I recall that Jabotinsky wrote that his Zionist settlers would have to do to the Arabs what the United States did to the Indians. That's why I'm against Zionism; because America's great crime was never punished and served as an inspiration for new crimes.
If we believed in any of the things we say we do, we would brand Saudi Arabia one of the worst tyrannies on Earth, one of the greatest human rights violators on Earth, and one of the greatest supporters of terrorism on Earth. Definitely the greatest exporter of Islamist extremism on Earth. All in all a far worse country than Iran.
But Saudi sells us oil, then takes our dollars and re-invests them in the US to prop up the value of the dollar. And it is willing to avoid direct confrontation with Israel to make us happy.
And that's all that matters to the government and to ordinary Americans.
The issue is, sir, did the US bungle negotiations with Japan by threatening to destroy it with sanctions?
But that's likely to be over your head, so how about why fascists came to power in Germany and Japan?
1. "Liberal" Britain and France enslaved vast tracts of Africa and Asia for their elites to exploit; Germany and Japan got in too late and were prevented from getting the really juicy pieces.
2. The democratic Japan of the '20s was humiliated by the US passing an immigration law that treated Japanese as an inferior and undesirable race (because IQ tests are infallible, you know), and the Washington Naval Treaty that required Japan's navy to be 60% the size of either the US and UK.
3. The Great Depression, caused by runaway capitalist speculation in the US, went global because of a trade war the US helped provoke with tough tariffs. This destroyed both Germany and Japan's export-driven economies, while the US, Britain and France exploited their colonial empires and satellites.
You right-wingers always start every timeline where the people we raped start fighting back, not where we raped them. But then, to paraphrase a famous bank robber, most nations are enslaved with a corporation, not a gun.
Yeah, the neo-Confederate behavior is getting more obvious with the GOP's deliberate snubs. The problem for Ashley Judd is that Kentucky is the same state that voted in slippery neo-Confederate Rand Paul. They must want the 19th century back awful bad, and the capitalists are rewarding them for it with union-busting car factories and white flight.
However, as a radical I think that it is the fate of American capitalism to get so in bed with Zionist and neo-Confederate extremism that they will all drag each other down into hell. Problem is, that hell is called the Second American Civil War, and we will all be there in it. Other radicals are completely in denial about this possibility. In fact, they hate the federal govt. so much that they seem to fantasize that they can make common cause with the militia right. They focus their hatred so entirely on the capitalists and Pentagon that they won't accept how much those bastards share with tens of millions of ordinary bigots, and how easily they could all come to work together (a la Franco, Pinochet, Suharto) to create a society vastly worse than the current national security state.
It will be the coalition of minorities at home and the outraged outside world that will bring this monstrous regime down. No help from the currently fashionable Left.
Obama's critics on the Left, correct though they were on specific issues, completely refused to consider why McConnell was so afraid of Obama.
It's not Obama, it's the implications of the growing multiethnic coalition that votes for him. Leftists are pissed that he can get that coalition with his wishy-washiness.
But maybe there's something more ugly at work, and since I slag right-wingers for racism every day of my life I might as well spread it around.
Leftists hate that coalition for not sharing their (and my) hatred of capitalism. I think as early as the counterculture era you could see the gulf between white radicals and non-whites who wanted their slice of the American materialist pie, not to blow it up.
So now the white Left faces their horrible, utter, absolute failure to win over more than a few of their own race into volutarily giving up its wealth and globally oppressive power - but they only blame blacks and Latinos for reproducing and consuming and not worshipping Dennis Kucinich.
But those are the people you've got to work with, and you never really tried. If there are any white radicals in the future they will be the heirs of Occupy, not academic Marxism or the Green Party, and even they can't seem to reach out to the minority vote that is the only thing holding back the redneck zombie army.
The problem with people is that they refuse to accept any up-front costs or sacrifices whatsoever to replace our electrical power sources immediately.
The reason for that is that they feel they have been screwed economically for years. Which is true. But the money that failed to get into their pockets was not "destroyed" by evil commie environmentalists. It was diverted into the pockets of the investor class. Then a tiny % of it was used to fund relentless right-wing propaganda, even from men of God, claiming the wealth was destroyed by evil commie environmentalists.
The bad guys have set up the perfect trap, in this and many other issues. They dumbed us down so we couldn't understand our wealth was being redistributed to investors, they seduced us with the promise of goodies so that we couldn't accept their evil intent, and then pulled the rug out from under us and blamed it all on their enemies and victims.
So now people are desperate, and will do whatever the rich command to survive to the next paycheck.
But a lot less people die from drunk driving since MADD changed the culture of American drinking. Driving drunk used to be seen as macho and an expression of freedom, like gun ownership is today. While MADD got laws passed to make it tougher on drunk drivers, it also created far more opprobrium for even getting started on the process.
I remember when smoking was seen as macho and an expression of freedom too. Like the Marlboro Man (deceased). When government regulated smoking and its advertising, it woke up a lot of people.
Maybe he's saying the difference in what the government is willing to do is that the gun lobby is seen as white Americans in good standing, while the terrorists are all foreigny and unChristiany.
After all, anti-abortion terrorists, who are white Americans in good standing, have largely succeeded in their goals yet rarely are called terrorists.
You're all missing the point. The Right believes that inferiors are to be punished and superiors are to be rewarded, as in ancient times. Punishing all gun owners is thus wrongly egalitarian. The violent property owner enforces morality. The violent poor are the source of all problems and must be punished again and again, relentlessly, collectively, until they act like a fantasy of happy darkies in old Dixie. If they resist, all Good Americans must buy guns and join in the effort to double down on the punishment, even if it means hundreds of thousands dead. God will reward us if we do, just as He rewarded the ancient Hebrews for slaughtering those He wanted slaughtered.
Therefore, all the children killed by the Good Americans by accident or anger are simply a necessary sacrifice to restore God's sacred hierarchy, just like everyone we've gotten killed in overseas wars.
I would disagree slightly in that we keep assuming the Middle East and Central Asia are the same thing. I think the US leadership views Afghanistan as an excuse to remain in Central Asia. That is a new game of energy resources, not the old game represented by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. US bigshots treated the former Soviet Moslem republics as spoils of war in the '90s. A resurgent Russia is pushing us out. Our enemy there is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, led by Russia and China and their obvious energy interests.
The question about the Middle East, to me, is whether we really are allies in a meaningful way with Saudi Arabia, given our submissive support of Israel. It seems that since Bush remained deaf to Saudi pleas around 2006-7 to save the Sunnis in Iraq, Saudi Arabia has stopped taking orders from us, and is using its vast wealth to buy a sphere of influence that also doesn't take orders from us.
Ironic. Because Afganistan isn't really a nation, the ANA regiments have no national pride, so indeed don't mind letting NATO do the real work in defending their fake country.
But because Americans do have national pride, we can't just say we screwed up and can't have our way in Afghanistan, Vietnam, etc., so we carry out this elaborate ritual to avoid saying we lost.
I guess national pride without a genuine belief that the cause is worth self-sacrifice is the difference between that sorry show and what an impoverished, inexperienced US did in World War II. The whole postwar doctrine that we could avoid another major war by breaking up global affairs into little "preventative" wars that we could easily win has foundered on the immovable rocks of democratic psychology.
History did not start in 1993, Bill, and neither did US support for dictators and torturers in the Arab world. Do you really believe that if we had kept our hands off, as we usually had before the 1970s, that there would be an al-Qaeda now? Oh no, you respond, then the Commies would have taken over. But then, I note, we armed, financed, and lionized the Mujahedeen to do the dirty work of beating the Commies, and they decided that we were just as bad and turned on us and won widespread support in the Arab world.
This self-righteous trip you're on about American power is not borne out by our eternal manufacturing of new enemies to fight. Something is not right about this whole process.
I'm not resting assured, Bill. Remember all those wonderful things we thought would happen once the Soviet Union went away? I'm supposed to believe that it costs more to fight some guys in caves than it did to fight the International Communist Conspiracy?
I think part of the scam of the Right that allowed them to restage 1929 is that they can say, "See, we had Big Government this time and we still had a crash."
Recall that one of Reagan's appointees wrote a biography in which he proudly admitted that they all intentionally cut taxes on the rich and raised military spending in order to create a future fiscal crisis that would require massive cuts to the programs that helped the Americans they considered their enemies. The Tea Party attacks on teachers and colleges, and the Fiscal Cliff, were the end game of the same strategy.
Tax cuts for the rich are how the Right create the illusion that somehow Big Government was responsible for the crash that the rich themselves actually engineered, with the resulting ballooning deficit as the scapegoat. The rich of 1929 would have considered it insane to do this on purpose. But that's because they were committed to investing in America, and they had no way to run up the deficit to manipulate the system.
Now, the rich can take their money out of the US, or easily move it from state to state. This means all governments, state or national, are blackmailed into a global bidding war against each other to cut taxes and social services. Meanwhile, military spending has come along as a way for the rich to get a government that's only big for them. So running up war spending while getting tax cuts, the Reagan formula, became the sacred formula. The military spending takes up all the slack that Keynes had expected to exist during a depression, yet does less and less each decade to produce ordinary jobs. That's because the military's "needs" are manufactured by lobbyists based on what the owners of the defense industry want: weapons that by nature require the fewest workers to make and maintain, whose budgets disproportionately disappear into "black" R&D and poorly-overseen software development. (Then easily diverted into political campaigns, a la Duke Cunningham?)
Keynes' mistake was to assume that all government spending at a particular point in time had an equal effect on the velocity of money, the key to getting out of a depression. Studies keep showing modern military spending produces the least economic multiplier of all government activities. Yet the sacred nature of national security makes it impossible for the public to use that data in judging what activities the government should continue. Thus the war machine has become the capitalists' perfect anti-Keynesian tool - government spending that can't stimulate the economy but can't be denounced as morally inferior to other forms of spending.
There are no facts anymore, only market segments. If Fox and the sponsors have cowed real newsmen, then liberals turn to Jon Stewart's comedy show to get nuggets of truth. If gun nuts refuse to accept that other gun nuts occasionally go on rampages, they immediately flock to websites alleging that they're all victims of a government hoax. So why shouldn't we, the citizens who supposedly govern the most heavily armed power on Earth, pick and choose our historical evidence from movies? It's the path of least resistance, isn't it?
Torture appeals to the public for exactly the same reason it appeals to Hollywood screenwriters, no matter how liberal they are. It is a magic bullet, that simplifies the complex plotlines of foreign affairs and war, Alexander's sword through the Gordian knot. Americans loved nukes and the Strategic Defense Initiative for the same reason, until learning that they really weren't magic.
