulers and our kleptocrats are all pretty much based just in the Imperial capital, "NYWash," and elsewhere on the planet, and so very few of them even use the dream-word "America" any more -- now it's just "the US." Except that "they" have nothing but contempt for "us."
You gotta love the Great GeoPoliticoEconomoReligioCorruptical Game, don'tcha?
Let's make treaties, with our noble cousins and correspondents, all over Europe and the Balkans, let the Speers and Krups and their "Allied" analogues loose in our treasuries, building engines of war. Then, when some butterfly's wing beats in Sarajevo, treaty ties trump wisdom, the whole spindizzy lifts off, most of a generation dies in "the trenches," bravely going, hopelessly, "over the top" with fixed bayonets into "interlocking fields of fire," while gas shells and huge railroad gun munitions explode all around.
Then, set the stage for the German Imperial Renaissance under GPERC Hitler's gang. Poke at the "Japs," whose GPERC rulers are doing the same selfish crap that "the West" has been doing, until Pearl Harbor flows into Tokyo Bay.
Support the Kuomintang. Prop up Batista and a host of others. Install the Shah, like a high-end appliance. Manufacture reasons to let the puny little pencil-necks that are proud, PROUD, to call themselves "neocons," let them play with their toy soldiers and trillions of our wealth in pursuit of another vain "end of history" moist dream. "Yellowcake" wars of choice. What at one point was going to be called "Operation Iraqi Liberation," until some some highly paid Pentagram acronymist maybe noted that might give away the strategy...
And now there's this lumbering, aging, increasingly myopic elephant, stumbling through the landscape that eventually will eat its carcass, driven by an equally impaired mahout, tramping through the sorghum fields and flattening huts and walls and trumpeting "I'm Number One."
And Hillary, trailing treaties and fawning attendants, having inhaled the evanescent vapors of endless Powerpoints, and the heady smoke rising from hot briefing papers, and the skewed imagery from lots of maps, some of them like the one above, those maps that highlight "choke points" and various "axes of evil" and depictions of "national interest" as defined by the Few, a presentation leading to patterns of thought and behaviors that distill all the life and richness out of a complex world, down into simplistic visual slogans, a world full of people who try to make it all work, and people who just want the trappings of local and/or absolute power -- Hillary goes to New Delhi, and says, "You gotta do what we tell you. Or there'll be the severed head of your favorite horse in bed with you, some morning."
Do butterfies' wings beat in New Delhi? or Hormuz? or in the contours of the "dashed line?" Are our "leaders" busily poking their "leaders" into a quantum jump in the global "arms business," and more of the behaviors that are maybe survivable (for our species) when they occur at smaller scales, but are mortal when the market is the whole Flat Earth?
Are US nukes targeted at Sao Paolo and Buenos Aires (no need to even ask about Teheran and Kabul, is there?) and such places, in the event that "things go South" as the elephant stumbles for the last time, to make sure the BRICs get blown out of the human edifice, too, as the US goes down?
The truth is, like it or not, we humans are all in this together. And there's enough of everything that matters, to go all the way around the table. If, IF, we can keep the Few from grabbing all but some crumbs and then suckering the rest of us into fighting each other over the scraps.
"time for us to take responsibility"? Yep. But the people who really catalyze and drive the "features" of our mutual present mess, know that they likely never will face any real consequences while they live, and after they are sated, spent and comfortably, well-cossetted-dead, what are the survivors going to do? Dig up the carcasses of the ones who weren't cremated, and "dishonor" them?
The verb could also be understood as a subjunctive concession: After me, let the deluge come (it can come, but it makes no difference to me). In this second case, the speaker asserts that nothing that happens after his disappearance matters to him.
We will trace the classical antecedents of this famous expression, and I already anticipate that practically all of these antecedents will coincide more with notion b) than with a).
It's worth reading the article.
These people, whether shaded toward the power or the "wealth" side, know their almost total immunity to any kind of retribution, and their freedom from notions like restitution and reasonable distribution. They get to say what's "not illegal," taking full advantage of the desperate need for the rest of us to at least believe in the existence of some kind of "rule of law," and our ignorance, for the most part, of how "the law" is drafted and ignored and administered.
There is probably a set of behaviors and a species of spiritual orientation that could lead to "better," since even "good" is not so very likely. The problem is, too many of us have that little limbic-system bias toward self-pleasing and tribal adhesion, and too often the reaction to the revanchists and reactionaries is just spasmodic violence, that can so easily be turned to the next round of kleptocracy and oppression. Might it work in Egypt and Tunisia and a few other places? But then you got Hillary and the CIA and the International Post-National MIC right to hand, ready to slip in and sabotage and derail... Hard to stay on the narrow path just even to "better," let alone "good" or "great!"
How the Hell do "we" get to "taking responsibility," when we're rolling that enormous Sisyphean rock always up the hill?
Look around, Dixie-- there's lots of models to choose from. How about China? or India (in its various parts)? or Notagainistan, which is all parts and no whole? or Syria, or Iran, or the Faux Democracy in Israel?
The rulers have only to avoid stumbling over that ill-defined, usually bloody bump where the rissing curve of "oppression/kleptocracy" and crosses the falling curve of "legitimacy/pain tolerance." One-party "elections," votes registered and tracked by voter's name, billions in all kinds of BS "persuasion" under the guise of "free exercise" of the "right" of speech, midnight visits by goons and thugs, and as long as I can choose among 455 cable channels, an infinity of porn and proselytizing and pandering on the 'net, 57 varieties of ketchup'n'macaroni-and-cheese, and 537 different styles of tooth brush, well, see, I am "free enough!" not to want to rock the boat, or roll the tumbrels...
Hey, man, don't you know it's part of the Narrative? And one is not supposed to go against the Narrative, is one, at the risk of being told to "STFU" and being ostracized, marginalized, minimized...
At least there's enough documentation floating around, credible or created, to make up whatever kind and shape of "history" and "current affairs" you care to. Gives future historians and pundits something to do, helps fill the dead air with deadly dysinformation...
Kudos, Fed, for common sense and decency. One might hope that both were as virulent as the viciousness and insanity and inanity that are so horribly and futilely pandemic. Too bad so many of us can't do other than sleepwalk through our lives of unaware and enormous and mortal mutual vulnerability, without our shots of adrenalin and testosterone and heavily advertised boozes...
It hasn't maybe served "Israel" well -- it has served a very few Israeli 'niks who profit politically and monetarily from igniting, and then fanning the flames, of incipient Armageddon. Is it possible for the brute slug that is the American electorate, and the cynical, fearful Israeli electorate, to maybe start to see that they are nothing but expendable pawns and "bugsplat" in the motions of these ersatz Great Gamers? And ask themselves some "strategic" questions, like "How do the rules and structure and order of play in the Forever War make my life, and the lives of those I care for and about, any better or more secure?"
Maybe there's a "use by" date on "democracy." By the way the mold is growing on it and the way it smells, that date on the one we delude ourselves we have in America seems to be way past and gone. Look what Egyptians and Syrians and others are willing to lay out there and to suffer and resist on the way, hopefully, to invoking some better form of governance. And look at the analogue here, the "Tea Party" showing up with hip-mounted pistoleros and hip-carried assault rifles at all kinds of political events.
It will be interesting to see what happens in Tampa, in the "Event Zone" (formerly called the "Cleared Zone") around our convention center when the Reds tee up their Gong Show in a few days. Especially since our Governator, Rick "I was never indicted even though I stole $4 billion from Medicare and Medicaid" Scott, a real piece of work, denied, by instant-return letter, a request from the mayor to "override" the state law that apotheosizes rugged individualism by "overriding" any local ordinances that restrict "concealed carry" of firearms. (For the fainting set, apparently the Secret Service can, under Federalism, still "override" the Florida concealed-carry law, so there's not supposed to be loose cannons and stray bullets wandering about, inside the actual convention hall...)
That "Event Zone" is where "protestors" will be carefully tended and herded by huge police and "security" forces into little parades and demonstration pits where they can't be seen by the Delegates and the Candidates, so as not to offend the Repubs who are expected to spend tens of millions of dollars in local establishments like Mons Venus, where for $50 you can buy a hands-on, full-nude, lap dance from some of "Tampa's most beautiful girls..."
That's the genius of all the parties and their campaigns these days. Wave a vague, qualified hand in the general direction of the Tenets of the Faithful, have your surrogates lay out the deceptions, then ride on in with a lariat spin and a whoop and a big bunch of pre-packaged lies to cover the fundamental purpose of politics in America (does anyone call it that any more?): Wealth transfer, via the infinitely spoiled and despoiling thing that everybody despises but nobody wants to lose the chance of Winning Big in -- the "spoils system."
All "sides" whine about how "elections have consequences." No recent elections have done a damn thing to open the windows, air out and sanitize our Imperial outhouse, or unhorse any of the Apocalypse Riders: the MIC, the Financial Kleptocracy, the Scum-suckers of C and K Streets, Big Religion, Big Carbon, and that worst of all Wraiths, Big "Medicine." Oh, and Nine Old Men, some of whom are women, whose edifice is undergoing massive rebuilding, starting with a new Overton Window that is irretrievably, for our lifetimes, shoved to extreme right (wrong?) wing of the structure...
All those angry white folks, too stupefied by focus-grouped rhetoric and the hot-buttoning of their id(-iot')s shibboleths and chimaeras to realize they are being led by their amygdalas and gonads into realms that are toxic to them and their children, born and unborn. And the sheep so happily follow the Judas Goats, up the chutes and into the slaughterhouse...
Too bad none of the tools and tactics and strategies the "infinitely strong, end-of-history US" ever deploys are in any way suited or fit or useful to "protect" people living in places like Afghanistan from the inherent destructive elements and effects of the Great Game. Quite the contrary, of course, by simple observation of what's shakin': "bugsplat" ("collateral damage"), bribery, corruption, diversion of a quarter of the planet's Real Wealth into war toys and cozy places to hang a plethora of Brass Hats.
We got megatons of "power" that our rulers are so quick to "project," and ranks of grasping, history-illiterate hegemonists to "cheer the troops straining to perform an idiot's mission/fool's errand (IM/FE, in Milspeak) on" from the safety of our Imperial Capital, but not even ounces of decency or common sense or the kind of "intelligence" that would give those of us who pay for all this with our wealth and our blood a nickel's worth of a chance at making things safer or more "secure" or in any way better for the most of us.
It ain't just "the President's party," unless you limit that set to the ones that hang around the West Wing. It seems like maybe somewhere in the bowels of the whole MICsecuritystate thing there are people who, like maybe some of the former Israeli Game Players reported on below, have some reservations about the REAL axis of evil, the planet-wide one, the one that, by virtuoso playing on the strings and keyboards of tribalism and fear, increasingly militarizes everything, sucks up ever more of the world's wealth, invents ever-more-morbid and murderous weapons, and makes some nice bonuses and pensions off of "policies" and lobbied profit-taking.
So even some of the executive agencies are a little concerned about an Obama-gang initiative to make it easier to push ever more weapons out the doors of "our" post-national weapons manufacturers, into places where the Sneaky Petes and Foggy Bottomers and Congressional junketers and all the other pond slime are happy to stir passions and get folks ready to shoot each other or blow each other up. Making a largely innate urge almost irresistible. White House Efforts to Relax Gun Exports Face Resistance http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304868004577378421787264242.html
I do hope our host does actually address the question he raises, about just what is "the Taliban." Because the "grim- visaged patriots" have been selling the whole World War Forever schtick based, among other lies, on the fraud that "the Taliban" is some huge, organized, evil entity, a wholly owned subsidiary of Al Quaeda, dedicated to the destruction of Truth, Justice and the American Way, "jest lahk th' Commyanist Menace." Which even a cursory look at the Afghan polity ought to make patently clear is not the case...
Too bad the folks in overalls (and uniforms, apparently) just can't seem to remember the moral of that wonderful little Uncle Remus fable, "Bre'r Rabbit and the Tarbaby..." http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ug97/remus/tar-baby.html
"Did the fox eat the rabbit?" asked the little boy to whom the story had been told.
"Dat's all de fur de tale goes," replied the old man. "He mout, an den agin he moutent. Some say Judge B'ar come 'long en loosed 'im - some say he didn't. I hear Miss Sally callin'. You better run 'long."
Keeping 50,000 or so troops in the Af-Pak region, to ensure Afghanistan does not become Somali [sic], or allow the rise of future terroist cells, is not all that costly.
Huh. Just in dollar terms, it costs a million bucks a year to keep a single GI in the field like that. More, if Our Troops are expected to keep doing the crap they have been doing, even salted with little acts of kindness and decency, that breeds more people who hate the US, for good reason, and want "us" the hell out of THEIR territory.
And what a wonderful set of assumptions, that 50,000 or so troops have a prayer of inoculating "Afghanistan" against becoming "Somali," let alone catching and "surgically excising" "future terrorist cells." It has never worked before, it's not working now, and gee, in spite of all the technology and wealth transfer, it ain't likely to work in the future.
Remember that little scene where the Marine officer is telling the Afghan man that he just HAS to move himself and his family back into a ghost market town emptied by insurgency, because "doctrine" requires it as part of the pageant of "pacification?" And that the GIs would "protect them?" Remember what the Afghan said? "Sir, with all your weapons and your technology, you cannot even protect yourselves. How can you expect to protect US?"
Of course if you would like to cut a check on your personal account to cover the cost of keeping those unfortunate "troops" hanging out there, well, maybe there's enough mercenaries willing to take your money... I bet even a fourth of the "Afghan Army" would be happy to sign up, for a fraction of the cost to the US economy and citizenry. Not that any of this does a damn thing to "increase security" in the world. Unless "security" just means "job security" for people in the MIC and state security apparatus...
Yeah, that was all Carter's fault. Right. Nothing to do with long-term stupid behaviors on the part of our Kleptocratic class, right? And inflation is now officially negligible, but tell that to the folks who are "benefiting" from all those trillions of permanent-war dollars by being told to work harder and longer for smaller wages, so they can try to afford Wonder Bread and mac'n'cheese and electricity and gasoline and stuff...
When Clinton left office, the national debt was on the way to extinction. When Reagan left office, billionaires' marginal tax rates were 91%. Got a smart remark about that?
You want CREEPY? How about THIS? "Mitt," "Mormon," "Mohammed," and "Muslim," ALL START WITH THE LETTER "M!!!!!!" AS DO "MONEY," AND "MILITARISM," AND MIC!!!!!!! AND YOU COULD GO ON AND ON AND ON!!!! WHY DOESN'T EVERYBODY SEE??????
The thing about seemingly cautious, 11-dimensional triangulation is that nobody who votes can begin to understand, or care, about all those careful nuances and esoteric talking points, which really ought to be called "talking dulls..."
And of course behind the curtain, the Imperializing and financialization go on, and on, and on...
Yeah, everyone can see that Obama and the people around him and the state security apparatus and Power Projectors he nominally commands are just more-peaceful-loving fellas. Not at all unclear about The Real Nature Of The World As They Insist It Must Be, or lost in visions of hegemony or at least protection of profits from the transaction of petroleum bidness, aimed like a laser target designator at increasing "democracy" and "stability" in the world, making life better for the people who actually do the work that creates the wealth that lets them play their Great Game?
And review the bidding for me: When has Obama "All options are on the table" Tough Guy, mover of carrier groups into positions of mutually increased hair-trigger vulnerability and de-stabilization, sender-off of reconnaissance and armed drones, "finding"-signer on many post-legal "covert actions" involving homicides, approver of our own Gulag, signer of NDAA and so much other post-constitutional-republican legislation, sponsor or at least encourager of Stuxnet and similar behaviors that OUR generals flatly call "acts of war" if aimed at THEM, ever been guilty of "advancing a more-peaceful [whatever that can possibly mean] position"?
Speaking of side-tracking and distraction, sir... "the unexamined life..." and all that.
