The thing that "Americans" know, the ones who Do Business with those "friends," those serial dictators (often involving delivery of huge amounts of weapons or the, shall we say, profitable extraction of what in other times would be "common resources,") and the people in government and the military who facilitate that Doing of Business, is that comfortable awareness and certainty that there are no personal consequences for them when countries fracture or collapse, or when ordinary people have finally had totally enough and do the chaotic and uncontrollable and almost unthinkable thing -- taking to the streets, and finding out how to gather weapons, and how to do tactics and make war on themselves. With Jackals and sneaky-Petes skulking around, looking for openings to advance their rulers' particular interests, or maybe just for the fun de-stabilizing things.
The people who set all the often-inevitable chaos up, sitting there at Langley and in Foggy Bottom and various offices and other imperial seats of power in DC, and in the top stories of corporate phalluses across the globe, have "people" to tell them the time, watch the crowds for "security threats" to their perfect persons, hold their coats and doors, deliver those perfect out-of-season flowers and fruit that the plutocrats whimsically call for, and tell them in immeasurable little ways every moment of every day how special and important and deserving and blessed they are. And the evidence is all around them: the private jets, the huge piles of money, the estates, the raw power to "make things happen" in their favor.
So there they squat, in their penthouses and paneled or glittering, glassy offices, enfolded in the conviction of their Entitlement To Everything, sneering and snickering at the Mob, most of whom are suckers enough to accept the perverse re-definition of "entitlement" into what Mittsy Romney and Babyface Ryan and the Koch-Rovers have made it, a pejorative to further denigrate the Mob's image of the Other.
It's not "countries" that have done this crap for millenia -- the Roman 1% had estates a long way from Rome to escape to, the Bourbons snuck off to Prussia, the Nazis de-camped to Argentina, the Kuomintang stole China's heritage and invaded and enserfed Formosa, all with nice portfolios and cartloads of expensive art and other portable treasures. National loyalty and that thing variously called "patriotism" are for suckers, just another myth and tool to manipulate the mopes.
We in America are not "the world's policemen:" more accurately, we are the world's Syndicate, collecting protection money, suborning governments where our actors are smart enough to do so, carrying water and manure for people who are smart enough to manipulate our thugs into "enforcement" of their interests, picking fights with people we are too clumsy and big to "defeat." Cops are supposed to be about maintaining order and respect for the law. That clearly ain't what our uniformed and plainclothes boots-on-the-ground are up to, at all.
And in the meantime, the Few live their upper-story existences, immune to the messes they make, the death and destruction and despair they cause, able to leap from tall buildings here to tall buildings somewhere else like Dubai, at the hint of approaching retribution.
Gee, there's this place called "Nacerima" where there's an unruly, disparate, multi-ethnic, religiously divided, angry and heavily-armed population, and a rapidly weakening set of "traditions" that used to rely on common myths about democracy and opportunity 'n stuff, to keep it all from flying apart into little secessionist units in places like "Saxet." One wonders if Bill thinks there's an argument for a strong, powerful Naceriman leader (what he implies is "ruler," not "leader," like a Saddam or a Bashad or Shah or Ayatollah, with the attendant ascendancy of one of the disparate groups over everyone else, and I bet he would expect to end up being part of the Ascenders) to keep it all, what's his phrase, "in check"?
That "in-check-ism" sure seems to be the central the notion that the Experienced Players in the Great Game are constantly working toward implementing, world-wide. It's so much easier to "do business" with a kleptocratic dictator, now isn't it?
No reason to worry about or be wary of a Zionist Likudnik with not "a" bomb, but maybe 400 of them, and an "enrichment" and actual bomb-making program that is operating with a pretty good head of steam right now.
The thing about all of this human-behavior, who's-a-bigger-liar stuff is that You Never Know, which is the fundamental fact that all the pot-stirrers and fomenters of conflict rely on when reminding us that You Can't Believe A Word Anyone Says. Of course, there are Experts who can parse the flood of words and, authoritatively, tell the rest of us what is or isn't in the minds of Mullahs and Masters of the Universe. And since Our Fellow American Rulers Who Would Never Lie To Us, or Our Allies the Israelis Who Would Never Lie To Us, say that the Evil Iranians are Up To Something , at least it must be more likely than not. Right? I mean, after all there were Weapons of Mass Destruction all over Iraq, right? and then there's stuff like this to read and try to figure out, when it comes to that IAEA thing and the biases that Prof Cole has dared to report here in the past: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/22/nuclear-watchdog-iran-iaea
Good luck figuring it all out. Following the money helps, but you got to account for all that tribal and power-driven stuff too...
Why does it seem that the "questions" about Iranian intentions re becoming a Mouse That Roared are mostly generated by people whose job it is to sow dissension, create fear and uncertainty, and do stuff like tell Yellowcake tales and scare us with fraudulent Bomber Gaps, Missile Gaps and Windows of Vulnerability that we might fall into or get thrown out of? And that so much of what our Experienced Players and Great Gamers claim to perceive in the intentions of Others is just projection of their own baser, scarier and more hateful wishes and dark midnight thoughts and secret plans? Coupled with really strenuous efforts to make sure that anyone foolish enough to try to relate to others with decency and honor and trustworthiness gets a lot of hard, painful lessons in how the worst of us work and how the rest of us have to play the same game or get killed, or worse, creating that ol' self-fulfilling prophecy thing?
It's a good thing, Bill, that probably nobody at all gives a hoot about what positions you (or I, of course, and my imaginary 3x5 cards) take or assume on any issue or point or argument, on matters minute or of Great Import.
And I hope you will be honest enough to keep salt and pepper shakers ready to hand, should future events reveal that any of your Jovian pronouncements prove to be, like, incorrect. I've got mine, a Fiestaware rooster and chicken inherited from my grandparents... (I was unaware that one was supposed to actually eat the egg, scrambled or over easy or hard, that one found on one's face after saying something that proved not to be so. I thought that little gustatory figure of speech was structured around eating one's hat that one had been found guilty of talking through.)
And guess what? There's a bunch of careful scholarship that concludes that all that "delivering" and "smiting" stuff was composed as a self-serving oral tradition, vetted and parsed and finally inscribed, by a bunch of patriarchal tribal leaders, whose opposite (and losing) numbers, the tribal chieftains and high priests of all those Hittites and Amorites and Jebusites, etc., that were put to the sword or enslaved by the Israelites, had composed similar traditions and texts with the same import, and them as the winners. And of course the KJV is only one of hundreds of renditions of the words, and people still argue vigorously and acrimoniously over the punctuation, the stresses, the manifold translations of the many words.
Is verse 22 the authority for the way the Likudniks are dealing with Gaza and the West Bank? "And the Lord thy God will put out those nations before thee by little and little: thou mayest not consume them at once, lest the beasts of the field increase upon thee"? One might guess the balance of that selection justifies and gives divine sanction to all the rest? When do the Israelites get to consume the US, or is the US not one of those "nations?" Might want to ask the Armageddonists among the Christians, the ones who are busily trying to bring about the end of the world so they can come into their version of 72 versions and endless ripe dates, what they think about that...
Does the G_d of Love trump the YWH of Abraham? Just asking.
Aw, c'mon, Perfesser -- ANYthing is possible, isn't it? Per that great purveyor of truthiness, Donald "You go to war with the Army you've got" Rumsfeld,
[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know.
So there! You see? Having experienced decades of Our Own Sacred Government lying to us in things large and small, having performed chemical and biological and radiological experiments on us mopes, trading weapons for hostages and using drug money to fund CIA-driven destabilizations whole denying everything or being unable to recall, conspiring to set in motion the nuclear arming of Israeli crazies, there are so many things we don't know that we don't know that, c'mon, it is POSSIBLE that those sneaky bastards in Iran have a huge underground nukeular weapons program, and ICBMs and cargo containers and truck bodies fitted with nukular devices that are just moments away from Destroying Our Ally Who Spies On Us, Sneers At Us, Takes Our Money And Pokes All Of Muslimia In The Eye Every Chance They Get, and of course blowing up the Pentagram, G_d between us and evil!!!!!
Our minds are made up, our limbic systems are spinning up to warp speed, and the drums of war are hammering in our brains and loins. Don't be confusing us with no damn FACTS, fer Jaysus' sake!!!
At the risk of incurring Mr. Bill's withering Olympian disdain, here's a little snippet of history that might have a bearing on one's evaluation and judgment of the nature of US Gamesmanship in this sick world. I would guess that Mr. Bill would discount it as just another conspiracy theory, of course, because it implicates some of the Great Game Narrative Heroes in some pretty skullduggerous acts, and of course these people NEVER would have stooped so low as to "go around" the US State Department and President to make a slick deal with a Towelheaded Terrorist, or trade hostages for weapons and cash, or divert Iranian money into arming terrorist insurgents in efforts to overthrow democratically elected governments in places like Nicaragua, or any stuff like that. Or, like, overthrow the Mossadegh democratically elected government of Iran in favor of a dictator to "our" liking, one who would undo the nationalization of the British and "American" oil extractors there. And other stuff, of course.
But here goes. It was referred to as the "October Surprise," and depending on where your loyalties and identities lie, and in a froth of conflicting testimony and paper trails, you might accept or reject the notion that Republican operatives and others who wanted Carter "out of there" cut a little deal with Ayatollayouso Khomeini to hang on to those 52 US Embassy hostages until after the 1980 election, to help ensure the Right outcome of the Reagan Revolution. Stuff like that NEVER happens in the real world, now does it? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_surprise_conspiracy_theory
Have at it, Mr. Bill, dig into your store of condescension and supercilious lingo -- this running impeachment gag seems to have become a personal thing for you.
And by the way, there are of course erudite others who have different, wildly different, and divergent, "explanations" for what happened to the economy of the US from, say, 1976 to, say, the present. And, of course, there's some objective evidence as to who got rich, and who got screwed, and what if anything was done to effect and affect the stability, vel non, of the human part of the planet during that time.
Hey, don'tcha know love, like Heaven, is boring? Can't begin to hold human interest the way anger and hatred and violence and even despair do.
Check out the lengthy, detailed, imaginative, voluptuous, evocative prose of those chroniclers of Badness, John Milton ("Paradise Lost") and Dante Alighieri ("The Inferno," and the rest of the "Divine Comedy",) and the many current action, fantasy, sci-fi, "history" and other titles in Barnes&Nobles, and the nature of TV entertainment and all those scare and screech and vampire and zombie movies, not to mention "Grand Theft Auto" and "Call of Duty" and Grimms' Fairy Tales. Even the "Left Behind" stuff -- the evil guys and gals are a lot more interesting than the insipid heroes, and even the Angels are violent warriors in a zero-sum game where you would think a merciful and all-mighty G_d would be able and willing to put an instant end to the fighting. Just like in Ireland or the Mideast or Notagainistan. Everybody hug, now, and kiss and make up...
Evil inspires, attracts, seduces, enlivens, encourages, incites, elevates. Who wants to sit on a cloud, strumming a harp, singing infinitely eternal paeans to G_d Almighty? Even 72 virgins and all the ripe dates you can eat are going to pale after a while. The best prose and poetry comes out of something very different than beatific and wishful and squishy visions. Which should tell us a lot about ourselves as a species, and if the learning is used well, maybe arm us against always succumbing to our limbic natures. Maybe figure out how to incorporate the Golden Rule into our lives as well as our lip service.
Not bloody likely, of course...
The other stuff is too much fun. Think about the words of Winston Churchill: "There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result." In context: http://fisticmystic.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/being-shot-at-without-result/ Ask one who waterboards or sends electric shocks to the genitals of a helpless person, or beats a grandmother holding a placard bloody and senseless with a baton, or pickles off a Hellfire or three into a group of "militants" and then several more into the people who follow the humane impulse to give aid and succor to the survivors of the first attack, how it works...
And nobody says much about how the Likudniks are an existential threat, a real and present and current existential threat, to the Palestinians. Once they've squeezed enough wealth and blood out of them, and displaced them from any place they live so as to invoke that old fraud, "possession is nine-tenths of the law..."
Ah, but our embassies are Sacred US Soil. Aren't they?
Isn't that what the treaties and all that stuff say?
Contrary to popular belief, diplomatic missions do not enjoy full extraterritorial status and are not sovereign territory of the represented state.... Rather, the premises of diplomatic missions remain under the jurisdiction of the host state while being afforded special privileges (such as immunity from most local laws) by the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. Diplomats themselves still retain full diplomatic immunity, and (as an adherent to the Vienna Convention) the host country may not enter the premises of the mission without permission of the represented country. The term "extraterritoriality," therefore, is often used in this broader sense when applied to diplomatic missions.
And hey, our Sneaky Petes would not be overthrowing democratically elected governments and sowing instability and propping up penny-ante dictators who happen to be Our Guys without Really Good Reasons that involve Preserving Our Sacred Way of Life, would they? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermit_Roosevelt,_Jr.
Details, details -- they fit so poorly with the Narrative...
Good job, Joe, conflating the many dead bodies of "bugsplattery" with the relatively tiny number of what we used to call "terrorists" that happen to get killed by Hellfires. But then this is all about Us versus Them, then having to be a way bigger population than is any kind of threat to our security and way of life...
And of course this situation, this eruption of anger and a bunch of other emotions by people who have been the negative beneficiaries of US imperialism (which goes back to the last years of the 19th century) is simply incomprehensible to us open-handed, generous, tolerant, progressive Americans (with a not so subtle subtext of "Them Wogs won't get away with treating US like that -- nuke 'em back to the stone age, where they belong!)
And maybe the whole propaganda-imposed analytics, of how it's them irrational evil Muslims being too sensitive about their backward religion, is just kind of, like, wrong, and people all around the planet are finally fed up with kleptocracy and the sending in of the Marines to "protect US Interests." Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.
Yeah, like people in this country are so truly concerned about incursions and intrusions into, and impositions and erosions of any of the Bill of Rights, except maybe a warped interpretation of the Second Amendment. You got any idea what is in the NDAA, the Patriot Act, stuff like that? Or what the various police departments in America are up to, not to mention a whole bunch of federal and state agencies?
And now people who have little axes to grind, little explosions to detonate, want to hide their games behind the moribund bodies of our "Founding Fathers..."
To go along with the notion that humans as a group can't really do much better than we are currently doing, there always being miserable skulch like WhoeverBasileActuallyIs and his backers, maybe you-all remember another effort to light the fuses at home and abroad: That 2005 video production that actually had some "production values," if none of the other kind, and won some awards at right-wing film festivals, Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsession:_Radical_Islam%27s_War_Against_the_West It was quite an ugly surprise to have that fall out of my Sunday newspaper, here in St. Pete, FL.
It's even got a home of its own: http://www.obsessionthemovie.com/ And of course if you tune in to the "Christian" TV channels, Judeo-Christian even, there's a whole lot more of that kind of stuff out there: "Who cares if the planet dies, as long as MY kind prevail or are the last to die!"
And of course in the Muslim world, you can bet that there are people who are morally and spiritually indistinguishable from the creatures here in America and England and France and Germany and even Norway, all of whom who peddle and live these messages designed to stir the pot, ignite the torches, and keep the ranks of the circular firing squads filled, just not with the shadowy personages standing behind and handing up full 30-round clips of .223 and 7.62 and .308 ammo, to the testosterone-poisoned, flag-wrapped fools in the front rank, just as fast as they can...
Speaking of facts not in evidence, here's a timeline relative to the Cairo embassy statement that maybe one would like to look at, and maybe try to impeach and discount as just being from some "liberal" outlet. http://www.scpr.org/programs/airtalk/2012/09/12/28388/libya-ambassador-killing/ And a comment that the US Embassy condemnation of that film, apparently issued "pre-violence," was "pandoring (sic) to the mob, pre-, post-, or during the violence," is not only illogical, it's unutterably weak, in the colloquial sense.
Need to always get the last word, and try to sow doubt and uncertainty in favor of the Neocon Narrative?
And it's hard to see what "American people" Digby is invoking with that assertion that they are "are no longer in a “restrained” mood regarding Islamic Fundamentalists" and are demanding that "Obama" hammer the new government of Libya.
Bill is big on contempt and ridicule. And also big on playing out the usual heavy trumps that lie so well on the American table, that bit about how all Arabs and Muslims and them people are irretrievably Evil Other, and we Christians are all just good and kind and all that. And once again "my country, or at least the part I run with, right or wrong."
Them 9/11 guys entered and/or stayed in the US illegally while prepping for the Big Day. As I recall it, they committed a bunch of frauds and violations of laws on currency transactions and a bunch of other stuff. And commandeering a passenger jet is pretty seriously a violation of the US code, and has been punished as such in the past (by a very different Justice Department.) And of course well after the fact, it becomes increasingly clear that Bush and Cheney and their underlings were not going to pay any attention to serious reporting that the 9-11 gang were here and planning an attack involving airliners and a lot of other reported signs and signals that should have been followed up on if the Kleptocrats were not so fixated on stealing Iraqi oil and doing favors for other players in that Great Game theater.
Interesting how the meaning of the word "patriotism" has wandered so very far from what most of us thought we understood about the term. To the point that Lockheed Martin's snottily arch and intentionally ambiguous "patriotic" corporate slogan is, or was recently, "We never forget who we're working for." And it appears that the "who" is maybe the critters called "shareholders," and the critters who populate that post-national entity's C-Suite and determine the value of their own services and thus their "fair compensation." And let us not forget "who" well KBR and Halliburton have done through all this. But "who" most definitely is not, as far as any reality or even appearances I can make out, the great mass of what used to be thought of as Americans, or any kind of pursuit of real security, long-game security and stability, for the US or the rest of the world.
Of course, there's "conservative," and then there's "conservative," which is a skunk of a different stripe and stink...
Speaking of innocent persons, was it in Somalia that one local druglord/warlord, beloved of our local CIA for the usual spurious murky reasons, fingered one of his competitors (with actually no ties and as I recall active antipathy to the kind of "terrorism" that supposedly is our target) as being an "al Quaeda, and the CIA obligingly "took him out?" Oh, well -- fog of war and all that.
"Legal" and "moral" have nothing to do with any of this -- just noises to be used post-hoc to "justify" what has to be a kind of fun game for the guys behind the screens, twiddling their joysticks...
And maybe that careful accounting should also reckon the cost of US "policies" and actions, including killing civilians who have families and clans and tribes that for some reason get pissed off and sorrowful when "we" or the sneaks who kill in "our" names do one of those "oopsies," and but for "our policies" would have zero reason to take up arms and do stuff like "blue-on-green" and all that.
Even the conservative "policy" people know that their actions are great recruiting tools for militancy and revenge. And a cynical person whose interests lie in keeping the Forever War going might actually look forward to a lot of "bugsplat," and the inevitable and predictable reactions from the Wogs, as a way to justify, to the rubes who pay for all of this, the "neeeeed" to keep doing More Of The Same. Spending trillions to swat mosquitoes, on the notion that if "we" don't keep doing it, "we" will be destroyed by Those Who Hate Us And Our Freedom tm(sic).
Like one of my favorite jokes:
A guy is walking in Times Square with an elephant gun under his arm. Cop says to him "What the heck do you think you are doing, carrying an elephant gun around Times Square?" Guy says, "Keeping the wild elephants away!" Cop says "There's not a wild elephant within 5,000 miles of here, buster!" Says the smug fella, "SEE? It works!"
Causation, again?
And who said anything about what you refer to as "doing nothing?" Effective law enforcement is doing plenty. What a surprise that the vast majority of would-be attacks by what we hardly call "terrorists" any more, since some of them are White Boys, are intercepted by simple police activity (and many of those are FOMENTED by police agents provacateur doing what used to be called "entrapment." And that it appears in recent bits from Bush presidential security briefings prior to that telling monkey-grin in that Texas classroom on 9-11, that the stuff to have intercepted the whole 9-11 plot was right there before the guys who told the bin Laden desk at the CIA to "stand down" because Georgie and Dickie no longer were concerned about him. It seems pretty clear that the sum of US "policies" toward hegemony and empire and all that are just sowing dragon's teeth, making a few people rich, corrupting politics and business at home and abroad, and doing less of what "we" are doing might actually result in some significant improvements in our way of life.