It doesn't take much to confuse Americans looking for excuses. They can't follw storylines this complicated in the evening news, so they could easily perceive the torture victim being told that his torture did stop an attack as some twisted sort of vindication for the practice.
Yes, this is exactly what we need to discuss. Not the media spectaculars or the gun lobby paranoia. The NRA tries a Manichean division of America into two races, the Good Americans and the Criminal Race. Then all the undeniable problems with guns are the fault of the Criminal Race forcing us Good Americans to escalate to save our society. But in fact we're all potentially killers because we're idiots with poor impulse control, and the corporations train us to be that way because it makes us better consumers. To point this out is to say that even white, Christian, property-owning Americans are such utter fools that they can't be trusted not to shoot each other, cheat on their wives, molest their daughters, download kiddie porn, snort cocaine, etc, etc, etc.
You can see the radical danger of that kind of realization.
See my comment on Swiss culture above. Believe it or not, Christiane, millions of Americans are constantly thinking about and training for the use of guns against other Americans - not foreign invaders. There are two different media empires - the white gun media and gangsta rap - that celebrate the idea of destroying ones' enemies. It's not a fantasy for Americans the way it is for Europeans, it's right there in the streets.
Besides that, and I think this is really significant, no Swiss reservist would ever think of using his government-issued assault rifle against his fellow citizens. American gun nuts - from white "patriots" to black gangsters - think about it all the time, even wish for it. That sounds like a state of war, not a society.
The issue is whether Jones, or a large section of the broader gun movement, have a problem with the goverment murdering Moslems. In fact, I think Jones does have a problem with it, but many of the people he's making his living off of hate the government only when it oppresses "real" Americans instead of gays, liberals, Moslems, socialists, Jews, blacks, the poor, and of course everyone else on Earth. We're supposed to believe that Jones' alternative States' Rights militia will respect the rights of all those other kinds of Americans given our history?
The militia neo-Confederates really, really believe that America was only ever supposed to be ruled by white Christian property owners. I'm not kidding. If you dig into the literature, or any of the more rabid gun magazines, the words are repeated over and over again, "America was not founded as a democracy."
Therefore, the current democratic government is tyranny and they have an unimpeachable right to overthrow it.
We need to be confronting these people with the monstrous past they are plotting to return us to. Force them to admit that they want to take the vote away from "un-American" minorities. That they will never share their gun rights with those minorities, instead branding them terrorists the instant they organize their own militias.
Don't forget the double standard of the gun nuts, who ignored the destruction of the black-separatist MOVE sect in Philadelphia by an ill-advised police explosive device, but fall over themselves hailing the virtues of white patriarch David Koresh. Both, it must be said, were a vast nuisance to their neighbors.
Don't even ask those bastards about the state murder of the Black Panthers unless you want to get punched.
Interesting that you should suggest suing the perpetrators. I think that the fear of lawsuits and interstate reparations is exactly why the Right and its oligarch bankrollers are dug in so hard, like Big Tobacco before them. Everything about the far-right ideology manufactured in the US since 1968 seems tailor-made to exonerate capitalism, capitalists and the bourgeoise lifestyle promoted by America from any responsibility for damage. They will literally claim the bad weather is a punishment from God for not killing all the gays before they make an admission that might lead to a tax for climate reparations.
They definitely already are paranoid about reparations for slavery, and again their ideology is tailored to defy it.
This is true, and in fact we know what happens when a commodity bubble goes too far:
1. The cost of the commodity falls so low that the producers can no longer meet their operating costs
2. They either cut back production to force the price up, or they go out of business and the same thing eventually happens
The thing that never changes is the growing up-front cost of ever-more exotic means of extracting the last dregs of oil and gas from the earth. Eventually, it will take almost as much enery to do this as the amount of energy extracted. How can that be profitable, unless we ironically have a cheaper energy source to power the operation?
Shale oil and gas was sold to the public as a long-lasting resource, and none of us pay any attention to how fast the wells dry up and have to be replaced at considerable expense. According to http://www.theoildrum.com, the early indications are not good.
It doesn't help that so many nations there have no known alternative to oil and gas sales to fund their rise from poverty - or to keep the existing regime in power. Taking that away means a lot of despair. We can hope that Desertec will make North African solar energy exportable via the European power grid, but this will be the kind of heroic engineering endeavor that humans no longer seem capable of.
"in order to guarantee Hizballah’s future and its unnatural expansion against history and politics..."
Sounds like this fellow shares the Sunni lie that the Shia are not the plurality anywhere, in Iraq or Lebanon, and deserve no voice in any government.
The enemy of Hezbollah is the friend of Israel and its plans for southern Lebanon. It's already established that Saudi Arabia is trying to come out on top in Syria. Granted, Assad must fall. But why is Saudi Arabia always trying to help Israel?
If my country is being raped by foreign invaders and hostile domestic militias decade after decade, I damn well have the right to create a militia to protect my people and restore order. Or do you consider Israel's pet militia slaughtering hundreds of Palestinians in Lebanon while Israeli troops looked the other way to be "order"?
Lebanon cannot have a legitimate government because its constitution prevents one-man one-vote, because that would dethrone the Sunni and Christian business elites. In that sense, the Shia had as much right to form Hezbollah as Nelson Mandela did to form the ANC. Because the US and Israel and Saudi Arabia refuse to allow a proper revolution to do what the ANC did (recall our invasions in 1958 and 1983), Hezbollah is accepting this absurd quasi-sovereign status while actually governing Arabs better than any of US/Israel's pet kings and tyrants do - at least the ones without oil.
Joe, my complaint is that the drones are killing a lot of innocent civilians, even launch delayed second attacks to kill the rescue workers after they arrive. We blow up wedding parties, we kill children. You can say the civilian Pakistani survivors are a bunch of dirty Moslem liars, but THEY'RE CITIZENS OF A SOVEREIGN STATE WE HAVEN'T DECLARED WAR ON! In fact, their government is supposed to be our ally. Yet it is NOT refuting the claims of civilian dead, nor is our ally Afghanistan.
Flying killer robots are just as indiscriminate a tool of war as manned aviation, and if we were using the latter to attack Pakistani territory, wouldn't there be consequences?
Robert E. Lee once said, after a victory, "It is good that war is so terrible, or we should soon grow too fond of it." The drones are a way to make war less "terrible" so we can remain fond of it, and its operating expenses. The only reason the death toll from drones is so tiny compared to the million dead in the Vietnam War is that our opponent is so weak, so few, living in a place so worthless that there are no cities to blow up. So what's the threat to us from those civilians?
We must stop lying about our magical weapons that never kill civilians. At least Madeline Albright was willing to say that causing the death of 400,000 innocent Iraqis via sanctions was "worth it". Let's see Obama say the same.
I'm with Joe on this one, because we must understand that we are dealing with an actual neo-Confederate movement, one whose agenda reaches back to the John Birch Society and the 1990s militias. This movement has sworn to take America back to the 19th century. The rich and the far-right in alliance have already re-created the economic conditions that caused the Great Depression, thus the 2008 crash. Yet afterwards they doubled down on the crazy, said we hadn't gone far enough back into the past. Now they're attacking Teddy Roosevelt as a commie for creating income tax (1908), calling for the repeal of the 13th Amendment (1865), even demanding an end to popular elections of senators (1830s). The goal has always been to radically polarize American wealth, so that a restored white patriarchy (Kochs, et al) would regain the monopoly of power that the slaveowners and robber barons once had and used to preside over white supremacy (the reward for their redneck rank & file).
Israel is now ruled by people with many connections to these maniacs. Not surprising given its own need to prevent an Arab-Israeli voting majority at all costs.
Because, of course, American support for the right-wing military of Indonesia committing multiple genocides, or the right-wing military of Guatemala murdering 400,000 Indians is so much more "serious" than what the left wing advocates.
Yeah, let's bring colonialism back. Isn't that essentially what Israel looks like to Arabs, and understandably so? You're saying that whites rule best, so they should rule everywhere. Do you want me to scour the Internet for the death toll of European imperialism in the last 200 years? It will be a large number.
You are also conveniently forgetting 1956, when pinko traitor Dwight Eisenhower broke up the colonialist UK-French-Israeli coalition that invaded the Sinai with the threat of Marshall Plan cutoffs. We used to stand for something other than Israeli expansion, sir. Note that in that same year Israeli agents bombed a USAID library in Egypt in a failed attempt to provoke a US war on Egypt, an act which the Israeli government not just admits, but celebrates. This was the nice socialist Israel, not the apartheid far-right Israel of today.
Also, you are wrong that the US was more popular in the Moslem world in general under Bush than under Obama. Our popularity collapsed everywhere under Bush, most importantly in Turkey where it has had serious consequences. Pakistan is the exception to this rule, due to Obama's policy of flying killer robots there blowing up wogs, which you probably applaud.
Yes, but liberal Zionists will hide behind the cover of gay rights, while continuing to undermine the Administration on those rare occasions when it shows any backbone.
Obama should have made this pick in 2009 and forced the Tea Party to establish its position on imperialism right away. Ron Paul would have found himself very lonely on the podium as the only GOP congressman supporting Hegel.
And maybe Hegel would not have been such a fan of the flying killer robots. Now it's too late to stop them, because they're fast, cheap and out of control.
Don't gay servicepersons have an even greater right not to have their lives thrown away in criminal wars of aggression, like the one against Iraq planned by Cheney's Likud-employed agents? How about the rights of the Iranians not to be slaughtered as a scapegoat so Israel can build more illegal settlements?
You are as shameless a dehumanizer of Moslem victims as Madeline Albright, who said the 400,000 Iraqis who died from US sanctions were "worth it". You obviously won't be happy until Iran is destroyed the way Iraq was. Thank you for telling me the name of the Zionist candidate for Albright II, Michelle Fluornoy. I will try to warn my friends against her. Also, thank you for laying out the entire strategy of the smear campaign that will be used by the non-existent Israel Lobby against Hegel.
Same reason we can't say "Israeli nuclear arsenal". Because if Israel is really that strong, it doesn't need to steal land and water from its neighbors or evolve a program of ethnic cleansing. As a Special Victim, it demands a free pass from what everyone knows is international law.
But it sure as hell is profitable for someone in Israel to do these things.
It doesn't work because the sequencing is different. The whole idea of colonialism is to use one's more advanced tech and organization to insert oneself in a territory to do bad things to the natives. Conversely, the Islamist fundamentalist attitude is that they are the natives, that the entire existing population be forced to conform to their own views, therefore it would be better to have everyone be backward rather than have infidel ideas create a ruling caste with a competitive advantage - such as the Westernized elites already implanted in their countries.