It must be so comforting to have such a nice complete narrative to explain why all the elements of the "policy" that constitutes visible and less-visible and invisible activities carried on by the MIC-state security apparatus on behalf of us "citizens" is just hunky-dory, resolvable to a nice binary "choice:" "Aggressively pursue these people (whoever "these people" happens to be) or withdraw. Too bad it has to be Neville Chamberlain or Sgt. Rock. Really too bad that our fearless (because immune to consequences) leaders and their apologists don't have a whit of an inkling of an impression of an idea of how to do anything different than all the crap that has failed so miserably before.
Bear in mind that the CIA and other sneaky pete organizations paid by American black accounts have done a whole lot of fomenting and training of "terrorists," in many different countries, who have gone on to execute "terrorist" actions in a lot of other countries. Ever heard of "blowback?"
Seems that I recall the CIA gifting Afghan warlords millions of dollars and lots of tactical training and weapons, on the way to having over 4000 US GIs and "UN forces" and a whole lot of just plain Afghan folks dead and in the ground.
Just a suggestion: If you think about it a little more widely, there are other behaviors open to "us" than your binary choice. And if you google the news, looking for "police" and "terrorist," you will find that the vast majority of "terrorist plots" are intercepted by plain old police work, often on tips from the Muslim community, rather than by drone strikes and Special Ops dudes double-tapping "evil towelheads" in their sleep...
We should all be so wise as the Experienced Players and their spokespeople, who would have us forget about all the monstrosities that they and their chums have, are, and henceforth will be, committing in the name, the holy name, of "freedom and independence for all." But actually in aid of that ongoing wealth transfer from a "real economy" to what they got in mind for us next...
Naw, "we" don't need to search abroad for monsters -- we got a whole shipload of them, home-grown fellas and gals who know that The Purpose of Torture is Torture, and The Purpose of Power is Power.
So "we" are assisting the progress of the Arab Spring? Or at least pretending that "we" are? On the evidence of burning up some munitions inventory on Gadaffyduck's force structure? Gee, I wonder if there's anything other than a bald assertion that might support that statement? Since the pretty much entire game plan for the New American Century and ol' Dulles and that Kermit Roosevelt guy and the rest has been to pretty much make sure that guys like the Shah, and Batista, and Savimbi, and de Klerk, and Marcos, and Netanyahu, and Karzai, and Somoza (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contras) and so on, rule the various roosts, has pretty much been, where it's even visible, a blanket refutation of that notion.
I'm sure it's just me, but looking over this and the rest of the most recent posts here, and cnbc.com and nakedcapitalism.com and military.com and redstates.com and FT.com and my local "newspaper" and economist.com and all that, oh, and aljazeeraenglish and Ha'aretz, it sure sort of looks to me, from that little sample, that we humans are, you know, like, fer shur, OMG, totally FU#$ED.
Every vector I can perceive points in that direction, not the least the so-called Right: Romneyisms are right up there, the appearance that if elected, he will drive the feudalization and Gilding of everything further, faster and higher, and out-Obama Obama and predecessors in war-izing everything that's not Hoovered up by the various species of Vampire Squids who are becoming the dominant species in our warming, acidifying ocean. (How the hell did this sorry assortment of smug, self-gratifying drumheads ever pull off the enormous coup of getting themselves labeled as "RIGHT?")
Some cry out, "Wake up!" as if most of us might somehow rouse ourselves from torpor and a long, accelerating plunge into nightmare, and Take Some Action that might Bring About Healthy Change. Me? I think I'd rather go actually, quietly to sleep, perchance to dream of Something Better, which at least for me would not be an IPO for some new dot.com phenom, or some "successful post-legal Hellfire mission," or assembly of that mortal virus that might give one the power of death over all the rest of us, or any of the other sh!t that's shaking.
Some of us are "sharp," and rise in little thermals and vortexes in the soup, and "prosper." But collectively, tied as we are to our little tribal bits of "wisdom" and "revealed truth" and all the complexities of profit and vengeance and sex and sorrow, "we" ain't got a prayer, even a Mormon long-game prayer, of much of anything better.
One wonders: do the Post-Nationals, the folks who have gotten very rich off setting up these so very profitable "confrontations," and carving up the carcass of what once was "America" and now is seldom even referred to as "the United States," give, or even have to give, a hoot that they've set up the conditions to destroy the dollar as the reserve currency, dissolve the Consuming Class as a sustainable entity, and demolish (albeit behind some nice wall hangings and other art work) all the mythical bits of what we used to pride ourselves on under the rubrics "rule of law" and "democracy" and "freedom," shibboleths without roots in reality though they were?
Why are so many of us still willing to believe in the existence and specialness and virtue of Our Nation, when the reality looks, from a not very great distance, a lot more like what's left after the "humane killer," http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17767661, shatters the steer's brainstem with a steel rod and the quivering corpse is dismantled in its trip through the slaughterhouse? Filet mignon and exotic frippery trimmings on the one plate, "lean finely textured beef (LFTB) and boneless lean beef trimmings (BLBT)" -- aka "pink slime" -- on another, nothing at all on a whole lot more.
But see, according to the Holy Doctrine of the Unilaterally Prosecuted War on Holy Terror, anyone killed by the Holy Action of the Holy Drone Drivers is, by simple Holy Definition, a Terrorist, Insurgent, Militant, Guerrilla, Bandit, Revolutionary, ENEMY. Or, in the places that Decent Ordinary People who tacitly support and enjoy this stuff, what the Holy Dudes and Battlespace Managers refer to, with a smirk, as "bugsplat."
So Legally, d'you see, in the New Imperial Order, what those Holy Dudes in the Holy Trailers are doing is the Lord's Work, by definition, since Our Holy Guys write the definitions, and the dogma, and the supravening Law of Projection of the Holy Power.
G_d's Work, d'you see? Even devout Muslims ought to be able to see that...
So Iran The Evil One, the Great Reification of the Moment, has a back-engineerable drone to work from. It ain't like the Experienced people in Iran who play the Great Game can't go out and buy drones, and missiles, and Nukular Weapons Technology, from Chinese or NKor or Paki or Israeli fronts or a dozen other sources, including nominal "American" war toy makers and bidnesses "just trying to make a buck."
The drone thing is just one tiny piece in the jigsaw of little consumptive technologisticalisms and initiatives and opportunities that we humans at one scale think are just so peachy and profit-centering and advantageous, but at another scale, well... Put the pieces together, if you can, and the puzzle looks ever more strongly like Armageddon, or near enough that the survivors might envy the dead...
Too bad Hollywood could not produce a better cautionary tale, a myth that might resonate in all the studiously empty skulls out there in FOXland, and maybe result in some actual, real, meaningful, large-scale, Hope-driven Change, than "The Day The Earth Stood Still." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Earth_Stood_Still_%282008_film%29
And too bad that so many comfortable Old White Farts are so thoroughly Superglued to their BarcaLoungers and HDTV and SUVs, and that they so insistently and effectively have their Yard Keepers applying heavy doses of the social and economic equivalent of Roundup to any bit of actual spring green that peeks out of the cracks in the asphalt...
We ain't the only plague species, but we sure can feel good about being the biggest, baddest, very most worst one...
The military is, as Smedley Butler so accurately and honestly observed, nothing but a racket, as evidenced by the economies of Egypt and Libya and Myanmar and Afpakinagistania and Rooshia and Israel and most African countries, and of course the biggest and worst and most prototypical example is our own USA! USA! USA! We're Number One! Or at least our Fearless Lead-from-the-Rear-ers are -- leaving the rest of us just enough of the notion, not the actuality of course, that we have "Freedom!" and "Liberty!" and "Justice!" to keep us from seeing how far the cancer has progressed... Just enough to keep the rest of us happily creating the wealth they siphon, the wealth that lets them live their wet dreams of Command and Control and Conquest.
Back to the barracks? I wonder if that notion ever occurs to OUR Barack...
I kind of don't think it's got anything to do with "conspiracy," TB. It's the nature of the whole complex clumsy inbred incompetent institution itself that chaps me. And I suppose the nature of the "human," too -- the knowledge that we could do so much better, at least what I consider better, as in safer and kinder and closer to that Golden Rule thing, and the pretty-much-certainty that we, the top-of-the-food-chain, peak-predator species, won't.
Maybe someone would like to make a case how a geometrically growing "Military Solution" to Everything will lead us or our grandkids into some better future? Or how the McClellans and McChrystals and MacArthurs and Westmorelands and all the huge ponderous inflexible bureaucracy and Giant Wealth Vacuum behind them, and their equivalents across the planet, are actually providing "security" for the critters who make the actual real-money wealth that they get to "deploy?"
But thanks for the response. And I hope you can find it in your spirit to forgive my little rant. It occurs to me, at least, that there is a big picture, here, behind all the little local tactical and pseudo-strategic and Grand Doctrinal pieces that are mostly too much trouble to assemble, since putting one's mind to the task kind of involves setting aside all the false fronts and tribal loyalties and personal interests that drive the present mess. A fourth of the world's wealth and a huge chunk of consumable resources (not counting all the proprietary scams like the Egyptian and Israeli and AfPakistani and Chinese military, etc., have racketeered their way into,) all that growing pile of wealth going into the grasping, clumsy hands of the Warlords.
An Israeli Experienced Player recently warned that the "Iranian Problem" might end up, like has happened many other times in history, creating a Pretty Awful Scenario by some tiny bit of "inadvertence," a typo in some "intelligence summary" or "strategic plan" or tripwire bit of What's Shaking in the Neocon Playbook. And every day, millions of humans grind away at creating, for various "very good reasons," more tripwires and hair-trigger mechanisms attached to ever more complex and out-of-control doomsday devices.
"the US Fifth Fleet, charged with providing security to the Gulf."
[sic]
One of those "things" that everybody just KNOWS is "indisputably true."
Weel, maybe if one defines "security" in a rather cramped sense -- like maybe the way the 5th Fleet provides "job security" for what, maybe 50-60,000 people, especially Admiral-class dreadnoughts needing a nice set of quarters and a comfortable wardroom and lots of uniformed dudes (do they still preferentially fill those slots with Filipinos?) to hold their coats and chairs and fawn on and feed them lavishly. So they can be in top form for all the Asymmetric Power Projection Drills that go along with the Mission Statement:
Fifth Fleet exemplifies the Department of the Navy's strategic concept "Forward... From the sea," by providing the ability to respond immediately to any emerging crisis from peace-keeping and humanitarian missions to asserting necessary force in regional conflicts.
Does that not sound all really well thought out, and, like, you know, "necessary," whatever that is supposed to mean?
Oh, and it gives the liberal-arts grads an opportunity to test their Psych 101 and Creative Writing skills by coming up with catchy, obfuscating names and acronyms for "operations," like "Operation Iraqi Liberation Freedom." Because "O.I.F" is less obvious than "O.I.L." And how's that "operation" worked out, again? Defined as a "success," mission accomplished, but in the parlance of the surgeon who said "oops," the patient still is left half-dead, on the kind of infinitely expensive life support that "conservatives" would deny to most of us Americans...
Call it what it is. This huge enterprise, another part of Gen. Smedley Butler's "racket," steams on in the actual service of a bunch of all the silent, venal goals that actually lie behind that quaint notion that the US military, out on far foreign adventures, is "protecting our freedoms," another nauseating shibboleth, while turning huge amounts of real wealth into dispensable munitions, guided mostly by notions and systems that have proved, so many times now, to be foolish, fraudulent and vain.
Today's bit of "milbabble:" http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/jfq_pubs/jfq0805.pdf. The received wisdom used to be that the largest dinosaurs had to grow several "brains" to manage their lumbering locomotion and other activities, a requirement dictated by the speed of nerve cell transmission. By the time the Head Brain perceived the cliff or tar sands and issued the "Whoa!" command, and the butt brain said "Say what?", the butt end was still driving forward with all the power of the rump and hind leg muscles (and a lot of inertia and momentum.) But the Networked Battlespace, and all its interoperable constituents and sub-tasks and offshoots and open-ended, metastatic Doctrines and Strategies and infinite stream of New Technologies and Really Cool Counter-counter-counter-counter...threat Weapons, is NOTHING like a Diplodocus, now is it? Ask Marine General Riper how that works: http://www.rense.com/general64/fore.htm Now there's "security" for you, complete with post-hoc spinning on a planetary scale.
I wonder when the next K-T event is due? I'm sure the militarists have plans to emerge Victorious... somehow. If only by hanging on, somehow, to the power to define "Victory..."
Resistance to all that futility is, of course, futile.
Actually, don't people generally kind of think #1 is #1? And my guess is that since probably 10 times as many of His Majesty's finest died by disease and accident as died "by the sword" or bullet, that's the reason for the phrasing... though of course it is a much greater "honor" to be hacked to death by a Khanda or Yatagan than to succumb to the marthambles or a quartain or malarial fever...
Anyone annoyed that the military beast pulls this same stunt, over and over, behind the fraud that they are "protecting our freedoms" and "providing for our security?" It ain't like the militaries in the US, the UK, Japan, Afpak and elsewhere are any less a bunch of blood-sucking parasites...
"Current policymakers in Washington should take note: it’s a strategy for disaster."
As if that is at all likely.
Two of my favorite reads are "First In: How the CIA Spearheaded The War On Terror In Afghanistan," by Gary Schroen, and "Where Men Win Glory," by Jon Krakauer. Both happen, more by happenstance than design, to highlight the enormous gulf between what "policy-makers," and "doers and shakers," perceive (or act upon in their own short-term personal and tribal interests despite perceptions,) and what really is happening in the places where they project their seminal power and send in the clowns with all those shrink-wrapped blocks of used, non-sequential $100 bills and carloads of Viagra and other presents to "buy loyalty," in a place where there is no such thing. And both also highlight the inevitable and terminal failures of even the Smartest of the Smartest Brass and their attendant jackals to actually accomplish anything that makes the world, let alone the US, more "secure."
But of course these A-hats write the artful after-action reports, occasionally "testify" to friendly parts of Congress, control the embedded journalists and enough of the leakage of reality to cover themselves until they retire, and have created such an enormous Juggernaut for themselves to ride on that there really is no chance in Hell that "we" can do any different, let alone any better. Until the Juggernaut runs out of crushable bodies to grease its "progress," or drops over one of the many cliffs above the black holes of history.
Maybe that same logic applies to the financialization of the "world economy," all those quadrillions of "notional value dollars," and our TBTFs here at home, and all the subsidies and regulatory protections that continue for the critters who manufacture the demand for all that carbondioximethanization machinery that "we" are told we yet again can just stay addicted to, come Hell or high water, because the crap won't really hit the fan until our n(great)grandkids inherit the earth, and enraged, dig up our bones to abuse, since we will be long gone, free from retribution, unobliged to make restitution...
Since, too, the "start grants" for all the industries, coal, steel, railroads, petroleum (that for one gets to take the stuff it sells back to us from public rocks, a "commons" if you will, and gee, pay a pittance for the leases and then often not even pay the lease money and hide the amount they actually extract and short-change on what they do pay, and of course the Horizon mess will never be "paid for" by BP) that fuel and drive our enormous consumption are long since "sunk costs..."
But not to worry, all the muscle is on the side of the takers and users and the rest, and isn't it hilarious that a few people "live simply, that others may simply live," while those who "can afford it" use millions of gallons of potable water on their acres of estate plantings and "water features" and air-condition 50,000-sq-ft "homes," etc.? Whatabuncha suckers!
The very word "law" in this context is the sickest kind of deceit.
There is no "law" -- maybe a few normative statements of discouragement of certain kinds of semi-universally abhorrent acts (if they are done to "your" tribe, that is, as opposed to "the enemy," against whom anything goes. And there's any number of apologists or outright denialists to certify that this "atrocity" or that one is just either the Fog (or Pink Mist) of War, or guess what, "Those rules do not apply to us on accounta first, we got SOVEREIGNTY, second, we SAY so, and third, whatchagonnadoaboutit?"