Do you assume, along with the Narrative, that there is a "they" called "al Quaeda" that is as organized as "we" like to believe "they" are? A kind of Wendy's franchise deal, spreading across the globe? All them Muslims all lined up to take a turn at "slaughtering civilians?" As if the actions of "conservatives" on all sides, and of course what used to be excoriated as Anarchist Bomb Throwers pursuing the Propaganda of the Deed, all through history, are not simply represented as somehow New and Different, in what's reported as Current Affairs?
Sure seems like our CIA-contractor-Special Ops great Hellfire-and-damnation "successes," in Pashtun-land and elsewhere, killing a few Wogs many of whom turn out to be inoffensive plain folks, are not only wasted energy but downright idiotic if the nominal goal is "increased security." But of course it don't appear that's the goal, at all...
These fu__ers know that they will be comfortably dead and beyond any retribution and restitution, fully pleased in every possible physical and emotional way at the expense of the rest of us, including of course our children and grandchildren. Romney and Ryan and the creatures who are fronting the purchase of their "election" are post-national; they can and do live anywhere they damn well want to, have no loyalty to anything but themselves, and could not care less about the miseries their "policies" and predations cause.
Guess What? The Kleptocrats just don't give a rip about any of that. Because, as they so smugly and snottily put it amongst themselves, "IBG-YBG" -- "I'll be gone, you'll be gone," before the crap hits the fan of course -- off to Dubai or wherever. Don't you just wish YOU lived like this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFAvvk9gM9U
Not about race, Bubba Reader? Y'all come on down here to Florida and The Villages, or the diner where I occasionally break my fast, or to the Bay Pines VA hospital complex where FOX runs all day on the wall TVs, and listen to the chatter. Be sure to stop in Alabama and Georgia and the Carolinas too, and take some side trips even to Chicago and Detroit. Does it make you uncomfortable that people dare to mention that racism thing? Kind of undercut your belief in the righteousness of your self-righteousness?
Take your demonstrably false talking points, all that crap about Obamacare being a "tax increase" and the rest, that you so shamelessly repeat, and take a hike.
The cool thing about how way too many people think is that (now that Canadian government types have labeled Iran the greatest threat to peace and stability in the world) we are getting closer, thanks to ignorance and prejudice and uncritical jingoism, to a Great Cleansing - where thanks to a relatively few of us, there will be a great singeing of the planet, that will rid it of most of us, decent people along with the lice and ticks and flag-waving, Limbaugh-believing critters...
This Viet vet, who "DEROSed" in August of 1968 after living through a thing called "Tet," offers the notion that any noise about anything anyone says that points to the idiocy and futility of what our Brass and the Neocons have wrought while "our troops are still in harm's way" does not get the fundamental reality.
Guess what? The whole freakin' Milo Minderbinder Enterprise is a FAILURE, if you measure it against any "national interest" of what used to be called "America."
On the other hand, it's conveniently boosted the careers of a bunch of Brass and their contractor pets and bosses, transferred at least $4 trillion out of the pockets of all the rest of us, recent past, present and long into the future, f_c_ed up a whole lot of your fellow US citizens in uniform, killed and injured G_d only knows how many noncombatants (and people who rightfully are defending THEIR country against yet another foreign invader who bombs indiscriminately, too often kills for kicks, has no freakin' idea of how to "win" an asymmetric fight, and is too stupid and brontosaurian to recognize the wisdom of cutting losses by getting out.)
There is not a G_ddam useful thing "we" can do in Notagainistan any more (other than enrich the rulers, enrich the contractors, and advance the Brass), nothing "we" could do there or in Iraq in the first place that comports with any sensible "national interest," hardly even the one that (wait for it, Bill) Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler identified 90 years ago: War is a RACKET, run to enrich a few corporate interests, and guess what, people? Where's that OIL "we" were going to TAKE to pay for the invasion of Iraq? And what have "we" bought by failing to kill bin Laden all those years ago, and kicking down doors in Kandahar to raise up more angry tribespeople who hate us worse and whose culture demands vengeance? Where's the Huge Store of Rare Earths and Minerals that "we" were told "we" could take out of Notagainistan as the justification du jour for more of the same? Can you spell "Chinese businessmen?"
So "we kill some of them and they kill some of us and we kill some of them and they kill some of us and we kill some of them and..." is neither a doctrine, a strategy, or any kind of intelligent tactic. And in the meantime, "we" pay their "militants" (we don't call them all "terrorists" any more, it seems) to drive the trucks that deliver the $400-a-gallon fuel to the Abrams tanks that sink in the sand and the Hummers and Buffalos that detonate the IEDs, oh,m and pay the "militants" not to attack the convoys taking all that expensive munitia to "the current front." (I just read that a third of all US GI deaths in that place resulted not from combat but from fatal accidents in Humvees. http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2012-08-31/health/bal-hopkins-humvee-injuries_1_vehicle-crashes-humvee-accidents-hopkins-analysis)
I don't care how many "troops" you "surge" into Notagainistan, there is no need to wait on the spin doctors to tell us why "it worked." It did not. It's a situation where there is no articulable rational goal, no way to "win," any more than there was in "my" war -- maybe except if you do what Gen. Curtis "Bomb 'em back to the Stone Age" LeMay and this guy and his staff and contractors, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/JD17Ae01.html, were ready and willing to do -- nuke the place until the land surface is melted into glass. Who cares about nuclear winter -- ever heard of that?-- or any other larger consequences?
I call BS on the notion that the "surges" "worked," the notion that "our Brave Soldiers" might suffer from vociferous pointing out of the enormous futility they are asked to kill (and die) for, and invite others who think it did to show detail to support their notion. Links to punditopinions do not count.
And it does not take a lot of digging to find that there are a lot of people, even Israelis, who are shall we say less than satisfied with the honesty and "judiciousness" of the various courts, civil, criminal and religious, in Israel. On the scholarly side, with a look at "fierce independence," http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2012/01/28/kenneth-levin-the-u-s-view-of-israels-judiciary/. On the Palestinian side, http://electronicintifada.net/content/can-rights-be-won-israels-courts/11355. And google has millions more bits on biases in the Israeli judiciary. It's not, far as I can see, just a matter of "hard cases making bad law." Anywhere you go on the planet, in systems created and maintained by hateful humans, you are going to find venality, corruption and bias.
Some places are worse than others, but in 20+ years of public and private legal practice, I saw some good, much bad and way too much really ugly in state and federal courts all across our "ruleoflaw" land. Israel ain't no better, and now that "we" are doing the same kind of "righteous killing," in various places at home and abroad, and running our "prison industrial complexes" and such-like, "we" both have descended a long way into the darkness.
The nice thing about this kind of discussion is that it gives a smidgen of hope that people, writ large, might be capable of thinking in terms of something other than unbridled combusto-consumption and profit and domination, and what might happen after they are dead.
But there's still so much of that pick-a-winner thinking and believing: which technology will RULE, in a game that's driven by competition and covetousness, especially in light of the unanticipatable popping up of newer-faster-cheaper? Put your money on a winner is the game of too many players, from financializationists to plodding government bureaucrats working at a 19th-century pace (out of career-concern necessity) to bribed legislators and hopeful CEOs of startups with great new ideas that may turn into blind alleys and dead-ends in the blink of a 'net post and tweet.
But I guess, for the sake of my grandchildren, I should be glad that there's at least an appearance that, except for the grifters and extractionists and their trolls and trulls, there's some small evidence that a different ethos about the oikos might be taking root. Query whether it's going to be buried by megatons of overburden from "bullshit-shovel-ready projects" like the "Coalfields Expressway," a marvelous bit of so-typical deceit: http://sierraclub.typepad.com/compass/2012/08/coals-road-to-nowhere-the-coalfields-expressway.html. Or zapped by UV or drowned by CO2 or rising ocean levels or asphyxiated by extinction of ocean phytoplankton, a la "Soylent Green."
What it takes, I think, is a fundamental revision of the basic approach to life. Something that even some reactionary "Christianists" are starting to discover is consistent with even the text of the Old Testament where so many of them find those "the Bible says" references to support their world view. That bit about wise stewardship and all, rather than use-it-up-before-Jesus-comes-back Dominionism. It's about silly stuff like eschewing plastic bags, and even tiny little nods toward "ecology" like smaller, thinner, shallower plastic caps on your thinner, lighter vitamin-water bottles.
And of course it's not a universal motion -- the Obamanauts have lit the fuse on oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean, and of course they are pushing "clean coal" as part of a Wise Strategy Of Energy Independence. As if "we" can keep spewing "our" externalities under the doctrine of American Exceptionalism, ad nauseam and ad mortem.
Oh, and I guess we should be gratified that, according to latest doctrine, the Navy is "going green." But guess what? A gallon of french fry-based jet fuel, which the Navy plans to be using ever more of, costs something like $30 a gallon: http://townhall.com/tipsheet/townhallcomstaff/2012/07/05/us_navy_going_green_spending_extra_622_to_use_chicken_fat_fuel, and probably has its own set of externalities in production. That's a kind of "substitution behavior," PR and career-driven, that only seems to make sense.
acting irrationally and vindictively against their companies
Bet you meant "countries," but it's more interesting as written.
Now there's a telling Freudian slip or innocent typo or whatever. How deeply the whole sick notion of the world as the oyster and playground and battlefield of corporate entities has penetrated. Colors and pollutes just about everything. Just like the whole lexicon of the neocons and Austrian-schoolers and Koch-trained barking dogs.
I tried watching a bit of the Red Convention (remember when these same people were all about rather being Dead than Red? How things change, in the mindlessness of tribal motions...). My "remote thumb" just took control, and forced me to find something, anything, other than that sick vision of falsehood and death and decay being so vociferously and enthusiastically transmitted and received by so many people who have so actively and successfully pursued power and personal wealth at the expense of any kind of virtue. Ann just "loves women." What is that supposed to mean?
Meantime, the Family Values crowd has been taking full advantage of the opportunities for covert hypocrisy, sneaking via "covered entrances" into the lapd-ancing and bl-w-jobbing and whatever-kink-you-want parlors of Tampa's famous sex club scene. What is with all them tighty-whitey "Christians" that they tolerate, wink at, and facilitate the whole set of evil behaviors, including ramping up for idiot military violence that serves only stupidity and desolation, on the part of "their leaders?"
How about setting up an International Displaced Despot Fund? A lot of these critters seem to hold on and keep the blood flowing in large part because of the wealth it brings them and their adherents. Would it not be cheaper and kinder to create a kind of "superfund" of the sort once used in the US to clean up the chemically toxic crap that "our" industry generated and dumped all over the landscape? Since a lot of the politically and socially toxic crap that's poisoning the planet is the detritus of "United Fruit diplomacy" of the sort practiced by the US and other "Great Powers," maybe putting billions into a pot for tin-pot dictators to draw on when they are finally on the ropes at home would lead to a gentle landing, rather than the serial horrors we see so much of today? I mean, it's not like these people can't be bought...
Ah, but G_d has spared the Reds (including the ones frequenting Tampa's famous Red Light establishments, coming and going and spilling their seed via "private covered entrances" free from reporting eyes.) S/He has redirected Isaac to deliver another blow to the Evil City of New Orleans, where I have seen perverse acts committed in my own presence and where public and private corruption, a behavior and condition unknown amongst the Select Delegates and Imperial Hangers-On, is rampant and open.
So you see, John Hagee and Tedd "He was just carrying my bag" Haggard have prayed for the Babylonians, and G_d has answered, and all's well in the mystical world of White Christian Politics.
Too bad the upcoming election is little but a choice between critters who agree on practices but have small differences on the pace at which the sh_t gets pitched at the fan.
It's a question of a choice of poisons -- and whether a relatively few humans can screw it up for all the rest.
I'm hopeful, for family reasons, that even if the worst happens, a few will figure out how to feed themselves and their loved ones even in a messed-up world. I personally doubt that there's even a tiny chance of goodness and reform for all, when there are so many pigs up on the porch figuring out how to sucker the rest of the animals into buying the notion that the Declaration of the Rights of Animals can be reduced to "All Animals Are Equal, But Some Are More Equal Than Others." Narcissism, hedonism, hypocrisy...
The common theme and genesis and genetics amongst these aborto-fascists seems to me simply the old reactionary, revanchist, patriarchal bit about putting women (and children) back in their place: chattel, to be dealt with summarily at the whim of the patriarch. One wonders if pantheistic religious-cultural traditions with the savor of G_d the Mother about them, and less of that Bishop-tells-Nun, broke-d1ck flavor, have this same kind of uncharitable meanness about them.
Most of us call our version of the Taliban "Christians," I guess on the notion that that is what they call themselves. It's no new revelation that our "Christians" find their sacred texts not in the Gospels (except for a few well-abused snippets) but in the meaner, violent, "patriotic" parts of the Pentateuch and the Prophets and of course the fortuitously included writings of St. John the Divine. And in the artful multi-level marketing structure set up by old Saul of Tarsus, writ out in his letters to various congregations and missionaries. If anything, far as I can make out, most self-identified "Christians" are at best "post-Paulists," who are running blindly and ineluctably along after the false prophets, the Haggards and Swaggerts and Hagees and so many aspirant more, that their own scripture warns them against.
Maybe another reason our paleoconservative reactionaries and their mind-managers dislike and fear Sharia is that most of the crap that our current crop of vampire squids is pulling on the rest of us would be, ah, illegal, an illegality backed by the notion that financialization and securitization and derivatization are in fact evil and vigorously disapproved of by the traditional Revealed Truth of the actual Prophet. http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/3837
Even Jesus, that historical creature obscured by the current smoke and fog of "Christianism/Paulism," seemed to have little use for the 0.01 percenters (camel, eye of a needle and all) and money changers, and sat down to dine with tax collectors and other notorious abusers of the ordinary people as a way to bring them to more moral and ethical behaviors. Can you see Jamie Dimon breaking bread with Our Lord? Not unless it's in a five-star restaurant, and on His AMEX card...
But good luck changing any of the momentum of what's going on -- money and debt own us.
Heaven forbid that we should actually forgive those who are indebted to us, as we pray to G-d to forgive our "debts" to the Almighty. That phrase has called for a heap of commentary, to hedge its plain meaning. http://bible.cc/matthew/6-12.htm
And on the notion of debt, in the present context, where it's being used as the touchstone for an imposed "austerity" that will hammer down the lid on the aspirations and the "rights" of ordinary people and complete their reduction to rented serfdom, there's some illumination to be gained from this little lecture: http://michael-hudson.com/2012/08/financial-predators-v-labor-industry-and-democracy/
It doesn't matter, there's no fixing this, and for a slightly different viewpoint on why we ordinary people are screwed, and the kinds of people who are doing it to us, you folks who are worried about little bits of Great Game policy might enjoy the real nature of how our kleptocracy is backing it into us. Got Debt? Got any idea how you "acquired" it?
Maybe it's just a point of view kind of thing, but would it maybe be a little more accurate to say it a little differently? That "our own bad guys" actually OWN US? Given who has most of the wealth, most of the political power, most of the police power, pretty much unbridled ability to have whatever they want to do, to us or anyone else, declared or recognized or accepted as "not illegal," or at least "without any effective remedy at law or in equity"?
And most of these "corporations" are not in any real-world sense "American" any more -- they are post- and trans-national, are effectively "states" in the Great game sense, have no loyalties to anything other than self-aggrandizement, filled with people who have inhaled the heady smoke of power over others.
"We" already belong to "them." "We" are just a rump tail of little people, little minuscule humans who work our butts off, individually or in our little collectives, to create real wealth that these creatures strip off us to fund the End Game of our species.
But it's good to read about the actions of others, elsewhere, to "do something" about all of that.
As far as I can tell, it's straight (if edited for continuity and clarity) reportage. You think maybe the silence is indicative? Maybe you've seen this little bit of what our Ryan backers have in mind and in process? http://www.volokh.com/2012/03/03/koch-v-cato-a-view-from-cato/#more-56521
Seems Cato was not "conservative" enough for the Kochs...
Too bad in all the talk about which source of "green energy" or consumo-combustion is "most competitive," I guess that would mean "priced" cheapest or with the best subsidy package or well-lobbied regulatory favoritism, that so little is discussed about externalities.
But then how does a "free market," made captive by these creatures, price an uninhabitable planet 200 or 2,000 years from now (now being the present moment, when the Koch Grabbers and the remoras that eat the scraps of their kills are maximizing their takings, ensuring they have a life of ease and pleasure and never have to wear the same underpants twice and have "people" to anticipate and attend to their every whim, no matter how whimsical)?
I bet there are "economists" who have irrefutable formulae to "prove" that the present value of a dead future is, well, ZERO, so it can be neglected for all "economic" purposes.
"Obama," that willing personification, that bump on the center-right line of the Overton horizon, may be "the only sensible choice" for us stoopid progressive types who can't bring ourselves to protest-vote for the Green Party candidate.
No surprises with these people, if you look at the fine print down the page.
Romney, that post-national inegalitarian, is making it easier by being so far off the beam. But google "Obama Coal." So gee, "we the people" can look forward to "boosted domestic oil production," code for tar sands and fracking and deep offshore and arctic extraction, untrammeled by any forcing of externalities into the "free market pricing."
Freedom? Constitution? Rights? Doing something other than what every other failing empire has done? Hey, they're only human. The only question is the pace at which we Use It All Up.
These people are not the friends of the species, ours or any other -- just maybe less bad than the Vulture, the Kochers et al.
(quick check of 3x5 cards -- yep, hit the points. Just like the constant apologists for the stoopid way "we" -- actually "they" -- have been doing "our" business across the planet for the last 150 years do with their 3x5s, though they have a slightly thicker stack to select from.)
I guess Rick "I have not been indicted" Scott's purchase of the Florida governorship with near $100 million of money he got by robbing Medicaid and Medicare through his HCA-Columbia operation is not in any way probative of how the way money works in the American spoils system 2.0.
And yes, FL Democrats can't find their majority of registered voters, here, to turn out to vote, against near $100 million in negative advertising, against a candidate unfortunately named "Sink." And for the same set of reasons, good old boy corruption and all, and the power of money, of course, FL is saddled with a permanent Red legislature and the culture of "development" that's sinking whatever was good about FL (from my point of view, of course.)
There were, of course, local reasons why Whitman lost to Brown. But of course in your form of discourse, one is only limited to a very tiny stream of permissible disputation.
If your guiding light and inspiration, Ayn Rand, had, as her own model for how we all ought to behave, a serial killer who hacked the limbs off a kidnapped 12-year-old girl and threw her head and torso at her father who was trying to pay a ransom, with her eyes sewn open so the father would think she was still alive so he would pay that ransom, a guy who Ayn Rand thought a very model of a person who did not give a fig for what "society" thought or felt, you would be Paul Ryan.
What did Rand admire so much about Hickman? His sociopathic qualities: “Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should,” she wrote, gushing that Hickman had “no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel ‘other people.’”
This echoes almost word for word Rand’s later description of her character Howard Roark, the hero of her novel The Fountainhead: “He was born without the ability to consider others.”
Ryan's just one of many other self-aggrandizing buttheads who poison our common well with their affection for that bloodsucker and their efforts to instill her "geist" as the rule for all of us.
But then those well-paid middle class jobs, there and in the military-industrial complex and our materialist consumer economy and Formerly Fourth Estate, are so hard to come by any more -- it's not like the Jeffersonian kinds of martyrs are rewarded for their standing up straight...
And of course since "our" military machine is just "training the wogs," all the pieces that are chatting about this face of "neocolonialism" can simply be ignored. Right?
Because "we" can just ignore the history of previous training operations like our connections to UNITA and the activities over many decades of the School of the Americas and related bits of the Racket?
I got to watch some of that "training" while doing my little bit of service to my country (sic) in Vietnam. Not a goddam thing to do with "winning hearts and minds," and there was plenty of "green-on-green" shooting in my time there. And how effective was that, as compared to say, Iraq? or Notagainistan? or any of those other little countries over there? http://www.observertoday.com/page/content.detail/id/573170/Robert-E--Foley--U-S--Army.html?nav=5199
Just asking... I am sure that there's an "experienced" riposte out there that will either make it all clear, or obscure the issue in the name of moreofthesame...)
"not in a particularly hostile corner of the world..."