I guess you could call it a religious take on Maoism, where one's beliefs are not meant to determine how rich one will be, but whether one is not tossed into a reeducation camp.
The description of current far-right Israeli thinking in this entry is depressingly similar to that of their American allies. I think the entire Israeli political establishment had a hand in creating the rabid racism and soldier-worship that brought this to pass. Look no further than the role of Meir in denying the legitimacy of the Palestinian people, and the hard work of Israeli socialists in beginning the process of dehumanizing Arabs. Begin and the supposedly moderate old Likud took it further.
Regardless of their views about economic policy, personal liberty, etc, they wanted their citizenry to be the new Spartans. Like the Afrikaners, like the old Confederacy, a society that paranoid and fearful of defeat will always try to concoct a moral imperative for winning - which must eventually become the idea of a Master Race.
In America, the same issue has always lurked in the form of the loss of white domination due to demographics. But substantial regions of white America do not share this paranoia, which has allowed Israel to devolve faster in recent years. It now seems their right wing serves as a role model for our white wing. Since neither movement gives a damn about democracy, it's simply a matter of depriving the enemy of the right to vote. We will see more of that, carried out by bullying normal people into silence for just that one election needed to change all the rules forever. Will Israel soon introduce the Grandfather Clause, the Poll Tax and the Literacy Test?
I don't think those bombs will stay in their silos for 50 years. You're describing a period longer than the history of South African apartheid - hardly a fate Israeli Arabs are likely to sit quietly through. Unlike South Africa, Israel can afford to entertain the fantasy of economically-feasible ethnic cleansing, based on its own history.
One of the things religions do is rewrite history to cover their tracks. Christians today can't explain why much of their dogma doesn't seem to be in the Bible, because it was concocted for later political reasons. Yet they can't accept that such manipulation occurs.
As long as Americans are culturally indoctrinated to view foreigners as not quite human, because anyone who is poor is subhuman and anyone who is rich and doesn't act white is insane, our endless foreign policy fiascos, blowbacks and catastrophes can always be excused by officials:
"We meant well; those people over there are crazy."
And our citizens will always nod their heads in empathy.
So what you're saying is that the West/Israel cynically switch sides back and forth between Arabs and Persians to keep both of them weak. Culling the herds, so to speak.
At least Scotland isn't using austerity dogma as an excuse to dismantle its national health system, while I've heard your neo-Victorian prime minister got money from American "health" conglomerates that clearly want to make British health into a clone of the US model - then he hastily imposed rules to make the NHS seek private outsourcing for some services, dismantling the previous bureaucracy in a naked attempt to forestall the public outcry. When did England become Wisconsin?
Under the rule of such lying bastards, Scotland will lose its money in favor of tax cuts for the oligarchs responsible for the crash. The SNP is the only true progressive party left in Britain. And if Scotland secedes and kicks out NATO, a far bigger waster of money, Salmonds deserves the Nobel Prize.
Don't forget that Scotland's nationalists are playing an energy nationalism card. Scots might be willing to put up with occasional inconveniences from wind intermittency that other bourgeoise nations are too spoiled to contemplate, in order to boast that Scotland doesn't need Britain to survive. The SNP was just as willing to play that game with offshore oil & gas - until it went into deep decline. Quebec's nationalists played it with hydro power. But the instant they find more oil in some god-awful place, they forget all about the environment, just like all the Americans mesmerized by shale-trapped oil and gas.
Nothing will change, I fear, until a country gains an economic advantage from alternative energy that gives it real power over others. Then jealousy overwhelms laziness and short-sightedness. This is what we're like.
Believe me, the Pentagon is more genuinely interested in diversifying its energy sources than the elected government of the US. Why? Because it has a blank check to pay the higher marginal costs of alternative energy, and it is being embarrassed by its need in Afghanistan to rely on its enemies for supply routes for its oil.
For instance, the Navy has been subsidizing biofuels for aircraft to help the industry get a footing, but the Tea Party Congress has forbidden it from doing so. If not for that, its nuclear carriers and submarines could guarantee that it will be functioning after the other services - and the rest of the world - are out of fuel.
The Army has been buying zinc-air batteries (which are refueled, not recharged) from Arotech as portable power sources for its ever-growing electronic inventory.
And the conversion to flying killer robots is under way, because it's the only way the US can hold onto its empire while being flat broke. The robots use a lot less fuel than manned jets, besides all their other advantages.
I have many criticisms of the American war machine, but as an institution obsessed with its self-preservation, it certainly is doing a better job preparing for a low-energy future than the taxpayers it hoses.
If we really wanted to, we could electrify much of our transportation, but it's too much of a disruption to our narcotized consumer sleepwalk. Like the New Deal or WW2, the sort of mass action that corporations fear could give the peasants ideas. It would not cost a lot of money to electrify all our freight railroads, yet that went nowhere. We could convert all non-hybrid city buses to natural gas, and actually save money. If we could even imagine making sacrifices, we could just levy a military services tax on our petroleum products, and then let the market force us all to move closer to our country's excellent network of waterways, like our forefathers did. Or pay the real energy cost for meat, or live without airlines perpetually bankrupted by fuel costs, or stop moving further from our jobs to flee from minorities and their supposed criminality.
The sacrifices themselves aren't the problem, it's that the economy can't function unless consumption keeps increasing geometrically.
But recall that we took Egypt's side in that crisis precisely because we knew Nasser had no ideological compunctions preventing him from becoming a Soviet ally, and we were sort of in a bidding war for his services. The 1973 crisis also showed the US acting as though it was competing with the USSR for hegemony while not letting their proxies go too far.
I think the deeper change was the indoctrination of the public - and perhaps the next generation of policymakers - to believe that it was worth getting a lot of Americans killed to control the Middle East. The blaming of the rotten economy of the '70s on OPEC prepared the way, and the rise of Islamism added that necessary spice of fear. Once they'd gone that far, people suddenly all acted as though the US was entitled to control all that happened there, with no basis in history.
Whereas, few Americans now would sacrifice their sons in a major conflict in east Asia, despite it being economically far more important to the world than it was when we did it in both Korea and Vietnam.
Consider that Dick Cheney, head of PNAC and previously of the American Enterprise Institute, and the other neocons were looking for an excuse to move US troops into Iraq and Iran, which was more central to the region where oil development was taking place (up into central Asia). The argument that they could take pressure off the Saud dynasty by relocating from Desert One to Iraq might have been appealing to more cautious conservatives, like Dick's oil industry friends.
Isn't it funny that Chiang's Kuomintang now is a puppet of Beijing, basically bought up for the purpose of opposing Taiwan's ruling party and its position of Taiwanese independence, which both Chiang and Mao rejected?
See, when new guys have the big money, all of the games America ran start operating very differently.
Interestingly, if you click the link, you find that Lincoln was writing a letter not on class relations, but attacking free trade and the economic concept that GNP maximization necessarily improves the well-being of a society. Very similar to modern debates about NAFTA and the hollowing-out of local economies by the crappy jobs it produces.
The Republican Party - because it is now the fusion of the northern and southern elites that led the Civil War - can no longer talk with a straight face about Lincoln. Southern Republicans still say terrible things about Lincoln exactly like their Democratic forebears, but conservative propaganda and corporate media insulate northern Republicans (who still have their uses) from hearing it. For instance, Ron Paul saying that Lincoln was wrong to fight (and I think even that he was a tyrant), which is hardly different than former Senate GOP leader Trent Lott telling Strom Thurmond admirers that if the latter had won the presidency in '48 "we wouldn't be having some of these problems we're having today". Meaning, blacks voting.
Every Republican who tries to reduce the number of blacks voting (you know who you are) is crapping on the Lincoln Monument. Which is fine as long as you're consistent and embrace secession. The capitalists who run the GOP would face a disaster if the USA were partitioned, and its military withdrawn from global economic manipulation to turn to face itself along a 2000-mile hostile frontier. And the states that most want to secede are the states where minorities are growing the fastest, so like the Israelis, they'd immediately have to restrict voting rights and then proceed down the road to apartheid. Try getting foreign investment then, racists.
So Lincoln and Franklin are discredited lefitsts. So the whole foundation of our republic is questionable, and we might as well open it up to conflict again.
I got something better than the "labor theory of value." It's "labor starving to death under market conditions might as well burn the whole damn country down theory." Let's factor that into labor markets, like the rich had to do when confronted with that possibility in the '30s, and see how much more generous the investor class magically becomes than it is today.
Or if you want to resurrect an oldie, we can call it the Balance of Terror. I'm fine with that.
The NRA just made a terrible tactical mistake. For years the blaming of TV, movies and games for violence was the domain of liberals. To small-government reactionaries, gun violence in the media was fine as long as it glorified the cops and military and white icons like cowboys. In other words, the rednecks demanded that the media teach their sons to share their worship of the efficacy of gun violence, so as to stay ahead of the dark-skinned horde breeding in the ghetto, who were genetically violent. Thus, "freedom" to indulge in violence would empower the "good guys" to victory; censorship, like gun control, would weaken us civilized folk but not the barbarians.
It was crazy, but it couldn't be refuted, thus held the gun community together and made it ever more extreme. The second you reverse your position, you admit that "free will" cannot be trusted regardless of race, that all kids have to be shielded from Pavlovian inculcation into violence, which can only be done by the government.
Once you've opened up that can of worms, you might as well say that government has a responsibility to the poor, the victims of racism, et al. The NRA has undermined the ethos of the white warrior tribe without even understanding that.
Now now, Effem, we must believe as Americans that any charity is more efficient and well-intentioned than any socialistic scheme of big government, so starving the latter to force-feed the former must be a virtue. Not only that, but the Christian Right for decades has been teaching its inner corps that the rich should pay lower taxes than the poor, because the rich must make better economic decision otherwise they wouldn't be rich (!). Therefore, it is entirely consistent for the right-wing movement that rich people should have total freedom to control the country with their spending, tax breaks, and donations to charities that promote... the right-wing movement!
We have to end the popular myth that the rich want what's best for the rest of us. They obtain multiple advantages from lording over a bankrupt and terrified population, which seems to be more of a sure thing than investing their wealth in a stronger commonwealth. Perhaps their increasingly inbred and autistic libertarian ideology and the accompanying manufacture of bullshit data to support it makes them feel better about this unnatural state.
"American political life has always been haunted by a fear of weakness and a conviction that Americans are condemned to vulnerability in a world full of anti-Americans eager to destroy them.”
Or substitute Germans or Japanese. Perhaps the world is full of one's enemies, but once it becomes the primary point of one's politics, madness ensues.