The only folks that get hailed up before the court of world opinion are a few more universally (sort of) detested individuals. The rest is convenient pretense, occasionally usable as makeweight for critiques of the actions of others, or excuses for doing what the ruler wants to do anyway -- like "pre-emptive war," and now what looks like "pre-revenge" and similar sick speciousisms.
There's no right unless there's a remedy, no "law" unless there's some enforcement mechanism. And to the folks who have parsed the video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0, go spend some time on Youtube where so many grim "patriots" are just yukking up this and other images of Americans doing it, "lighting up" batches of "hajjis" and "terrorists" and "insurgents" and all the convenient other labels that bear zilch relation to what sure seems apparently to be "atrocities" on unsuspecting civilians in far too many of the little night-vision or full color helmet-cam clips.
Yeah, just let's sit around and wait for whatever happens to happen, and then turn to each other and say "What the heck happened?"
To the extent that "public opinion" means anything, and of course there's not always deep wisdom to be found in the polling of crowds, failure to participate, and dumbly taking advice not to "speculate" and just wait for 20 years in the hope that some part of the great Game might belatedly and long past time for any effective acts of retribution against the Kermit Roosevelts and suchlike, kind of leaves the doors wide open for every little sneak and strategicocidal SOB to keep nudging the world a little closer to the precipice.
All for the best of reasons, right? And the rest of us should forget millenia of perfidy and fraud and mayhem, and just trust that the powers that Be have it all under control, right?
And "the UN position"? What kind of smoke is that? It sure seems like some of the US/Israeli neocons don't actually have a "negotiating position," other than "unconditional surrender and sign over your oil to us.
"Militias:" what hides behind that comfortably neutral word again? There's a fraction of every population, it seems to me, that's closer to the breaching of all social bonds, to the kind of "get it on!" impulse that leads to piles of corpses, or mounds of freshly turned dirt to be forensically excavated after some kind of "normalcy" is eventually established.
My question to all the great thinkers and Experienced Players (I just saw Tom Friedman authoritatively explain current US electoral politics and the state of the rest of the whole Currently Important World in a 3-minute MSM interview) is how to erect structures and conditions to at least make Kosovo and Sabra-Shatila and the bleeding neighborhoods of Homs less likely in the future. Stuff like this (Warning: Disturbing content. Or maybe secretly exciting, to some of us...) http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/kosovo/Kosovo-Photographs.htm
Given human nature, and the intense pleasure and immense profit (the precursor and pre-condition to other pleasures for the profited) derived by that set of humans from killing the screaming or apathetic, and helpless with assegai and club and 7.62mm bullet, and a history of slaughter as long as your arm and opposable thumb, who's going to eschew the No Quarter killing, to surrender (rather than yield to, or run to and embrace) the impulses to do death unto others, who then will do back?
Yes, stop the slaughter, and stop it now, but just exactly how does "the world community," that oxymoronical reification, go about it? When so many of us and our leaders are "invested" in more of the same?
There must be other, maybe longer-time-horizon, tools that can be brought to bear on cultures, something other, and more healthily inventive, than carbon-fiber string dragged across the nodes of the power grid to blow it out, Apaches doing the too often misguided-missile thing, and pleading with other RISK players not to keep selling weapons to one set or the other (while keeping one's own clandestine armamentarium wide open for business.)
There's war hammers, but there are carpenter's and roofer's and jeweler's hammers too...
Of course, there is a lot of debate about the whole imbroglio between US and Japanese interest-declarers and government leaders, as I recall, and a lot of opinion, and even scholarship, at odds with the "US good-Japs bad" versions. Of course, it's all just about power, resources and dominion -- resolved and resolving in many random ways.
Pearl Harbor planning "long predated" the August 1941 embargo? By what, a couple of months? An action facilitated by US negotiating behavior that let Tojo ascend? But let us stay with the comfortable explanations... easier on the conscience.
By the way, I see CNN is touting the possibility that The Iranian Navy May Threaten The US East Coast!!!!! Oooooooh! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_Uhamn2wvc And maybe of more concern, if the US/Israel consortium does get something started, or if by the inadvertences that sometimes "start things" in situations like this, might be that maybe our vaunted technological and firepower superiority might not "git 'er done" before the equivalent of a Pearl Harbor's worth of US Navy ships, including carriers this time, ends up making new habitat on the bottom of the Persian Gulf. Which ought to concern even all the "patriots" who could give a rat's a$$ less about all the other, "lesser" people that might get killed and maimed, as stakes in this hand of Great Game Poker.
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Sex sells.
Is there a factual basis for the implied "reality" that there is, outside of the "conservative talking point universe," a substantial thingie labeled "birth control abortion"?
Google "abortion as birth control" and see what you find, and please don't limit your scholarship to just the stuff that "social conservative Talibanners" emit...
Are privatized growth-industry prisons, and "convict slave labor," and now the burgeoning business of debtor's prisons for the same folks that Dickens used to write about, and of course the sonorous, Old Testament Death Penalty, all good ideas, in your book?
And other than "It's complicated," one wonders what this little snippet means:
"Youth coalition at heart of Egyptian uprising disbands"
Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/07/07/155330/youth-coalition-at-heart-of-egyptian.html#storylink=cpy#storylink=cpy
Needed: a new category and noun to render nugatory and replace the current Chimaera labeled "war." What "we" are doing any more is not what the trumpets-drums-and-banners set has in mind when they blab about "the US needs to go to war against Iran (picking a wild outlier example.)" But "we" still resonate in idiot martial slavering to that old myth that the current reality hides behind. Rather, it's what Smedley Butler named it: A racket, an enormous, self-generating, self-bloating racket. Top to almost-the-bottom, and I would except only those lost souls who enlist in the rosy fog of patriotic macho. So many of whom discover, as several young men in Marines BDUs in various "embedded" videos, speaking from "forward bases" and "outposts" in the infinitely hostile terrain of Notagainistan, have put it, that the only real "mission," among all the dozens that Really Smart Generals and Really Crafty CIA Spooks and Really Dumb Politicians have told them serially are what they are Over There for, is "staying alive, coming home." And who then do whatever it takes, when they are sent out on futile asymmetric patrols to "win hearts and minds by encouraging the Hajjis to shoot at them or blast them with IEDs, and then killing a lot of them," or find themselves in guerrilla-selected ambush battles, to come home alive.
How great can the gulf between the ground-truth reality and the stupid effing myths that so many of "us" believe get, before there's no more money and no more troops and no more oil and no more Shining City on a Hill to come home to? It's a cancer, folks. Don't you see it? A sneaky, aggressive, malignant, metastatic cancer, tricking us into generating ever more and ever larger arteries to sen ever more of our blood and energy off to be converted into just more terminal tumor tissue.
Anyone want to take a stab at coming up with a neologism that better describes what the activity formerly tricked out as "war" actually is, these days?
"I’d prefer a wise and kind leader to all this crap, I really would."
Careful what you wish for.
It should be pretty plain that with every increment of Bigness of institutions, particularly where the main model of human interaction is the "business deal" and its subsidiary, what we carelessly and imprecisely call "war," and where Big Money is used to keep score and facilitate the titillation of the fanciest yearnings of the most jaded, you are very likely t end up with a "leader." The chances of ending up with a "wise and kind" leader? How big, for you mathematicians, can numbers less than zero actually get?
You can bet that our "leaders," in among all the other Strange Attractors and webs of deceit that their PR hacks and message manipulators are generating to attract (or deter) your sacred Vote, are all hoping to to tap into that same emotional pool that Ronnie Raygun siphoned out of -- the vulnerability of most of us to the image of the seemingly competent, avuncular guy who can reassure, and make all seem like, well, "Morning In America." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUKAkm8A9nM (On the other hand, there's this view: http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/09/23/copycats-beware-morning-in-america-cant-be-replicated/ )
Genghis Khan and some guy named Hitler and another fella named "Alexander" were all competent fellas, in their way -- and probably inevitable.
"Ooooh,, rub that little spot over there to the right, will ya? --- Aaaaaaaah, that feeeeels so goooooood...."
Once the briefcase labeled "Legitimacy" starts to leak, no amount of duct tape or hot lead or tissue of lies will repair it...
Yeah, that's one way to look at it.
On the other hand, there's a virtual plethora of "powerful supporters of war" in both Greater and Lesser Israel. All the contingency plans and attack routes and target lists are in place, all the forward deployment has already been done, and OUR crop of "western warmongers" is pounding the drums and sending out the emissaries to Congress and "our allies," some of whom seem just a little bit leery of getting sucked into another set of doomed, losing, asymmetric, trillion-dollar, dinosaurian "It's MY oil" exercises, with dissolution of the "West" as the likely endpoint.
In the emergency room, the doctors, with their finely honed skills, concentrate on the patient's right arm, shattered in a motorcycle wreck. Some dumb orderly or nurse points out that there's a gallon or two of blood on the floor, bled out of a little slit next to the shoulder blade, and that there hasn't been a palpable pulse in a couple of minutes. Looking up from the neat, highly skilled re-build of the arm bones, one trauma ortho surgeon looks around the table and says, "Who's gonna call it?" The vascular specialist and the neurosurgeon flip a trochar, and the losing neuro guy says "Ok, time of death, 11:11."
Stupid humans.
Yeah... them Parsees be a rough regime, aye ... the west better keep up its guard... and heaven forbid one might point out the kind of stuff that appears in the Israeli press every day, these days -- sonorously reminiscent of the run-up to Iraqagainistan. Like http://www.haaretz.com/a-double-barreled-solution-to-iran.premium-1.448210#, "A double-barrelled solution to Iran," per an Israeli political scientist: "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran," and try to sucker the other neighbors into making peace with Israel, all on the same weekend.
You presumably know enough about "the west" to not really be even a tiny bit worried about "it" keeping up "its" guard. But it is so satisfying to "talk tough," like real Great Game players, isn't it? And who gives a rip if every iteration and re-re-re-interation of the "it's a jungle out there, and winners never sleep" theme gets us that little bit closer to the Great End Game.
Another crowd, another day: "Give us Barrabas!"
Making it no longer "insurance," but just "national universal health care." A much more likeable notion.
Face it, folks -- "Exceptional America" is nothing more than a myth, and a screwed one at that.
There's an enormous gulf between what "our troops" are mythically supposed to be doing (per the imagery fed into the public mind) and what actually happens on the ground, and in all those contractor trailers and offices scattered with our "bases" across the planet.
What "our troops" are tasked to do, since the Korean War, is take part in a gigantic exercise in futility. All the "wise" noises over this or that strategy and tactical set, whether McChrystal or some other guru has the doctrinal keys to "victory" or "success," are just so much BS. The reality is that the whole Pentacle apparatus has morphed into a gigantic wealth-transfer-and-waste-generating machine. NONE of "our" vaunted grand doctrines have managed even a scintilla of "success" in the reality of asymmetric Global Wars. (Killing a lot of "gooks" and "towelheads" on the way to the latest Khe Sanh or other "Linchpin to the whole war effort, gotta hold it forever, we win all the battles so how can we lose the war" idiocy is not "success." Converting ever-increasing volumes of usable real wealth in the tens of trillions, more than enough to feed everyone and "fix" health care and much more, is not "victory--" except for the post-national, hide-behind-the-Flag-waving, war-toy contractor corporate profitabilities -- see e.g. the many examples of screw-the-nation-ism, like the recent case of United Technologies "knowingly and wilfully" selling advanced technology to "enemy China" just to make a buck and let the Commies develop a "modern" attack helicopter that would pose a threat (requiring, of course, more procurements with more money pumped into the "threat-chasing" pipeline to counter") to "our troops" in any shootin' conflict.
Even the Free Republic gagged on this one: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2900811/posts. In the real world of world-wide, well-orchestrated military-industrialism, "we" are not supposed to pay any attention to "cross-pollination" like this, and I guess "we" are supposed to be satisfied that UT has paid a $75 million penalty for this egregious bit of sophistry.
Pity the poor troops, people like me who were maybe raised on Presbyterianism and the tenets of Boy Scoutery ("do my duty to God and my country"), who enlisted to "protect America and our sacred way of life," only to learn what the game really is. The game so accurately identified by Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler in his pithy, informed formulation:
http://rationalrevolution.net/war/major_general_smedley_butler_usm.htm
Cognitive dissonance, meet massive fraud and corruption... "Thank you for your service"? Bull effing shit.
Words, words, words...
I prefer "Kleptocracy" as the best descriptor for the Current State. That's just me, of course.
Another quibble: "leave millions uninsured," as opposed to "leave millions with no regular health care and using the ERs as an expensive necessity, or just dying"? Why is the whole "healthcare" thingie (almost) always framed in terms of "insurance" and "coverage?" I know, the train left the station decades ago, and the PR scum for the "stakeholders" have been banging that drum (and delivering the ca$h) for just as long. But every repeat of that "meme" just adds weight to the idiot notion that "insurance" is the way to think about and "manage" this whole great public issue, turning it into just another other massive wealth redistribution schtick.
"Privatization" of a large public asset -- a nice marker of the kind of militokleptocracy that wracks so much of the former colonial world. There's a lot of words written about the nerve of Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry in daring to challenge what Musharraf and the other kleppers at the center of the corruption and repression matrix were up to -- "disappearing" citizens, blowing off demands for "habeas corpus," and selling public assets to "investors" with some clear problems with kidkbacks. Here's one sample: http://www.loc.gov/law/help/pakistan-justice.php
Given the way "militobusiness interests" operate in places like Libya, Syria, Egypt, Israel, Pakistan and such, with the White Elephants of corruption and baksheesh and immunized naked power hung around the necks of the ordinary people who generate the real wealth that makes any of this possible, one might be a little skeptical about the remarks offered by Mr. Waheed.
Seems to me that ordinary people, particularly in "Arab" places that our Rightsters try to scare us might be the source of the spread of what they peddle as the "disease" of "Sharia law" are yearning for a sense of the legitimacy of their ruling structures and classes. What a surprise that courts and lawyers might be acting to manufacture and validate the little bits of honesty and goodness that are the bricks in that edifice of legitimacy under a real rule of law. What a surprise, also, that John Roberts would apparently choose not to be labeled as the fella who put the stake through the heart of what is left of the mythical rule of law in America.
But the thing about the Kochs is that they just KNOW, rightly or wrongly, that they have wrapped themselves in that "vast indifference of great wealth" that assures them of peaceful deaths after long, well-cared-for, insulated lives with every comfort and indulgence that their "people" can provide for them. And those "people" include a lot of "security specialists," no doubt trained by maybe semi-detached bits of Mossad and the CIA and various "special forces" entities.
So these folks are our Louis XIVs, who know, and live the truth of, that nobless-oblige-free zoning, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noblesse_oblige, to the extent that they can happily and breezily and with the serial miseries of history on their side, observe that "apres nous le deluge..." See http://tradicionclasica.blogspot.com/2006/01/expression-aprs-moi-le-dluge-and-its.html for a nice discussion, in context, of the import and history of that midddle-finger-to-the-middle-class notion. And remember that Wall Street is still open 24/7, and folks there still smirk and wink and reassure each other that before any crap can even come close to hitting the fan, "IBG-YBG!" ("I'll be gone, you'll be gone... so who gives a rat's arse?")
I bet you mean "Iranian" airliner. Another example of how the idiocy of "our" entire current course of human conduct, our "policies" and "interests" and "our" geometrically tumescent "abilities to threaten and project power" and all that other Great Game/Game of RISK! bullshiptery is skating all of us, especially those of us who pay for all this but have zero say-so in how it all goes down, quickly along to the Great (END) Game of our species.
Note the features of the Wiki report on the "shootdown" of Iran Air Flight 655, killing 290 very surprised people: young, dumb, scared, inexperienced "troops" in several levels of "tight space," compressed by geography and time and the expectations of a rather hard-ass bunch of officers, literally working "in the dark," struggling to make sense of a flood of information of a volume that was minute, compared to the bitstorm that flies at them in "our" wonderful new Networked Battlespace, where "we" add data dumps and "features" because "we" can and because they are "really cool." And of course profitable.