Neither was Honduras, or Costa Rica which now "hosts" thousands of Marines and navy ships, under the smokescreen labeled "war on drugs," the other war besides the "war on terror" that can't be ever "won," and the participants could care less since it's their livelihood, their bread and butter, their trillion dollars a year right off the top, a national haircut that stops somewhere around the hyoid bone and removes the thinking parts and severs all those large blood vessels.
There's a huge miilitary bureaucracy with visions of hegemonic sugarplums dancing in their heads, and "Made in USA" stamped on their uniforms, making its own mission in the same way a metastatic cancer makes its own mission.
Not a hostile part of the world? Look up a little further in this space, to the article by Nick Turse on "our" Grand Great Game Vision of a Worldwide Networked Interoperable Battlespace, where the Call of Duty specialists are installing more half-trained, half-ass, militarized little bunches who can repeat the endless history that's played out, in so many senses, in places like Angola and Vietnam and Iraq and Notagainistan, and Somalia and now all the rest of the AFRICOM space and CENTCOM space and so on and so forth: https://www.juancole.com/2012/08/americas-new-proxy-wars-turse.html
"From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli..."
"War is nothing but a freakin' racket."
I guess the Really Smart People know that the best course of conduct, for their personal profit and comfort, is to shout up the current slogans, brag up the "successes," natter about supporting the Troops, and wave the flag that has come to stand for something so very much other than what the shibboleths pretend it means. Because after all, if "we" want to maintain power over the earth's resources so "we" can eat high on what's left of the hog until it's all gone, the army ants need to keep scouting and stirring and setting up trained cadres of their kind who can be agitated and activated to screw things up for ordinary people "in ev'ry clime and place where we could take a gun."
There's power, and there's authority, and then there's legitimacy, which seems to me to be a mass judgment, enforced via everything from disrespect and indifference to what seems to be going on in Syria, on the virtue and ability and "right" to rule of any given set of 'crats, whether auto-, demo-, theo-, klepto-, or what have you.
It's all complicated, of course -- especially when the Great Gamers stick their protuberances into things, carrying forward all the miseries occasioned by their thugs and functionaries, paving the way for one elite or another, or several, to feather their personal nests.
How much wealth resides in Swiss and Cayman and even "US" banks who service the kleptocracies, stolen from the needs and produce of ordinary people? You wonder where El Bashar keeps his hoard -- did he trade tidbits on good places to stash "ill-gotten gains" with Yasser Arafat and the Gaddafi family? Maybe Idi Amin? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idi_Amin
The same blockheads that carry placards reading "Keep your filthy government hands off my Medicare."
As a species, we are too stoopid to survive. Nice that we can leave artifacts of our local greatnesses as the bases of other gravity wells, and even propel one little bit of technology right out of the Solar System...
You'll see that same explosion of joy when a free safety bliltzes and spears a quarterback and knocks him out of the game. Or in videos from helmet-cams of Our Troops, when a 1,000-lb GBU blows the shit out of an "enemy outpost," or from "Taliban" videos of IEDs blowing the shit out of GIs in their Buffalos...
The trick is to build cues and incentives into the culture that minimize those kinds of fierce bloody joys, all part of the fellow-feeling, we're-part-of-the-same-tribe set of sensations that the ole limbic system keeps on pounding as a rhythm to our brains, and encourage and reinforce the other kind...
Made-up enemies, straight out of "1984." Two-minute hates. How easy, Orwell knew and warned, to manipulate all us sheeple into shooting ourselves in the ass and then shooting ourselves in the head.
My favorite filmic bit on this subject is M. Emmet Walsh as the Mad Sniper in "The Jerk:" "Die, you random son of a bitch! DIE, GAS PUMPER!"
Just like here, eh, Grumpy? And the Predatory Natives (of various eras, all of whom were, in their turn, Immigrants) have free rein to rob, murder and rape too. And of course the government can spy on the contents of your toilet, grope your privates in pub(l)ic, all that stuff. What you gonna do about all that stuff?
And do you get at all exercised ang grumpy about our Financial Industry Overlords, who have bled 80 or more percent of all the wealth of the nation, counterfeited hundreds of trillions of dollars, stung people like you and me by indexing our mortgages and credit card interest to "LIBOR" and then diddled that number as they pleased? Or paid themselves billions in "bonuses?" Or created fake transactions where you, and I, are losers in bets we never even got the thrill of placing? Or how about Mittens and the others who have apparently stripped between $21 and $32 TRILLION in Real Wealth off the planet and squirreled it away, safe from taxation or seizure for violation of various laws, in "foreign banks" including our own US of A "Goldman Sachs" and others?
Now there's a freakin' rape and robbery and murder for you to get peeved at, hey?
I guess, Joe, it's all so simple when your version of the world is kind of a 3-level game of RISK!, and protecting a narrative that has "us" doing good, or right, or maybe just proper by your estimation, everywhere, is the central tenet of belief.
Love the false equivalence between the Nazi/Axis war machine and a penny-ante pecksniff little bunch called "al Quaeda," which becomes a casus idioti for trillions of dollars of grotesquely wasteful, distorting violence that so far has produced what? a SWAT takedown of bin Laden, after years of failure or unconcern? Stupid behaviors like setting the Marines up in Beirut for a truck bombing, and detecting IEDs by having GIs drive over them? Billions of dollars spent killing hundreds of people, many or even most of whom are just villagers, not even "terraists?" What "we" are doing is not even efficient -- and Ted Gunderson, the FBI LA station chief, says most terror attacks are committed by "our" CIA and FBI: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/08/george-washington-is-america-the-worlds-largest-sponsor-of-terrorism.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29
And the tribe you swing for: Interesting little takeaway from current news, it seems Lt. General William Odom, NSA director under Reagan, who said this:
"Because the US itself has a long record of supporting terrorists and using terrorist tactics, the slogans of today's war on terrorism merely make the United States look hypocritical to the rest of the world.... By any measure the US has long used terrorism. In '78-'79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism -- in every version they produced, the lawyers said the US would be in violation."
Op. cit.
"We're" doing it, so it must be Right, right? Rationalization in favor of one's tribe is I guess laudable from a certain point of view. When it comes to the species, not so much. Not even from the standpoint of survival and prospering of the freakin' nation you plump for.
So tell us, Bill, out of your depth of knowledge, what ARE "we" trying to do by droning and hellfiring the mountains of northeast Notagainistan and northwest Pakistan?
So is the logic is that any time "we" define some set of people as "terrorist leaders," that's the green light to do whatever murder "we" want to, without respect to national boundaries or "national interests" or even politics or, do you remember this word, "BLOWBACK?" Is it OK for Haqqanis to define our war leaders and sneaky-petes as "terrorist leaders" and kill them where they sit?
Just in case people have forgotten, "our" sneaky-petes are a pretty noxious bunch who are doing "stuff" in our names, every day, that has nothing to do with any of the aspirational notions that "we" pretend to hold. There's a few actual reporters of facts and relationships who make the foredoomed effort to remind the rest of us about what really goes on behind the Patriotic Curtain. A quick read is Chalmers Johnson's distillation of the reasons why a US that believed and acted on its supposed "fundamental values" ought to demolish the CIA and salt the ground it was built on: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175578/best_of_tomdispatch%3A_chalmers_johnson%2C_the_cia_and_a_blowback_world/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=db3e64c238-TD_Johnson8_5_2012&utm_medium=email
There's a guy who has been inside the belly of the Beast, and knows whereof he speaks. Unlike the Narrative Supporters who piecemeal try to shut the mouths of any who point to the reality. Read Chalmers' stuff, and Smedley Butler's, and the several others who spell it out, and then get "disgusted" if you can about comparisons of the actions of "our Rough Men" to carrion eaters and maggot-breeders. They are driving "us" over a very high cliff, though of course they are wearing the parachutes they deny to the rest of us...
What's the parallel between German armies all over the European map, including Belgium, being bombed with varying and post-hoc-seemingly questionably effective tonnage, as part of a world war spasm that had the potential, sort of, for the Germans to "dominate everything," and annoying Haqqanis and maybe a salting of a tiny number of "al Quaedas" up there in the Northwest Tribal Regions, who are doing what again?? Attacking "our" little poutposts, put there purposely to annoy and attack people who pose little or no threat to "us?"
"We" have no freakin' business there. Far as I can see, "We" have no "national interest" that can be denominated, outside of some fuzzy notion of Great Game whiz-kiddery. And of course the inertia of the whole insane military-industrial-political futility that says "We've" thrown a whole lot of money into this foolishness, we have a huge, profitable bureaucracy in place to keep on doing this same grotesque, expensive crap, our sneaky petes have careers and contacts to maintain, and all the rest.
"We" have mastered the dirty arts of "regime change" and de-stabilization and suckering our population into paying for inflating the endless, infinitely elastic bubbles of imperial wars. Too bad "we" don't invest a tiny fraction of all that subtlety and wealth into understanding and carrying forward the kinds of strategems and processes that lead to a HEALTHY meta-stability -- not the spurious "stability" of having "our guy" as dictator of this or that corrupt polity.
It sure seems, looking at history (which you seem wont, selectively, to do), that the "covert involvement" of various "US forces" in matters of all sorts, across most of the planet, has pretty much failed to produce much more than the seeds and eggs of new miseries.
You seem a pretty hefty partisan for "US interests." Given what "US interest" have done to the species and the planet, it sure seems to me that there's a lot of ugly similarity to carrion eaters amongst the activities of the CIA and the School of the Americas and our current "we can kill anyone we feel like killing, and rendition for torture is just peachy" crowd. Which comes with a long, scaly tail of things like the Shah and the Phoenix Program and "destabilizing" various places to make sure that no "commies" or, God Forbid, "socialists," would ever lead nations where United Fruit or various oil and tin and copper, et disgusting, twisted cetera, "interests" had "interests."
The folks who do "covert" stuff (and even overt stuff, as Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler pointed out, pointedly) in the name of "America" have a very bad record of doing much for humanity, except for the tiny part with wealth and power. And that apparently continues to be the case.
The tools our "rough men" choose to use, tactically and strategically, are training up armies and "police forces" to do what they do in support of this or that "friendly kleptocrat." And of course plain old invasions, and supplying weapons, for profit, to add instability to the mix. There are other tools and behaviors, that might obviate the other stuff over time, that rust in the locker.
Maybe this time in Syria the results of all the fiddling, and of course "our" rough men are not alone, will be judged less morbid. But if our own warlords and kleptocrats keep sowing dragon's teeth all over the place, along with cluster bomblets and mines and every other war-toy invention, then there's yet another set of reasons humanity is on the way out.
Though a few, of course, will really get rich and high on the glissade...
Re US "covert" involvement in places like Syria: Do hornets and blowflies ever congregate around corpses at the scene of a slaughter? Do maggots eat the flesh of the dead, breeding new generations of blowflies and hornets?
They're just doing what they do, after all... Our buzzing insects are no friends of anything that looks like what most folks think of when they hear the word "democracy."
Reminds me of an article by that famous deformed reactionary, John Silber, sneering at what he called "apocalypticists" for worrying about human-induced messing up of the planet -- in that case in reference to the then-current concern about science showing the "deleterious effects" of a "nuclear winter," still a possibility, of course.
His Alfred E. Newman, "What? Me worry?" conclusion was "So what if all life on the surface of the planet dies? Life will go on! There's the tubeworms and crabs and little fishies that live amongst the fumaroles and superheated jets of water from those cracks in the planet's crust, down in the deepest parts of the oceans..."
Is that an acceptable endpoint-and-potential-do-over?
False choices lead to stupid behaviors. this is not either-coal-or-wood, it's dead-planet combusti-consumption, or wiser alternatives.
And of course your notion of ROI increases with each "fuel transition" sort of glosses over what are called "externalities," the manifold ills and pains and gee, like, death of the planet and our species, which, mirabile dictu, the freakin' MARKET has managed to avoid pricing into the costs of combusti-consumption.
Do any of your cavils impeach the basic conclusion that we humans are most of the way up the creek and have thrown our paddles off the boat? Or are you just concerned about the integrity of the record?
Is steel manufactured or mined? Coal gets blasted and dug from the ground and has to go through a whole bunch of processes and of course transport before it gets burned or turned to coke.
One basic problem is that people like the Kochs, and so many of the rest of us, just do not give a crap about what happens after we die. If things are going to get really bad for our grandkids (or if we have none, there's another reason for total unconcern), WHO CARES? The attitude is "As long as I can tool around in my Maybach and power up my private jet and run that megayacht between watering holes at 20 or 50 gallons to the mile or steal wealth and bits of the future by "externalizing" stuff like The End Of The World As We Know It, who gives a ripshit?"
And that's especially true where the people who so often knowingly and intentionally pull this crap off, one little or large bit of excrement at a time, know there are no consequences for them.
What are the rest of us sweltering, starving, dehydrating humans going to do, once the shit really hits the fan? These folks own the enforcement structures, have their own private security armies, lots of lawyers and stuff, and of course will live out their lives like the C-Suite-ers in the Soylent Corporation -- comfortable, with all the toys and titillation they could want. What are the rest of us going to do? Dig up their bodies and dishonor and despoil them? THAT's effective dissuasion, now isn't it?
I'll remember sitting in the back of a UH-1H, up on an evening test flight out of the large US installation at Phu Bai, flown by a pilot who should have known better. He took us over the nearby Army of the Republic of Vietnam compound at about 800 feet, and what a surprise that red tracers, each one with four regular full-metal-jacket rounds in between, should come sweeping and zipping up at us. Nominal "friendly fire," by soldiers who wouldn't fight the enemy we identified for them and who were Catholic or ancestor worshipers, not Muslims. Since we wore much the same uniforms, this was pretty much "green on green" violence. (Forget about "fragging," and GIs shooting each other over various slights, and in drug and alcohol hazes, then and now...)
"We" weren't wanted there, "we" had no mission then of any more significance to either legitimate "national interests" or "national security" than Our Troops have now. It's just a huge wealth transfer, and the thunderous, ponderous rumbling toward the cliff of that murderous juggernaut called the military-industrial complex. Which every year eats up more and more of all the goods of our nation: an enormous, self-generating tapeworm, a malignant and metastatic cancer, sucking the energy and nutrition out of our country, and sowing dragon's teeth and bitter pills all across the planet as part of keeping the whole shooting match in business.
When I was a kid, our family dentist always nicked the tooth next to the one he was working on with his drill, to ensure a steady stream of cavities to be filled. And now we got the Drone Patrols and Black Operators out there, busily killing "insurgents" (note how they are less often called "terrorists" any more?)
And so many of us are still stupid enough to believe that old lie about how "it is sweet and proper to die for the fatherland." Or if not die, then send other people to die so we can have those touching Returns of Honored Corpses, with full military honors, to keep the home fires burning...
One of the reactionary hits on Palestinians in years gone by is that they were, as a bunch, TOO smart for their britches.
The squawk was that the freakin' UN through one of its we-don't-pay-for-such-fripperies agencies had the gall, the GALL, to take education into the "camps," so that the supposedly otherwise ignorant "Arabs" became aware of Hanna Arendt and Saul Alinsky and even Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. And of course Adam Smith and Marx and maybe even Che and Mao.
Cited repeatedly in the '60s as yet another reason for the Robert Welch brigade not to fund our share of the UN.
I wonder: Is the US up-to-date on its share, now that our leaders are so adroitly using "UN" as a cover for their imperial tomfoolery, like "two UN soldiers, one from Alabama and the other from Texas, were killed by explosion in Helmand province, the UN command reported Sunday"? You would think Ban Ki Moon would at least demand the same kind of deal that our local Major League Baseball stadium has -- several million bucks for "naming rights" from the Tropicana brand.
Or maybe these Machiavells know the history, and are so enamored of something else altogether, or are getting so personally rich off of the bleeding idiocy, that they just don't care? Or maybe Mittens really IS the Antichrist, and he's just doing what comes naturally?
My grandchildren would really like to know why they face this kind of future...
A small rhetorical point in all this noxious cesspit: Why are the nominal Israelis who are simply stealing Palestinian property called "settlers?" Once again, the Narrative choice, inflated by repetition and spin, totally obscures the reality (except for a few who pay a little more attention to the ground truths.)
Interesting how the oligarchs have these enormous skills at organization over time, the tenacity and long-view dedication to accumulating power and wealth, using the tools of nominal political legitimacy like "elections" and supreme court appointments and and filling up the various bureaucracies and the military with fellow-travelers. All the while, most of us little people either just mope along, taking whatever trickles and crumbs they drop on the floor under their feet.
What is it about evil, that it is so much more, ah, efficient?
And given the corruption of the entire Imperial apparatus in DC, what difference does it make, except maybe on a tiny few margins, who the heck is "president?" You'd have to replace all the congrescritters with honest, decent people, and a huge bureaucracy both "civilian' and military.
And then, of course, in a long line of "incidents" that include Pollard, the USS Liberty and so many others, there's this:
The CIA station chief opened the locked box containing the sensitive equipment he used from his home in Tel Aviv, Israel, to communicate with CIA headquarters in Virginia, only to find that someone had tampered with it. He sent word to his superiors about the break-in.
The incident, described to the Associated Press by three former senior U.S. intelligence officials, might have been dismissed as just another cloak-and-dagger incident in the world of international espionage, except that the same thing had happened to the previous station chief in Israel.
It was a not-so-subtle reminder that, even in a country friendly to the United States, the CIA was itself being watched.
Such meddling underscores what is widely known but rarely discussed outside intelligence circles: U.S. national security officials consider Israel to be, at times, a frustrating ally and a genuine counterintelligence threat.
In addition to what the former U.S. officials described as intrusions in homes in the past decade, Israel has been implicated in U.S. criminal espionage cases and disciplinary proceedings against CIA officers and blamed in the presumed death of an important spy in Syria for the CIA during the administration of President George W. Bush.
The CIA considers Israel its No. 1 counterintelligence threat in the agency's Near East Division, the group that oversees spying across the Middle East, according to current and former officials. Counterintelligence is the art of protecting national secrets from spies. This means the CIA believes that U.S. national secrets are safer from other Middle Eastern governments than from Israel.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
The rich folks here in Florida build their castles on the sands of beaches and barrier islands, and when storms come and wash the excrescences away, us little people get to fund the "rebuilding" and that endless scam called "beach renourishment," to "restore" for their delectation the changeable coastline that they don't even have a legal claim to.
Ooh, my bad for not being more specific. RUSSIAN gun makers rather than Colt are feeding Assad's horror.
Do you dispute that there's a pretty well organized world trade in weapons? AKs and FALs and M4s are almost as fungible as oil, and travel almost as freely across borders to the overall benefit of war profiteers and dorks who think arming this or that group of people will "advance some strategic interest" or other. And there's a growing bit of documentation that maybe it's not so far fetched that our sneaky petes are facilitating the movement of US and Israeli made weapons into Syria.
Forget about the big view considerations of whether weaponizing the whole freakin' planet is doing anything to help keep the species alive and whether all the Great Gamery is doing anything to feed people or aid in any kind of stability. Gotta be precise in attributing the delivery of weapons to the proper part of a worldwide industry...
Meanwhile, the Whole Earth Consumptive Repressive Military Monster continues to turn a quarter and more of our real wealth into weapons for sale and for use, and generate more deaths that will turn into "reasons" for still more killing. And We The People of USA can cheer ourselves that our post-national war machine is the largest maker and seller and distributor (though by no means the only one) of all the stuff being shot off in Damascus and so many other places.
Why would it not be shocking, on the rare occasions that it happens, when the enormous thing called the US government, through all its various branches and parts, ever does actually "occasionally act above-board and in good faith to promote a decent outcome"? You and I likely having very different ideas of what constitutes a "decent outcome."
Maybe because it's kind of a rare occurrence? Or when it happens, it's an unintended consequence of some other action directed toward one or more aspects of achieving hegemony and oiling the wheels of the prolongation of our grotesquely consumptive "wayoflife?" You profess belief that "the US" is at least sort of good, or at least that you are ok with the few behaviors that we get to see (via Wikileaks, and other inadvertences.) A lot of your fellow citizens, myself included, are sick of the terminal sickness of Empire. No 'conspiracy theories' needed -- just the ability to read, and remember.