Thank God you mentioned well depletion rates. Nobody understands how important the depletion rate is with these exotic extraction technologies. Generally, gas wells deplete very fast no matter what type, and the new enhanced recovery oil wells deplete faster than the earlier types. Ignoring this creates the illusion that cumulative growth in production is possible for long.
So the question is, are those ALEC scum simply acting as a cynical industry lobby, as when they push obviously profit-driven legislation, or is there a deeper agenda, as I believe is the case with ALEC's role in pushing prison slave labor.
You create a profitable class of convict slaves, then you need a segment of the public that views themselves as deserving to be the masters.
The test case, as I've always said, would be what would happen if a group outside the right-wing white-dominated patriarchy were to organize a gun culture as pervasive as that of American right-wingers - in other words, a rival armed militia. If ALEC just represents greedy gun makers, it should welcome the arms race. If it views a restoration of white supremacy as the way to complete its vision of returning America to the 19th century, then these interlopers will be denounced as terrorists and gun laws will be written to discriminate against them.
According to our classical liberal ideology, we form societies for the sake of security while maintaining as much of our freedom as we can. So it matters to the citizens of a country that so many of them die at the hands of other citizens, not because they were trying to drive from one place to another, but because they wanted to kill them. The question is, what does this mean about our relationship to and obligations to one another?
But the people opposed to disarming civilians are usually the ones most opposed to reducing their countries' militaries. Ron Paul's contrary attitudes about that are now a small minority view within the very Tea Party movement he's credited with starting. It's all about the fear of the "other", an ideology about the threat from within or without your borders, easily flipping like a switch based on sensationalized events.
The striking thing about Michael Moore's movie "Bowling for Columbmine" is that he argues the problem is indeed not guns per se, but American gun culture. A simple trip to Toronto shows a universe of difference in attitudes about crime and guns. He even opens people's doors at random to show that not everyone in Toronto bothers to lock them. Does this mean that robberies don't happen in Canada? No, it means that people there are acculturated to not letting fear of violence rule their lives - which is why they rarely use their guns on each other.
Of course, once you have the culture, people will buy far more lethal guns, setting off an arms race between every citizen.
The far right is working day and night to infiltrate the US military as well. I think when their dreams come true, it will be via a military coup, and the militias will do the dirty work of exterminating enemies on the local level. Recall Indonesia, where the Army overthrew Suharto, and then 600,000 ethnic Chinese and Communists somehow got hacked to death by Malay civilians. Was the Army really doing nothing during all that, or was it directing traffic?
Like a lot of things in the US, the debate about guns is hiding another dispute over who is a "real" American and who is an inferior.
The framing of the NRA, et al is that there is an implied "criminal" race, and a non-criminal "American" race, with no crossing over, no shadings, no ambiguity. If the Good Americans simply out-firepower the Bad Americans sufficiently, then the war on crime is won, just like the war on Indians. The fantasy about militias is therefore the next logical step. The fantasy about militias overthrowing a government that refuses to strip Bad Americans of their false equality is the next insane step.
Instead, the Good Americans are deeply flawed, paranoid people who shoot their spouses, children, parents, and best friends when they lose their tempers. When that happens these Good Americans magically become Bad Americans, who all along were hiding in disguise among us like Communists and child molestors.
The point of it all, of course, is that the militia advocates have no intention of allowing blacks or Hispanics or gays or leftists or atheists avail themselves of the 2nd Amendment in the same way that Good Americans can. The instant that those undesirables form militias to counter right-wing militias, they will simply be labeled terrorists, treated completely differently under the law, and no one will blink.
I'm afraid this is all going to become irrelevant in a few years, because people will be able to manufacture guns at home.
You've probably noticed articles about home 3-D printers lately. That's because this is an industry that's taking off, which means each year will bring printers that can use a wider range of plastic materials. That's on top of the proliferation of CNC machines that can handle all the metal parts of any gun you've ever seen.
If mass murderers, as Prof. Cole implies, are impulse buyers of guns, then they really don't need the guns to be durable. In the future you will get mad, download the blueprints with a click of a mouse, and pump out many plastic-barreled guns from the 3-D printer that you got for Christmas 2015 because everybody had one. Even worse, they might pass through a simple metal detector.
The implications for mass civil conflict are even more heinous.
The gun cult (which has sucked the casual users into its orbit with the fear of confiscation) views all the victims you mention as necessary casualties in a perpetual war to defend America's manly soul. They wouldn't flinch if they had to escalate to all-out civil war to crush deviance.
Unfortunately, not only do we have all the guns we need to defeat every form of gun restriction, but we have all the guns we need to fight that civil war. It's like when Saddam Hussein threw open the doors of his armories to ensure the incoming Occupation would be drowned in sectarian war.
All that lies between us and that abyss is what we choose to believe about our fellow citizens. If that could be changed, the guns would be no more dangerous than they are in Canada. But the government does not have the power to change how we feel about each other. Usually, it is the war itself that changes that.
You're on the mark here. I think that there is a dark shadow on our society that goes back to its origins, and that is the American meaning of the word "freedom". I think that far too much of our history shows it to mean "the power of life and death over inferior creatures". Crazy people just categorize who is inferior and who is superior differently than "patriots", corporations, and fundamentalists. But the gun manifests that power for everyone who lusts after it.
And yet everywhere in the media, the headlines scream "UNIONS CAUSE HOSTESS BANKRUPTCY!"
Headlines written by members of the same elite class as these thieves, going to the same golf clubs, putting their kids in the same private schools. Because it is the same caste of men who run the media, the think-tanks, and the US Chamber of Commerce.
The key here is that Israel's economic ties are very different than its political ties. America supplies Israel with ambition, arrogance and impunity, but not oil. Israel exports creepy military and police-state technology to America and other countries, but otherwise it trades to the Mediterranean world, where it has run out of friends.
Are you Swedes bombarded round-the-clock with commercial propaganda extolling your corporations as the source of all good, and a deranged TV "news" network and thousands of churches damning the workers and democratic government as the source of all evil? Are your corporations continually blackmailing local and state governments and playing them off against each other for more favorable legislation against workers?
It's hard to keep people joining unions under those (American) conditions. As for why your corporations haven't simply abandoned Sweden entirely, I guess American investors are further down the road to the commoditization of all relationships, predicted by Marx.
Juan, you might recall Jimi Hendrix's song "Machine Gun", where he sang from the point of view of the Vietnamese peasants under Yankee firepower: "Wanna pick up a gun and fight like a farmer." This from a veteran of the 101st Airborne.
It's foolish to say that the Right is amending its positions until one can say who actually controls that function on the Right, and what their agenda is.
Is the Right the capitalist class on the top, the yuppie libertarian cult that worships capitalism that actual, cynical capitalists know is a fantasy, the ugly racist populism of older working class whites, or the religious extremist movement that tries to unite them all under its opiates?
We must assume that in a capitalist country, capitalists have an agenda. They certainly have the resources to choose which other special interest groups to manipulate and fit into its plans. The logical interest of a capitalist, personal values aside, is: (a) cut wages, (b) increase sales, until he has all money and we have none. Which is impossible, as Marx pointed out, thus leading to the boom & bust cycles of the laissez-faire era that radicalized the workers before the New Deal.
Let's say that those capitalists who lack a social conscience wanted to go back to that unworkable past model. How would they get us to stomach it when our ancestors rejected it? Whom would they need to get on their side to pull that off? Whom would they divide and conquer?
and if they found their allies were insane, how far would they plunge the nation into insanity to obtain short-term profits?
Remember, the global financial system, which can be knocked over by some amateurs flying an airliner into a skyscraper, will not survive the market fluctuations caused by increasingly unstable weather. It's like the insurance industry, which also won't survive.
Unfortunately, that wealth is what is needed to finance the environmental reconstruction required to save us. Instead the rich will stubbornly use their wealth to lobby against any change at all until it's even too late for them.
My guess is that the rich are plotting to build the City of Domes from "Logan's Run", or the all-fatso starship from "Wall-E", and the 10% of the rest of us who will survive will be their peons.
'Cap & trade' was a rhetorical device manufactured by libertarians for the purpose of proving that there was a free-market solution for every problem caused by human greed, and thus protecting their beloved ideology. I'm sure they had every intention of hypocritically reversing their position as soon as cap & trade had performed its purpose of sabotaging more 'socialistic' assaults on the CO2 problem.
The problem with China is that it never throws anything away, because it wants nothing but accumulation. Thus ancient, dirty factories producing shoddy goods stay in business while very advanced automated factories get all the TV publicity. They can't imagine replacing coal with any other form of power when they can simply try producing all forms, dirty and clean, simultaneously and pumping up those GNP stats that determine whether party officials get promoted or fired, and keep the Shanghai stock market rising.
They want to accumulate wealth at double-digit rates until they have as much stuff as us, and then negotiate new values. It will be too late by then, but they feel entitled, and most other societies in the same position would act the same way.
Big Oil wouldn't be what it is today without those car companies, and vice versa.
What's the difference between them?
Is it that the auto industry is seen as contaminated by being located in Negro-infested Detroit, and being unionized?
Yet Big Oil is sucking all kinds of money out of the US and has, as a necessary cost of doing business, empowered all sorts of nasty regimes overseas. How is this more patriotic than what the car companies do?
Are right-wing Americans really now required to hate their 5000-lb 4x4 pickups and SUVs, yet love the foreign petroleum going into their tanks?
Or maybe... they like what Big Oil justifies. The ridiculous giant gas guzzlers Detroit built all these years exemplify the cult of American exceptionalism - but their fuel requirements DEMAND American exceptionalism: the military domination of the Middle East, dovetailing into the Crusader castle known as Israel, and the plain of Armageddon.
And that means a $750,000,000,000 annual expenditure on military matters, money that they can then demand be extracted from everything else they hate about America and modern life: social programs, poverty programs, public education, science and research. The war machine employs them in myriad bizarre little right-wing companies working on killer robots and armor for Special Forces, America's faux knighthood.
Most of all, the movement is about helping the movement, and Big Oil helps fund it, and electric cars will replace Big Oil with new elites that might act differently, so why even take the risk when it's so much easier to poison the air and water and terrorize the planet?
What this is about is the need of the right-wing movement to terrorize anyone who attacks cranks like the makers of the anti-Mohammed video.
This is simply the movement protecting its great strength: a vast number of ostensibly separate extremists, supposedly acting only out of the goodness of their hearts, and clearly intimidating us normals by the aggressiveness of their convictions, all putting out the same lies on cue. This appears very convincing to those person already disgusted with the way their lives are going under late capitalism, but too in love with the idea of inequality to ever blame it on capitalism.