One little radar operator, convinced the flight profile and signature were clearly from a CIVILIAN target but unable to correlate and parse the hour's difference between "bridge time" and "civilian time" the civil airline schedules were printed in, the pressure that comes from having to assume everything seemingly "inbound" is a deadly threat, so off go a YAHOOO!! couple of Standard missiles that blew the Enemy Arabs out of the sky. Was there cheering in the Vincennes' CIC when the blip vaporized? Gee, I wonder...
For that, as with a few of the more notorious present "bug-splat booboos" in the current Forever War Follies, "we" ended up paying blood money, to the tune of a mere $132 million. For an "action" that despite everything that was done wrong, despite the loss and waste of our supposed values, still resulted in the "award" of medals to those gallant sailors:
And gee, do you suppose that any of this resulted in any kind of disciplinary or corrective action? Combat Information Centers on today's Navy ships are still full of bugs, with contractors chasing them while trying to lay off blame for malfunctions on the products of their competitors...
"Italian airliner" sounds so much less disconcerting, almost comforting, if totally inaccurate. Why is that?
There's this expression, "loose cannon," that every day has more meaning.
Weapons increasingly flood the world, and it's a myth that those who deploy and fire them are some kind of supermen and -women who follow orders (except for "bad" ones) and abide by the Law of War and all that crap. More and more of those weapons are on hair-triggers: they are "use-or-lose," like ship-defense and -attack missiles and torpedoes, where the "horizon times" and thus moments available for perception and judgment are measured in minutes to seconds. More and more of them are under the "control" of young people, or of various kinds of 'paths with axes to grind, fearful or tribal or revenge-motivated.
In 1980 or so I was soaking in a large public bath, invoking the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, in a hotel in Beppu, Japan. Several US naval vessels (guided missile frigates and destroyers) were making a port call, at a time when the Japanese Constitution and politics were afire over the US refusal to even state an intention to abide by the US-imposed proscription on ANY nuclear weapons in the country. This was at a time when the US and Soviet Navies were playing bumper-tag and chest thumping and toe-stepping-on, all over that huge ocean area.
So -- three enthusiastic and culturally klutzy US naval officers high-fived their way into the bath area, skipped the obligatory pre-washing, and jumped in the heated pool where I was floating. Drawn to me as a fellow "gaijin," I guess.
We started chatting about this and that, and I had to ask whether there was any truth to the news that their ships were armed with nukes. "Of course!" was the quick reply. The Rooskies have 'em, we'd be fools not to. And two of them were "missile officers," proud of holding the keys and delegated authority to launch nuke-headed missiles, on the apparent incoming approach of Commie missiles, at Commie ships manned by equally grimly fearfully political and enthusiastic Soviet officers with about the same weakness in the C-and-C chain, who might have fired off a few missiles, out of politics, or boredom, or drunkenness, or spite, or just a spastic response to some little glitch in the situation-reporting radar and equipment. Short "horizon times," y'know.
And don't respond that that is all Tom Clancy stuff. Shot down any Iranian airliners, recently? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655
Talking in terms of "Syria" (or some war-loving little band in Syrian uniforms) shooting down a "Turkey" bird kind of misses the point, obscuring what's happening and what's happened at the "tactical" level as a result of decades of building long chains of dominoes, stood on end on a shaky old table that itself is balanced on a house of cards... just waiting for some brat or some klutz to bump the table, or a random gust to jiggle one of those cards...
So very hard to keep the genie in the bottle, with so many curious or foolish or ill-willed people playing with the cork. So impossible to cram him back in, once he gets a toe free.
Speaking of glimpsing freedom, a concept and shibboleth that so many yearn about and moon over, without much attempt at understanding what it means, even to them: You could do worse than read some old stuff by a guy named H. G. Wells, who wrote a book I just came across as part of a Nook gift: "The World Set Free." http://www.online-literature.com/wellshg/worldsetfree/ Took me over the emotional top...
We could all do so much better. Too bad it's so likely that we won't.
In first-year law school courses on "Property" you learn there's no "absolute" in "fee simple absolute," you quickly learn that there is no such thing as a nsupposed exclusive, extreme and total "right" in a parcel of land or any other tangible thing. The fraudulent and ignorant misrepresentational notions of "the movement formerly known as Tea Party" are so far off the beam as to be laughable if they weren't so pernicious.
What a person holds in respect to "property" is not some simple-minded "king of his castle," absolutist "right." Rather, it's a bundle of rights, circumscribed by ancient doctrines and relationships (e.g., no sending your sewage onto your neighbor's "property," and other practical impositions of the Golden Rule) and of course all those constantly shifting laws and regulations that are often justifiable as checks on unbridled greed and abuse, and inevitably are also warped and biased and abused by those with power, including the rich folks who whine the loudest about the supposed horrors of "government compulsion" yet send their little back-door men to neak in with money-stuffed envelopes to add "suggested legislative model language" to "facilitate" stuffing personally profitable statutes and ordinances and rules into the "rights" bundle. And are among the first and worst, when it comes to siccing the "brown-shirted Code Enforcers" on their neighbors.
Without correlative duties and obligations, there's no such thing as "rights."
If you follow the fracking saga, or the planning for the Keystone pipeline, or the history of the railroads, or downtown redevelopment in any urban area, you know how stuff like "eminent domain" and regulatory capture works.
Madison fertilized the TP convention on "property" himself:
There's no such thing as that kind of "exclusion." Before feeding the rather Top-Predator notions of "rights," according to the the Norquist/Koch Right, one might ask for a little careful exegesis of the conundrum and violent interface that Madison kind of feather-dusts over:
Emphasis in the original.
And what is that "juster meaning" morsel supposed to convey, again? That the current huge lobbying to force EPA to "save our economy" by "leaving alone OUR right to burn OUR Clean Coal (sic, ha ha)," and the push to burn all the natural gas and "let nature take its course" as all the sovereign individuals in our combusto-consumer culture keep on with all the behaviors that are killing the planet (slower than the spoilers need to worry at all about, of course), is A-OK? Because under the spoils system, the Reds by consistency of effort have managed to pack the Supreme Court with "business-friendly" people, who have painted over all the principles inscribed on the barn door except "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others"?
O.I.L. would seem to be a somewhat obscurantist acronym for the much broader, more inclusive, more fundamental nature of the Beast: wealth transfer, at a rate that tops the Milo Minderbinder/Smedley Butler scale of unimaginably futile and stupid greed, year after year over year.
This is mostly just all about wealth transfer. From the peasants to the self-perpetuating "elites," to all those dumb-faux Messianic "contractors" and the politicos and officer-corporatists.
We really are a fracked-up species...
Suicidally insane for the Game to work.
WOPR proved it: the only way to win (depending of course on how you define a "win") is not to play...
What a surprise that the enterprising "generals" are keeping their talons sunk and locked into the body of what might have become what, a "different state"? Any examples out there of a well-entrenched, fortified idustro-military kleptocracy ever "turning power over" before a replacement elite figured out how to starve the fat old beasts out of their caves and fortified cities?
Anybody notice how our own Kleptocrats-General are setting up their own strongpoints, with perimeter defenses aimed outwards, out from the Green Lines around their newly renamed "joint bases," right at the slobs who fund the war-ization of everything and are busily hitching their minutely profitable little techno-wagons to the rapidly accelerating US manifestation of the Juggernaut?
Not to worry though-- like the burning of the last few tons of "clean coal"and "OUR natural gas (sic)" it's a self limiting plague.... eventually.
What these guys do, in the Heart of Darkness, often or usually with the connivance of Sneaky Petes and the jaw-snapping of Jackals from one Great or Lesser Power or another, looks, smells, tastes and bleeds just like the base nature of the whole human enterprise. Drug war, wars of choice, the "war on terror" with its amorphous and asymptotic margins, the whole enthusiastic getting-off on ever-more-seductively-destructive weaponry peddled like washing machines and color TVs to anyone with some money to buy, all the cheap puffing up of "differences" and playing on the tuneful limbic systems of all those individual human brains, just to keep the pot on the boil. The sickly patina of "international legitimacy" on the rotting flesh of culture and civility and now the concatenation of all those manipulative and manufactured "threats" into the truly existential threat to the species. Smacking down or dividing-and-conquering any one or little group that tries to do something different and better.
Stupid humans...
Facts? or factoids? And the deprecating response falls short of addressing the points I questioned.
Is the "correct" approach to applaud the application of a Band-Aid to a paper cut, when the patient is bleeding out from a bunch of arterial wounds and choking on his own vomit?
Or maybe they made an informed, forward-looking choice? Looking at what the inevitable failures, in the Murphy-space where humans and their machines actually live (not that idealized closed world of Engineer-space), can cost?
Love the chest thumping. We're Number One!
Does that not kind of go around the point that "America," especially if you include all the carbon-converting-by-CO2NOxSO2mbustion post-nationals that may have some legacy connection to the good ol' USA, and the MIC worldwide, and all the efforts "we" are putting into keeping the home fires burning, hot and high and producing lots of CO2 and methane and that kind of schmutz, are pretty much "Number One" per capita in "doing unto others," via frackery and chicanery, to support that consumatopian lifestyle and the mythical Liberty&Freedom that characterizes We The People? How many billions, or trillions, of dollars is being "invested" in Who Cares? I'll Be Gone, You'll Be Gone-ism?"
How much are we World Leaders in Everything "investing," in mountaintopping and fracking and nuclear plants that will never be built (like the ones I and my neighborly rate-payers are ponying up $9.5 billion in "pre-expenditures" to pad the balance sheets and jump the bonuses of Florida's Progress "HaHa" Energy and its C-suite? And we are being urged to keep on buying those Chevvies and Fords and building yet more miles of 'superhighway" -- another "investment in the [totally short-term, immediate, who cares about 20 years from now] future?"
There's not enough big profit in that model, not enough opportunities for CEOs to "excel" in the Great Game of Compensation (sic) Maximization...
Yeah, Joe, and the pro-war people who run the shoot-the-commanders part of the action have such a high rate of success. No mis-fires, no little oopsies that do such a great job of convincing the rest of the world of US superiority in Everything. Especially when they use the occasional "kill," which in many instances is "drone-scamming" where Warlord A just PROMISES that Warlord B (who happens to be a rival in the opium trade or just a competitor for local hegemony) will be will be sitting and plotting the next 9/11 at coordinates such-and-so, to justify trillions of dollars in Military Futility.
What "security" have "we" bought will all those trillions? Oh, I forgot the "elephant gun" proof: The cop stops the dude in camo, stalking the streets of Manhattan with bandoliers of .458-cal soft-points and a big ol' Winchester rifle. "What the heck are you doing, carrying that thing around in the city?" asks the cop. "Protecting us against wild elephants, of course!" says the dude. "There's not a wild elephant within 7,000 miles of here!" replies the cop. "See?" says the dude. "It works! Now leave me alone so I can get back to my Duty Call."
But I acknowledge that atavistic, troglodytic thrill of even the fake green-tinted video of "bin Ladin's Last Moments," and "bin Ladin's funeral swim." Too bad that the vast majority of anti-terrorism is boring old police work, and that some of it looks so much like boring old police entrapment... Nowhere near as exciting as kicking down the door and shooting everyone in the room, or pickling off a couple of Hellfires.
Too bad the reactionaries and "rightists" define out of existence any other kind of approach to security and stability than spending a quarter and more of the world's wealth on war toys and mayhem, incapable of applying anything other than some kind of Big F___in' Hammer to every situation, because that involves the exercise of Big Power, and presents the opportunity to keep the idiotic dead-end sameness of Great Game "policy" going.
And now the shameless try to shame people with consciences into buying into more military BigHammerism, because no one has a clue how to derail, or at least switch off the Main Line, the Dead End Express they have us all riding on.
Tell us, please, what combination of doctrines, drones, bombs, bullets, boots and bushwah will properly effectuate the "Duty to Protect," which mostly gets invoked as a way to suck the rest of us into another gay, mad whirl. Seriously. Duty to Protect? Exactly how do "we" protect the people of Houla, or My Lai, or how many other atrocity-places? If "we" are so smart and rich and powerful, how do we keep the kinds of societies and militaries and kleptocracies that perform them (when it's not OUR troops occasionally doing the deed) from rising to power? But that ain't what it's all about, is it?
Good thing cognitive dissonance is not a painful disability.
Sure looks to me like the "treasured values" that some people used to associate with "America" are nothing but disrespected, to the Nth degree, by them there Neocons and grim-jawed "patriots," who do all these "wars of choice" and are too stupid to even manage to achieve their goals and ends. Or maybe they do -- chaos, violence, destruction...
And the $1- or maybe $15-trillion-a-year question is, what, out of all the devices and demonics of all the hardware, software, wetware, Tupperware and networked battlespacery that the military-industrialists have bought, with our money and blood, what set of the tools of the World of Warcraft are going to be able to answer the Call of Duty and have a prayer of bringing a halt to the present murder? Gonna Send In the Flying Clones?
And out of all those tools and toys, which ones have a prayer of keeping another Assadhole from Assuming Power and accumulating, out of the huge weapons bazaar that our very own US government works so Assiduously to keep flooding the planet with every imaginable kind of threat-creating and threat-answering-by-creating-more-threats weapons, the very weapons (and a whole lot more, stealthier and sneakier and more lethal) like the ones sold by Russians and so many others in that huge sick competition for "Mayhem Market Share," to his uniformed, uninformed "services," who, just like ours, are "protecting the national government from threats and enemies, foreign and domestic?"
What's the way out of the circular firing squad we seem to be all-anxiously-in-line to stand up and take our places in?
The Horror! The Horror! But what is the set of deployments and battlespace managements that will stop the Horror without catalyzing a lot worse? What's the end-game? And given the uniform history of failure of The Brass to do any different than the previous multifarious failures, I would not suggest leaving it up to them to pick and choose, given their obvious interest in keeping the Game that they love and live off of going apace...
You've got an exaggerated notion of what "the drones" are capable of accomplishing. This ain't the climactic battle scene in "The Return of the King," where all the Good People get all excited that "The Eagles are coming! The Eagles are coming!"
The real trick is to keep tabs on all the Saurons out there, and keep them from developing the latest technology for making Rings of Power. Good luck with that, of course... that train left the station long ago.
Maybe if the Olde Englishe equivalents of the neocons and the current financialists and the Smoot-Hawleys of their day had been a little wiser and less interested in short-term personal gain and the playing out of their fantasies on the lives of others, maybe if wiser heads had prevailed, you would not have had the Stamp Act and the other triggers of the REBELLION, or whatever you want to call it, that ended up with Hessians in Manhattan and all the rest.
But then people are always coming up with cute and quaint ideas on how to subjugate and invade and repress and suppress and kill each other, and are really good at putting up judicially and ecclesiastically sanctioned rationales, pretty pasteboard over the simple greed and innate violence of our species.
Patently, there is no "us plan for a nuclear weapons free Middle East," or "Near East," or "Far East." the Big Toys are for the Big Boys, because that "massive retaliation" and "glassification of nations" is fundamental to our rulers' behaviors.
What kind of weapons do you think are in the lockers on the carriers and other major vessels, and of course what's on the noses of all those Trident missiles in all those "silos" in all those submarines, over there in the eastern Med and Persian gulf? And of course the Game is currently dominated by a significant linkage between the keepers and coddlers of the 200 or 400 nukes that parts of the Israeli structure built and keep adding to, and our own "Bomb,bomb Iran-ers."
By the way, anybody seen this little fun item? "Iran To Sue Google Over Dropping Persian gulf Name." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/17/iran-google-suit-persian-gulf_n_1525986.html Kind of like those villages and cities in the Soviet Union that just "disappeared" from one year's version of the national maps to another -- having been either irradiated or gassed or bio-weaponed out of habitability.