And yes, there is more than enough evidence that there's a huge amount of "nefarious activity." And more than enough evidence that dirty US fingers, stuck into the pots that other people have to eat out of, are causing enormous sicknesses across the whole planet. "Wild Bill" Donovan's and J. Edgar's and the Dulles's heirs and successors, aided and abetted by faceless thousands of careerists in all the great agencies, are at it, every day, hot and heavy.
What's YOUR plan for "resisting tyranny?" Go to work carrying water for the government? Or something more along the lines of the Michigan Militia? Fat white guys in camo duds pretending to be dangerous commandos, between work weeks at Wendy's?
And may the many different kinds of people in Syria succeed in outlasting yet another tin pot dictator who for whatever reasons thinks it's wise to kill the people he rules. How many of those has the "government" you are going to "resist" supported, for "reasons of state" that I bet you agree with? Jonas Savimbi? Battista? The Shah? And not so long ago, even Our Friend Against The Iranians, Saddam Hussein?
No doubt this current event will give comfort to the LoveGunners who fantasize about "resisting tyranny" (while busily supporting and facilitating and knuckling under to our uniquely American version of it at home.)
Some folks just never met an externality they didn't like.
The War Machine, seeing in some of its crazed parts that maybe the host organisms are getting a little weak to support the blood-sucking at the current rate, and wanting to extend its ability to "fight in any time and place" and ensure its covert hegemony, is putting some of OUR wealth (not as much as into more F-22s) into "alternative energy." Lots of ways to spin that "initiative": http://www.consumerenergyreport.com/2012/06/07/the-operational-and-strategic-rationale-behind-the-u-s-militarys-energy-efforts/
Since the Brass Hats drive much of policy by their procurements ("fight the war with the army you've got"), and political interference on their own and (same thing) their contractors' behalf, what a surprise that there would be an alt-energy "initiative."
Too bad these dorks keep trying to force-fit a definition of the universe onto the rest of us, against all evidence, for their own benefit. Just blowing huge holes in the world's actual residual security and stability, while proving again and again what the Afghan villager said to the Marine gunny who was telling him that this week's doctrine required the villagers to move back into towns where "the Taliban" had driven them out: "You people, with all your military power and technology, cannot even defend yourselves against the [asymmetric fighters.] How can you say that you will defend US? You will be gone soon anyway, and we must stay here and try to live."
So the Shootin' Battlespace moves on, and the "fully burdened cost" of getting petrofuel to "the front" will continue to include bribes to "the Taliban" and various warlords and "government officials" not to blow it up and burn it before it can be used in the latest frontal fiasco.
How stupid can we Game of RISK!/CallofDuty humans be?
I guess you must live someplace where a 20-foot rise in the ocean level and some degrees of global temperature rise won't bother you.
Too bad for the rest of us, right?
And you conflate the manufacture of (maybe) products from petrochemicals with impulse rides on private jets, megayachts that get 50 gallons to the mile, joyriding in Escalades, stuff like that. What I bet you would call "freedom," except that it's "free" only in the sense that other people, in other places and times, will be paying a horrific bill for your indulgence (and mine) in your short-termery.
They're doing both, of course. Only as a way of extending the arrant idiocy that is the Grand Networked Battlespace, of which this is one tiny Policy/Marketing Document: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/53204302/INTEGRATING-THE-BATTLESPACE-WITH-SOFTWARE-BASED-COMMUNICATIONS (Note the links to a buttload more documents in the same vein -- which looks to me like a large-bore IV in our collective subclavian vein, draining, draining, draining.
And what is that Grand Networked Interoperable Trans-National Battlespace Thingie, for all the trillions of dollars spent on expensive offices for contractors and Procurement Generals and all the rest of the giant bloated blood-sucking monolithic unitary parasite that is the World MIC.
Which, if you have not been paying attention, is eating a quarter, and a growing share on top, of the globe's wealth, and returning not ten cents' worth of "security," just more "threats" for that whole freakin' bunch of self-inflating cheats and thieves to use as the excuse, the "rationale," the sucker-baits, for still MORE "threats" and counter-threats and counter-counter-counter-counter-counter....threats. More "arms" to stir the world's hot pots, and of course in this area at least, USA is Number One!
The economy could also benefit, and maybe improve for once, if the US invests more in the usage of solar and natural gas energy. They’re more expensive than fossil fuels and oil, but they have much better and more efficient effects in the long run. Overall, I only encourage the military further to utilize solar energy,and perhaps eventually the entire country will follow.
Just take a moment to follow the money from your pocket to somewhere or other, to see what it all means.
The ongoing turnover is a big reason why the United States had the biggest reduction in CO2 releases of any country in the world last year.
If true, what a purely fortuitous effect of the "economics" of a dump in methane prices.
What's needed is a different driver for the whole shebang, one based on surival rather than short-term profit maximization, the continued spewing of external costs onto the most of us, and the long slow or maybe not so slow death of the habitable planet.
Coal gets cheep again, and the canaries will be gasping once again. And on behalf of my grandkids, let me say that it is no answer at all to just parrot "But that's the way it is..."
"It" got that way by choices and decisions and policies and legislation and what happens when guys in expensive suits build themselves big edifices and multiple mansions.
For a little more in the way of facts and opinions of even many former and current Bankstas, here are a couple of recent extracts from Yves Smith's "Naked Capital."
First, it seems even a lot of Really Big Present or Former Bankstas are now (for whatever reason -- to deflect the anger of the rest of us?) offering that the Big Things (can't honestly call them "banks" any more) need to be dissected into smaller theft units:
And in case you think this was all just boys-will-be-boys, and this stolen wealth should be "protected" where it has gone to, look here -- it's not even like most of this was "not illegal," here's a nice concise collection of felonies for you to berate your boughten legislators and timorous prosecutors with:
And since so much of that money is stolen, or "obtained in manners and by methods that have been legislated to not be illegal," or by people who have purchased immunity from prosecution one way or another, where do you get off your "moral" high horse pontificating about the sanctity of purloined "capital?"
You maybe admire Yasser Arafat, who squirreled billions of bucks intended for relief of the misery of "his people," much of which was apparently in accounts in them furrin sekrit banks to which only he, in his brain, kept the numbers and passwords? And of course he is just one of a large host of parasites and predators, for whom you are apparently an apologist. Who's got all that swag now, hey?
What's "fled" is the TAKEN wealth actually created, actually "earned," by generations of people who just do an honest day's work, most often any more for a whole lot less than what even former Robber Barons and vampire squids considered an honest day's pay.
These Beautiful Folks blow off the truth that we are all in this together, they have no sense of even propriety, let alone satiety. And they really sicken the rest of us, who know that there really is enough of everything that's needed to go all around the table, except for the Effing Few who eat all but one of the chops and all but one of the broccoli spears and all but one of the chocolate chip cookies, and then sucker the rest of us into warring over the scraps they leave.
That you are posting crap like this here indicates to me that you are not yourself one of the post-trans-national Really Rich Folk, just one of their "people" or a wannabe who isn't and likely never will be.
In case you haven't run across it, there's a telling exposition of how that whole "faith-based" thing works, including Ted Hagee's giant CUFI-AIPAC scam machine: Matt Taibbi's "The Great Derangement." Interesting how his well-fleeced flock just blows right past, in their mass-delusion "bible studies," all the Biblical warnings against False Prophets and pseudo-Messiahs.
Given the way us humans work, I kind of despair of anything ever getting what I would consider "better."
Not that it matters, given the reality of our Imperial Court and how Bidness is done in Washington, but those of us who cling to a quaint notion that the spoils system actually is supposed to effectuate some Change when there's a change in the nominal party in power might ask if there's a snowball's chance that the Nuttiness might lead to Sanity and Honesty and Fairness and that kind of silliness in the Bazaar that is Congress.
For those not clear on how "Policy" and legislative sausage are actually made, might I recommend at least the first few chapters of Matt Taibbi's "The Great Derangement"? Also illustrative of how Outliers like Bachmann (and Thurmond and Helms and DeLay and such) get there and stay there. Gotta love our Freedom...
Since when is Ron Paul any kind of "Republican," other than as a flag of convenience? You fear Sharia law? what do you think a Ron Paul-directed US of A would look like? Ask a woman, sans pearls, how she might feel about that kind of future. You think Paul would have any interest, once in power, in cutting back on any of our military excrescences? And of course he has some interesting notions of what America as a "freee market" would magically look like.
Shrink "the government," and replace it with all these "government-like organizations," so we can live like the folks on that planet visited by Captain Kirk and Spock, where the whole joint works on the Al Capone model... Pay your protection, or die.
Granted, what we have collectively saddled ourselves with is tailing down into that same kind of dystopia, on a slightly different trajectory. Seems we humans can't do any different, certainly not any better...
You support YOUR version of the Second Amendment, which in its entirety reads:
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Which well-regulated militia do you belong to?
And yes, I have heard all the smarmy work-arounds that the NRA and other gun lovers have cobbled up to justify their preferences and peccadilloes. No sale, a four-corners strict construction is compellingly plain-meaning.
And one might ask if you might be blind and gullible enough to fail to see that our NeoSecurity State and the way things work right now, already, in a political division near you and in our Imperial Capital, are not as bad and as pervasive as the stuff of your Maofears and Stalinterors and Hitlerhorrors? There were a whole lot of humans who were very comfortable going along with those predatory elites, just like the NRA is happy to go along with our current set of predators and kleptocrats.
"Disarmed population?" How you gonna protect your freakin' bank account against government cyberseizure, your HomeIsYourCastle against theft by the Foreclosing Bankstas or some pipeline company all that other stuff that "the government" and the People Who Want To Run Government Like A Business And Already Are are holding, like your delicate cullions, in their massive inevitable slowly tightening hands? You gonna shoot your way out of the actual "takeover?" Which day, on the long slow descent into subjugation, are you going to pick to start your revolt? "It can't happen here"? Hey, it already has. All that's left is some further integration of the control mechanisms and some mopping up. Military training, or even thousands of "CallofDuty" hours ain't gonna help even a little.
You think you are "free," because you can buy guns 'n ammo? You think the massive thing that rules you and the rest of us and is turning us into serfs and slaves and cranking the machinery that is grinding up the planet at an ever-faster rate is in the tiniest way concerned about that little bit of chimerical "freedom" you think you have left? Really?
Extra points for being such a careful reader -- actually, IN-reader. Wrong, very wrong on both of your imputations, but then I bet you knew that before you wrote. Guns are dumb, so are most of the people who get off on them.
Makes you proud of your country, right? that it is full of such people, of which a percentage are not that far away from "lighting up" their families and local theaters and schools and such? We're "horrified" by Columbine and Aurora, but the level of prurient interest in the incidents and aftermath is simply enormous.
One wonders if the gun lovers who love the myths and, yes, sexual pleasures, and sense of power that those full-and-semi-auto little machines provide them, along with a large chunk of their identity, will be descending like the Harpies to eat Cole's liver.
Or maybe they are finally getting so freakin' smug that they have buffaloed (a rich word) the rest of us so thoroughly that they don't even feel the need to lay down suppressive fire on any wimpy commie libruls who might question their faith and their fun.
Fun. Stuff like this "Full Auto" get-together -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lkCc6y9MpM . The family that shoots, and blows, sh#t up together, stays together, or something. Or at least they all have a fair shootin' chance if one of their number goes berserk and starts off on a family murder-suicide mission, or another enactment of some movie idiocy or scenario out of "Call of Duty"...
And for all you gun lovers out there, this Vietvet shoots, and has his own little "bitter man's" arsenal, in various calibers, so spare your rage. Or your smarmy "logical" arguments.
I know, most people know, that the toothpaste was long since squeezed out of all our sensible tubes, and the "FOXFreeeeedom bell" can never be un-rung, and this is just one more part of the great swathes of dead-end-ianism that is going to kill America-the-sometime-great-notion, and for you to believe that Obama was going to take your guns away just shows how far down the rabbit hole you have gone.
Cancerous tumors never know when to quit while they are ahead...
Bless you, professor, for your courage and honor. Too bad there are no medals for people like you.
A lot of National Socialist "leaders" took that deal, when it was offered by the "winning" governments in 1945 and thereafter... Took a lot of the treasures of Europe with them, too.
Kind of like Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang gang did when they fled the mainland, and invaded and took over Formosa (subjugating and dispossessing the folks who, you know, LIVED there, sounding like a lot of other more recent events), ripping off the portable wealth and art of an ancient land. No falling on THEIR swords, for any of these kleptocrats, ha ha ha.
At least the Germans seem to have ended up with a bit more stability and a lot kinder and gentler social order. Italians? Not so much, but then our sneaky petes have a lot to do with how that came to be... http://killinghope.org/bblum6/italy1.htm
When you have "Wild Bill" wild cards stirring parts of the pot in different directions, it's so very hard to even make a list of possible prediction outcomes, let alone do anything to help them along in a sustainable, "golden rule" kind of direction.
Ask Joe and Bill about where one might draw that line.
Sure seems to me that the Kermits and Wild Bills of the world just do the stuff they do "because they can." I recall one of the US sneaky petes, years ago, being asked why his little group had fomented one coup or another "takedown" stratagem -- and that was pretty much the response: "We were on the ground, we saw the opportunity and we took it."
Who gives a shit for long wisdom, consistency, stability, even whether this or that game makes any sense for the "national interest," when you can make people afraid of you and take their stuff? Happens on school buses and in our elementary and high school hallways every weekday except holidays... I guess "by definition" if it's done by the CIA spooks or any of "our" other pot-stirrers, it's "in the national interest."
A certain amount of cowboyism may be tolerable in a cynical world with the equivalent of its immune system still largely intact. We have largely used up that particular capacity now.
Professor, maybe someone needs to educate our potential benefactor on the meaning of the words "investigation," "reporting," and "news." Given that the corporate person, Microsoft, has kind of been shown to be a destroyer of wealth while building its own enormous store of cash, http://www.crisisremedies.com/Google_and_Microsoft_The_Destructiveness_Of_Wealth_and_Ego.shtml, driven by that "competition" thingie that C-suite-ers use to justify their excesses, I would hold out little hope that even Melinda (etymologically, "sweet") can move the Juggernaut out of its course -- too many little striving men and women intent on selfish interests are pushing the wagon).
We little individual persons are of course "free," so far, and so generally futilely, to petition the corporate facade not to crush us the rest of the way into the ignorant dust. Hope springs eternal!
Hey, Bill, if you're gonna do a drive-by "impeachment" shooting, via that "what is the evidence" trick, the kind you tend to ignore when someone returns the favor, in the Great Game of politipolemics, in hopes that your own misprisions will just scroll down and disappear into the Netnoise, all part of your tag-team, aggressive justification (sic) of your notion of what ought to be the status quo going forward (even if it kills the rest of us humans), y'all oughta make sure the target is disabled (or precluded by closing of comments, in the "last word" version of the game) from shooting back.
But of course in the endgame shitstorm that's currently afoot, the one about who gets to use up the last drop of oil and the last kilo of copper and bushel of barley and all that, every cowpie that gets flung up on the screen obscures a piece of the true picture, and with all the flying droppings it's dang near impossible for the janitors to even scratch the surface to let folks see the dug-down reality. "Conservative" Victory Through BS Power!
In the words of Patrick O'Brian, WW II British sneaky-pete turned really great historical-novel author, spoken by his cynically romantic protagonist Steven Maturin:
"Patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my country, right or wrong, which is infamous, or my country is always right, which is imbecile.”
Well, shucks, Joe, it's like there's no evidence and history that supports, even proves, that Skuldugs wearing a "Made In USA" label in their shorts have, like, y'know, "meddled in the affairs of the region.
Glad your first squib ends with that limiting phrase, "is bizarre to AN American observer." It would have strained the truth rather far to claim that there are no "American observers" who, with good reason and plenty of examples, note that there are lots of little "interventions" by nominal "US" critters in that part of the world.
The fun part for me is how this is all being accomplished.
Which involves a long, slow, covert process of aiding the nation formerly known as America along its way to fiscal and moral bankruptcy. Fostered by the millions of myth-believing working stiffs who actually create the declining wealth (and jobs, via our consumption and willingness to accept an ever-smaller share of the wealth we create) that enables this sickness.
Most of us have no idea what the metastatic malignancy known as the MIC/state security apparatus is really up to, using our money and our future and our credulous young people. Just like cancerous tumors in our bodies, these constructs have learned how to hide their real nature behind a thin screen of lies and commonplaces, and suckered us into believing that they are just normal body tissues and organs. All the while making vastly more of their own kind of cells, proliferating and spreading and infiltrating, and pulling that trick called "angiogenesis" by which the cancer tricks the body into growing huge new arteries, to bring ever more of our nutrients strength direct to the tumor, leading to that horrible wasting death.
The thing is, it's a global phenomenon, carried forward by the likes of Wolfowitz and Cheney and a host of careerists who profit from this grand end game. And nobody (or not enough of us) has a clue, first, that this is happening, and second, what, if anything, can be done to arrest or even slow the progression of the disease.
As with lawyers, so the old joke goes, Rmoney has nothing to fear. The shark will happily extend a fellow rapacious predator full professional courtesies.
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The thing that "Americans" know, the ones who Do Business with those "friends," those serial dictators (often involving delivery of huge amounts of weapons or the, shall we say, profitable extraction of what in other times would be "common resources,") and the people in government and the military who facilitate that Doing of Business, is that comfortable awareness and certainty that there are no personal consequences for them when countries fracture or collapse, or when ordinary people have finally had totally enough and do the chaotic and uncontrollable and almost unthinkable thing -- taking to the streets, and finding out how to gather weapons, and how to do tactics and make war on themselves. With Jackals and sneaky-Petes skulking around, looking for openings to advance their rulers' particular interests, or maybe just for the fun de-stabilizing things.
The people who set all the often-inevitable chaos up, sitting there at Langley and in Foggy Bottom and various offices and other imperial seats of power in DC, and in the top stories of corporate phalluses across the globe, have "people" to tell them the time, watch the crowds for "security threats" to their perfect persons, hold their coats and doors, deliver those perfect out-of-season flowers and fruit that the plutocrats whimsically call for, and tell them in immeasurable little ways every moment of every day how special and important and deserving and blessed they are. And the evidence is all around them: the private jets, the huge piles of money, the estates, the raw power to "make things happen" in their favor.
So there they squat, in their penthouses and paneled or glittering, glassy offices, enfolded in the conviction of their Entitlement To Everything, sneering and snickering at the Mob, most of whom are suckers enough to accept the perverse re-definition of "entitlement" into what Mittsy Romney and Babyface Ryan and the Koch-Rovers have made it, a pejorative to further denigrate the Mob's image of the Other.
It's not "countries" that have done this crap for millenia -- the Roman 1% had estates a long way from Rome to escape to, the Bourbons snuck off to Prussia, the Nazis de-camped to Argentina, the Kuomintang stole China's heritage and invaded and enserfed Formosa, all with nice portfolios and cartloads of expensive art and other portable treasures. National loyalty and that thing variously called "patriotism" are for suckers, just another myth and tool to manipulate the mopes.
We in America are not "the world's policemen:" more accurately, we are the world's Syndicate, collecting protection money, suborning governments where our actors are smart enough to do so, carrying water and manure for people who are smart enough to manipulate our thugs into "enforcement" of their interests, picking fights with people we are too clumsy and big to "defeat." Cops are supposed to be about maintaining order and respect for the law. That clearly ain't what our uniformed and plainclothes boots-on-the-ground are up to, at all.
And in the meantime, the Few live their upper-story existences, immune to the messes they make, the death and destruction and despair they cause, able to leap from tall buildings here to tall buildings somewhere else like Dubai, at the hint of approaching retribution.
Gee, there's this place called "Nacerima" where there's an unruly, disparate, multi-ethnic, religiously divided, angry and heavily-armed population, and a rapidly weakening set of "traditions" that used to rely on common myths about democracy and opportunity 'n stuff, to keep it all from flying apart into little secessionist units in places like "Saxet." One wonders if Bill thinks there's an argument for a strong, powerful Naceriman leader (what he implies is "ruler," not "leader," like a Saddam or a Bashad or Shah or Ayatollah, with the attendant ascendancy of one of the disparate groups over everyone else, and I bet he would expect to end up being part of the Ascenders) to keep it all, what's his phrase, "in check"?