As long as the ties between these seditionists are too complex for laymen to decipher, as long as the ones who are "too extreme" can be plausibly denied as being representative of the movement's aims (for now), as long as genuinely independent cranks are inspired by the professional haters to keep spewing new hate on new media, the bad guys create the alternative universe which you folks are all complaining about, in which Fox News worshippers are steadily prepared to accept ideas even more hateful than what can be pinned on Fox.
Yes, Obama's people tried to take a cheap shot at the video cranks, but we all ought to be doing that because this is war right here at home. As for all of you Gaddafi-lovers who are playing along with Fox to get revenge on Obama for not bailing out your hero, well, when the far right takes over thanks to your sabotaging our own unity, you will end up in the same death camp as me. The right's fanaticism is an excuse to action, extremism, and the most monstrous and Herculean acts, while the left's fanaticism is an excuse to cop out, to be lazy, to use facts to justify disunity and perpetual pissing on any Democrat who can gain any traction among the mainstream Americans you hate so much.
It says a lot about the nature of our problems that the only hope for humanity is to scrap various of our existing technological systems - and thus the existing elites that own and operate them. In his book "American Theocracy", Kevin Phillips proposed that societies that attain great power via a particular energy source eventually rebuild their culture around that source, such that they can't move forward on more advanced alternatives until their competitors have already ruined them:
Netherlands - wind & sail power
Britain - coal
USA - petroleum
The aforementioned World Health Organization report is the truth of what Israel is very carefully carrying out: to eliminate the Palestinian population by 2020.
Remember the good old days when all Russians and Chinese were assumed to be mad dog killers who would nuke us at the drop of a hat no matter how massive our retaliation would be?
That's dehumanization of the enemy. We dehumanized the Iraqis until we could pretend that they would try to nuke us so we could invade them. Now Iran's turn.
Your mistake is in assuming that the US and Israel are sincere in wanting to live peacefully with Iran's current government. Given they don't, it is actually useful to them to make Iran more of a threat, not less.
The logic is that Israel has always intended to make the Arab population of Palestine disappear (see: Jabotinsky's remarks that the Zionists must do unto the Arab as the U.S. of Americans did unto the Indians). All Israeli actions are consistent with making the lives of Palestinians impossible so that they all move away, yet avoid outside retaliation. Why else did Israel help to create Hamas as a way to destroy a PLO that was getting too much outside support, then several years ago send weapons to the PLO to overthrow an elected Hamas government? Over and over again, until they're all dead?
If you refuse to accept that this is the logic of the Zionist historical mission, then I don't understand you either. Now that mission might be amended one day, but Israelis have been too richly rewarded up to this point to reverse their reenactment of white America's Manifest Destiny.
Before the regency of Dick Cheney, oil company heads were no friends of Israel. I guess their old ties to the Arab monarchies and the fact that their industry was not particularly staffed by Jewish-Americans made them very nervous about Israel disrupting their production arrangements.
However, before Cheney became VP he gave a speech to a petroleum group in his Halliburton capacity in which he warned that state-owned oil companies would interfere with the need for massive increases in oil production in the 2000s. Simultaneously his PNAC cabal argued for the takeover of Iran and Iraq to give America permanent global hegemony, and some of that cabal worked for the Likud developing a new paradigm of replacing Arab regimes with pro-Western puppets.
It seems that Cheney masterminded the conversion of the oil elite to active support of Israeli-US conquest of the oil states as a final solution to the problem of Arab instability and resistance. This simplified the GOP's ideology by putting Big Oil and Christian Zionists and militarists on the same page.
I think inciting violence is exactly the goal of racist leaders, both the Israeli and US examples given. They need the occasional slave revolt to keep the masters desperate for their brand of leadership, and the provocations that cause the revolts are very profitable acts of economic exploitation. There is no downside for the bad guys until stronger forces intervene.
This is the truth. This is what wars look like between the First World and the Third World. First worlders throw increasingly advanced techno-terrors at the Third Worlders and run up ever more one-sided kill ratios, but consequently their taxpayers feel entitled to fewer and fewer body bags coming home. Why? Because their politicians can't honestly explain why the conquest of Third Worlders is worth genuine sacrifices. They can only hint that the enemy are so subhuman that the life of one of our boys is truly worth the lives of 100 of theirs.
Thus to paraphrase how Willard put it in Apocalypse Now, we're in suburban high-tech pushbutton warfare comfort growing softer, and Charlie is squatting in the bush growing stronger. Charlie, in the global sense, is outreproducing the ability of our robot killers and smart bombs to hold him back.
Firstly, your range will vary. The EPA just introduced a tougher mileage test, under which the big-pack Tesla's range fell from 300 to 265. We don't know how the smaller packs will do; it depends on how much lighter they make the cars.
Tesla uses cheap Panasonic laptop batteries; in order to make these safe they require their own climate control system. But Panasonic is not going away, and laptops will keep getting smaller. So each year Panasonic introduces batteries which weigh about 10% less and also cost less. So by the time your Tesla's pack is worn down to maybe 70-80% of original capacity, supposedly after 100,000 miles, there will be a much better Panasonic pack waiting, as opposed to what you get if your gas car's engine needs an overhaul then.
Furthermore, a pack that's still got 80% of its capacity is not useless. Nissan is trying to develop a re-use plan which thus further drops battery costs. For instance, as a storage system for solar energy arrays.
Much of the right-wing anger against the car is about its cost; the cheapest version only has half the batteries as the version now being delivered, and that's $57,995 before the hated Federal tax credit. However, when a prominent magazine declared the Tesla S the most important car since the Ford Model T and got denounced along similar lines, I pointed out at a forum that in 1908, the T cost $850, and the per capita income of the US was less than half that. Ford's enormous expansion and ingenious cost cutting brought the car's price down to $260 by the early 1920s. Such a huge drop is certainly not possible for Tesla, but batteries are getting cheaper, and that's likely close to half the price of the current model.
Seriously, Joe, do you think anyone can hide anything big from the CIA? We know all about Israel's nukes and lie about those too. Look at the Valerie Plame case, where the CIA had an elaborate network of fake arms dealers to catch these kinds of activities before Dick Cheney sabotaged it to destroy a personal enemy.
There's also a book called "Your Government Failed You" by retired intel official Richard Clarke, hardly a liberal, in which he described being involved in the discovery during the Reagan era that Saudi Arabia had purchased Chinese IRBMs and was building a base for them, presumably with nuclear warheads on the way. Private messages from the Administration got the Saudis to dismantle it before anyone found out - but we did end up building Desert One for them instead.
The point is, how does the US arbitrarily decide which countries it enforces supposedly-unbiased international law upon?
Thanks for running this story. I have been following Tesla's efforts closely, and found an owner's forum where production figures are being closely tracked.
These are sharp and obviously affluent people who want Tesla to work out its startup issues and proceed to create cheaper models for the masses. They do have their own jargon, because Tesla arranged production to get the most expensive versions on the road first, besides the waiting list. So you have reservation numbers based on that, and VIN numbers that are a better indication of how many have been built.
Musk said his break-even point would be about 160 cars a week; the research at this forum indicates they've gotten to 200 cars a week. Tesla currently inspects and tests cars very closely, which is time-consuming. A second shift is currently being trained, so production could double.
After that, a medium-sized SUV, and down the road, a compact sedan meant to compete with the BMW 3-series.
During my prolonged and ultimately unsuccessful process to get a job in the European analysis office of the CIA (couldn't get Top Secret clearance), my would-be supervisor explained that my job as a 24-year-old analyst would be to tell clients - Congressmen and higher - what they should think, because they didn't really know anything about the matters they came to us about, but didn't really want to admit it.
That was pretty scary, but I realize now that if I'd gotten the job, years later I would have been working for the Bush gang, who promoted analysts who were wrong about Iraq, and forced out analysts who were right. If elected officials are completely dependent on the CIA for their understanding of the outside world, then our democracy is as broken as Mr. McPhee says it is.
The GOP definitely can't use Petraeus now. They're so obsessed with the need for short-term smears against Obama to keep their movement going that they must now explain the adultery of Petraeus as typical of an "Obamanaut" and fellow-traveler, like every other Republican who has cooperated with Obama in customary ways. I hope they're stupid enough to go even further and condemn the Army as a tainted, socialist organization that doesn't want to murder Moslems enough - what with their treatment of Colin Powell. That will derail the unknown plans of extremist theocrats like Jerry Boykin already in the high command.
What scares me is how much we Americans have changed since our successful Occupations of Germany and Japan after 1945. What, do you have to attack American forces with equally advanced technology just so that we will treat you like human beings after we beat you? Or is it that we felt so good about ourselves because Germany and Japan were clearly admitting that we'd beaten them - being totalitarian societies that spoke with one voice - but we never felt that way in South Vietnam, Iraq, etc. where the people never submitted to our wonderfulness?
Or, are Americans, in whole or the part that serves in the military, just more racist and barbaric now?
But Grumpy, 120 years ago the Protestant newspapers and clergymen and politicians were all screaming that the Catholics and Jews weren't assimilating at all, and the Chinese were even worse. Prohibition was really a tool to demonize Jews and Catholics - alcohol was proof those people weren't assimilating!
I would argue that the urban immigrants and blacks of that era carried out a veritable Cultural Revolution, one we can't see today because it was completely normalized by mass media (cities), movies (Jews), and the New Deal coalition. In other words, the new guys won and rewrote what it means to be American.
You're right, but how would the Tea Party demographic feel about capitalism the instant that they saw it no longer favoring their race over all others? America's advantage over other capitalisms is that racial wedge that makes poor whites side with their masters.
Bush also began the GOP reign of terror against minority voters, using his agent Hans von Spakovsky to organize an array of dirty tricks to suppress the non-white vote. Obama's election has brought out into the open the belief of many whites that blacks and Latinos must not be allowed to determine the outcome of elections, that by definition this is fraudulent because they're not "real" Americans.
So what the world would think about President Romney's foreign policies will matter a hell of a lot less than what his henchmen at all levels of government do to continue us down the road to Jim Crow Jr. - imprisoning non-whites on the slightest pretext in private prisons, creating more economic barriers to poor voters, and most importantly terminating the automatic citizenship of all US-born children, which will create a permanent Latino serf class. (Stateless?) Do you think they mind what the world will do any more than the National Party of South Africa did for 40 years?
I think what would likely happen to the Romney economy is that his oligarch buddies will suddenly open up the money floodgates they kept closed to sabotage Obama. Then we will have a repeat of the Bush financial bubble.
Most Americans still don't understand how the 2001-2008 bubble scam worked. They don't want to understand, because it's their last hope for a better life. The scam creates the illusion of prosperity because:
1. People are able to "buy" more stuff even though they earn less income. This in turn allows retailers to hire more badly-paid workers, which doesn't permit inflationary pressure from wages.