That is pure, unadulterated revisionist history. To put it politely. "By the time we found out about them." Uh-huh. http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/asiapcf/02/04/pakistan.nuclear.timeline.reut/
Would that, one wonders, involve "EU" (pronounced "EEEewww?", formerly the Band-aid Fig Leaf known as "NATO") attacks on the House of Saud? Which would presumably involve, among other futilities, a chance, finally, to see whether the F-22 (and the F-35, if it's ever allowed to cross the street and go around the block without being tied to a huge tail of contractor dandling) and the missiles attached thereto and "avionics" contained therein, is "better" in aerial combat than the F-16s and other stuff "our" MIC has so lustily sold to the Saudi military? Or can it all be done as a keyboard exercise, by "sanctioning" the sale of "Saudi oil?"
"Justification? We don' neeed no steeenkin' justification!!! Weee dooooes what weee want!"
Want a couple of great examples of how the real "gulf war," the one between careerist and self-aggrandizing neocon "perceptions" and what the sheeple are led to believe and worship, on the one hand, and the reality of GIs killing and being killed and then killing some more and all the while billions and going on trillions of Real Money dollars are just disappearing into the fog of war, on the other? Read, with an ever so slightly jaundiced eye, CIA sneak Gary Schroen's marvelously oblivious tract on his summer vacation in Notagainistan, "First In: An Insider's Account of How The CIA Spearheaded The War On Terror In Afghanistan." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Events_leading_to_the_attack_on_Pearl_Harbor . then maybe read, if you can find it, "Long Rifle," by LeBleu, a "troop's" experience with The Freakin' Brass and dedicated people learning that they are doing stupid stuff decreed by liars and fools. And follow that with Jon Krakauer's "Where Men Win Glory," http://articles.latimes.com/2009/sep/11/entertainment/et-book11 , about the macho and brave life of football notable Pat Tillman, and his idiocy-induced, fraudulently miscast death, on accounta the massive, disgusting inertia and momentum of that enormous bloated grasping bureaucracy that is pulling its branches together to force all of us into a war-ized endgame in the Great Networked Battlespace (here's just one slightly dated pitch that captures a little bit of the whole sick spirit of the thing: http://www.boeing.com/news/releases/1999/news_release_990310b.html )
And this is going to change just how, again? for anything but the worse? because of all those people who are "invested" in More Of The Same Stupid?
At some point, if what I hope to be the case is true, all these folks are going to run out of the last vestiges of "legitimacy," and people are going rear up and say "NO MAS!" Wonder if that will be before or after we run out of petroBTUs, and before or after our current net direction as a species has made the place uninhabitable...
What's our and Israel's and Saudi Arabia's and our Other Global Current Pre-Dominated Partner Nations' excuse, then, and don't say that "we" don't do it, or that "we're exceptinoal."
Here's one take on the issue (the fun part is the comments, so much dissembling!): http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/05/22/1093867/-Iran-committed-to-full-annihilation-of-Israel-says-top-Iranian-military-commander
And Who Freaking Knows what it means? The Great Gamers have so thoroughly soured the milk, spoiled the nest, all that, that nobody can know anything any more, only follow ancient prejudices and tribal interests and the driving beat of the amygdala as it marimbas away on the rest of the notes in the limbic system.
Gen. Curtis LeMay was pressing real hard, for a lot of years, to nuke the Soviet Union, and Vietnam, and any other old place, and here's a good read, complete with lots of verbal saber rattling and all that sneaky-pete, surrogacy-based, "WHAT democracy? That's just a selling point for Hidden Oligarchy" stuff. Robert Scherer's "With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush, and Nuclear War" http://www.amazon.com/With-Enough-Shovels-Reagan-Nuclear/dp/0394414829
Just by way of reminding all of us that 'stupid' is not confined to just a few of us.
Per a recent presentation for Israel Bonds, the investments in those instruments do help with infrastructure and stuff that seems generally beneficial, but also allow the rulers to "invest" in a huge and growing military-industrial establishment. Almost all the start-ups touted at that presentation, which was based on a nationally distributed multi-media pitch piece, were companies making ever-more-sneaky-and-"sophisticated" weapons and related systems.
What's abundantly clear from that presentation is that not only are US taxpayers dumping billions into the Israeli coffers every year (earning the label "Uncle Sucker" for their trouble), people all over the US are adding $600 million in bond purchases, bonds which are paid off presumably out of, in part, that taxpayer money from the rest of us. All supporting an important but increasingly ugly state, with all its offshoots and odd activities.
Nothing particularly new about the reality of a World Military-Industrial "thing," where all the players are attached to all the other players, right straight across the imaginary lines that divide one "people" from another, all just buying and selling war crap to one anothers' oligarchs, and cross-pollinating their fevered brains with dreams of ever-more-efficient and sneaky death-dealing, and selling points labeled "security" and "hegemony" and (sub silentio) "futility," and the goal of the game is extracting wealth from the "real economies" and converting it to careers and dachas and still more deadly rounds of still more deadlier weapons and still more stupid tactics and repeatedly idiotic strategies and doctrines. Like this Really Cool Toy: http://mashable.com/2012/04/23/quadrotor-machine-gun-video/
Yeah, I know -- it's complicated, and I don't understand all the implications and facets... even Super390 doesn't, probably... and I bet, really, that NObody does. Except for maybe a very few, who want to keep it that way. Behind a carefully assembled and artfully maintained shrubbery.
Why no wise, long-view policies in Israel (or hardly anywhere else in the Mideast Bazaar)? Maybe it has to do with the nature of humans, and the reality that there will always be oligarchies (oiligarchies, while the oil lasts) running any organization. And maybe it's what happens to "tribes with flags," who have traditions and shibboleths that force the advancement, over time, of a certain kind of "leader."
Maybe it's just the "odor" of both, but it sure smells to me like there are massive parallels between the Likudnik rulers, like that knowing face on TIME magazine's cover last week, and guys like Yasser Arafat. About whom there is a truly illuminating piece that I keep going back to: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/09/in-a-ruined-country/4167/ Which points out so very clearly the cynical, grasping, faux-patriotic-actual-traitorous nature of not only Arafat but so many others. People who know how to project a great "patriotic" Potemkin front, seemingly just being "all about 'their' people," while compulsively salting away the big bucks, engaging in vigorous and humorous corruption, and laughing with their play-date buddies on the other side of various Green Lines and Walls and Death Zones and Frontiers.
"Things just the way they are, getting slightly worse all the time to keep the peasants in line" are the fallow ground where these vigorously toxic seeds fortuitously fall, to prosper and suck all the nutrients out of shallow soil. That others prosper or survive is just fortuity: the rhizomes of the noxious weeds just happen to miss their little patches of dirt, or in the case of the war-and-oil business, cross-fertilize.
Too bad we don't seem to be able to do any better – just a series of negative-sum games masked as zero-sum.
One wonders about whether stuff like this and the bombing of Lebanon and all the other Apartheid horrors produces any significant internal strains and tensions in the Israeli Defence Forces. Not every conscript doing his duty for the fatherland might think what happened was right, or even smart. At some point, cognitive dissonance becomes so painful that there has to be a novation of the spirit.
The dudes in uniform on that hillside might have been situationally, or emotionally, or both, or neither, driven not to make their nominal tribespersons drop their weapons. Reminds me of that scene in "Lawrence of Arabia" where Lawrence and the Bedou catch up to the Turkish gaggle of troops that have just looted and murdered and raped in a village back down the road: "No Quarter!"
It's a human thing, and I doubt we as a species will survive it.
I wonder who's the current holder of the One Ring:
"One Ring to rule them all,
One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all
And in the Darkness bind them.
In the Land of Mordor,
Where the Shadow lies."
Oooh, see the pretty pictures!
http://www.dailyyonder.com/how-do-you-kill-mountain/2010/01/14/2535
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3Ly683Spig
Another thing that might happen is that like all really aggressive cancers or really obnoxious parasites, the Bigs, which I would lump together as the Kleptocracy since they steal all the real wealth to fund their pleasures, is that eventually they sap so much of the host's body, strip so much of the stored energy, the lifeblood, that the host organism eventually coughs and dies.
What we got going, what's being done to us for the "life tenure" of the very few who could not care less about whatever might happen after they die, is not maintainable for much longer. http://tradicionclasica.blogspot.com/2006/01/expression-aprs-moi-le-dluge-and-its.html You think the Kochs or Dimon or Blankfein give a rip about what comes after, or next after they leave the stage? Maybe review the back story for that desolate classic, "Soylent Green." http://www.rachelaaron.net/soylent/history.html Where the corporate rulers know that they've facilitated the endstage of climate collapse and the using up of all the available resources, and are having to kill the few corporatists with consciences who might blow the whistle before they blow this joint. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green
Ha. Ha.
Nothing changes. Go back and read the Pentateuch, and on into 1 and 2 Kings. Does Bibi come before or after David? All about "slewing with the edge of the sword," and taking slaves and booty and flocks. And land. By conquest. Or theft. And of course G_d approves... except when His People "fall away."
Thank you. Too bad this kind of awareness is in no danger of "going viral..."
There's a whole literature, scholarly and otherwise, on how people create and then treat differences between one another, for identity or for personal gain. But a picture is worth at least a thousand words, so how's this for giggles?
"A Class Divided, " http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/etc/view.html
"I have a dream..."
Nice if one could actually fix the problem. Dr. Seuss described the fundamental problem in "The butter Battle Book," and had a great, technology-pushing idea on how to fix it as described in "The Sneetches and Other Stories." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Seuss_bibliography
I personally am probably considered "white," though my skin tones are creamish, tannish, yellowish with a hint of pinkish on the palms and soles, etc. Raised Presbyterian, "pure" Scotch-English. "Black" people, most of whom grip their identity as "Black" as fiercely as "white" people grasp theirs, have skin tones including ochre, red, multiple shades of brown and khaki and blues of various hues, all the way to obsidian. And so it goes for the rest of our species.
I wish all of us, especially my grandkids who are pure Melting Pot, ripe with the strength of admixture and alloy, luck in escaping our common inheritance of idiot limbic-system-driven tribal identification.
One might hope that ... (add your own prescription)
Interesting that nobody has anything to add here...
"The purpose of torture is torture." Or so I read.
One might ask whether human-induced heating, leading to all that gas being released, could honestly be called a "natural" phenomenon. Kind of like acidification of the oceans is "natural," onaccounta what CO2 does when it meets the 'magical microlayer' at the sea's surface. Or all those termite flatulences, on the increase of which one can note that slash-and-burn agriculture and other "natural" human activities opening up new niches for these critters, or McCowflatulence...
From David's link, re: the combusticonsumption (consumibustion?) of what is so euphemistically called "natural gas." Which is actually methane, ethane, propane, butane, sulfur and secret schmutz from the "extraction processes," stuff that most would recognize as an explosive poisonous brew when stated that way. But most will cheer at the idea that "clean" methane will outstrip "dirty" strip-mined coal. And gloss right over the reality, the resulting steady increase in human-excreted slow poisons -- cheering that "this contribution is projected to grow."
We love our comforting euphemisms. "Natural" -- what could be safer and more wholesome than that? Those healing, "surgical" things called "drone strikes." "New! Improved!", which usually means "Crummier! and Less For The Same Or More Money!" Even "consumption" is mostly a good thing, to the point that many people sport their "I'M A BIG-TIME CONSUMER" badges on the T-shirts that say "We're spending our children's inheritance!"
Highlight the word "grow," a euphemism that papers over a huge number of sins. That's probably the worst and most misleading of all. "Growth" is what cancers and parasites are best at, up to the point they kill their host. But almost uniformly, and certainly uninformedly, humans cheer dang near ANYthing that "grows," from fracking, to nuclear power generation, to a patently finite "housing market" and all the efforts to re-inflate that bubble that are now in play -- hey, we HAVE to "grow" jobs in the construction industry, a traditional plow horse for "the growth of the economy.
But all the drivers in the various parts of the planetary ecology, the ones that move-and-shake the movers-and-shakers, are all part of a full set of positive-feedback loops, with nary an effective short-term counterbalance to limit or terminate them. As in, you can win "investment bets" by betting on the growth of frackers, which gives you lots of money to spend on consuming more crap made with methane heat and petroleum feedstocks.
Wish I could figure out how to make a quick buck off all this. Knowing that I'm not gonna be around much more than another 20 or 30 years, so my little bits of badness will be someone else's problem, and there'll be not a damn thing they could to me, or to undo me getting my "growth" now...
I think that referred to "3 million Americans who suffer from or have been diagnosed with schizophrenia," or in the debased language of our times, are "victims" of the disorder, and in the logic of the writer, maybe causatively "victims" of MJ.
Super, it doesn't hurt that all those PO-lice departments, small and large, self-fund with licit and illicit subsidies from drug arrests and seizures of vehicles, homes, boats, aircraft, jewelry, and of course huge amounts of cash that might happen to be lying around when The Man kicks the door in, warrant or not.
Lots of Prohibitionists had a real liking for Jim Beam, as much as Jim Crow...
Booze is legal, tobacco is legal, Xanax and oxycodone are legal, and anyone care to debate that there's a whole bunch more souls, bodies, "family values" and public and private money lost to those indulgences, and more costs, than all the pot problems that some would do the ol' "Reefer Madness, Rebooted, With Subtle New Arguments" schtick on?
Follow the money, people. Money, LARGE, HUGE money, is the hormone, the lubricant, the adhesive, the marker, that drives all this stuff. Love of money, and the way it lets those with no conscience or self-restraint tickle the nerve endings in their limbic systems, and satisfy their amygdalic urges, and accumulate power over others. Drug lords, prison lords, Koch sockers in the various legislatures and palaces and courthouses, et bloody cetera.
And yeah, there's no doing without money, but which flavor of money? The sawbuck in my wallet, or the cloudbloat of little bits and bytes that represents the Funny Munny, in the form of T-full-faith-and-credit-Bills or the "notional dollars" that bids fair, once again, to drive ordinary people back down into servitude and destitution? Maybe the terabucks that flow to the MIC, globally? The money that people EARN by physical labor of various sorts, and the parts of mind-work that are not part of the Great Destruction the Wall Streeters are dropping on us, those really smart SOBs who "make" money, who don't "earn" it in any sense that makes any sense, at least to me, by inflating with laughing gas (they giggle, and the joke's on us) in an enormous act of counterfeiting all those CDSs and CDOs the rest of us have to "make real on" when they go south? Those people whose ethical horizons stop at "So what? I'll be gone and you'll be gone, so f__k the Muppets and Dumb Money! Phillip, bring the Ferrari around to the side door where the Occupiers can't see me..."
Whatchagonnadoaboutit?
Like the lawyer who spews out some "prejudicial inadmissible" tripe in a jury trial before an objection and ruling from the judge can happen, the folks who drum up all this tribal spear-shaking know that no amount of "instruction to disregard" will un-ring the bell, or put the toothpaste back in the tube.
I personally doubt that humans will learn to manage, let alone master, the ugly and destructive parts of their nature, in this and in areas like economy-trashing and planet-demolition, before the active few like the colonel and the rest have catalyzed a reaction that will kill most or all of us.
And maybe they even believe they are "doing God's Work, since He's so dang SLOW at it..."
The merger has been accomplished, Super.
I bet you even know about Pantex, the private bidness in Amarillo, TX that "maintains" and assembles "our" nuclear weapons. The quotes on "our" are to express my skepticism that all that destructive force is really there for the general welfare, as opposed to the welfare of the Generals. Pantex is staffed by people who beleeeeve it is their duty to advance the Apocalypse and get themselves Raptured. "I got my salvation," sayeth the bomb-building Rapturist-Apocalypticist, "you DESERVE to be incineradiated for your unbelief in my version of All That Is That Matters."
Here's the pallid version, with vague references to a few problems at this plant that handles billions of kilotons worth of naked force: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantex_Plant
And here's a slightly more chilling take: http://www.thirteen.org/openmind/history/learning-to-live-with-the-bomb/970/ And for a look back in terror: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1129&dat=19860628&id=ka8xAAAAIBAJ&sjid=UG4DAAAAIBAJ&pg=7001,8661780
And remember: "Our" nukular deterrent is the foundation of Pax Americana. The biggest ones are currently "operated" on all our behalf by those Xtianists in the Air Force.