That "in-check-ism" sure seems to be the central the notion that the Experienced Players in the Great Game are constantly working toward implementing, world-wide. It's so much easier to "do business" with a kleptocratic dictator, now isn't it?
No reason to worry about or be wary of a Zionist Likudnik with not "a" bomb, but maybe 400 of them, and an "enrichment" and actual bomb-making program that is operating with a pretty good head of steam right now.
The thing about all of this human-behavior, who's-a-bigger-liar stuff is that You Never Know, which is the fundamental fact that all the pot-stirrers and fomenters of conflict rely on when reminding us that You Can't Believe A Word Anyone Says. Of course, there are Experts who can parse the flood of words and, authoritatively, tell the rest of us what is or isn't in the minds of Mullahs and Masters of the Universe. And since Our Fellow American Rulers Who Would Never Lie To Us, or Our Allies the Israelis Who Would Never Lie To Us, say that the Evil Iranians are Up To Something , at least it must be more likely than not. Right? I mean, after all there were Weapons of Mass Destruction all over Iraq, right? and then there's stuff like this to read and try to figure out, when it comes to that IAEA thing and the biases that Prof Cole has dared to report here in the past: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/22/nuclear-watchdog-iran-iaea
Good luck figuring it all out. Following the money helps, but you got to account for all that tribal and power-driven stuff too...
Why does it seem that the "questions" about Iranian intentions re becoming a Mouse That Roared are mostly generated by people whose job it is to sow dissension, create fear and uncertainty, and do stuff like tell Yellowcake tales and scare us with fraudulent Bomber Gaps, Missile Gaps and Windows of Vulnerability that we might fall into or get thrown out of? And that so much of what our Experienced Players and Great Gamers claim to perceive in the intentions of Others is just projection of their own baser, scarier and more hateful wishes and dark midnight thoughts and secret plans? Coupled with really strenuous efforts to make sure that anyone foolish enough to try to relate to others with decency and honor and trustworthiness gets a lot of hard, painful lessons in how the worst of us work and how the rest of us have to play the same game or get killed, or worse, creating that ol' self-fulfilling prophecy thing?
It's a good thing, Bill, that probably nobody at all gives a hoot about what positions you (or I, of course, and my imaginary 3x5 cards) take or assume on any issue or point or argument, on matters minute or of Great Import.
And I hope you will be honest enough to keep salt and pepper shakers ready to hand, should future events reveal that any of your Jovian pronouncements prove to be, like, incorrect. I've got mine, a Fiestaware rooster and chicken inherited from my grandparents... (I was unaware that one was supposed to actually eat the egg, scrambled or over easy or hard, that one found on one's face after saying something that proved not to be so. I thought that little gustatory figure of speech was structured around eating one's hat that one had been found guilty of talking through.)
And guess what? There's a bunch of careful scholarship that concludes that all that "delivering" and "smiting" stuff was composed as a self-serving oral tradition, vetted and parsed and finally inscribed, by a bunch of patriarchal tribal leaders, whose opposite (and losing) numbers, the tribal chieftains and high priests of all those Hittites and Amorites and Jebusites, etc., that were put to the sword or enslaved by the Israelites, had composed similar traditions and texts with the same import, and them as the winners. And of course the KJV is only one of hundreds of renditions of the words, and people still argue vigorously and acrimoniously over the punctuation, the stresses, the manifold translations of the many words.
Is verse 22 the authority for the way the Likudniks are dealing with Gaza and the West Bank? "And the Lord thy God will put out those nations before thee by little and little: thou mayest not consume them at once, lest the beasts of the field increase upon thee"? One might guess the balance of that selection justifies and gives divine sanction to all the rest? When do the Israelites get to consume the US, or is the US not one of those "nations?" Might want to ask the Armageddonists among the Christians, the ones who are busily trying to bring about the end of the world so they can come into their version of 72 versions and endless ripe dates, what they think about that...
Does the G_d of Love trump the YWH of Abraham? Just asking.
Aw, c'mon, Perfesser -- ANYthing is possible, isn't it? Per that great purveyor of truthiness, Donald "You go to war with the Army you've got" Rumsfeld,
So there! You see? Having experienced decades of Our Own Sacred Government lying to us in things large and small, having performed chemical and biological and radiological experiments on us mopes, trading weapons for hostages and using drug money to fund CIA-driven destabilizations whole denying everything or being unable to recall, conspiring to set in motion the nuclear arming of Israeli crazies, there are so many things we don't know that we don't know that, c'mon, it is POSSIBLE that those sneaky bastards in Iran have a huge underground nukeular weapons program, and ICBMs and cargo containers and truck bodies fitted with nukular devices that are just moments away from Destroying Our Ally Who Spies On Us, Sneers At Us, Takes Our Money And Pokes All Of Muslimia In The Eye Every Chance They Get, and of course blowing up the Pentagram, G_d between us and evil!!!!!
Our minds are made up, our limbic systems are spinning up to warp speed, and the drums of war are hammering in our brains and loins. Don't be confusing us with no damn FACTS, fer Jaysus' sake!!!
At the risk of incurring Mr. Bill's withering Olympian disdain, here's a little snippet of history that might have a bearing on one's evaluation and judgment of the nature of US Gamesmanship in this sick world. I would guess that Mr. Bill would discount it as just another conspiracy theory, of course, because it implicates some of the Great Game Narrative Heroes in some pretty skullduggerous acts, and of course these people NEVER would have stooped so low as to "go around" the US State Department and President to make a slick deal with a Towelheaded Terrorist, or trade hostages for weapons and cash, or divert Iranian money into arming terrorist insurgents in efforts to overthrow democratically elected governments in places like Nicaragua, or any stuff like that. Or, like, overthrow the Mossadegh democratically elected government of Iran in favor of a dictator to "our" liking, one who would undo the nationalization of the British and "American" oil extractors there. And other stuff, of course.
But here goes. It was referred to as the "October Surprise," and depending on where your loyalties and identities lie, and in a froth of conflicting testimony and paper trails, you might accept or reject the notion that Republican operatives and others who wanted Carter "out of there" cut a little deal with Ayatollayouso Khomeini to hang on to those 52 US Embassy hostages until after the 1980 election, to help ensure the Right outcome of the Reagan Revolution. Stuff like that NEVER happens in the real world, now does it? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_surprise_conspiracy_theory
Have at it, Mr. Bill, dig into your store of condescension and supercilious lingo -- this running impeachment gag seems to have become a personal thing for you.
And by the way, there are of course erudite others who have different, wildly different, and divergent, "explanations" for what happened to the economy of the US from, say, 1976 to, say, the present. And, of course, there's some objective evidence as to who got rich, and who got screwed, and what if anything was done to effect and affect the stability, vel non, of the human part of the planet during that time.
Hey, don'tcha know love, like Heaven, is boring? Can't begin to hold human interest the way anger and hatred and violence and even despair do.
Check out the lengthy, detailed, imaginative, voluptuous, evocative prose of those chroniclers of Badness, John Milton ("Paradise Lost") and Dante Alighieri ("The Inferno," and the rest of the "Divine Comedy",) and the many current action, fantasy, sci-fi, "history" and other titles in Barnes&Nobles, and the nature of TV entertainment and all those scare and screech and vampire and zombie movies, not to mention "Grand Theft Auto" and "Call of Duty" and Grimms' Fairy Tales. Even the "Left Behind" stuff -- the evil guys and gals are a lot more interesting than the insipid heroes, and even the Angels are violent warriors in a zero-sum game where you would think a merciful and all-mighty G_d would be able and willing to put an instant end to the fighting. Just like in Ireland or the Mideast or Notagainistan. Everybody hug, now, and kiss and make up...
Evil inspires, attracts, seduces, enlivens, encourages, incites, elevates. Who wants to sit on a cloud, strumming a harp, singing infinitely eternal paeans to G_d Almighty? Even 72 virgins and all the ripe dates you can eat are going to pale after a while. The best prose and poetry comes out of something very different than beatific and wishful and squishy visions. Which should tell us a lot about ourselves as a species, and if the learning is used well, maybe arm us against always succumbing to our limbic natures. Maybe figure out how to incorporate the Golden Rule into our lives as well as our lip service.
Not bloody likely, of course...
The other stuff is too much fun. Think about the words of Winston Churchill: "There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result." In context: http://fisticmystic.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/being-shot-at-without-result/ Ask one who waterboards or sends electric shocks to the genitals of a helpless person, or beats a grandmother holding a placard bloody and senseless with a baton, or pickles off a Hellfire or three into a group of "militants" and then several more into the people who follow the humane impulse to give aid and succor to the survivors of the first attack, how it works...
And nobody says much about how the Likudniks are an existential threat, a real and present and current existential threat, to the Palestinians. Once they've squeezed enough wealth and blood out of them, and displaced them from any place they live so as to invoke that old fraud, "possession is nine-tenths of the law..."
And how many times does it have to be pointed out that our war leaders and state security mavens actually consider the Great Gamers in Israel to be the most significant Mideast threat to US interests and stability? Even Ha'Aretz put this AP story up for Israelis to laugh about: "Former U.S. officials say CIA considers Israel to be Mideast's biggest spy threat." http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/former-u-s-officials-say-cia-considers-israel-to-be-mideast-s-biggest-spy-threat-1.454189
That's what Limbaugh says. So it must be true.
Ah, but our embassies are Sacred US Soil. Aren't they?
Isn't that what the treaties and all that stuff say?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomatic_mission
And hey, our Sneaky Petes would not be overthrowing democratically elected governments and sowing instability and propping up penny-ante dictators who happen to be Our Guys without Really Good Reasons that involve Preserving Our Sacred Way of Life, would they? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermit_Roosevelt,_Jr.
Details, details -- they fit so poorly with the Narrative...
Good job, Joe, conflating the many dead bodies of "bugsplattery" with the relatively tiny number of what we used to call "terrorists" that happen to get killed by Hellfires. But then this is all about Us versus Them, then having to be a way bigger population than is any kind of threat to our security and way of life...
And of course this situation, this eruption of anger and a bunch of other emotions by people who have been the negative beneficiaries of US imperialism (which goes back to the last years of the 19th century) is simply incomprehensible to us open-handed, generous, tolerant, progressive Americans (with a not so subtle subtext of "Them Wogs won't get away with treating US like that -- nuke 'em back to the stone age, where they belong!)
And maybe the whole propaganda-imposed analytics, of how it's them irrational evil Muslims being too sensitive about their backward religion, is just kind of, like, wrong, and people all around the planet are finally fed up with kleptocracy and the sending in of the Marines to "protect US Interests." Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.
Yeah, like people in this country are so truly concerned about incursions and intrusions into, and impositions and erosions of any of the Bill of Rights, except maybe a warped interpretation of the Second Amendment. You got any idea what is in the NDAA, the Patriot Act, stuff like that? Or what the various police departments in America are up to, not to mention a whole bunch of federal and state agencies?
And now people who have little axes to grind, little explosions to detonate, want to hide their games behind the moribund bodies of our "Founding Fathers..."
To go along with the notion that humans as a group can't really do much better than we are currently doing, there always being miserable skulch like WhoeverBasileActuallyIs and his backers, maybe you-all remember another effort to light the fuses at home and abroad: That 2005 video production that actually had some "production values," if none of the other kind, and won some awards at right-wing film festivals, Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsession:_Radical_Islam%27s_War_Against_the_West It was quite an ugly surprise to have that fall out of my Sunday newspaper, here in St. Pete, FL.
It's even got a home of its own: http://www.obsessionthemovie.com/ And of course if you tune in to the "Christian" TV channels, Judeo-Christian even, there's a whole lot more of that kind of stuff out there: "Who cares if the planet dies, as long as MY kind prevail or are the last to die!"
And of course in the Muslim world, you can bet that there are people who are morally and spiritually indistinguishable from the creatures here in America and England and France and Germany and even Norway, all of whom who peddle and live these messages designed to stir the pot, ignite the torches, and keep the ranks of the circular firing squads filled, just not with the shadowy personages standing behind and handing up full 30-round clips of .223 and 7.62 and .308 ammo, to the testosterone-poisoned, flag-wrapped fools in the front rank, just as fast as they can...
Speaking of facts not in evidence, here's a timeline relative to the Cairo embassy statement that maybe one would like to look at, and maybe try to impeach and discount as just being from some "liberal" outlet. http://www.scpr.org/programs/airtalk/2012/09/12/28388/libya-ambassador-killing/ And a comment that the US Embassy condemnation of that film, apparently issued "pre-violence," was "pandoring (sic) to the mob, pre-, post-, or during the violence," is not only illogical, it's unutterably weak, in the colloquial sense.
And as to whether "Sam Bacile" is an Israeli-American, or something else altogether, including a work of creative "Xtian" fiction, there's this: http://www.scpr.org/programs/airtalk/2012/09/12/28388/libya-ambassador-killing/ Details at 11?
Need to always get the last word, and try to sow doubt and uncertainty in favor of the Neocon Narrative?
And it's hard to see what "American people" Digby is invoking with that assertion that they are "are no longer in a “restrained” mood regarding Islamic Fundamentalists" and are demanding that "Obama" hammer the new government of Libya.
Bill is big on contempt and ridicule. And also big on playing out the usual heavy trumps that lie so well on the American table, that bit about how all Arabs and Muslims and them people are irretrievably Evil Other, and we Christians are all just good and kind and all that. And once again "my country, or at least the part I run with, right or wrong."
Them 9/11 guys entered and/or stayed in the US illegally while prepping for the Big Day. As I recall it, they committed a bunch of frauds and violations of laws on currency transactions and a bunch of other stuff. And commandeering a passenger jet is pretty seriously a violation of the US code, and has been punished as such in the past (by a very different Justice Department.) And of course well after the fact, it becomes increasingly clear that Bush and Cheney and their underlings were not going to pay any attention to serious reporting that the 9-11 gang were here and planning an attack involving airliners and a lot of other reported signs and signals that should have been followed up on if the Kleptocrats were not so fixated on stealing Iraqi oil and doing favors for other players in that Great Game theater.
Interesting how the meaning of the word "patriotism" has wandered so very far from what most of us thought we understood about the term. To the point that Lockheed Martin's snottily arch and intentionally ambiguous "patriotic" corporate slogan is, or was recently, "We never forget who we're working for." And it appears that the "who" is maybe the critters called "shareholders," and the critters who populate that post-national entity's C-Suite and determine the value of their own services and thus their "fair compensation." And let us not forget "who" well KBR and Halliburton have done through all this. But "who" most definitely is not, as far as any reality or even appearances I can make out, the great mass of what used to be thought of as Americans, or any kind of pursuit of real security, long-game security and stability, for the US or the rest of the world.
Of course, there's "conservative," and then there's "conservative," which is a skunk of a different stripe and stink...
Speaking of innocent persons, was it in Somalia that one local druglord/warlord, beloved of our local CIA for the usual spurious murky reasons, fingered one of his competitors (with actually no ties and as I recall active antipathy to the kind of "terrorism" that supposedly is our target) as being an "al Quaeda, and the CIA obligingly "took him out?" Oh, well -- fog of war and all that.
"Legal" and "moral" have nothing to do with any of this -- just noises to be used post-hoc to "justify" what has to be a kind of fun game for the guys behind the screens, twiddling their joysticks...
And maybe that careful accounting should also reckon the cost of US "policies" and actions, including killing civilians who have families and clans and tribes that for some reason get pissed off and sorrowful when "we" or the sneaks who kill in "our" names do one of those "oopsies," and but for "our policies" would have zero reason to take up arms and do stuff like "blue-on-green" and all that.
Even the conservative "policy" people know that their actions are great recruiting tools for militancy and revenge. And a cynical person whose interests lie in keeping the Forever War going might actually look forward to a lot of "bugsplat," and the inevitable and predictable reactions from the Wogs, as a way to justify, to the rubes who pay for all of this, the "neeeeed" to keep doing More Of The Same. Spending trillions to swat mosquitoes, on the notion that if "we" don't keep doing it, "we" will be destroyed by Those Who Hate Us And Our Freedom tm(sic).
Like one of my favorite jokes:
A guy is walking in Times Square with an elephant gun under his arm. Cop says to him "What the heck do you think you are doing, carrying an elephant gun around Times Square?" Guy says, "Keeping the wild elephants away!" Cop says "There's not a wild elephant within 5,000 miles of here, buster!" Says the smug fella, "SEE? It works!"
Causation, again?
And who said anything about what you refer to as "doing nothing?" Effective law enforcement is doing plenty. What a surprise that the vast majority of would-be attacks by what we hardly call "terrorists" any more, since some of them are White Boys, are intercepted by simple police activity (and many of those are FOMENTED by police agents provacateur doing what used to be called "entrapment." And that it appears in recent bits from Bush presidential security briefings prior to that telling monkey-grin in that Texas classroom on 9-11, that the stuff to have intercepted the whole 9-11 plot was right there before the guys who told the bin Laden desk at the CIA to "stand down" because Georgie and Dickie no longer were concerned about him. It seems pretty clear that the sum of US "policies" toward hegemony and empire and all that are just sowing dragon's teeth, making a few people rich, corrupting politics and business at home and abroad, and doing less of what "we" are doing might actually result in some significant improvements in our way of life.
Do you assume, along with the Narrative, that there is a "they" called "al Quaeda" that is as organized as "we" like to believe "they" are? A kind of Wendy's franchise deal, spreading across the globe? All them Muslims all lined up to take a turn at "slaughtering civilians?" As if the actions of "conservatives" on all sides, and of course what used to be excoriated as Anarchist Bomb Throwers pursuing the Propaganda of the Deed, all through history, are not simply represented as somehow New and Different, in what's reported as Current Affairs?
Sure seems like our CIA-contractor-Special Ops great Hellfire-and-damnation "successes," in Pashtun-land and elsewhere, killing a few Wogs many of whom turn out to be inoffensive plain folks, are not only wasted energy but downright idiotic if the nominal goal is "increased security." But of course it don't appear that's the goal, at all...
Wow. I feel so much better now.
What are your scientific credentials, again, Alex? Reading stuff at RedStates? Auditing FOX?
And let's all remember how things work: "Apres moi le deluge..." (For anyone who would like to read a little article that really puts old Louis XIV's purported pronouncement in richer context, look here: http://tradicionclasica.blogspot.com/2006/01/expression-aprs-moi-le-dluge-and-its.html )
These fu__ers know that they will be comfortably dead and beyond any retribution and restitution, fully pleased in every possible physical and emotional way at the expense of the rest of us, including of course our children and grandchildren. Romney and Ryan and the creatures who are fronting the purchase of their "election" are post-national; they can and do live anywhere they damn well want to, have no loyalty to anything but themselves, and could not care less about the miseries their "policies" and predations cause.
Guess What? The Kleptocrats just don't give a rip about any of that. Because, as they so smugly and snottily put it amongst themselves, "IBG-YBG" -- "I'll be gone, you'll be gone," before the crap hits the fan of course -- off to Dubai or wherever. Don't you just wish YOU lived like this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFAvvk9gM9U
Not about race, Bubba Reader? Y'all come on down here to Florida and The Villages, or the diner where I occasionally break my fast, or to the Bay Pines VA hospital complex where FOX runs all day on the wall TVs, and listen to the chatter. Be sure to stop in Alabama and Georgia and the Carolinas too, and take some side trips even to Chicago and Detroit. Does it make you uncomfortable that people dare to mention that racism thing? Kind of undercut your belief in the righteousness of your self-righteousness?
Take your demonstrably false talking points, all that crap about Obamacare being a "tax increase" and the rest, that you so shamelessly repeat, and take a hike.
The cool thing about how way too many people think is that (now that Canadian government types have labeled Iran the greatest threat to peace and stability in the world) we are getting closer, thanks to ignorance and prejudice and uncritical jingoism, to a Great Cleansing - where thanks to a relatively few of us, there will be a great singeing of the planet, that will rid it of most of us, decent people along with the lice and ticks and flag-waving, Limbaugh-believing critters...
This Viet vet, who "DEROSed" in August of 1968 after living through a thing called "Tet," offers the notion that any noise about anything anyone says that points to the idiocy and futility of what our Brass and the Neocons have wrought while "our troops are still in harm's way" does not get the fundamental reality.