2. As some of us recall, the mortgages or whatever lending instrument will be weaponized next time will in turn be traded on unregulated markets at dizzying rates of speed, again without affecting inflation. This will create paper wealth that will be lent to more people who will eventually be unable to repay.
3. On paper, homeowners can't lose.
How big was the scam? In 2004, it's said, home equity loans approached a trillion dollars. Now while a few loans were paid off, taking money out of the economy, we can guess that this single financial scam contributed 5% or more to the entire GNP. Yet inflation-adjusted economic growth that year was much lower. The rest of the US economy was SHRINKING.
Without the mortgage scam, the terrible depression would have started on 9/11/2001, not in 10/2008.
Since half the country refuses to accept this, it's bound to happen again. When has Romney or any GOP leader refuted any of these practices? They intend to do it again, and dump another crash on the Democrats in 2020.
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I recall that Jabotinsky wrote that his Zionist settlers would have to do to the Arabs what the United States did to the Indians. That's why I'm against Zionism; because America's great crime was never punished and served as an inspiration for new crimes.
If we believed in any of the things we say we do, we would brand Saudi Arabia one of the worst tyrannies on Earth, one of the greatest human rights violators on Earth, and one of the greatest supporters of terrorism on Earth. Definitely the greatest exporter of Islamist extremism on Earth. All in all a far worse country than Iran.
But Saudi sells us oil, then takes our dollars and re-invests them in the US to prop up the value of the dollar. And it is willing to avoid direct confrontation with Israel to make us happy.
And that's all that matters to the government and to ordinary Americans.
The issue is, sir, did the US bungle negotiations with Japan by threatening to destroy it with sanctions?
But that's likely to be over your head, so how about why fascists came to power in Germany and Japan?
1. "Liberal" Britain and France enslaved vast tracts of Africa and Asia for their elites to exploit; Germany and Japan got in too late and were prevented from getting the really juicy pieces.
2. The democratic Japan of the '20s was humiliated by the US passing an immigration law that treated Japanese as an inferior and undesirable race (because IQ tests are infallible, you know), and the Washington Naval Treaty that required Japan's navy to be 60% the size of either the US and UK.
3. The Great Depression, caused by runaway capitalist speculation in the US, went global because of a trade war the US helped provoke with tough tariffs. This destroyed both Germany and Japan's export-driven economies, while the US, Britain and France exploited their colonial empires and satellites.
You right-wingers always start every timeline where the people we raped start fighting back, not where we raped them. But then, to paraphrase a famous bank robber, most nations are enslaved with a corporation, not a gun.
Yeah, the neo-Confederate behavior is getting more obvious with the GOP's deliberate snubs. The problem for Ashley Judd is that Kentucky is the same state that voted in slippery neo-Confederate Rand Paul. They must want the 19th century back awful bad, and the capitalists are rewarding them for it with union-busting car factories and white flight.
However, as a radical I think that it is the fate of American capitalism to get so in bed with Zionist and neo-Confederate extremism that they will all drag each other down into hell. Problem is, that hell is called the Second American Civil War, and we will all be there in it. Other radicals are completely in denial about this possibility. In fact, they hate the federal govt. so much that they seem to fantasize that they can make common cause with the militia right. They focus their hatred so entirely on the capitalists and Pentagon that they won't accept how much those bastards share with tens of millions of ordinary bigots, and how easily they could all come to work together (a la Franco, Pinochet, Suharto) to create a society vastly worse than the current national security state.
It will be the coalition of minorities at home and the outraged outside world that will bring this monstrous regime down. No help from the currently fashionable Left.
Obama's critics on the Left, correct though they were on specific issues, completely refused to consider why McConnell was so afraid of Obama.
It's not Obama, it's the implications of the growing multiethnic coalition that votes for him. Leftists are pissed that he can get that coalition with his wishy-washiness.
But maybe there's something more ugly at work, and since I slag right-wingers for racism every day of my life I might as well spread it around.
Leftists hate that coalition for not sharing their (and my) hatred of capitalism. I think as early as the counterculture era you could see the gulf between white radicals and non-whites who wanted their slice of the American materialist pie, not to blow it up.
So now the white Left faces their horrible, utter, absolute failure to win over more than a few of their own race into volutarily giving up its wealth and globally oppressive power - but they only blame blacks and Latinos for reproducing and consuming and not worshipping Dennis Kucinich.
But those are the people you've got to work with, and you never really tried. If there are any white radicals in the future they will be the heirs of Occupy, not academic Marxism or the Green Party, and even they can't seem to reach out to the minority vote that is the only thing holding back the redneck zombie army.
The problem with people is that they refuse to accept any up-front costs or sacrifices whatsoever to replace our electrical power sources immediately.
The reason for that is that they feel they have been screwed economically for years. Which is true. But the money that failed to get into their pockets was not "destroyed" by evil commie environmentalists. It was diverted into the pockets of the investor class. Then a tiny % of it was used to fund relentless right-wing propaganda, even from men of God, claiming the wealth was destroyed by evil commie environmentalists.
The bad guys have set up the perfect trap, in this and many other issues. They dumbed us down so we couldn't understand our wealth was being redistributed to investors, they seduced us with the promise of goodies so that we couldn't accept their evil intent, and then pulled the rug out from under us and blamed it all on their enemies and victims.
So now people are desperate, and will do whatever the rich command to survive to the next paycheck.
Catastrophe first. Then panicked reorganization. That's the American way.
But a lot less people die from drunk driving since MADD changed the culture of American drinking. Driving drunk used to be seen as macho and an expression of freedom, like gun ownership is today. While MADD got laws passed to make it tougher on drunk drivers, it also created far more opprobrium for even getting started on the process.
I remember when smoking was seen as macho and an expression of freedom too. Like the Marlboro Man (deceased). When government regulated smoking and its advertising, it woke up a lot of people.
Maybe he's saying the difference in what the government is willing to do is that the gun lobby is seen as white Americans in good standing, while the terrorists are all foreigny and unChristiany.
After all, anti-abortion terrorists, who are white Americans in good standing, have largely succeeded in their goals yet rarely are called terrorists.
You're all missing the point. The Right believes that inferiors are to be punished and superiors are to be rewarded, as in ancient times. Punishing all gun owners is thus wrongly egalitarian. The violent property owner enforces morality. The violent poor are the source of all problems and must be punished again and again, relentlessly, collectively, until they act like a fantasy of happy darkies in old Dixie. If they resist, all Good Americans must buy guns and join in the effort to double down on the punishment, even if it means hundreds of thousands dead. God will reward us if we do, just as He rewarded the ancient Hebrews for slaughtering those He wanted slaughtered.
Therefore, all the children killed by the Good Americans by accident or anger are simply a necessary sacrifice to restore God's sacred hierarchy, just like everyone we've gotten killed in overseas wars.
I would disagree slightly in that we keep assuming the Middle East and Central Asia are the same thing. I think the US leadership views Afghanistan as an excuse to remain in Central Asia. That is a new game of energy resources, not the old game represented by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. US bigshots treated the former Soviet Moslem republics as spoils of war in the '90s. A resurgent Russia is pushing us out. Our enemy there is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, led by Russia and China and their obvious energy interests.
The question about the Middle East, to me, is whether we really are allies in a meaningful way with Saudi Arabia, given our submissive support of Israel. It seems that since Bush remained deaf to Saudi pleas around 2006-7 to save the Sunnis in Iraq, Saudi Arabia has stopped taking orders from us, and is using its vast wealth to buy a sphere of influence that also doesn't take orders from us.
Ironic. Because Afganistan isn't really a nation, the ANA regiments have no national pride, so indeed don't mind letting NATO do the real work in defending their fake country.
But because Americans do have national pride, we can't just say we screwed up and can't have our way in Afghanistan, Vietnam, etc., so we carry out this elaborate ritual to avoid saying we lost.
I guess national pride without a genuine belief that the cause is worth self-sacrifice is the difference between that sorry show and what an impoverished, inexperienced US did in World War II. The whole postwar doctrine that we could avoid another major war by breaking up global affairs into little "preventative" wars that we could easily win has foundered on the immovable rocks of democratic psychology.
History did not start in 1993, Bill, and neither did US support for dictators and torturers in the Arab world. Do you really believe that if we had kept our hands off, as we usually had before the 1970s, that there would be an al-Qaeda now? Oh no, you respond, then the Commies would have taken over. But then, I note, we armed, financed, and lionized the Mujahedeen to do the dirty work of beating the Commies, and they decided that we were just as bad and turned on us and won widespread support in the Arab world.
This self-righteous trip you're on about American power is not borne out by our eternal manufacturing of new enemies to fight. Something is not right about this whole process.
I'm not resting assured, Bill. Remember all those wonderful things we thought would happen once the Soviet Union went away? I'm supposed to believe that it costs more to fight some guys in caves than it did to fight the International Communist Conspiracy?
I think part of the scam of the Right that allowed them to restage 1929 is that they can say, "See, we had Big Government this time and we still had a crash."
Recall that one of Reagan's appointees wrote a biography in which he proudly admitted that they all intentionally cut taxes on the rich and raised military spending in order to create a future fiscal crisis that would require massive cuts to the programs that helped the Americans they considered their enemies. The Tea Party attacks on teachers and colleges, and the Fiscal Cliff, were the end game of the same strategy.
Tax cuts for the rich are how the Right create the illusion that somehow Big Government was responsible for the crash that the rich themselves actually engineered, with the resulting ballooning deficit as the scapegoat. The rich of 1929 would have considered it insane to do this on purpose. But that's because they were committed to investing in America, and they had no way to run up the deficit to manipulate the system.
Now, the rich can take their money out of the US, or easily move it from state to state. This means all governments, state or national, are blackmailed into a global bidding war against each other to cut taxes and social services. Meanwhile, military spending has come along as a way for the rich to get a government that's only big for them. So running up war spending while getting tax cuts, the Reagan formula, became the sacred formula. The military spending takes up all the slack that Keynes had expected to exist during a depression, yet does less and less each decade to produce ordinary jobs. That's because the military's "needs" are manufactured by lobbyists based on what the owners of the defense industry want: weapons that by nature require the fewest workers to make and maintain, whose budgets disproportionately disappear into "black" R&D and poorly-overseen software development. (Then easily diverted into political campaigns, a la Duke Cunningham?)