As my ex-wife used to say to me, "When you do X, it's WRONG. When I do X, it's DIFFERENT." Simple, right?
Say again what in the way of Magic Arrows is left, in the human behavioral quiver, that might leave one with some tiny hope that the species, including my grandchildren, has a prayer of surviving, let alone muddling through?
You gotta love google. Look up "gay mormons," and settle in for a magical mystery tour of cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy. For starters: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/23/mormon-parents-gay-it-gets-better_n_1445851.html
What is it that drives people like Roy Cohn, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Cohn , and of course all the closeted pontiffs in the Mormon hierarchonate? Not to mention all the other sad, nasty gays who over time have served well the "conservative" side of the Overton Spectrum?
What is it that sorts us roughly into two piles: People with empathy who understand and practice tolerance and forgiveness and forbearance, and Jerry Falwell and Mittsy and that Charmer from Wasilla, and the nasty mullahs, and Likudanyahoos, and the rest over in the musty, fetid, dark corner? The ones who think a notreallyanpology will let them sucker the other pile yet again, getting, like Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker and Tedd Haggard, serial forgiveness and restoration, without penance or even just real contrition?
My personal suspicion is that, taken as a body, the human species has a death wish.
Yeah, "reported success."
And let's remember who does the "reporting," again, and dare "we" asks against what measure are the "outcomes" of those random "missions" are measured, and how many times have "they" flat-out lied about stuff like that? And of course the "it-worked-ness" of all that torture sure is way open to question, with a pretty strong indication that the whole Gulag-R-US exists, well, just because it exists, and it does a pretty good job of proving, in this generation as in prior millenia, "the purpose of torture is torture." Yeah, let's give a nice secure playpen to "patriotic sociopaths..."
Since when does sowing dragon's teeth constitute any part of "our desired purpose"? I'm sure you know that may not be who you and I are, but there's a lot, too many, of "US" who are something else altogether... shameless, among other descriptors.
One might wonder if the same people who brought ought the "Phoenix Program" during the Vietnam Thing rolled out the whole "Drone Program." For sure, at least the same kind of people. "Fighting terrorists" by "being terrorists."
Want to get a flavor for the Counter-Insurgency Doctrine thingie? Here's the smoke, http://www.rand.org/pubs/occasional_papers/2009/RAND_OP258.pdf, and here's a little more of a mirror: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Program
And then there's the reality:
And what was the outcome of THAT pseudo-war, again? "Made in Vietnam" clothing in our signature American stores, and the US Navy doing joint operations with the Vietnamese Navy?
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Ooooh, goodie! Now we've got speculation, coupled with possibly slanted reporting, added into a false syllogism, all of which establishes beyond peradventure that the Forever War just HAS to continue, to "protect us" from the "international CommicalQuaeda conspiracy!" What a wonderful leap of faith!
Other than a convenient, soul-satisfying label, what is an "al Quaeda type?" Did Timmy McVeigh, and for that matter his pals, and The Unabomber guy, and the others, all fall into that "See, they're all like that and they're Oh My God EVERYWHERE!" category that so many of us can't seem to make any sense of the world without reference to? Or who maybe beat the drum loudly for that theme, for various personally profitable reasons? I seem to recall that members, the sociopathic ones at least, of all the various groups in "Baghdad" and the rest of Iraq, and of course in Notagainistan, ALL have "set off bombs" and done all that other murderous stuff to one another. Is the inescapable conclusion that "they" are all "al Quaeda types?"
There's this word, "discrimination," and I don't mean that in the racism sense at all...
I mean, it's never happened that bombings like this have been false-flaggy in the extreme, now has it? Or just dumb-ass random?
That's the whole thing about our great human culture set -- we've got it so goobered up and complicated that no one can ever be sure about anything, and it's so easy (just ask the CIA spooks and the Mossad and Savak and ISI and MI-(shhhhh) and NKVD and Stasi and all the rest of those shits-in-the-shadows, http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x2182790) to fire up the ol' limbic systems of a lot of fellow humans and get them to shooting and torturing and consigning others to Hellfire and demagogic damnation. Not to mention sending whole nations of humans into idiot tizzies that nonetheless "feel right" on accounta how our little brains operate. As a way to keep the most of us slaving away to make the few of us ever more "comfortable."
Seems to me that the anonymous bombs, and many of the ones for which "responsibility" (what a sick choice of nouns) is claimed, are more about blowing up any bits of "community" and "commonality" and "commensalism" that might be starting to develop, in any subset of our population, than about any kind of tactical advantage. Too many of us humans get off on chaos -- or, if I remember right, as in Iraq maybe up to the present, ordinary people with no particular axe to grind but who have no income thanks to geopolitical jerkymeatery like Operation Enduring Futility, get paid by the crazies or plotters to plant those roadsiders or pack the trucks and minibikes and briefcases and park them where a lot of other ordinary people are milling around.
Too much "you never know" to ever be "absolutely honestly sure" about ANYthing. And all the "experts say" and "sources tell" and the rest of the freakin' fog just make it ever more convoluted and worse.
One wonders if there's maybe a reason why "tribe" and "terror" both start with the letter "t."
You've got the right idea about people minding their own business. But there's something very wrong with the first clause: it "looked like" Saddam was on a Yellow Cake Road to nuclear parity with the US and Israel, or maybe ready to deploy nasty bugs like the ones "our" and "our friends" are "studying" and stockpiling, or so we were told.
We are told it "looks like" some of Iran's leaders, just like their opposite numbers in Pakistan and Israel actually were, on a path to assembling nukes. "They" don't hold referenda on these things, any more than "we" all voted for all-out Cold War or even thingies like invading Vietnam (though "we" were told of an incident in the Gulfo of Tonkin...) and Notagain?istan. And your formulation, that just assumes that Israeli rulers and all of the US are on the same fire team, takes a giant leap past what ought to be not only a Current Situation assessment of REAL US "national interests," which is not what the paid shills tell us over and over and over, but an ongoing holding of our "leaders'feet to a very hot fire to induce them to do the things that day to day and over time actually reduce the trend toward a dead end for the whole species. Encouraging healthy economies. Increasing the participation in government. Obviating the need for hunger strikes and intifadas and for people like Nelson Mandela and Aung Son Suu Kyi and even Gandhi, and on a different scale, Bradley ("Who?") Manning, to shame us and "them" into doing better.
The trouble with leaving the "shoot first" machinery in place is of course that it encourages those Iranians who see how "we" play the Great Game to set up their own Doomsday Machine. And then you got the generals and colonels and "pundits" in their bunkers with their itchy tougher-than-you shiny pants, and a bunch of jumpy, testosterone-and-adrenlaline-pumped youngsters just ready to LAUNCH whatever weapons on whatever predetermined paths in response to whatever pre-programmed stimuli, given how short the horizon times are for anti-ship missiles and how invisible mines and submarines have become and how easy it was for a RETIRED Marine General, Paul Riper, to sink the 5th Fleet (in the 2002 Millenium Chllenge Game of "Battleship" -- http://www.cuttingedge.org/news/n2026.cfm). Use it or lose it? Lose WHAT, again? Our whole species?
(for the Reds among us, here's another interesting, old-school take on that 2002 war game: http://www.cuttingedge.org/news/n2026.cfm)
"great Persia?" Ooooh, Scary! that sounds like the Caliphate!!! Ooooh, wait – that's an AYrab notion, not Persian!!! Ooooh, wait, that sounds just like the Dirty Red (remember how recently "conservatives" were supposed to rather be DEAD than RED?) Commyanists, who wanted to TAKE US OVER, just like the Pod People in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers!!!" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_the_Body_Snatchers
And back in the early '80s, I attended a meeting of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, where Tariq Aziz spoke (anyone remember him?) and, to loud "American" applause, he told of the marvelous dream of a "Greater Iraq, "with somewhat elastic limits, destined to spread beyond the arbitrary colonialist straight lines in the sand. (This is back when "we" were sending "him" arms of all kinds, and other encouragements.) Ever heard of a lady named April Glaspie, carrying a Message from US to Saddam that "we take no position in your little Arab squabbles," so help yourself to the oil fields of Kuwait? (Wiki has a nice loyalist take on that bit of history, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War, which includes, in passing, the following sentence:
Huh.)
And of course OUR sneaky-petes and other Great Gamers don't have ambitions to spread the umbra of "American" hegemony, the "New American Century" thing, over not only the near and far east, but north and south too. The "end of history." Maybe you heard of that "vision?" Maybe your tribal sense of belonging trumps any incentive to kind of see all the fine details in the Game board and all the actual moves in the play?
Fellow citizen, "we" need to refine the terminology, and look up the word "reification," which comes right after "hypostatization." There's a set of "they"s that run the international activities of this country, and a set of "theys" in Iran and the "People's Republic of China" and Israel and North Korea and most every other one of the atavistic nation-state thingies that the real "they," the Great Gamers, use to front their fallacies and fund their follies. "We" in our own glass house do not have a leg to stand on when it comes to throwing stones at others, given all the "initiatives" and "stratagems" that "we" or at least our "theys" have pulled off in service of corporate extensions and that the taking of that oldest and, in Henry "Great Gamiest" Kissinger's immor(t)al phrase, "ultimate aphrodisiac," power. "They" is not "us," except via tacit, stupid, blindly enthusiastic and/or fearful acceptance and ratification. Not there, and not here.
You got any idea how many sides of the polygon the Pod People in Rings of Power in the Pentagram, or down in Foggy Bottom, or at Langley, are on, in any one of the various "conflicts" that are running up the enormous MICtab, all across the planet? How often "our" Players have had weapons and "advisors" on both sides of murderous little wars and insurgencies? Care to review the bidding on "the US's" military-political-economic involvement in Afghanistan, or Iran for that matter? Or do you have any problem with having "them," stupidly, trying to buy the loyalty of Pashtun warlords with bottles of Viagra and crates of cash? Tell me why there's thousands of Marines and dozens of US warships virtually invading Costa Rica, yet again? There's a zillion examples of that kind of "they-ism."
You got kids? What kind of world do you want them to live in? An "American" world? But our rulers and our kleptocrats are all pretty much based just in the Imperial capital, "NYWash," and elsewhere on the planet, and so very few of them even use the dream-word "America" any more -- now it's just "the US." Except that "they" have nothing but contempt for "us."
You gotta love the Great GeoPoliticoEconomoReligioCorruptical Game, don'tcha?
Let's make treaties, with our noble cousins and correspondents, all over Europe and the Balkans, let the Speers and Krups and their "Allied" analogues loose in our treasuries, building engines of war. Then, when some butterfly's wing beats in Sarajevo, treaty ties trump wisdom, the whole spindizzy lifts off, most of a generation dies in "the trenches," bravely going, hopelessly, "over the top" with fixed bayonets into "interlocking fields of fire," while gas shells and huge railroad gun munitions explode all around.
Then, set the stage for the German Imperial Renaissance under GPERC Hitler's gang. Poke at the "Japs," whose GPERC rulers are doing the same selfish crap that "the West" has been doing, until Pearl Harbor flows into Tokyo Bay.
Support the Kuomintang. Prop up Batista and a host of others. Install the Shah, like a high-end appliance. Manufacture reasons to let the puny little pencil-necks that are proud, PROUD, to call themselves "neocons," let them play with their toy soldiers and trillions of our wealth in pursuit of another vain "end of history" moist dream. "Yellowcake" wars of choice. What at one point was going to be called "Operation Iraqi Liberation," until some some highly paid Pentagram acronymist maybe noted that might give away the strategy...
And now there's this lumbering, aging, increasingly myopic elephant, stumbling through the landscape that eventually will eat its carcass, driven by an equally impaired mahout, tramping through the sorghum fields and flattening huts and walls and trumpeting "I'm Number One."
And Hillary, trailing treaties and fawning attendants, having inhaled the evanescent vapors of endless Powerpoints, and the heady smoke rising from hot briefing papers, and the skewed imagery from lots of maps, some of them like the one above, those maps that highlight "choke points" and various "axes of evil" and depictions of "national interest" as defined by the Few, a presentation leading to patterns of thought and behaviors that distill all the life and richness out of a complex world, down into simplistic visual slogans, a world full of people who try to make it all work, and people who just want the trappings of local and/or absolute power -- Hillary goes to New Delhi, and says, "You gotta do what we tell you. Or there'll be the severed head of your favorite horse in bed with you, some morning."
Do butterfies' wings beat in New Delhi? or Hormuz? or in the contours of the "dashed line?" Are our "leaders" busily poking their "leaders" into a quantum jump in the global "arms business," and more of the behaviors that are maybe survivable (for our species) when they occur at smaller scales, but are mortal when the market is the whole Flat Earth?
Are US nukes targeted at Sao Paolo and Buenos Aires (no need to even ask about Teheran and Kabul, is there?) and such places, in the event that "things go South" as the elephant stumbles for the last time, to make sure the BRICs get blown out of the human edifice, too, as the US goes down?
The truth is, like it or not, we humans are all in this together. And there's enough of everything that matters, to go all the way around the table. If, IF, we can keep the Few from grabbing all but some crumbs and then suckering the rest of us into fighting each other over the scraps.
"Can we all just get along?"
Re Madison's observation:
"No _hit?"
"time for us to take responsibility"? Yep. But the people who really catalyze and drive the "features" of our mutual present mess, know that they likely never will face any real consequences while they live, and after they are sated, spent and comfortably, well-cossetted-dead, what are the survivors going to do? Dig up the carcasses of the ones who weren't cremated, and "dishonor" them?
"Apres moi, le deluge" has a couple of interpretations: http://tradicionclasica.blogspot.com/2006/01/expression-aprs-moi-le-dluge-and-its.html Version B:
It's worth reading the article.
These people, whether shaded toward the power or the "wealth" side, know their almost total immunity to any kind of retribution, and their freedom from notions like restitution and reasonable distribution. They get to say what's "not illegal," taking full advantage of the desperate need for the rest of us to at least believe in the existence of some kind of "rule of law," and our ignorance, for the most part, of how "the law" is drafted and ignored and administered.
There is probably a set of behaviors and a species of spiritual orientation that could lead to "better," since even "good" is not so very likely. The problem is, too many of us have that little limbic-system bias toward self-pleasing and tribal adhesion, and too often the reaction to the revanchists and reactionaries is just spasmodic violence, that can so easily be turned to the next round of kleptocracy and oppression. Might it work in Egypt and Tunisia and a few other places? But then you got Hillary and the CIA and the International Post-National MIC right to hand, ready to slip in and sabotage and derail... Hard to stay on the narrow path just even to "better," let alone "good" or "great!"
How the Hell do "we" get to "taking responsibility," when we're rolling that enormous Sisyphean rock always up the hill?
But there's always hope...
Look around, Dixie-- there's lots of models to choose from. How about China? or India (in its various parts)? or Notagainistan, which is all parts and no whole? or Syria, or Iran, or the Faux Democracy in Israel?
The rulers have only to avoid stumbling over that ill-defined, usually bloody bump where the rissing curve of "oppression/kleptocracy" and crosses the falling curve of "legitimacy/pain tolerance." One-party "elections," votes registered and tracked by voter's name, billions in all kinds of BS "persuasion" under the guise of "free exercise" of the "right" of speech, midnight visits by goons and thugs, and as long as I can choose among 455 cable channels, an infinity of porn and proselytizing and pandering on the 'net, 57 varieties of ketchup'n'macaroni-and-cheese, and 537 different styles of tooth brush, well, see, I am "free enough!" not to want to rock the boat, or roll the tumbrels...
Hey, man, don't you know it's part of the Narrative? And one is not supposed to go against the Narrative, is one, at the risk of being told to "STFU" and being ostracized, marginalized, minimized...