Guess what? The whole freakin' Milo Minderbinder Enterprise is a FAILURE, if you measure it against any "national interest" of what used to be called "America."
On the other hand, it's conveniently boosted the careers of a bunch of Brass and their contractor pets and bosses, transferred at least $4 trillion out of the pockets of all the rest of us, recent past, present and long into the future, f_c_ed up a whole lot of your fellow US citizens in uniform, killed and injured G_d only knows how many noncombatants (and people who rightfully are defending THEIR country against yet another foreign invader who bombs indiscriminately, too often kills for kicks, has no freakin' idea of how to "win" an asymmetric fight, and is too stupid and brontosaurian to recognize the wisdom of cutting losses by getting out.)
There is not a G_ddam useful thing "we" can do in Notagainistan any more (other than enrich the rulers, enrich the contractors, and advance the Brass), nothing "we" could do there or in Iraq in the first place that comports with any sensible "national interest," hardly even the one that (wait for it, Bill) Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler identified 90 years ago: War is a RACKET, run to enrich a few corporate interests, and guess what, people? Where's that OIL "we" were going to TAKE to pay for the invasion of Iraq? And what have "we" bought by failing to kill bin Laden all those years ago, and kicking down doors in Kandahar to raise up more angry tribespeople who hate us worse and whose culture demands vengeance? Where's the Huge Store of Rare Earths and Minerals that "we" were told "we" could take out of Notagainistan as the justification du jour for more of the same? Can you spell "Chinese businessmen?"
So "we kill some of them and they kill some of us and we kill some of them and they kill some of us and we kill some of them and..." is neither a doctrine, a strategy, or any kind of intelligent tactic. And in the meantime, "we" pay their "militants" (we don't call them all "terrorists" any more, it seems) to drive the trucks that deliver the $400-a-gallon fuel to the Abrams tanks that sink in the sand and the Hummers and Buffalos that detonate the IEDs, oh,m and pay the "militants" not to attack the convoys taking all that expensive munitia to "the current front." (I just read that a third of all US GI deaths in that place resulted not from combat but from fatal accidents in Humvees. http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2012-08-31/health/bal-hopkins-humvee-injuries_1_vehicle-crashes-humvee-accidents-hopkins-analysis)
I don't care how many "troops" you "surge" into Notagainistan, there is no need to wait on the spin doctors to tell us why "it worked." It did not. It's a situation where there is no articulable rational goal, no way to "win," any more than there was in "my" war -- maybe except if you do what Gen. Curtis "Bomb 'em back to the Stone Age" LeMay and this guy and his staff and contractors, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/JD17Ae01.html, were ready and willing to do -- nuke the place until the land surface is melted into glass. Who cares about nuclear winter -- ever heard of that?-- or any other larger consequences?
I call BS on the notion that the "surges" "worked," the notion that "our Brave Soldiers" might suffer from vociferous pointing out of the enormous futility they are asked to kill (and die) for, and invite others who think it did to show detail to support their notion. Links to punditopinions do not count.
Yeah, just like here in America.
And it does not take a lot of digging to find that there are a lot of people, even Israelis, who are shall we say less than satisfied with the honesty and "judiciousness" of the various courts, civil, criminal and religious, in Israel. On the scholarly side, with a look at "fierce independence," http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2012/01/28/kenneth-levin-the-u-s-view-of-israels-judiciary/. On the Palestinian side, http://electronicintifada.net/content/can-rights-be-won-israels-courts/11355. And google has millions more bits on biases in the Israeli judiciary. It's not, far as I can see, just a matter of "hard cases making bad law." Anywhere you go on the planet, in systems created and maintained by hateful humans, you are going to find venality, corruption and bias.
Some places are worse than others, but in 20+ years of public and private legal practice, I saw some good, much bad and way too much really ugly in state and federal courts all across our "ruleoflaw" land. Israel ain't no better, and now that "we" are doing the same kind of "righteous killing," in various places at home and abroad, and running our "prison industrial complexes" and such-like, "we" both have descended a long way into the darkness.
And that pseudostatistic proves exactly what, again, Beavis?
Simply astounding "logic." I hope all your personal perceptions are equally simplistic... Who's your hero? Ron Paul, Ron Reagan (who?), Ron-ney?
The nice thing about this kind of discussion is that it gives a smidgen of hope that people, writ large, might be capable of thinking in terms of something other than unbridled combusto-consumption and profit and domination, and what might happen after they are dead.
But there's still so much of that pick-a-winner thinking and believing: which technology will RULE, in a game that's driven by competition and covetousness, especially in light of the unanticipatable popping up of newer-faster-cheaper? Put your money on a winner is the game of too many players, from financializationists to plodding government bureaucrats working at a 19th-century pace (out of career-concern necessity) to bribed legislators and hopeful CEOs of startups with great new ideas that may turn into blind alleys and dead-ends in the blink of a 'net post and tweet.
But I guess, for the sake of my grandchildren, I should be glad that there's at least an appearance that, except for the grifters and extractionists and their trolls and trulls, there's some small evidence that a different ethos about the oikos might be taking root. Query whether it's going to be buried by megatons of overburden from "bullshit-shovel-ready projects" like the "Coalfields Expressway," a marvelous bit of so-typical deceit: http://sierraclub.typepad.com/compass/2012/08/coals-road-to-nowhere-the-coalfields-expressway.html. Or zapped by UV or drowned by CO2 or rising ocean levels or asphyxiated by extinction of ocean phytoplankton, a la "Soylent Green."
What it takes, I think, is a fundamental revision of the basic approach to life. Something that even some reactionary "Christianists" are starting to discover is consistent with even the text of the Old Testament where so many of them find those "the Bible says" references to support their world view. That bit about wise stewardship and all, rather than use-it-up-before-Jesus-comes-back Dominionism. It's about silly stuff like eschewing plastic bags, and even tiny little nods toward "ecology" like smaller, thinner, shallower plastic caps on your thinner, lighter vitamin-water bottles.
And of course it's not a universal motion -- the Obamanauts have lit the fuse on oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean, and of course they are pushing "clean coal" as part of a Wise Strategy Of Energy Independence. As if "we" can keep spewing "our" externalities under the doctrine of American Exceptionalism, ad nauseam and ad mortem.
Oh, and I guess we should be gratified that, according to latest doctrine, the Navy is "going green." But guess what? A gallon of french fry-based jet fuel, which the Navy plans to be using ever more of, costs something like $30 a gallon: http://townhall.com/tipsheet/townhallcomstaff/2012/07/05/us_navy_going_green_spending_extra_622_to_use_chicken_fat_fuel, and probably has its own set of externalities in production. That's a kind of "substitution behavior," PR and career-driven, that only seems to make sense.
Bet you meant "countries," but it's more interesting as written.
Now there's a telling Freudian slip or innocent typo or whatever. How deeply the whole sick notion of the world as the oyster and playground and battlefield of corporate entities has penetrated. Colors and pollutes just about everything. Just like the whole lexicon of the neocons and Austrian-schoolers and Koch-trained barking dogs.
I tried watching a bit of the Red Convention (remember when these same people were all about rather being Dead than Red? How things change, in the mindlessness of tribal motions...). My "remote thumb" just took control, and forced me to find something, anything, other than that sick vision of falsehood and death and decay being so vociferously and enthusiastically transmitted and received by so many people who have so actively and successfully pursued power and personal wealth at the expense of any kind of virtue. Ann just "loves women." What is that supposed to mean?
Meantime, the Family Values crowd has been taking full advantage of the opportunities for covert hypocrisy, sneaking via "covered entrances" into the lapd-ancing and bl-w-jobbing and whatever-kink-you-want parlors of Tampa's famous sex club scene. What is with all them tighty-whitey "Christians" that they tolerate, wink at, and facilitate the whole set of evil behaviors, including ramping up for idiot military violence that serves only stupidity and desolation, on the part of "their leaders?"
How about setting up an International Displaced Despot Fund? A lot of these critters seem to hold on and keep the blood flowing in large part because of the wealth it brings them and their adherents. Would it not be cheaper and kinder to create a kind of "superfund" of the sort once used in the US to clean up the chemically toxic crap that "our" industry generated and dumped all over the landscape? Since a lot of the politically and socially toxic crap that's poisoning the planet is the detritus of "United Fruit diplomacy" of the sort practiced by the US and other "Great Powers," maybe putting billions into a pot for tin-pot dictators to draw on when they are finally on the ropes at home would lead to a gentle landing, rather than the serial horrors we see so much of today? I mean, it's not like these people can't be bought...
Ah, but G_d has spared the Reds (including the ones frequenting Tampa's famous Red Light establishments, coming and going and spilling their seed via "private covered entrances" free from reporting eyes.) S/He has redirected Isaac to deliver another blow to the Evil City of New Orleans, where I have seen perverse acts committed in my own presence and where public and private corruption, a behavior and condition unknown amongst the Select Delegates and Imperial Hangers-On, is rampant and open.
So you see, John Hagee and Tedd "He was just carrying my bag" Haggard have prayed for the Babylonians, and G_d has answered, and all's well in the mystical world of White Christian Politics.
Can you spell "Wall-E?"
Too bad the upcoming election is little but a choice between critters who agree on practices but have small differences on the pace at which the sh_t gets pitched at the fan.
It's a question of a choice of poisons -- and whether a relatively few humans can screw it up for all the rest.
I'm hopeful, for family reasons, that even if the worst happens, a few will figure out how to feed themselves and their loved ones even in a messed-up world. I personally doubt that there's even a tiny chance of goodness and reform for all, when there are so many pigs up on the porch figuring out how to sucker the rest of the animals into buying the notion that the Declaration of the Rights of Animals can be reduced to "All Animals Are Equal, But Some Are More Equal Than Others." Narcissism, hedonism, hypocrisy...
The common theme and genesis and genetics amongst these aborto-fascists seems to me simply the old reactionary, revanchist, patriarchal bit about putting women (and children) back in their place: chattel, to be dealt with summarily at the whim of the patriarch. One wonders if pantheistic religious-cultural traditions with the savor of G_d the Mother about them, and less of that Bishop-tells-Nun, broke-d1ck flavor, have this same kind of uncharitable meanness about them.
Most of us call our version of the Taliban "Christians," I guess on the notion that that is what they call themselves. It's no new revelation that our "Christians" find their sacred texts not in the Gospels (except for a few well-abused snippets) but in the meaner, violent, "patriotic" parts of the Pentateuch and the Prophets and of course the fortuitously included writings of St. John the Divine. And in the artful multi-level marketing structure set up by old Saul of Tarsus, writ out in his letters to various congregations and missionaries. If anything, far as I can make out, most self-identified "Christians" are at best "post-Paulists," who are running blindly and ineluctably along after the false prophets, the Haggards and Swaggerts and Hagees and so many aspirant more, that their own scripture warns them against.
Maybe another reason our paleoconservative reactionaries and their mind-managers dislike and fear Sharia is that most of the crap that our current crop of vampire squids is pulling on the rest of us would be, ah, illegal, an illegality backed by the notion that financialization and securitization and derivatization are in fact evil and vigorously disapproved of by the traditional Revealed Truth of the actual Prophet. http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/3837
Even Jesus, that historical creature obscured by the current smoke and fog of "Christianism/Paulism," seemed to have little use for the 0.01 percenters (camel, eye of a needle and all) and money changers, and sat down to dine with tax collectors and other notorious abusers of the ordinary people as a way to bring them to more moral and ethical behaviors. Can you see Jamie Dimon breaking bread with Our Lord? Not unless it's in a five-star restaurant, and on His AMEX card...
But good luck changing any of the momentum of what's going on -- money and debt own us.
Heaven forbid that we should actually forgive those who are indebted to us, as we pray to G-d to forgive our "debts" to the Almighty. That phrase has called for a heap of commentary, to hedge its plain meaning. http://bible.cc/matthew/6-12.htm
And on the notion of debt, in the present context, where it's being used as the touchstone for an imposed "austerity" that will hammer down the lid on the aspirations and the "rights" of ordinary people and complete their reduction to rented serfdom, there's some illumination to be gained from this little lecture: http://michael-hudson.com/2012/08/financial-predators-v-labor-industry-and-democracy/
Anyone for a little cherry Jubilee? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_%28biblical%29, and http://www.jubileeusa.org/home.html
It doesn't matter, there's no fixing this, and for a slightly different viewpoint on why we ordinary people are screwed, and the kinds of people who are doing it to us, you folks who are worried about little bits of Great Game policy might enjoy the real nature of how our kleptocracy is backing it into us. Got Debt? Got any idea how you "acquired" it?
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-shhhh%E2%80%A6-it%E2%80%99s-even-worse-great-depression
Maybe it's just a point of view kind of thing, but would it maybe be a little more accurate to say it a little differently? That "our own bad guys" actually OWN US? Given who has most of the wealth, most of the political power, most of the police power, pretty much unbridled ability to have whatever they want to do, to us or anyone else, declared or recognized or accepted as "not illegal," or at least "without any effective remedy at law or in equity"?
And most of these "corporations" are not in any real-world sense "American" any more -- they are post- and trans-national, are effectively "states" in the Great game sense, have no loyalties to anything other than self-aggrandizement, filled with people who have inhaled the heady smoke of power over others.
"We" already belong to "them." "We" are just a rump tail of little people, little minuscule humans who work our butts off, individually or in our little collectives, to create real wealth that these creatures strip off us to fund the End Game of our species.
But it's good to read about the actions of others, elsewhere, to "do something" about all of that.
"Carthago Delenda Est!" We even got our own Cato, the Institute, now a wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Industries, PNC (Post-National Corporatocracy). http://blogs.desmoinesregister.com/dmr/index.php/2010/10/24/carthago-delenda-est/
And in the end, there's that bit of doggerel about "I am Ozymandias, King of Kings..."
As far as I can tell, it's straight (if edited for continuity and clarity) reportage. You think maybe the silence is indicative? Maybe you've seen this little bit of what our Ryan backers have in mind and in process? http://www.volokh.com/2012/03/03/koch-v-cato-a-view-from-cato/#more-56521
Seems Cato was not "conservative" enough for the Kochs...
Want to see the REAL corporatokleptocracy? Lookie here, at what our anarcho-capitalists (like the Kochies) have planned for us: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/11/journey-into-a-libertarian-future-part-i-%E2%80%93the-vision.html
One of my many flaws. But I agree with your comment. Just a thought in addition.
Too bad in all the talk about which source of "green energy" or consumo-combustion is "most competitive," I guess that would mean "priced" cheapest or with the best subsidy package or well-lobbied regulatory favoritism, that so little is discussed about externalities.
But then how does a "free market," made captive by these creatures, price an uninhabitable planet 200 or 2,000 years from now (now being the present moment, when the Koch Grabbers and the remoras that eat the scraps of their kills are maximizing their takings, ensuring they have a life of ease and pleasure and never have to wear the same underpants twice and have "people" to anticipate and attend to their every whim, no matter how whimsical)?
I bet there are "economists" who have irrefutable formulae to "prove" that the present value of a dead future is, well, ZERO, so it can be neglected for all "economic" purposes.
"Obama," that willing personification, that bump on the center-right line of the Overton horizon, may be "the only sensible choice" for us stoopid progressive types who can't bring ourselves to protest-vote for the Green Party candidate.
But lookie here at what the outlines of the Present Occupant's "All Of The Above Approach To Energy Independence" actually contain. http://www.barackobama.com/energy-info?source=om2012_PR_G_ic-energy-search-bg_clean-coal_en-cc4&omtype=ofa&subsource=mkwid|6BGUlGsx|kw|coal%20obama|matchtype|b|pcrid|15969752173|pl||&gclid=CNuE3ZbU6bECFcyA7QodSE8AhQ Who drafted that? Dick Cheney? Think "progressives" have a prayer of changing a jot or tittle of that?
No surprises with these people, if you look at the fine print down the page.
Romney, that post-national inegalitarian, is making it easier by being so far off the beam. But google "Obama Coal." So gee, "we the people" can look forward to "boosted domestic oil production," code for tar sands and fracking and deep offshore and arctic extraction, untrammeled by any forcing of externalities into the "free market pricing."
And of course "clean coal," one of the more evil oxymorons I've encountered, with mountaintopping and no-regulation shaft mining (which actually only employs about 80,000 people at peon wages) and all. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/29/wind-now-employs-more-peo_n_162277.html
More war, 24/7, across the planet? No problem, the Beast has been unchained and funded and "based" and set in motion. (I trust that "our" Great Gamers' usual incompetence will trash, or turn to really potent Blowback, most of their initiatives and stratagems, to "our" detriment and their tiny personal gain. Reaper = $120 million. http://nation.time.com/2012/02/28/2-the-mq-9s-cost-and-performance/ Global Hawk = $170 million. http://www.strategypage.com/dls/articles/US-Air-Force-Gives-Up-On-Global-Hawk-2-8-2012.asp Each. http://dronewarsuk.wordpress.com/drone-crash-database/)
Freedom? Constitution? Rights? Doing something other than what every other failing empire has done? Hey, they're only human. The only question is the pace at which we Use It All Up.
These people are not the friends of the species, ours or any other -- just maybe less bad than the Vulture, the Kochers et al.
(quick check of 3x5 cards -- yep, hit the points. Just like the constant apologists for the stoopid way "we" -- actually "they" -- have been doing "our" business across the planet for the last 150 years do with their 3x5s, though they have a slightly thicker stack to select from.)
I guess Rick "I have not been indicted" Scott's purchase of the Florida governorship with near $100 million of money he got by robbing Medicaid and Medicare through his HCA-Columbia operation is not in any way probative of how the way money works in the American spoils system 2.0.
And yes, FL Democrats can't find their majority of registered voters, here, to turn out to vote, against near $100 million in negative advertising, against a candidate unfortunately named "Sink." And for the same set of reasons, good old boy corruption and all, and the power of money, of course, FL is saddled with a permanent Red legislature and the culture of "development" that's sinking whatever was good about FL (from my point of view, of course.)
There were, of course, local reasons why Whitman lost to Brown. But of course in your form of discourse, one is only limited to a very tiny stream of permissible disputation.
Ah, the Libertarian solution! It's all so simple... except for the getting there, and making it work once you arrive...
If your guiding light and inspiration, Ayn Rand, had, as her own model for how we all ought to behave, a serial killer who hacked the limbs off a kidnapped 12-year-old girl and threw her head and torso at her father who was trying to pay a ransom, with her eyes sewn open so the father would think she was still alive so he would pay that ransom, a guy who Ayn Rand thought a very model of a person who did not give a fig for what "society" thought or felt, you would be Paul Ryan.
Wow, that's who I want to be when I grow up...
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021118602
Ryan's just one of many other self-aggrandizing buttheads who poison our common well with their affection for that bloodsucker and their efforts to instill her "geist" as the rule for all of us.
They're showing more of what counts than, e.g., the writers and reporters with NPR and CPB, who so tamely accepted the mastery of the Jesuitical neocons appointed by Reagan and his Red successors. http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-november-7-2011/npr-vs--conservative-talk-radio Not that it's any different with the go-along-to-get-along at the NYT and WSJ and even my little local rag, "Florida's Best Newspaper" by its editors' own claims, the Tampa Bay Times, which is not even owned by McClatchy. http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/people/person.asp?personId=752434&ticker=MNI:US
But then those well-paid middle class jobs, there and in the military-industrial complex and our materialist consumer economy and Formerly Fourth Estate, are so hard to come by any more -- it's not like the Jeffersonian kinds of martyrs are rewarded for their standing up straight...
And of course since "our" military machine is just "training the wogs," all the pieces that are chatting about this face of "neocolonialism" can simply be ignored. Right?
Because "we" can just ignore the history of previous training operations like our connections to UNITA and the activities over many decades of the School of the Americas and related bits of the Racket?
I got to watch some of that "training" while doing my little bit of service to my country (sic) in Vietnam. Not a goddam thing to do with "winning hearts and minds," and there was plenty of "green-on-green" shooting in my time there. And how effective was that, as compared to say, Iraq? or Notagainistan? or any of those other little countries over there? http://www.observertoday.com/page/content.detail/id/573170/Robert-E--Foley--U-S--Army.html?nav=5199
Pieces like this?