Keynes' mistake was to assume that all government spending at a particular point in time had an equal effect on the velocity of money, the key to getting out of a depression. Studies keep showing modern military spending produces the least economic multiplier of all government activities. Yet the sacred nature of national security makes it impossible for the public to use that data in judging what activities the government should continue. Thus the war machine has become the capitalists' perfect anti-Keynesian tool - government spending that can't stimulate the economy but can't be denounced as morally inferior to other forms of spending.
There are no facts anymore, only market segments. If Fox and the sponsors have cowed real newsmen, then liberals turn to Jon Stewart's comedy show to get nuggets of truth. If gun nuts refuse to accept that other gun nuts occasionally go on rampages, they immediately flock to websites alleging that they're all victims of a government hoax. So why shouldn't we, the citizens who supposedly govern the most heavily armed power on Earth, pick and choose our historical evidence from movies? It's the path of least resistance, isn't it?
Torture appeals to the public for exactly the same reason it appeals to Hollywood screenwriters, no matter how liberal they are. It is a magic bullet, that simplifies the complex plotlines of foreign affairs and war, Alexander's sword through the Gordian knot. Americans loved nukes and the Strategic Defense Initiative for the same reason, until learning that they really weren't magic.
It doesn't take much to confuse Americans looking for excuses. They can't follw storylines this complicated in the evening news, so they could easily perceive the torture victim being told that his torture did stop an attack as some twisted sort of vindication for the practice.
Yes, this is exactly what we need to discuss. Not the media spectaculars or the gun lobby paranoia. The NRA tries a Manichean division of America into two races, the Good Americans and the Criminal Race. Then all the undeniable problems with guns are the fault of the Criminal Race forcing us Good Americans to escalate to save our society. But in fact we're all potentially killers because we're idiots with poor impulse control, and the corporations train us to be that way because it makes us better consumers. To point this out is to say that even white, Christian, property-owning Americans are such utter fools that they can't be trusted not to shoot each other, cheat on their wives, molest their daughters, download kiddie porn, snort cocaine, etc, etc, etc.
You can see the radical danger of that kind of realization.
See my comment on Swiss culture above. Believe it or not, Christiane, millions of Americans are constantly thinking about and training for the use of guns against other Americans - not foreign invaders. There are two different media empires - the white gun media and gangsta rap - that celebrate the idea of destroying ones' enemies. It's not a fantasy for Americans the way it is for Europeans, it's right there in the streets.
Besides that, and I think this is really significant, no Swiss reservist would ever think of using his government-issued assault rifle against his fellow citizens. American gun nuts - from white "patriots" to black gangsters - think about it all the time, even wish for it. That sounds like a state of war, not a society.
The issue is whether Jones, or a large section of the broader gun movement, have a problem with the goverment murdering Moslems. In fact, I think Jones does have a problem with it, but many of the people he's making his living off of hate the government only when it oppresses "real" Americans instead of gays, liberals, Moslems, socialists, Jews, blacks, the poor, and of course everyone else on Earth. We're supposed to believe that Jones' alternative States' Rights militia will respect the rights of all those other kinds of Americans given our history?
By the standards of Jones' movement, everything the Ku Klux Klan did was justified as a rebellion against Federal tyranny. Consider that.
The militia neo-Confederates really, really believe that America was only ever supposed to be ruled by white Christian property owners. I'm not kidding. If you dig into the literature, or any of the more rabid gun magazines, the words are repeated over and over again, "America was not founded as a democracy."
Therefore, the current democratic government is tyranny and they have an unimpeachable right to overthrow it.
We need to be confronting these people with the monstrous past they are plotting to return us to. Force them to admit that they want to take the vote away from "un-American" minorities. That they will never share their gun rights with those minorities, instead branding them terrorists the instant they organize their own militias.
Don't forget the double standard of the gun nuts, who ignored the destruction of the black-separatist MOVE sect in Philadelphia by an ill-advised police explosive device, but fall over themselves hailing the virtues of white patriarch David Koresh. Both, it must be said, were a vast nuisance to their neighbors.
Don't even ask those bastards about the state murder of the Black Panthers unless you want to get punched.
Interesting that you should suggest suing the perpetrators. I think that the fear of lawsuits and interstate reparations is exactly why the Right and its oligarch bankrollers are dug in so hard, like Big Tobacco before them. Everything about the far-right ideology manufactured in the US since 1968 seems tailor-made to exonerate capitalism, capitalists and the bourgeoise lifestyle promoted by America from any responsibility for damage. They will literally claim the bad weather is a punishment from God for not killing all the gays before they make an admission that might lead to a tax for climate reparations.
They definitely already are paranoid about reparations for slavery, and again their ideology is tailored to defy it.
This is true, and in fact we know what happens when a commodity bubble goes too far:
1. The cost of the commodity falls so low that the producers can no longer meet their operating costs
2. They either cut back production to force the price up, or they go out of business and the same thing eventually happens
The thing that never changes is the growing up-front cost of ever-more exotic means of extracting the last dregs of oil and gas from the earth. Eventually, it will take almost as much enery to do this as the amount of energy extracted. How can that be profitable, unless we ironically have a cheaper energy source to power the operation?
Shale oil and gas was sold to the public as a long-lasting resource, and none of us pay any attention to how fast the wells dry up and have to be replaced at considerable expense. According to http://www.theoildrum.com, the early indications are not good.
It doesn't help that so many nations there have no known alternative to oil and gas sales to fund their rise from poverty - or to keep the existing regime in power. Taking that away means a lot of despair. We can hope that Desertec will make North African solar energy exportable via the European power grid, but this will be the kind of heroic engineering endeavor that humans no longer seem capable of.
"in order to guarantee Hizballah’s future and its unnatural expansion against history and politics..."
Sounds like this fellow shares the Sunni lie that the Shia are not the plurality anywhere, in Iraq or Lebanon, and deserve no voice in any government.
The enemy of Hezbollah is the friend of Israel and its plans for southern Lebanon. It's already established that Saudi Arabia is trying to come out on top in Syria. Granted, Assad must fall. But why is Saudi Arabia always trying to help Israel?
If my country is being raped by foreign invaders and hostile domestic militias decade after decade, I damn well have the right to create a militia to protect my people and restore order. Or do you consider Israel's pet militia slaughtering hundreds of Palestinians in Lebanon while Israeli troops looked the other way to be "order"?
Lebanon cannot have a legitimate government because its constitution prevents one-man one-vote, because that would dethrone the Sunni and Christian business elites. In that sense, the Shia had as much right to form Hezbollah as Nelson Mandela did to form the ANC. Because the US and Israel and Saudi Arabia refuse to allow a proper revolution to do what the ANC did (recall our invasions in 1958 and 1983), Hezbollah is accepting this absurd quasi-sovereign status while actually governing Arabs better than any of US/Israel's pet kings and tyrants do - at least the ones without oil.
Joe, my complaint is that the drones are killing a lot of innocent civilians, even launch delayed second attacks to kill the rescue workers after they arrive. We blow up wedding parties, we kill children. You can say the civilian Pakistani survivors are a bunch of dirty Moslem liars, but THEY'RE CITIZENS OF A SOVEREIGN STATE WE HAVEN'T DECLARED WAR ON! In fact, their government is supposed to be our ally. Yet it is NOT refuting the claims of civilian dead, nor is our ally Afghanistan.
Flying killer robots are just as indiscriminate a tool of war as manned aviation, and if we were using the latter to attack Pakistani territory, wouldn't there be consequences?
Robert E. Lee once said, after a victory, "It is good that war is so terrible, or we should soon grow too fond of it." The drones are a way to make war less "terrible" so we can remain fond of it, and its operating expenses. The only reason the death toll from drones is so tiny compared to the million dead in the Vietnam War is that our opponent is so weak, so few, living in a place so worthless that there are no cities to blow up. So what's the threat to us from those civilians?
We must stop lying about our magical weapons that never kill civilians. At least Madeline Albright was willing to say that causing the death of 400,000 innocent Iraqis via sanctions was "worth it". Let's see Obama say the same.
I'm with Joe on this one, because we must understand that we are dealing with an actual neo-Confederate movement, one whose agenda reaches back to the John Birch Society and the 1990s militias. This movement has sworn to take America back to the 19th century. The rich and the far-right in alliance have already re-created the economic conditions that caused the Great Depression, thus the 2008 crash. Yet afterwards they doubled down on the crazy, said we hadn't gone far enough back into the past. Now they're attacking Teddy Roosevelt as a commie for creating income tax (1908), calling for the repeal of the 13th Amendment (1865), even demanding an end to popular elections of senators (1830s). The goal has always been to radically polarize American wealth, so that a restored white patriarchy (Kochs, et al) would regain the monopoly of power that the slaveowners and robber barons once had and used to preside over white supremacy (the reward for their redneck rank & file).
Israel is now ruled by people with many connections to these maniacs. Not surprising given its own need to prevent an Arab-Israeli voting majority at all costs.
Because, of course, American support for the right-wing military of Indonesia committing multiple genocides, or the right-wing military of Guatemala murdering 400,000 Indians is so much more "serious" than what the left wing advocates.
Yeah, let's bring colonialism back. Isn't that essentially what Israel looks like to Arabs, and understandably so? You're saying that whites rule best, so they should rule everywhere. Do you want me to scour the Internet for the death toll of European imperialism in the last 200 years? It will be a large number.
You are also conveniently forgetting 1956, when pinko traitor Dwight Eisenhower broke up the colonialist UK-French-Israeli coalition that invaded the Sinai with the threat of Marshall Plan cutoffs. We used to stand for something other than Israeli expansion, sir. Note that in that same year Israeli agents bombed a USAID library in Egypt in a failed attempt to provoke a US war on Egypt, an act which the Israeli government not just admits, but celebrates. This was the nice socialist Israel, not the apartheid far-right Israel of today.
Also, you are wrong that the US was more popular in the Moslem world in general under Bush than under Obama. Our popularity collapsed everywhere under Bush, most importantly in Turkey where it has had serious consequences. Pakistan is the exception to this rule, due to Obama's policy of flying killer robots there blowing up wogs, which you probably applaud.
Yes, but liberal Zionists will hide behind the cover of gay rights, while continuing to undermine the Administration on those rare occasions when it shows any backbone.
Obama should have made this pick in 2009 and forced the Tea Party to establish its position on imperialism right away. Ron Paul would have found himself very lonely on the podium as the only GOP congressman supporting Hegel.
And maybe Hegel would not have been such a fan of the flying killer robots. Now it's too late to stop them, because they're fast, cheap and out of control.
Don't gay servicepersons have an even greater right not to have their lives thrown away in criminal wars of aggression, like the one against Iraq planned by Cheney's Likud-employed agents? How about the rights of the Iranians not to be slaughtered as a scapegoat so Israel can build more illegal settlements?