At least there's enough documentation floating around, credible or created, to make up whatever kind and shape of "history" and "current affairs" you care to. Gives future historians and pundits something to do, helps fill the dead air with deadly dysinformation...
Kudos, Fed, for common sense and decency. One might hope that both were as virulent as the viciousness and insanity and inanity that are so horribly and futilely pandemic. Too bad so many of us can't do other than sleepwalk through our lives of unaware and enormous and mortal mutual vulnerability, without our shots of adrenalin and testosterone and heavily advertised boozes...
It hasn't maybe served "Israel" well -- it has served a very few Israeli 'niks who profit politically and monetarily from igniting, and then fanning the flames, of incipient Armageddon. Is it possible for the brute slug that is the American electorate, and the cynical, fearful Israeli electorate, to maybe start to see that they are nothing but expendable pawns and "bugsplat" in the motions of these ersatz Great Gamers? And ask themselves some "strategic" questions, like "How do the rules and structure and order of play in the Forever War make my life, and the lives of those I care for and about, any better or more secure?"
Maybe there's a "use by" date on "democracy." By the way the mold is growing on it and the way it smells, that date on the one we delude ourselves we have in America seems to be way past and gone. Look what Egyptians and Syrians and others are willing to lay out there and to suffer and resist on the way, hopefully, to invoking some better form of governance. And look at the analogue here, the "Tea Party" showing up with hip-mounted pistoleros and hip-carried assault rifles at all kinds of political events.
It will be interesting to see what happens in Tampa, in the "Event Zone" (formerly called the "Cleared Zone") around our convention center when the Reds tee up their Gong Show in a few days. Especially since our Governator, Rick "I was never indicted even though I stole $4 billion from Medicare and Medicaid" Scott, a real piece of work, denied, by instant-return letter, a request from the mayor to "override" the state law that apotheosizes rugged individualism by "overriding" any local ordinances that restrict "concealed carry" of firearms. (For the fainting set, apparently the Secret Service can, under Federalism, still "override" the Florida concealed-carry law, so there's not supposed to be loose cannons and stray bullets wandering about, inside the actual convention hall...)
That "Event Zone" is where "protestors" will be carefully tended and herded by huge police and "security" forces into little parades and demonstration pits where they can't be seen by the Delegates and the Candidates, so as not to offend the Repubs who are expected to spend tens of millions of dollars in local establishments like Mons Venus, where for $50 you can buy a hands-on, full-nude, lap dance from some of "Tampa's most beautiful girls..."
That's the genius of all the parties and their campaigns these days. Wave a vague, qualified hand in the general direction of the Tenets of the Faithful, have your surrogates lay out the deceptions, then ride on in with a lariat spin and a whoop and a big bunch of pre-packaged lies to cover the fundamental purpose of politics in America (does anyone call it that any more?): Wealth transfer, via the infinitely spoiled and despoiling thing that everybody despises but nobody wants to lose the chance of Winning Big in -- the "spoils system."
All "sides" whine about how "elections have consequences." No recent elections have done a damn thing to open the windows, air out and sanitize our Imperial outhouse, or unhorse any of the Apocalypse Riders: the MIC, the Financial Kleptocracy, the Scum-suckers of C and K Streets, Big Religion, Big Carbon, and that worst of all Wraiths, Big "Medicine." Oh, and Nine Old Men, some of whom are women, whose edifice is undergoing massive rebuilding, starting with a new Overton Window that is irretrievably, for our lifetimes, shoved to extreme right (wrong?) wing of the structure...
All those angry white folks, too stupefied by focus-grouped rhetoric and the hot-buttoning of their id(-iot')s shibboleths and chimaeras to realize they are being led by their amygdalas and gonads into realms that are toxic to them and their children, born and unborn. And the sheep so happily follow the Judas Goats, up the chutes and into the slaughterhouse...
Too bad none of the tools and tactics and strategies the "infinitely strong, end-of-history US" ever deploys are in any way suited or fit or useful to "protect" people living in places like Afghanistan from the inherent destructive elements and effects of the Great Game. Quite the contrary, of course, by simple observation of what's shakin': "bugsplat" ("collateral damage"), bribery, corruption, diversion of a quarter of the planet's Real Wealth into war toys and cozy places to hang a plethora of Brass Hats.
We got megatons of "power" that our rulers are so quick to "project," and ranks of grasping, history-illiterate hegemonists to "cheer the troops straining to perform an idiot's mission/fool's errand (IM/FE, in Milspeak) on" from the safety of our Imperial Capital, but not even ounces of decency or common sense or the kind of "intelligence" that would give those of us who pay for all this with our wealth and our blood a nickel's worth of a chance at making things safer or more "secure" or in any way better for the most of us.
It ain't just "the President's party," unless you limit that set to the ones that hang around the West Wing. It seems like maybe somewhere in the bowels of the whole MICsecuritystate thing there are people who, like maybe some of the former Israeli Game Players reported on below, have some reservations about the REAL axis of evil, the planet-wide one, the one that, by virtuoso playing on the strings and keyboards of tribalism and fear, increasingly militarizes everything, sucks up ever more of the world's wealth, invents ever-more-morbid and murderous weapons, and makes some nice bonuses and pensions off of "policies" and lobbied profit-taking.
So even some of the executive agencies are a little concerned about an Obama-gang initiative to make it easier to push ever more weapons out the doors of "our" post-national weapons manufacturers, into places where the Sneaky Petes and Foggy Bottomers and Congressional junketers and all the other pond slime are happy to stir passions and get folks ready to shoot each other or blow each other up. Making a largely innate urge almost irresistible. White House Efforts to Relax Gun Exports Face Resistance http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304868004577378421787264242.html
I do hope our host does actually address the question he raises, about just what is "the Taliban." Because the "grim- visaged patriots" have been selling the whole World War Forever schtick based, among other lies, on the fraud that "the Taliban" is some huge, organized, evil entity, a wholly owned subsidiary of Al Quaeda, dedicated to the destruction of Truth, Justice and the American Way, "jest lahk th' Commyanist Menace." Which even a cursory look at the Afghan polity ought to make patently clear is not the case...
Too bad the folks in overalls (and uniforms, apparently) just can't seem to remember the moral of that wonderful little Uncle Remus fable, "Bre'r Rabbit and the Tarbaby..." http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ug97/remus/tar-baby.html
Huh. Just in dollar terms, it costs a million bucks a year to keep a single GI in the field like that. More, if Our Troops are expected to keep doing the crap they have been doing, even salted with little acts of kindness and decency, that breeds more people who hate the US, for good reason, and want "us" the hell out of THEIR territory.
And what a wonderful set of assumptions, that 50,000 or so troops have a prayer of inoculating "Afghanistan" against becoming "Somali," let alone catching and "surgically excising" "future terrorist cells." It has never worked before, it's not working now, and gee, in spite of all the technology and wealth transfer, it ain't likely to work in the future.
Remember that little scene where the Marine officer is telling the Afghan man that he just HAS to move himself and his family back into a ghost market town emptied by insurgency, because "doctrine" requires it as part of the pageant of "pacification?" And that the GIs would "protect them?" Remember what the Afghan said? "Sir, with all your weapons and your technology, you cannot even protect yourselves. How can you expect to protect US?"
Of course if you would like to cut a check on your personal account to cover the cost of keeping those unfortunate "troops" hanging out there, well, maybe there's enough mercenaries willing to take your money... I bet even a fourth of the "Afghan Army" would be happy to sign up, for a fraction of the cost to the US economy and citizenry. Not that any of this does a damn thing to "increase security" in the world. Unless "security" just means "job security" for people in the MIC and state security apparatus...
Yeah, that was all Carter's fault. Right. Nothing to do with long-term stupid behaviors on the part of our Kleptocratic class, right? And inflation is now officially negligible, but tell that to the folks who are "benefiting" from all those trillions of permanent-war dollars by being told to work harder and longer for smaller wages, so they can try to afford Wonder Bread and mac'n'cheese and electricity and gasoline and stuff...
When Clinton left office, the national debt was on the way to extinction. When Reagan left office, billionaires' marginal tax rates were 91%. Got a smart remark about that?
You want CREEPY? How about THIS? "Mitt," "Mormon," "Mohammed," and "Muslim," ALL START WITH THE LETTER "M!!!!!!" AS DO "MONEY," AND "MILITARISM," AND MIC!!!!!!! AND YOU COULD GO ON AND ON AND ON!!!! WHY DOESN'T EVERYBODY SEE??????
The thing about seemingly cautious, 11-dimensional triangulation is that nobody who votes can begin to understand, or care, about all those careful nuances and esoteric talking points, which really ought to be called "talking dulls..."
And of course behind the curtain, the Imperializing and financialization go on, and on, and on...
Yeah, everyone can see that Obama and the people around him and the state security apparatus and Power Projectors he nominally commands are just more-peaceful-loving fellas. Not at all unclear about The Real Nature Of The World As They Insist It Must Be, or lost in visions of hegemony or at least protection of profits from the transaction of petroleum bidness, aimed like a laser target designator at increasing "democracy" and "stability" in the world, making life better for the people who actually do the work that creates the wealth that lets them play their Great Game?
And review the bidding for me: When has Obama "All options are on the table" Tough Guy, mover of carrier groups into positions of mutually increased hair-trigger vulnerability and de-stabilization, sender-off of reconnaissance and armed drones, "finding"-signer on many post-legal "covert actions" involving homicides, approver of our own Gulag, signer of NDAA and so much other post-constitutional-republican legislation, sponsor or at least encourager of Stuxnet and similar behaviors that OUR generals flatly call "acts of war" if aimed at THEM, ever been guilty of "advancing a more-peaceful [whatever that can possibly mean] position"?
Speaking of side-tracking and distraction, sir... "the unexamined life..." and all that.
It must be so comforting to have such a nice complete narrative to explain why all the elements of the "policy" that constitutes visible and less-visible and invisible activities carried on by the MIC-state security apparatus on behalf of us "citizens" is just hunky-dory, resolvable to a nice binary "choice:" "Aggressively pursue these people (whoever "these people" happens to be) or withdraw. Too bad it has to be Neville Chamberlain or Sgt. Rock. Really too bad that our fearless (because immune to consequences) leaders and their apologists don't have a whit of an inkling of an impression of an idea of how to do anything different than all the crap that has failed so miserably before.
Bear in mind that the CIA and other sneaky pete organizations paid by American black accounts have done a whole lot of fomenting and training of "terrorists," in many different countries, who have gone on to execute "terrorist" actions in a lot of other countries. Ever heard of "blowback?"
Seems that I recall the CIA gifting Afghan warlords millions of dollars and lots of tactical training and weapons, on the way to having over 4000 US GIs and "UN forces" and a whole lot of just plain Afghan folks dead and in the ground.
Just a suggestion: If you think about it a little more widely, there are other behaviors open to "us" than your binary choice. And if you google the news, looking for "police" and "terrorist," you will find that the vast majority of "terrorist plots" are intercepted by plain old police work, often on tips from the Muslim community, rather than by drone strikes and Special Ops dudes double-tapping "evil towelheads" in their sleep...
We should all be so wise as the Experienced Players and their spokespeople, who would have us forget about all the monstrosities that they and their chums have, are, and henceforth will be, committing in the name, the holy name, of "freedom and independence for all." But actually in aid of that ongoing wealth transfer from a "real economy" to what they got in mind for us next...
Maybe some of us have read this little link: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2012/04/george_w_bush_and_torture_america_s_highest_officials_are_responsible_for_the_enhanced_interrogation_of_prisoners_.html
Naw, "we" don't need to search abroad for monsters -- we got a whole shipload of them, home-grown fellas and gals who know that The Purpose of Torture is Torture, and The Purpose of Power is Power.
So "we" are assisting the progress of the Arab Spring? Or at least pretending that "we" are? On the evidence of burning up some munitions inventory on Gadaffyduck's force structure? Gee, I wonder if there's anything other than a bald assertion that might support that statement? Since the pretty much entire game plan for the New American Century and ol' Dulles and that Kermit Roosevelt guy and the rest has been to pretty much make sure that guys like the Shah, and Batista, and Savimbi, and de Klerk, and Marcos, and Netanyahu, and Karzai, and Somoza (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contras) and so on, rule the various roosts, has pretty much been, where it's even visible, a blanket refutation of that notion.
I'm sure it's just me, but looking over this and the rest of the most recent posts here, and cnbc.com and nakedcapitalism.com and military.com and redstates.com and FT.com and my local "newspaper" and economist.com and all that, oh, and aljazeeraenglish and Ha'aretz, it sure sort of looks to me, from that little sample, that we humans are, you know, like, fer shur, OMG, totally FU#$ED.
Every vector I can perceive points in that direction, not the least the so-called Right: Romneyisms are right up there, the appearance that if elected, he will drive the feudalization and Gilding of everything further, faster and higher, and out-Obama Obama and predecessors in war-izing everything that's not Hoovered up by the various species of Vampire Squids who are becoming the dominant species in our warming, acidifying ocean. (How the hell did this sorry assortment of smug, self-gratifying drumheads ever pull off the enormous coup of getting themselves labeled as "RIGHT?")
Some cry out, "Wake up!" as if most of us might somehow rouse ourselves from torpor and a long, accelerating plunge into nightmare, and Take Some Action that might Bring About Healthy Change. Me? I think I'd rather go actually, quietly to sleep, perchance to dream of Something Better, which at least for me would not be an IPO for some new dot.com phenom, or some "successful post-legal Hellfire mission," or assembly of that mortal virus that might give one the power of death over all the rest of us, or any of the other sh!t that's shaking.
Some of us are "sharp," and rise in little thermals and vortexes in the soup, and "prosper." But collectively, tied as we are to our little tribal bits of "wisdom" and "revealed truth" and all the complexities of profit and vengeance and sex and sorrow, "we" ain't got a prayer, even a Mormon long-game prayer, of much of anything better.
Welcome to Anomie, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomie, that wild cousin of Entropy... To Arms! To Arms!
One wonders: do the Post-Nationals, the folks who have gotten very rich off setting up these so very profitable "confrontations," and carving up the carcass of what once was "America" and now is seldom even referred to as "the United States," give, or even have to give, a hoot that they've set up the conditions to destroy the dollar as the reserve currency, dissolve the Consuming Class as a sustainable entity, and demolish (albeit behind some nice wall hangings and other art work) all the mythical bits of what we used to pride ourselves on under the rubrics "rule of law" and "democracy" and "freedom," shibboleths without roots in reality though they were?
Why are so many of us still willing to believe in the existence and specialness and virtue of Our Nation, when the reality looks, from a not very great distance, a lot more like what's left after the "humane killer," http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17767661, shatters the steer's brainstem with a steel rod and the quivering corpse is dismantled in its trip through the slaughterhouse? Filet mignon and exotic frippery trimmings on the one plate, "lean finely textured beef (LFTB) and boneless lean beef trimmings (BLBT)" -- aka "pink slime" -- on another, nothing at all on a whole lot more.
And back in 1988, when the hair plugs were still freshly planted in that pre-bald pate, ol' Joe Biden had a little problem coming up with original material. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history_lesson/2008/08/the_write_stuff.html But who remembers stuff like that?
His current imago, if not pristine, sure has been puffed and buffed and blow-dried into a neo-comb-over, marking him as a Serious Person(a).
We are being had, folks, and why are do many of us just insist on staying deeply "invested" in this fraud-raddled market?
But see, according to the Holy Doctrine of the Unilaterally Prosecuted War on Holy Terror, anyone killed by the Holy Action of the Holy Drone Drivers is, by simple Holy Definition, a Terrorist, Insurgent, Militant, Guerrilla, Bandit, Revolutionary, ENEMY. Or, in the places that Decent Ordinary People who tacitly support and enjoy this stuff, what the Holy Dudes and Battlespace Managers refer to, with a smirk, as "bugsplat."
So Legally, d'you see, in the New Imperial Order, what those Holy Dudes in the Holy Trailers are doing is the Lord's Work, by definition, since Our Holy Guys write the definitions, and the dogma, and the supravening Law of Projection of the Holy Power.