AFRICOM & Neo Colonialism era begins. http://www.armytimes.com/news/2012/06/army-3000-soldiers-serve-in-africa-next-year-060812/ ("The army's last frontier.")
American Troops to occupy Africa. http://llenrad.com/american-troops-to-occupy-africa-africom-neo-colonialism-era-begins/
AFRICOM And Neocolonialism In Africa Today http://www.thomhartmann.com/forum/2011/09/africom-and-neocolonialism-africa-today
HILLARY CLINTON EMBARKS ON NEO-COLONIAL TOUR OF AFRICA http://libya360.wordpress.com/2012/07/31/hillary-clinton-embarks-on-neo-colonial-tour-of-africa/
Africa: U.S. And NATO Build Neo-Colonial Proxy Forces http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2012/07/01/africa-u-s-and-nato-build-neo-colonial-proxy-forces/
THE U.S. AFRICA COMMAND (AFRICOM): BUILDING PARTNERSHIP OR NEO-COLONIALISM OF U.S.-AFRICA RELATIONS? http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/57718447/u-s-africa-command-africom-building-partnership-neo-colonialism-u-s-africa-relations ("'forging alliances' or neocolonial exercise?" What exactly does "forging alliances" mean, again, like in places where there's been a series of military coups by ever-lower-ranked soldiers, right down to privates, who then establish kleptocracies with the most repressive and unstable kinds of "policies" that have not a damn thing to do with "democracy" but everything to do with letting nominally "American" post-national corporations loot the available resources?
Just asking... I am sure that there's an "experienced" riposte out there that will either make it all clear, or obscure the issue in the name of moreofthesame...)
Neither was Honduras, or Costa Rica which now "hosts" thousands of Marines and navy ships, under the smokescreen labeled "war on drugs," the other war besides the "war on terror" that can't be ever "won," and the participants could care less since it's their livelihood, their bread and butter, their trillion dollars a year right off the top, a national haircut that stops somewhere around the hyoid bone and removes the thinking parts and severs all those large blood vessels.
There's a huge miilitary bureaucracy with visions of hegemonic sugarplums dancing in their heads, and "Made in USA" stamped on their uniforms, making its own mission in the same way a metastatic cancer makes its own mission.
Not a hostile part of the world? Look up a little further in this space, to the article by Nick Turse on "our" Grand Great Game Vision of a Worldwide Networked Interoperable Battlespace, where the Call of Duty specialists are installing more half-trained, half-ass, militarized little bunches who can repeat the endless history that's played out, in so many senses, in places like Angola and Vietnam and Iraq and Notagainistan, and Somalia and now all the rest of the AFRICOM space and CENTCOM space and so on and so forth: https://www.juancole.com/2012/08/americas-new-proxy-wars-turse.html
"From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli..."
"War is nothing but a freakin' racket."
I guess the Really Smart People know that the best course of conduct, for their personal profit and comfort, is to shout up the current slogans, brag up the "successes," natter about supporting the Troops, and wave the flag that has come to stand for something so very much other than what the shibboleths pretend it means. Because after all, if "we" want to maintain power over the earth's resources so "we" can eat high on what's left of the hog until it's all gone, the army ants need to keep scouting and stirring and setting up trained cadres of their kind who can be agitated and activated to screw things up for ordinary people "in ev'ry clime and place where we could take a gun."
Yah, let's remember "our" history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marines%27_Hymn. And of course the less visible or discussed part, where the rubber hits the road, or the electrical cables hit the genitals: http://lewrockwell.com/spl4/us-largest-sponsor-of-terrorism.html
There's power, and there's authority, and then there's legitimacy, which seems to me to be a mass judgment, enforced via everything from disrespect and indifference to what seems to be going on in Syria, on the virtue and ability and "right" to rule of any given set of 'crats, whether auto-, demo-, theo-, klepto-, or what have you.
It's all complicated, of course -- especially when the Great Gamers stick their protuberances into things, carrying forward all the miseries occasioned by their thugs and functionaries, paving the way for one elite or another, or several, to feather their personal nests.
How much wealth resides in Swiss and Cayman and even "US" banks who service the kleptocracies, stolen from the needs and produce of ordinary people? You wonder where El Bashar keeps his hoard -- did he trade tidbits on good places to stash "ill-gotten gains" with Yasser Arafat and the Gaddafi family? Maybe Idi Amin? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idi_Amin
The same blockheads that carry placards reading "Keep your filthy government hands off my Medicare."
As a species, we are too stoopid to survive. Nice that we can leave artifacts of our local greatnesses as the bases of other gravity wells, and even propel one little bit of technology right out of the Solar System...
You'll see that same explosion of joy when a free safety bliltzes and spears a quarterback and knocks him out of the game. Or in videos from helmet-cams of Our Troops, when a 1,000-lb GBU blows the shit out of an "enemy outpost," or from "Taliban" videos of IEDs blowing the shit out of GIs in their Buffalos...
The trick is to build cues and incentives into the culture that minimize those kinds of fierce bloody joys, all part of the fellow-feeling, we're-part-of-the-same-tribe set of sensations that the ole limbic system keeps on pounding as a rhythm to our brains, and encourage and reinforce the other kind...
Made-up enemies, straight out of "1984." Two-minute hates. How easy, Orwell knew and warned, to manipulate all us sheeple into shooting ourselves in the ass and then shooting ourselves in the head.
My favorite filmic bit on this subject is M. Emmet Walsh as the Mad Sniper in "The Jerk:" "Die, you random son of a bitch! DIE, GAS PUMPER!"
Just like here, eh, Grumpy? And the Predatory Natives (of various eras, all of whom were, in their turn, Immigrants) have free rein to rob, murder and rape too. And of course the government can spy on the contents of your toilet, grope your privates in pub(l)ic, all that stuff. What you gonna do about all that stuff?
And do you get at all exercised ang grumpy about our Financial Industry Overlords, who have bled 80 or more percent of all the wealth of the nation, counterfeited hundreds of trillions of dollars, stung people like you and me by indexing our mortgages and credit card interest to "LIBOR" and then diddled that number as they pleased? Or paid themselves billions in "bonuses?" Or created fake transactions where you, and I, are losers in bets we never even got the thrill of placing? Or how about Mittens and the others who have apparently stripped between $21 and $32 TRILLION in Real Wealth off the planet and squirreled it away, safe from taxation or seizure for violation of various laws, in "foreign banks" including our own US of A "Goldman Sachs" and others?
Now there's a freakin' rape and robbery and murder for you to get peeved at, hey?
I guess, Joe, it's all so simple when your version of the world is kind of a 3-level game of RISK!, and protecting a narrative that has "us" doing good, or right, or maybe just proper by your estimation, everywhere, is the central tenet of belief.
Love the false equivalence between the Nazi/Axis war machine and a penny-ante pecksniff little bunch called "al Quaeda," which becomes a casus idioti for trillions of dollars of grotesquely wasteful, distorting violence that so far has produced what? a SWAT takedown of bin Laden, after years of failure or unconcern? Stupid behaviors like setting the Marines up in Beirut for a truck bombing, and detecting IEDs by having GIs drive over them? Billions of dollars spent killing hundreds of people, many or even most of whom are just villagers, not even "terraists?" What "we" are doing is not even efficient -- and Ted Gunderson, the FBI LA station chief, says most terror attacks are committed by "our" CIA and FBI: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/08/george-washington-is-america-the-worlds-largest-sponsor-of-terrorism.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29
And the tribe you swing for: Interesting little takeaway from current news, it seems Lt. General William Odom, NSA director under Reagan, who said this:
Op. cit.
"We're" doing it, so it must be Right, right? Rationalization in favor of one's tribe is I guess laudable from a certain point of view. When it comes to the species, not so much. Not even from the standpoint of survival and prospering of the freakin' nation you plump for.
So tell us, Bill, out of your depth of knowledge, what ARE "we" trying to do by droning and hellfiring the mountains of northeast Notagainistan and northwest Pakistan?
So is the logic is that any time "we" define some set of people as "terrorist leaders," that's the green light to do whatever murder "we" want to, without respect to national boundaries or "national interests" or even politics or, do you remember this word, "BLOWBACK?" Is it OK for Haqqanis to define our war leaders and sneaky-petes as "terrorist leaders" and kill them where they sit?
Just in case people have forgotten, "our" sneaky-petes are a pretty noxious bunch who are doing "stuff" in our names, every day, that has nothing to do with any of the aspirational notions that "we" pretend to hold. There's a few actual reporters of facts and relationships who make the foredoomed effort to remind the rest of us about what really goes on behind the Patriotic Curtain. A quick read is Chalmers Johnson's distillation of the reasons why a US that believed and acted on its supposed "fundamental values" ought to demolish the CIA and salt the ground it was built on: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175578/best_of_tomdispatch%3A_chalmers_johnson%2C_the_cia_and_a_blowback_world/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=db3e64c238-TD_Johnson8_5_2012&utm_medium=email
There's a guy who has been inside the belly of the Beast, and knows whereof he speaks. Unlike the Narrative Supporters who piecemeal try to shut the mouths of any who point to the reality. Read Chalmers' stuff, and Smedley Butler's, and the several others who spell it out, and then get "disgusted" if you can about comparisons of the actions of "our Rough Men" to carrion eaters and maggot-breeders. They are driving "us" over a very high cliff, though of course they are wearing the parachutes they deny to the rest of us...
Joe, it's kind of hard to follow your logic here.
What's the parallel between German armies all over the European map, including Belgium, being bombed with varying and post-hoc-seemingly questionably effective tonnage, as part of a world war spasm that had the potential, sort of, for the Germans to "dominate everything," and annoying Haqqanis and maybe a salting of a tiny number of "al Quaedas" up there in the Northwest Tribal Regions, who are doing what again?? Attacking "our" little poutposts, put there purposely to annoy and attack people who pose little or no threat to "us?"
"We" have no freakin' business there. Far as I can see, "We" have no "national interest" that can be denominated, outside of some fuzzy notion of Great Game whiz-kiddery. And of course the inertia of the whole insane military-industrial-political futility that says "We've" thrown a whole lot of money into this foolishness, we have a huge, profitable bureaucracy in place to keep on doing this same grotesque, expensive crap, our sneaky petes have careers and contacts to maintain, and all the rest.
"We" have mastered the dirty arts of "regime change" and de-stabilization and suckering our population into paying for inflating the endless, infinitely elastic bubbles of imperial wars. Too bad "we" don't invest a tiny fraction of all that subtlety and wealth into understanding and carrying forward the kinds of strategems and processes that lead to a HEALTHY meta-stability -- not the spurious "stability" of having "our guy" as dictator of this or that corrupt polity.
I think the horse-punching was in "Blazing Saddles."
It sure seems, looking at history (which you seem wont, selectively, to do), that the "covert involvement" of various "US forces" in matters of all sorts, across most of the planet, has pretty much failed to produce much more than the seeds and eggs of new miseries.
You seem a pretty hefty partisan for "US interests." Given what "US interest" have done to the species and the planet, it sure seems to me that there's a lot of ugly similarity to carrion eaters amongst the activities of the CIA and the School of the Americas and our current "we can kill anyone we feel like killing, and rendition for torture is just peachy" crowd. Which comes with a long, scaly tail of things like the Shah and the Phoenix Program and "destabilizing" various places to make sure that no "commies" or, God Forbid, "socialists," would ever lead nations where United Fruit or various oil and tin and copper, et disgusting, twisted cetera, "interests" had "interests."
The folks who do "covert" stuff (and even overt stuff, as Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler pointed out, pointedly) in the name of "America" have a very bad record of doing much for humanity, except for the tiny part with wealth and power. And that apparently continues to be the case.
The tools our "rough men" choose to use, tactically and strategically, are training up armies and "police forces" to do what they do in support of this or that "friendly kleptocrat." And of course plain old invasions, and supplying weapons, for profit, to add instability to the mix. There are other tools and behaviors, that might obviate the other stuff over time, that rust in the locker.
Maybe this time in Syria the results of all the fiddling, and of course "our" rough men are not alone, will be judged less morbid. But if our own warlords and kleptocrats keep sowing dragon's teeth all over the place, along with cluster bomblets and mines and every other war-toy invention, then there's yet another set of reasons humanity is on the way out.
Though a few, of course, will really get rich and high on the glissade...
Re US "covert" involvement in places like Syria: Do hornets and blowflies ever congregate around corpses at the scene of a slaughter? Do maggots eat the flesh of the dead, breeding new generations of blowflies and hornets?
They're just doing what they do, after all... Our buzzing insects are no friends of anything that looks like what most folks think of when they hear the word "democracy."
So what's the take-away? Que sera, sera?
Reminds me of an article by that famous deformed reactionary, John Silber, sneering at what he called "apocalypticists" for worrying about human-induced messing up of the planet -- in that case in reference to the then-current concern about science showing the "deleterious effects" of a "nuclear winter," still a possibility, of course.
His Alfred E. Newman, "What? Me worry?" conclusion was "So what if all life on the surface of the planet dies? Life will go on! There's the tubeworms and crabs and little fishies that live amongst the fumaroles and superheated jets of water from those cracks in the planet's crust, down in the deepest parts of the oceans..."
Is that an acceptable endpoint-and-potential-do-over?
False choices lead to stupid behaviors. this is not either-coal-or-wood, it's dead-planet combusti-consumption, or wiser alternatives.
And of course your notion of ROI increases with each "fuel transition" sort of glosses over what are called "externalities," the manifold ills and pains and gee, like, death of the planet and our species, which, mirabile dictu, the freakin' MARKET has managed to avoid pricing into the costs of combusti-consumption.
Do any of your cavils impeach the basic conclusion that we humans are most of the way up the creek and have thrown our paddles off the boat? Or are you just concerned about the integrity of the record?
Is steel manufactured or mined? Coal gets blasted and dug from the ground and has to go through a whole bunch of processes and of course transport before it gets burned or turned to coke.
One basic problem is that people like the Kochs, and so many of the rest of us, just do not give a crap about what happens after we die. If things are going to get really bad for our grandkids (or if we have none, there's another reason for total unconcern), WHO CARES? The attitude is "As long as I can tool around in my Maybach and power up my private jet and run that megayacht between watering holes at 20 or 50 gallons to the mile or steal wealth and bits of the future by "externalizing" stuff like The End Of The World As We Know It, who gives a ripshit?"
And that's especially true where the people who so often knowingly and intentionally pull this crap off, one little or large bit of excrement at a time, know there are no consequences for them.
What are the rest of us sweltering, starving, dehydrating humans going to do, once the shit really hits the fan? These folks own the enforcement structures, have their own private security armies, lots of lawyers and stuff, and of course will live out their lives like the C-Suite-ers in the Soylent Corporation -- comfortable, with all the toys and titillation they could want. What are the rest of us going to do? Dig up their bodies and dishonor and despoil them? THAT's effective dissuasion, now isn't it?
I'll remember sitting in the back of a UH-1H, up on an evening test flight out of the large US installation at Phu Bai, flown by a pilot who should have known better. He took us over the nearby Army of the Republic of Vietnam compound at about 800 feet, and what a surprise that red tracers, each one with four regular full-metal-jacket rounds in between, should come sweeping and zipping up at us. Nominal "friendly fire," by soldiers who wouldn't fight the enemy we identified for them and who were Catholic or ancestor worshipers, not Muslims. Since we wore much the same uniforms, this was pretty much "green on green" violence. (Forget about "fragging," and GIs shooting each other over various slights, and in drug and alcohol hazes, then and now...)
"We" weren't wanted there, "we" had no mission then of any more significance to either legitimate "national interests" or "national security" than Our Troops have now. It's just a huge wealth transfer, and the thunderous, ponderous rumbling toward the cliff of that murderous juggernaut called the military-industrial complex. Which every year eats up more and more of all the goods of our nation: an enormous, self-generating tapeworm, a malignant and metastatic cancer, sucking the energy and nutrition out of our country, and sowing dragon's teeth and bitter pills all across the planet as part of keeping the whole shooting match in business.
When I was a kid, our family dentist always nicked the tooth next to the one he was working on with his drill, to ensure a steady stream of cavities to be filled. And now we got the Drone Patrols and Black Operators out there, busily killing "insurgents" (note how they are less often called "terrorists" any more?)
And so many of us are still stupid enough to believe that old lie about how "it is sweet and proper to die for the fatherland." Or if not die, then send other people to die so we can have those touching Returns of Honored Corpses, with full military honors, to keep the home fires burning...
One of the reactionary hits on Palestinians in years gone by is that they were, as a bunch, TOO smart for their britches.
The squawk was that the freakin' UN through one of its we-don't-pay-for-such-fripperies agencies had the gall, the GALL, to take education into the "camps," so that the supposedly otherwise ignorant "Arabs" became aware of Hanna Arendt and Saul Alinsky and even Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. And of course Adam Smith and Marx and maybe even Che and Mao.
Cited repeatedly in the '60s as yet another reason for the Robert Welch brigade not to fund our share of the UN.
I wonder: Is the US up-to-date on its share, now that our leaders are so adroitly using "UN" as a cover for their imperial tomfoolery, like "two UN soldiers, one from Alabama and the other from Texas, were killed by explosion in Helmand province, the UN command reported Sunday"? You would think Ban Ki Moon would at least demand the same kind of deal that our local Major League Baseball stadium has -- several million bucks for "naming rights" from the Tropicana brand.
!!!
How's that silly old song go?
"Don't know much about history
Don't know much biology
Don't know much about a science book
Don't know much about the french I took
But I do know that I love you
And I know that if you love me too
What a wonderful world this would be
Read more: http://artists.letssingit.com/sam-cooke-lyrics-wonderful-world-wzxlmlw#ixzz227MDVcHh
LetsSingIt - Your favorite Music Community
Or maybe these Machiavells know the history, and are so enamored of something else altogether, or are getting so personally rich off of the bleeding idiocy, that they just don't care? Or maybe Mittens really IS the Antichrist, and he's just doing what comes naturally?
My grandchildren would really like to know why they face this kind of future...
A small rhetorical point in all this noxious cesspit: Why are the nominal Israelis who are simply stealing Palestinian property called "settlers?" Once again, the Narrative choice, inflated by repetition and spin, totally obscures the reality (except for a few who pay a little more attention to the ground truths.)
Interesting how the oligarchs have these enormous skills at organization over time, the tenacity and long-view dedication to accumulating power and wealth, using the tools of nominal political legitimacy like "elections" and supreme court appointments and and filling up the various bureaucracies and the military with fellow-travelers. All the while, most of us little people either just mope along, taking whatever trickles and crumbs they drop on the floor under their feet.
What is it about evil, that it is so much more, ah, efficient?
And given the corruption of the entire Imperial apparatus in DC, what difference does it make, except maybe on a tiny few margins, who the heck is "president?" You'd have to replace all the congrescritters with honest, decent people, and a huge bureaucracy both "civilian' and military.
Good luck with that...
It's just s syntactical issue: when they say the US has a foreign policy driven by national interest, they don't specify which nation.
And then, of course, in a long line of "incidents" that include Pollard, the USS Liberty and so many others, there's this:
http://www.tampabay.com/incoming/us-sees-israel-tight-mideast-ally-as-spy-threat/1243037
Ally? With "friends" like this, who needs enemies?
How's that go again?
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
The rich folks here in Florida build their castles on the sands of beaches and barrier islands, and when storms come and wash the excrescences away, us little people get to fund the "rebuilding" and that endless scam called "beach renourishment," to "restore" for their delectation the changeable coastline that they don't even have a legal claim to.
Ooh, my bad for not being more specific. RUSSIAN gun makers rather than Colt are feeding Assad's horror.
Do you dispute that there's a pretty well organized world trade in weapons? AKs and FALs and M4s are almost as fungible as oil, and travel almost as freely across borders to the overall benefit of war profiteers and dorks who think arming this or that group of people will "advance some strategic interest" or other. And there's a growing bit of documentation that maybe it's not so far fetched that our sneaky petes are facilitating the movement of US and Israeli made weapons into Syria.
http://www.rt.com/news/us-syria-arms-opposition-907/
Forget about the big view considerations of whether weaponizing the whole freakin' planet is doing anything to help keep the species alive and whether all the Great Gamery is doing anything to feed people or aid in any kind of stability. Gotta be precise in attributing the delivery of weapons to the proper part of a worldwide industry...
"Most are just praying for peace."
Amen. Insh'Allah.
Meanwhile, the Whole Earth Consumptive Repressive Military Monster continues to turn a quarter and more of our real wealth into weapons for sale and for use, and generate more deaths that will turn into "reasons" for still more killing. And We The People of USA can cheer ourselves that our post-national war machine is the largest maker and seller and distributor (though by no means the only one) of all the stuff being shot off in Damascus and so many other places.
"And that's the way it is..."
Why would it not be shocking, on the rare occasions that it happens, when the enormous thing called the US government, through all its various branches and parts, ever does actually "occasionally act above-board and in good faith to promote a decent outcome"? You and I likely having very different ideas of what constitutes a "decent outcome."
Maybe because it's kind of a rare occurrence? Or when it happens, it's an unintended consequence of some other action directed toward one or more aspects of achieving hegemony and oiling the wheels of the prolongation of our grotesquely consumptive "wayoflife?" You profess belief that "the US" is at least sort of good, or at least that you are ok with the few behaviors that we get to see (via Wikileaks, and other inadvertences.) A lot of your fellow citizens, myself included, are sick of the terminal sickness of Empire. No 'conspiracy theories' needed -- just the ability to read, and remember.
And yes, there is more than enough evidence that there's a huge amount of "nefarious activity." And more than enough evidence that dirty US fingers, stuck into the pots that other people have to eat out of, are causing enormous sicknesses across the whole planet. "Wild Bill" Donovan's and J. Edgar's and the Dulles's heirs and successors, aided and abetted by faceless thousands of careerists in all the great agencies, are at it, every day, hot and heavy.
Either you don't get it, or you don't get it.
What's YOUR plan for "resisting tyranny?" Go to work carrying water for the government? Or something more along the lines of the Michigan Militia? Fat white guys in camo duds pretending to be dangerous commandos, between work weeks at Wendy's?
And may the many different kinds of people in Syria succeed in outlasting yet another tin pot dictator who for whatever reasons thinks it's wise to kill the people he rules. How many of those has the "government" you are going to "resist" supported, for "reasons of state" that I bet you agree with? Jonas Savimbi? Battista? The Shah? And not so long ago, even Our Friend Against The Iranians, Saddam Hussein?
No doubt this current event will give comfort to the LoveGunners who fantasize about "resisting tyranny" (while busily supporting and facilitating and knuckling under to our uniquely American version of it at home.)
Maybe Canadians and Mexicans (abetted by the Iranians and the Chicoms and Rooskies, of course) will facilitate the cross-border delivery of large quantities of infantry arms to our home-fried Patriots, when the Government finally moves a division of the Troops We Support to a deployment near their homes. Anybody read or seen "Even Days In May," recently? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Days_in_May How about "Broken Arrow"? Anybody know anything about "Operation Garden Plot," http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/garden_plot.htm ? Which has been activated to help protect the vital asse(t)s of the two national political parties' national-convention delegates against any kind of risk of pollution or uncomfortable petitioning for redress of grievances? http://www2.tbo.com/news/republican-national-convention/2012/jul/23/military-stands-ready-if-needed-at-rnc-other-conve-ar-438599/
So much to be prepared for...
Don't neglect the subsidies to the nuclear folks, please.
Some folks just never met an externality they didn't like.
The War Machine, seeing in some of its crazed parts that maybe the host organisms are getting a little weak to support the blood-sucking at the current rate, and wanting to extend its ability to "fight in any time and place" and ensure its covert hegemony, is putting some of OUR wealth (not as much as into more F-22s) into "alternative energy." Lots of ways to spin that "initiative": http://www.consumerenergyreport.com/2012/06/07/the-operational-and-strategic-rationale-behind-the-u-s-militarys-energy-efforts/
Since the Brass Hats drive much of policy by their procurements ("fight the war with the army you've got"), and political interference on their own and (same thing) their contractors' behalf, what a surprise that there would be an alt-energy "initiative."
Too bad these dorks keep trying to force-fit a definition of the universe onto the rest of us, against all evidence, for their own benefit. Just blowing huge holes in the world's actual residual security and stability, while proving again and again what the Afghan villager said to the Marine gunny who was telling him that this week's doctrine required the villagers to move back into towns where "the Taliban" had driven them out: "You people, with all your military power and technology, cannot even defend yourselves against the [asymmetric fighters.] How can you say that you will defend US? You will be gone soon anyway, and we must stay here and try to live."
So the Shootin' Battlespace moves on, and the "fully burdened cost" of getting petrofuel to "the front" will continue to include bribes to "the Taliban" and various warlords and "government officials" not to blow it up and burn it before it can be used in the latest frontal fiasco.
How stupid can we Game of RISK!/CallofDuty humans be?
"Plenty of room for ALL methods of power gen"?
I guess you must live someplace where a 20-foot rise in the ocean level and some degrees of global temperature rise won't bother you.
Too bad for the rest of us, right?
And you conflate the manufacture of (maybe) products from petrochemicals with impulse rides on private jets, megayachts that get 50 gallons to the mile, joyriding in Escalades, stuff like that. What I bet you would call "freedom," except that it's "free" only in the sense that other people, in other places and times, will be paying a horrific bill for your indulgence (and mine) in your short-termery.
They're doing both, of course. Only as a way of extending the arrant idiocy that is the Grand Networked Battlespace, of which this is one tiny Policy/Marketing Document: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/53204302/INTEGRATING-THE-BATTLESPACE-WITH-SOFTWARE-BASED-COMMUNICATIONS (Note the links to a buttload more documents in the same vein -- which looks to me like a large-bore IV in our collective subclavian vein, draining, draining, draining.
And what is that Grand Networked Interoperable Trans-National Battlespace Thingie, for all the trillions of dollars spent on expensive offices for contractors and Procurement Generals and all the rest of the giant bloated blood-sucking monolithic unitary parasite that is the World MIC.
Which, if you have not been paying attention, is eating a quarter, and a growing share on top, of the globe's wealth, and returning not ten cents' worth of "security," just more "threats" for that whole freakin' bunch of self-inflating cheats and thieves to use as the excuse, the "rationale," the sucker-baits, for still MORE "threats" and counter-threats and counter-counter-counter-counter-counter....threats. More "arms" to stir the world's hot pots, and of course in this area at least, USA is Number One!
Hoorayuh, BOO-yah, for US! You can trust that "they" are working on it. And here is one stupid round of applause for what they're up to: http://bryrehertzogcomp4.wordpress.com/2012/02/10/military-goes-green/:
Just take a moment to follow the money from your pocket to somewhere or other, to see what it all means.
Now isn't THAT special...
If true, what a purely fortuitous effect of the "economics" of a dump in methane prices.
What's needed is a different driver for the whole shebang, one based on surival rather than short-term profit maximization, the continued spewing of external costs onto the most of us, and the long slow or maybe not so slow death of the habitable planet.
Coal gets cheep again, and the canaries will be gasping once again. And on behalf of my grandkids, let me say that it is no answer at all to just parrot "But that's the way it is..."
"It" got that way by choices and decisions and policies and legislation and what happens when guys in expensive suits build themselves big edifices and multiple mansions.
For a little more in the way of facts and opinions of even many former and current Bankstas, here are a couple of recent extracts from Yves Smith's "Naked Capital."
First, it seems even a lot of Really Big Present or Former Bankstas are now (for whatever reason -- to deflect the anger of the rest of us?) offering that the Big Things (can't honestly call them "banks" any more) need to be dissected into smaller theft units:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/07/george-washington-numerous-top-bankers-call-for-break-up-of-giant-banks.html
And in case you think this was all just boys-will-be-boys, and this stolen wealth should be "protected" where it has gone to, look here -- it's not even like most of this was "not illegal," here's a nice concise collection of felonies for you to berate your boughten legislators and timorous prosecutors with:
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/07/big-banks-are-criminal-enterprises.html
"Mother of God, is this the end of RICO?" http://www.snopes.com/language/acronyms/rico.asp
And since so much of that money is stolen, or "obtained in manners and by methods that have been legislated to not be illegal," or by people who have purchased immunity from prosecution one way or another, where do you get off your "moral" high horse pontificating about the sanctity of purloined "capital?"
You maybe admire Yasser Arafat, who squirreled billions of bucks intended for relief of the misery of "his people," much of which was apparently in accounts in them furrin sekrit banks to which only he, in his brain, kept the numbers and passwords? And of course he is just one of a large host of parasites and predators, for whom you are apparently an apologist. Who's got all that swag now, hey?
What's "fled" is the TAKEN wealth actually created, actually "earned," by generations of people who just do an honest day's work, most often any more for a whole lot less than what even former Robber Barons and vampire squids considered an honest day's pay.
These Beautiful Folks blow off the truth that we are all in this together, they have no sense of even propriety, let alone satiety. And they really sicken the rest of us, who know that there really is enough of everything that's needed to go all around the table, except for the Effing Few who eat all but one of the chops and all but one of the broccoli spears and all but one of the chocolate chip cookies, and then sucker the rest of us into warring over the scraps they leave.
That you are posting crap like this here indicates to me that you are not yourself one of the post-trans-national Really Rich Folk, just one of their "people" or a wannabe who isn't and likely never will be.
Don't come down on my block, bunkie.
In case you haven't run across it, there's a telling exposition of how that whole "faith-based" thing works, including Ted Hagee's giant CUFI-AIPAC scam machine: Matt Taibbi's "The Great Derangement." Interesting how his well-fleeced flock just blows right past, in their mass-delusion "bible studies," all the Biblical warnings against False Prophets and pseudo-Messiahs.
Given the way us humans work, I kind of despair of anything ever getting what I would consider "better."
Not that it matters, given the reality of our Imperial Court and how Bidness is done in Washington, but those of us who cling to a quaint notion that the spoils system actually is supposed to effectuate some Change when there's a change in the nominal party in power might ask if there's a snowball's chance that the Nuttiness might lead to Sanity and Honesty and Fairness and that kind of silliness in the Bazaar that is Congress.
For those not clear on how "Policy" and legislative sausage are actually made, might I recommend at least the first few chapters of Matt Taibbi's "The Great Derangement"? Also illustrative of how Outliers like Bachmann (and Thurmond and Helms and DeLay and such) get there and stay there. Gotta love our Freedom...
Since when is Ron Paul any kind of "Republican," other than as a flag of convenience? You fear Sharia law? what do you think a Ron Paul-directed US of A would look like? Ask a woman, sans pearls, how she might feel about that kind of future. You think Paul would have any interest, once in power, in cutting back on any of our military excrescences? And of course he has some interesting notions of what America as a "freee market" would magically look like.
Yeah, and vehement Mr. Ron Paul, he wants to "free" our "markets," so our Great Nation can end up looking like this:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/11/journey-into-a-libertarian-future-part-i-%E2%80%93the-vision.html
Shrink "the government," and replace it with all these "government-like organizations," so we can live like the folks on that planet visited by Captain Kirk and Spock, where the whole joint works on the Al Capone model... Pay your protection, or die.
Granted, what we have collectively saddled ourselves with is tailing down into that same kind of dystopia, on a slightly different trajectory. Seems we humans can't do any different, certainly not any better...
You support YOUR version of the Second Amendment, which in its entirety reads:
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Which well-regulated militia do you belong to?
And yes, I have heard all the smarmy work-arounds that the NRA and other gun lovers have cobbled up to justify their preferences and peccadilloes. No sale, a four-corners strict construction is compellingly plain-meaning.
And one might ask if you might be blind and gullible enough to fail to see that our NeoSecurity State and the way things work right now, already, in a political division near you and in our Imperial Capital, are not as bad and as pervasive as the stuff of your Maofears and Stalinterors and Hitlerhorrors? There were a whole lot of humans who were very comfortable going along with those predatory elites, just like the NRA is happy to go along with our current set of predators and kleptocrats.
"Disarmed population?" How you gonna protect your freakin' bank account against government cyberseizure, your HomeIsYourCastle against theft by the Foreclosing Bankstas or some pipeline company all that other stuff that "the government" and the People Who Want To Run Government Like A Business And Already Are are holding, like your delicate cullions, in their massive inevitable slowly tightening hands? You gonna shoot your way out of the actual "takeover?" Which day, on the long slow descent into subjugation, are you going to pick to start your revolt? "It can't happen here"? Hey, it already has. All that's left is some further integration of the control mechanisms and some mopping up. Military training, or even thousands of "CallofDuty" hours ain't gonna help even a little.
You think you are "free," because you can buy guns 'n ammo? You think the massive thing that rules you and the rest of us and is turning us into serfs and slaves and cranking the machinery that is grinding up the planet at an ever-faster rate is in the tiniest way concerned about that little bit of chimerical "freedom" you think you have left? Really?
Oh, but there's lots of them getting ready to do just that, now isn't there? Or what they imagine are inroads into their "liberties..."
Extra points for being such a careful reader -- actually, IN-reader. Wrong, very wrong on both of your imputations, but then I bet you knew that before you wrote. Guns are dumb, so are most of the people who get off on them.
Here's the "NeoAmerica" I'm talking about:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiZBbla4DMg
and here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPXgGzjKQnQ
and a whole lot more.
And here's what people who call themselves "real Americans" think on the subject of full auto: http://www.defensivecarry.com/forum/defensive-rifles-shotgun-discussion/124660-convert-your-ar-15-full-auto-legally.html
Makes you proud of your country, right? that it is full of such people, of which a percentage are not that far away from "lighting up" their families and local theaters and schools and such? We're "horrified" by Columbine and Aurora, but the level of prurient interest in the incidents and aftermath is simply enormous.
One wonders if the gun lovers who love the myths and, yes, sexual pleasures, and sense of power that those full-and-semi-auto little machines provide them, along with a large chunk of their identity, will be descending like the Harpies to eat Cole's liver.
Or maybe they are finally getting so freakin' smug that they have buffaloed (a rich word) the rest of us so thoroughly that they don't even feel the need to lay down suppressive fire on any wimpy commie libruls who might question their faith and their fun.
Fun. Stuff like this "Full Auto" get-together -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lkCc6y9MpM . The family that shoots, and blows, sh#t up together, stays together, or something. Or at least they all have a fair shootin' chance if one of their number goes berserk and starts off on a family murder-suicide mission, or another enactment of some movie idiocy or scenario out of "Call of Duty"...
And for all you gun lovers out there, this Vietvet shoots, and has his own little "bitter man's" arsenal, in various calibers, so spare your rage. Or your smarmy "logical" arguments.
I know, most people know, that the toothpaste was long since squeezed out of all our sensible tubes, and the "FOXFreeeeedom bell" can never be un-rung, and this is just one more part of the great swathes of dead-end-ianism that is going to kill America-the-sometime-great-notion, and for you to believe that Obama was going to take your guns away just shows how far down the rabbit hole you have gone.
Cancerous tumors never know when to quit while they are ahead...
Bless you, professor, for your courage and honor. Too bad there are no medals for people like you.
A lot of National Socialist "leaders" took that deal, when it was offered by the "winning" governments in 1945 and thereafter... Took a lot of the treasures of Europe with them, too.
Kind of like Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang gang did when they fled the mainland, and invaded and took over Formosa (subjugating and dispossessing the folks who, you know, LIVED there, sounding like a lot of other more recent events), ripping off the portable wealth and art of an ancient land. No falling on THEIR swords, for any of these kleptocrats, ha ha ha.
At least the Germans seem to have ended up with a bit more stability and a lot kinder and gentler social order. Italians? Not so much, but then our sneaky petes have a lot to do with how that came to be... http://killinghope.org/bblum6/italy1.htm
When you have "Wild Bill" wild cards stirring parts of the pot in different directions, it's so very hard to even make a list of possible prediction outcomes, let alone do anything to help them along in a sustainable, "golden rule" kind of direction.
Ask Joe and Bill about where one might draw that line.
Sure seems to me that the Kermits and Wild Bills of the world just do the stuff they do "because they can." I recall one of the US sneaky petes, years ago, being asked why his little group had fomented one coup or another "takedown" stratagem -- and that was pretty much the response: "We were on the ground, we saw the opportunity and we took it."
Who gives a shit for long wisdom, consistency, stability, even whether this or that game makes any sense for the "national interest," when you can make people afraid of you and take their stuff? Happens on school buses and in our elementary and high school hallways every weekday except holidays... I guess "by definition" if it's done by the CIA spooks or any of "our" other pot-stirrers, it's "in the national interest."
A certain amount of cowboyism may be tolerable in a cynical world with the equivalent of its immune system still largely intact. We have largely used up that particular capacity now.
Rachel Maddow, maybe?
Professor, maybe someone needs to educate our potential benefactor on the meaning of the words "investigation," "reporting," and "news." Given that the corporate person, Microsoft, has kind of been shown to be a destroyer of wealth while building its own enormous store of cash, http://www.crisisremedies.com/Google_and_Microsoft_The_Destructiveness_Of_Wealth_and_Ego.shtml, driven by that "competition" thingie that C-suite-ers use to justify their excesses, I would hold out little hope that even Melinda (etymologically, "sweet") can move the Juggernaut out of its course -- too many little striving men and women intent on selfish interests are pushing the wagon).
We little individual persons are of course "free," so far, and so generally futilely, to petition the corporate facade not to crush us the rest of the way into the ignorant dust. Hope springs eternal!
Hey, Bill, if you're gonna do a drive-by "impeachment" shooting, via that "what is the evidence" trick, the kind you tend to ignore when someone returns the favor, in the Great Game of politipolemics, in hopes that your own misprisions will just scroll down and disappear into the Netnoise, all part of your tag-team, aggressive justification (sic) of your notion of what ought to be the status quo going forward (even if it kills the rest of us humans), y'all oughta make sure the target is disabled (or precluded by closing of comments, in the "last word" version of the game) from shooting back.
But of course in the endgame shitstorm that's currently afoot, the one about who gets to use up the last drop of oil and the last kilo of copper and bushel of barley and all that, every cowpie that gets flung up on the screen obscures a piece of the true picture, and with all the flying droppings it's dang near impossible for the janitors to even scratch the surface to let folks see the dug-down reality. "Conservative" Victory Through BS Power!
In the words of Patrick O'Brian, WW II British sneaky-pete turned really great historical-novel author, spoken by his cynically romantic protagonist Steven Maturin:
Well, shucks, Joe, it's like there's no evidence and history that supports, even proves, that Skuldugs wearing a "Made In USA" label in their shorts have, like, y'know, "meddled in the affairs of the region.
Glad your first squib ends with that limiting phrase, "is bizarre to AN American observer." It would have strained the truth rather far to claim that there are no "American observers" who, with good reason and plenty of examples, note that there are lots of little "interventions" by nominal "US" critters in that part of the world.
So much pain and blood, so little apparent concern...
The fun part for me is how this is all being accomplished.
Which involves a long, slow, covert process of aiding the nation formerly known as America along its way to fiscal and moral bankruptcy. Fostered by the millions of myth-believing working stiffs who actually create the declining wealth (and jobs, via our consumption and willingness to accept an ever-smaller share of the wealth we create) that enables this sickness.
Most of us have no idea what the metastatic malignancy known as the MIC/state security apparatus is really up to, using our money and our future and our credulous young people. Just like cancerous tumors in our bodies, these constructs have learned how to hide their real nature behind a thin screen of lies and commonplaces, and suckered us into believing that they are just normal body tissues and organs. All the while making vastly more of their own kind of cells, proliferating and spreading and infiltrating, and pulling that trick called "angiogenesis" by which the cancer tricks the body into growing huge new arteries, to bring ever more of our nutrients strength direct to the tumor, leading to that horrible wasting death.
The thing is, it's a global phenomenon, carried forward by the likes of Wolfowitz and Cheney and a host of careerists who profit from this grand end game. And nobody (or not enough of us) has a clue, first, that this is happening, and second, what, if anything, can be done to arrest or even slow the progression of the disease.
As with lawyers, so the old joke goes, Rmoney has nothing to fear. The shark will happily extend a fellow rapacious predator full professional courtesies.