G_d's Work, d'you see? Even devout Muslims ought to be able to see that...
So Iran The Evil One, the Great Reification of the Moment, has a back-engineerable drone to work from. It ain't like the Experienced people in Iran who play the Great Game can't go out and buy drones, and missiles, and Nukular Weapons Technology, from Chinese or NKor or Paki or Israeli fronts or a dozen other sources, including nominal "American" war toy makers and bidnesses "just trying to make a buck."
The drone thing is just one tiny piece in the jigsaw of little consumptive technologisticalisms and initiatives and opportunities that we humans at one scale think are just so peachy and profit-centering and advantageous, but at another scale, well... Put the pieces together, if you can, and the puzzle looks ever more strongly like Armageddon, or near enough that the survivors might envy the dead...
Too bad Hollywood could not produce a better cautionary tale, a myth that might resonate in all the studiously empty skulls out there in FOXland, and maybe result in some actual, real, meaningful, large-scale, Hope-driven Change, than "The Day The Earth Stood Still." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Earth_Stood_Still_%282008_film%29
And too bad that "Soylent Green" is so, you know, 1973 polyester cheesy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_green
And too bad that so many comfortable Old White Farts are so thoroughly Superglued to their BarcaLoungers and HDTV and SUVs, and that they so insistently and effectively have their Yard Keepers applying heavy doses of the social and economic equivalent of Roundup to any bit of actual spring green that peeks out of the cracks in the asphalt...
We ain't the only plague species, but we sure can feel good about being the biggest, baddest, very most worst one...
The military is, as Smedley Butler so accurately and honestly observed, nothing but a racket, as evidenced by the economies of Egypt and Libya and Myanmar and Afpakinagistania and Rooshia and Israel and most African countries, and of course the biggest and worst and most prototypical example is our own USA! USA! USA! We're Number One! Or at least our Fearless Lead-from-the-Rear-ers are -- leaving the rest of us just enough of the notion, not the actuality of course, that we have "Freedom!" and "Liberty!" and "Justice!" to keep us from seeing how far the cancer has progressed... Just enough to keep the rest of us happily creating the wealth they siphon, the wealth that lets them live their wet dreams of Command and Control and Conquest.
Back to the barracks? I wonder if that notion ever occurs to OUR Barack...
You ain't ignorant at all, my fellow American -- you see pretty clearly what REALLY is, and not what they tell us "is."
I kind of don't think it's got anything to do with "conspiracy," TB. It's the nature of the whole complex clumsy inbred incompetent institution itself that chaps me. And I suppose the nature of the "human," too -- the knowledge that we could do so much better, at least what I consider better, as in safer and kinder and closer to that Golden Rule thing, and the pretty-much-certainty that we, the top-of-the-food-chain, peak-predator species, won't.
Maybe someone would like to make a case how a geometrically growing "Military Solution" to Everything will lead us or our grandkids into some better future? Or how the McClellans and McChrystals and MacArthurs and Westmorelands and all the huge ponderous inflexible bureaucracy and Giant Wealth Vacuum behind them, and their equivalents across the planet, are actually providing "security" for the critters who make the actual real-money wealth that they get to "deploy?"
But thanks for the response. And I hope you can find it in your spirit to forgive my little rant. It occurs to me, at least, that there is a big picture, here, behind all the little local tactical and pseudo-strategic and Grand Doctrinal pieces that are mostly too much trouble to assemble, since putting one's mind to the task kind of involves setting aside all the false fronts and tribal loyalties and personal interests that drive the present mess. A fourth of the world's wealth and a huge chunk of consumable resources (not counting all the proprietary scams like the Egyptian and Israeli and AfPakistani and Chinese military, etc., have racketeered their way into,) all that growing pile of wealth going into the grasping, clumsy hands of the Warlords.
An Israeli Experienced Player recently warned that the "Iranian Problem" might end up, like has happened many other times in history, creating a Pretty Awful Scenario by some tiny bit of "inadvertence," a typo in some "intelligence summary" or "strategic plan" or tripwire bit of What's Shaking in the Neocon Playbook. And every day, millions of humans grind away at creating, for various "very good reasons," more tripwires and hair-trigger mechanisms attached to ever more complex and out-of-control doomsday devices.
What's the end game look like, to you?
[sic]
One of those "things" that everybody just KNOWS is "indisputably true."
Weel, maybe if one defines "security" in a rather cramped sense -- like maybe the way the 5th Fleet provides "job security" for what, maybe 50-60,000 people, especially Admiral-class dreadnoughts needing a nice set of quarters and a comfortable wardroom and lots of uniformed dudes (do they still preferentially fill those slots with Filipinos?) to hold their coats and chairs and fawn on and feed them lavishly. So they can be in top form for all the Asymmetric Power Projection Drills that go along with the Mission Statement:
Does that not sound all really well thought out, and, like, you know, "necessary," whatever that is supposed to mean?
Oh, and it gives the liberal-arts grads an opportunity to test their Psych 101 and Creative Writing skills by coming up with catchy, obfuscating names and acronyms for "operations," like "Operation Iraqi
LiberationFreedom." Because "O.I.F" is less obvious than "O.I.L." And how's that "operation" worked out, again? Defined as a "success," mission accomplished, but in the parlance of the surgeon who said "oops," the patient still is left half-dead, on the kind of infinitely expensive life support that "conservatives" would deny to most of us Americans...Call it what it is. This huge enterprise, another part of Gen. Smedley Butler's "racket," steams on in the actual service of a bunch of all the silent, venal goals that actually lie behind that quaint notion that the US military, out on far foreign adventures, is "protecting our freedoms," another nauseating shibboleth, while turning huge amounts of real wealth into dispensable munitions, guided mostly by notions and systems that have proved, so many times now, to be foolish, fraudulent and vain.
Today's bit of "milbabble:" http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/jfq_pubs/jfq0805.pdf. The received wisdom used to be that the largest dinosaurs had to grow several "brains" to manage their lumbering locomotion and other activities, a requirement dictated by the speed of nerve cell transmission. By the time the Head Brain perceived the cliff or tar sands and issued the "Whoa!" command, and the butt brain said "Say what?", the butt end was still driving forward with all the power of the rump and hind leg muscles (and a lot of inertia and momentum.) But the Networked Battlespace, and all its interoperable constituents and sub-tasks and offshoots and open-ended, metastatic Doctrines and Strategies and infinite stream of New Technologies and Really Cool Counter-counter-counter-counter...threat Weapons, is NOTHING like a Diplodocus, now is it? Ask Marine General Riper how that works: http://www.rense.com/general64/fore.htm Now there's "security" for you, complete with post-hoc spinning on a planetary scale.
I wonder when the next K-T event is due? I'm sure the militarists have plans to emerge Victorious... somehow. If only by hanging on, somehow, to the power to define "Victory..."
Resistance to all that futility is, of course, futile.
Actually, don't people generally kind of think #1 is #1? And my guess is that since probably 10 times as many of His Majesty's finest died by disease and accident as died "by the sword" or bullet, that's the reason for the phrasing... though of course it is a much greater "honor" to be hacked to death by a Khanda or Yatagan than to succumb to the marthambles or a quartain or malarial fever...
Want a little look into another episode in the infinite history of "military apropexpropriation?" Take a look back at New South Wales, where British Armyites "made their fortunes" and ascended to the ranks of nobility by virtue of convict-slave labor and diddling with the public purse and the, er, "rule by law." http://www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au/lawlink/supreme_court/ll_sc.nsf/vwFiles/Spigelman220108.pdf/$file/Spigelman220108.pdf
Anyone annoyed that the military beast pulls this same stunt, over and over, behind the fraud that they are "protecting our freedoms" and "providing for our security?" It ain't like the militaries in the US, the UK, Japan, Afpak and elsewhere are any less a bunch of blood-sucking parasites...
As if that is at all likely.
Two of my favorite reads are "First In: How the CIA Spearheaded The War On Terror In Afghanistan," by Gary Schroen, and "Where Men Win Glory," by Jon Krakauer. Both happen, more by happenstance than design, to highlight the enormous gulf between what "policy-makers," and "doers and shakers," perceive (or act upon in their own short-term personal and tribal interests despite perceptions,) and what really is happening in the places where they project their seminal power and send in the clowns with all those shrink-wrapped blocks of used, non-sequential $100 bills and carloads of Viagra and other presents to "buy loyalty," in a place where there is no such thing. And both also highlight the inevitable and terminal failures of even the Smartest of the Smartest Brass and their attendant jackals to actually accomplish anything that makes the world, let alone the US, more "secure."
But of course these A-hats write the artful after-action reports, occasionally "testify" to friendly parts of Congress, control the embedded journalists and enough of the leakage of reality to cover themselves until they retire, and have created such an enormous Juggernaut for themselves to ride on that there really is no chance in Hell that "we" can do any different, let alone any better. Until the Juggernaut runs out of crushable bodies to grease its "progress," or drops over one of the many cliffs above the black holes of history.
Maybe that same logic applies to the financialization of the "world economy," all those quadrillions of "notional value dollars," and our TBTFs here at home, and all the subsidies and regulatory protections that continue for the critters who manufacture the demand for all that carbondioximethanization machinery that "we" are told we yet again can just stay addicted to, come Hell or high water, because the crap won't really hit the fan until our n(great)grandkids inherit the earth, and enraged, dig up our bones to abuse, since we will be long gone, free from retribution, unobliged to make restitution...
Since, too, the "start grants" for all the industries, coal, steel, railroads, petroleum (that for one gets to take the stuff it sells back to us from public rocks, a "commons" if you will, and gee, pay a pittance for the leases and then often not even pay the lease money and hide the amount they actually extract and short-change on what they do pay, and of course the Horizon mess will never be "paid for" by BP) that fuel and drive our enormous consumption are long since "sunk costs..."
But not to worry, all the muscle is on the side of the takers and users and the rest, and isn't it hilarious that a few people "live simply, that others may simply live," while those who "can afford it" use millions of gallons of potable water on their acres of estate plantings and "water features" and air-condition 50,000-sq-ft "homes," etc.? Whatabuncha suckers!
The very word "law" in this context is the sickest kind of deceit.
There is no "law" -- maybe a few normative statements of discouragement of certain kinds of semi-universally abhorrent acts (if they are done to "your" tribe, that is, as opposed to "the enemy," against whom anything goes. And there's any number of apologists or outright denialists to certify that this "atrocity" or that one is just either the Fog (or Pink Mist) of War, or guess what, "Those rules do not apply to us on accounta first, we got SOVEREIGNTY, second, we SAY so, and third, whatchagonnadoaboutit?"
The only folks that get hailed up before the court of world opinion are a few more universally (sort of) detested individuals. The rest is convenient pretense, occasionally usable as makeweight for critiques of the actions of others, or excuses for doing what the ruler wants to do anyway -- like "pre-emptive war," and now what looks like "pre-revenge" and similar sick speciousisms.
There's no right unless there's a remedy, no "law" unless there's some enforcement mechanism. And to the folks who have parsed the video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0, go spend some time on Youtube where so many grim "patriots" are just yukking up this and other images of Americans doing it, "lighting up" batches of "hajjis" and "terrorists" and "insurgents" and all the convenient other labels that bear zilch relation to what sure seems apparently to be "atrocities" on unsuspecting civilians in far too many of the little night-vision or full color helmet-cam clips.
Yah, can you spell "Henry Potter?" What "banksters" think of him: http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/top-5/2008/12/23/Was-Mr-Potter-Right-After-All/
How about "The Great Mortgage Train Robbery Settlement?" http://reason.org/blog/show/mortgage-settlements-servicing-stan
Or just about anything that Yves Smith shines her little flashlight on?
Yeah, just let's sit around and wait for whatever happens to happen, and then turn to each other and say "What the heck happened?"
To the extent that "public opinion" means anything, and of course there's not always deep wisdom to be found in the polling of crowds, failure to participate, and dumbly taking advice not to "speculate" and just wait for 20 years in the hope that some part of the great Game might belatedly and long past time for any effective acts of retribution against the Kermit Roosevelts and suchlike, kind of leaves the doors wide open for every little sneak and strategicocidal SOB to keep nudging the world a little closer to the precipice.
All for the best of reasons, right? And the rest of us should forget millenia of perfidy and fraud and mayhem, and just trust that the powers that Be have it all under control, right?
And "the UN position"? What kind of smoke is that? It sure seems like some of the US/Israeli neocons don't actually have a "negotiating position," other than "unconditional surrender and sign over your oil to us.
If only it could be taught in school, or added to the water supply, or spread via a tailored virus or something...
This might be closer to the current and long-standing reality: Biologist E.O. Wilson on Why Humans, Like Ants, Need a Tribe. http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/04/01/biologist-e-o-wilson-on-why-humans-like-ants-need-a-tribe.html
Too bad our tribes have killed off the presence of people like Walter Kronkite, and marginalized Bill Moyers and their equivalents across the globe... http://www.tmz.com/2009/07/17/walter-cronkite-dies/#.T4moVNmwHKc
"And that's the way it is, Saturday, April 14, 2012."
"Militias:" what hides behind that comfortably neutral word again? There's a fraction of every population, it seems to me, that's closer to the breaching of all social bonds, to the kind of "get it on!" impulse that leads to piles of corpses, or mounds of freshly turned dirt to be forensically excavated after some kind of "normalcy" is eventually established.
My question to all the great thinkers and Experienced Players (I just saw Tom Friedman authoritatively explain current US electoral politics and the state of the rest of the whole Currently Important World in a 3-minute MSM interview) is how to erect structures and conditions to at least make Kosovo and Sabra-Shatila and the bleeding neighborhoods of Homs less likely in the future. Stuff like this (Warning: Disturbing content. Or maybe secretly exciting, to some of us...) http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/kosovo/Kosovo-Photographs.htm
Given human nature, and the intense pleasure and immense profit (the precursor and pre-condition to other pleasures for the profited) derived by that set of humans from killing the screaming or apathetic, and helpless with assegai and club and 7.62mm bullet, and a history of slaughter as long as your arm and opposable thumb, who's going to eschew the No Quarter killing, to surrender (rather than yield to, or run to and embrace) the impulses to do death unto others, who then will do back?
Yes, stop the slaughter, and stop it now, but just exactly how does "the world community," that oxymoronical reification, go about it? When so many of us and our leaders are "invested" in more of the same?
There must be other, maybe longer-time-horizon, tools that can be brought to bear on cultures, something other, and more healthily inventive, than carbon-fiber string dragged across the nodes of the power grid to blow it out, Apaches doing the too often misguided-missile thing, and pleading with other RISK players not to keep selling weapons to one set or the other (while keeping one's own clandestine armamentarium wide open for business.)
There's war hammers, but there are carpenter's and roofer's and jeweler's hammers too...
Of course, there is a lot of debate about the whole imbroglio between US and Japanese interest-declarers and government leaders, as I recall, and a lot of opinion, and even scholarship, at odds with the "US good-Japs bad" versions. Of course, it's all just about power, resources and dominion -- resolved and resolving in many random ways.
Pearl Harbor planning "long predated" the August 1941 embargo? By what, a couple of months? An action facilitated by US negotiating behavior that let Tojo ascend? But let us stay with the comfortable explanations... easier on the conscience.
By the way, I see CNN is touting the possibility that The Iranian Navy May Threaten The US East Coast!!!!! Oooooooh! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_Uhamn2wvc And maybe of more concern, if the US/Israel consortium does get something started, or if by the inadvertences that sometimes "start things" in situations like this, might be that maybe our vaunted technological and firepower superiority might not "git 'er done" before the equivalent of a Pearl Harbor's worth of US Navy ships, including carriers this time, ends up making new habitat on the bottom of the Persian Gulf. Which ought to concern even all the "patriots" who could give a rat's a$$ less about all the other, "lesser" people that might get killed and maimed, as stakes in this hand of Great Game Poker.