You are as shameless a dehumanizer of Moslem victims as Madeline Albright, who said the 400,000 Iraqis who died from US sanctions were "worth it". You obviously won't be happy until Iran is destroyed the way Iraq was. Thank you for telling me the name of the Zionist candidate for Albright II, Michelle Fluornoy. I will try to warn my friends against her. Also, thank you for laying out the entire strategy of the smear campaign that will be used by the non-existent Israel Lobby against Hegel.
Same reason we can't say "Israeli nuclear arsenal". Because if Israel is really that strong, it doesn't need to steal land and water from its neighbors or evolve a program of ethnic cleansing. As a Special Victim, it demands a free pass from what everyone knows is international law.
But it sure as hell is profitable for someone in Israel to do these things.
Since Israel has no model for survival except perpetual expansion, it would be hostile not to give it enough weapons to steal more land.
It doesn't work because the sequencing is different. The whole idea of colonialism is to use one's more advanced tech and organization to insert oneself in a territory to do bad things to the natives. Conversely, the Islamist fundamentalist attitude is that they are the natives, that the entire existing population be forced to conform to their own views, therefore it would be better to have everyone be backward rather than have infidel ideas create a ruling caste with a competitive advantage - such as the Westernized elites already implanted in their countries.
I guess you could call it a religious take on Maoism, where one's beliefs are not meant to determine how rich one will be, but whether one is not tossed into a reeducation camp.
The description of current far-right Israeli thinking in this entry is depressingly similar to that of their American allies. I think the entire Israeli political establishment had a hand in creating the rabid racism and soldier-worship that brought this to pass. Look no further than the role of Meir in denying the legitimacy of the Palestinian people, and the hard work of Israeli socialists in beginning the process of dehumanizing Arabs. Begin and the supposedly moderate old Likud took it further.
Regardless of their views about economic policy, personal liberty, etc, they wanted their citizenry to be the new Spartans. Like the Afrikaners, like the old Confederacy, a society that paranoid and fearful of defeat will always try to concoct a moral imperative for winning - which must eventually become the idea of a Master Race.
In America, the same issue has always lurked in the form of the loss of white domination due to demographics. But substantial regions of white America do not share this paranoia, which has allowed Israel to devolve faster in recent years. It now seems their right wing serves as a role model for our white wing. Since neither movement gives a damn about democracy, it's simply a matter of depriving the enemy of the right to vote. We will see more of that, carried out by bullying normal people into silence for just that one election needed to change all the rules forever. Will Israel soon introduce the Grandfather Clause, the Poll Tax and the Literacy Test?
I don't think those bombs will stay in their silos for 50 years. You're describing a period longer than the history of South African apartheid - hardly a fate Israeli Arabs are likely to sit quietly through. Unlike South Africa, Israel can afford to entertain the fantasy of economically-feasible ethnic cleansing, based on its own history.
One of the things religions do is rewrite history to cover their tracks. Christians today can't explain why much of their dogma doesn't seem to be in the Bible, because it was concocted for later political reasons. Yet they can't accept that such manipulation occurs.
Bill,
Multiple explanations are possible. Bad ideas and bad weather can be a brutal combination, as they found out on the Great Plains circa 1930.
As long as Americans are culturally indoctrinated to view foreigners as not quite human, because anyone who is poor is subhuman and anyone who is rich and doesn't act white is insane, our endless foreign policy fiascos, blowbacks and catastrophes can always be excused by officials:
"We meant well; those people over there are crazy."
And our citizens will always nod their heads in empathy.
So what you're saying is that the West/Israel cynically switch sides back and forth between Arabs and Persians to keep both of them weak. Culling the herds, so to speak.
At least Scotland isn't using austerity dogma as an excuse to dismantle its national health system, while I've heard your neo-Victorian prime minister got money from American "health" conglomerates that clearly want to make British health into a clone of the US model - then he hastily imposed rules to make the NHS seek private outsourcing for some services, dismantling the previous bureaucracy in a naked attempt to forestall the public outcry. When did England become Wisconsin?
Under the rule of such lying bastards, Scotland will lose its money in favor of tax cuts for the oligarchs responsible for the crash. The SNP is the only true progressive party left in Britain. And if Scotland secedes and kicks out NATO, a far bigger waster of money, Salmonds deserves the Nobel Prize.
Don't forget that Scotland's nationalists are playing an energy nationalism card. Scots might be willing to put up with occasional inconveniences from wind intermittency that other bourgeoise nations are too spoiled to contemplate, in order to boast that Scotland doesn't need Britain to survive. The SNP was just as willing to play that game with offshore oil & gas - until it went into deep decline. Quebec's nationalists played it with hydro power. But the instant they find more oil in some god-awful place, they forget all about the environment, just like all the Americans mesmerized by shale-trapped oil and gas.
Nothing will change, I fear, until a country gains an economic advantage from alternative energy that gives it real power over others. Then jealousy overwhelms laziness and short-sightedness. This is what we're like.
Believe me, the Pentagon is more genuinely interested in diversifying its energy sources than the elected government of the US. Why? Because it has a blank check to pay the higher marginal costs of alternative energy, and it is being embarrassed by its need in Afghanistan to rely on its enemies for supply routes for its oil.
For instance, the Navy has been subsidizing biofuels for aircraft to help the industry get a footing, but the Tea Party Congress has forbidden it from doing so. If not for that, its nuclear carriers and submarines could guarantee that it will be functioning after the other services - and the rest of the world - are out of fuel.
The Army has been buying zinc-air batteries (which are refueled, not recharged) from Arotech as portable power sources for its ever-growing electronic inventory.
And the conversion to flying killer robots is under way, because it's the only way the US can hold onto its empire while being flat broke. The robots use a lot less fuel than manned jets, besides all their other advantages.
I have many criticisms of the American war machine, but as an institution obsessed with its self-preservation, it certainly is doing a better job preparing for a low-energy future than the taxpayers it hoses.
If we really wanted to, we could electrify much of our transportation, but it's too much of a disruption to our narcotized consumer sleepwalk. Like the New Deal or WW2, the sort of mass action that corporations fear could give the peasants ideas. It would not cost a lot of money to electrify all our freight railroads, yet that went nowhere. We could convert all non-hybrid city buses to natural gas, and actually save money. If we could even imagine making sacrifices, we could just levy a military services tax on our petroleum products, and then let the market force us all to move closer to our country's excellent network of waterways, like our forefathers did. Or pay the real energy cost for meat, or live without airlines perpetually bankrupted by fuel costs, or stop moving further from our jobs to flee from minorities and their supposed criminality.
The sacrifices themselves aren't the problem, it's that the economy can't function unless consumption keeps increasing geometrically.
But recall that we took Egypt's side in that crisis precisely because we knew Nasser had no ideological compunctions preventing him from becoming a Soviet ally, and we were sort of in a bidding war for his services. The 1973 crisis also showed the US acting as though it was competing with the USSR for hegemony while not letting their proxies go too far.
I think the deeper change was the indoctrination of the public - and perhaps the next generation of policymakers - to believe that it was worth getting a lot of Americans killed to control the Middle East. The blaming of the rotten economy of the '70s on OPEC prepared the way, and the rise of Islamism added that necessary spice of fear. Once they'd gone that far, people suddenly all acted as though the US was entitled to control all that happened there, with no basis in history.
Whereas, few Americans now would sacrifice their sons in a major conflict in east Asia, despite it being economically far more important to the world than it was when we did it in both Korea and Vietnam.
Consider that Dick Cheney, head of PNAC and previously of the American Enterprise Institute, and the other neocons were looking for an excuse to move US troops into Iraq and Iran, which was more central to the region where oil development was taking place (up into central Asia). The argument that they could take pressure off the Saud dynasty by relocating from Desert One to Iraq might have been appealing to more cautious conservatives, like Dick's oil industry friends.
Isn't it funny that Chiang's Kuomintang now is a puppet of Beijing, basically bought up for the purpose of opposing Taiwan's ruling party and its position of Taiwanese independence, which both Chiang and Mao rejected?
See, when new guys have the big money, all of the games America ran start operating very differently.
Interestingly, if you click the link, you find that Lincoln was writing a letter not on class relations, but attacking free trade and the economic concept that GNP maximization necessarily improves the well-being of a society. Very similar to modern debates about NAFTA and the hollowing-out of local economies by the crappy jobs it produces.
The Republican Party - because it is now the fusion of the northern and southern elites that led the Civil War - can no longer talk with a straight face about Lincoln. Southern Republicans still say terrible things about Lincoln exactly like their Democratic forebears, but conservative propaganda and corporate media insulate northern Republicans (who still have their uses) from hearing it. For instance, Ron Paul saying that Lincoln was wrong to fight (and I think even that he was a tyrant), which is hardly different than former Senate GOP leader Trent Lott telling Strom Thurmond admirers that if the latter had won the presidency in '48 "we wouldn't be having some of these problems we're having today". Meaning, blacks voting.
Every Republican who tries to reduce the number of blacks voting (you know who you are) is crapping on the Lincoln Monument. Which is fine as long as you're consistent and embrace secession. The capitalists who run the GOP would face a disaster if the USA were partitioned, and its military withdrawn from global economic manipulation to turn to face itself along a 2000-mile hostile frontier. And the states that most want to secede are the states where minorities are growing the fastest, so like the Israelis, they'd immediately have to restrict voting rights and then proceed down the road to apartheid. Try getting foreign investment then, racists.
So Lincoln and Franklin are discredited lefitsts. So the whole foundation of our republic is questionable, and we might as well open it up to conflict again.
I got something better than the "labor theory of value." It's "labor starving to death under market conditions might as well burn the whole damn country down theory." Let's factor that into labor markets, like the rich had to do when confronted with that possibility in the '30s, and see how much more generous the investor class magically becomes than it is today.
Or if you want to resurrect an oldie, we can call it the Balance of Terror. I'm fine with that.
The NRA just made a terrible tactical mistake. For years the blaming of TV, movies and games for violence was the domain of liberals. To small-government reactionaries, gun violence in the media was fine as long as it glorified the cops and military and white icons like cowboys. In other words, the rednecks demanded that the media teach their sons to share their worship of the efficacy of gun violence, so as to stay ahead of the dark-skinned horde breeding in the ghetto, who were genetically violent. Thus, "freedom" to indulge in violence would empower the "good guys" to victory; censorship, like gun control, would weaken us civilized folk but not the barbarians.
It was crazy, but it couldn't be refuted, thus held the gun community together and made it ever more extreme. The second you reverse your position, you admit that "free will" cannot be trusted regardless of race, that all kids have to be shielded from Pavlovian inculcation into violence, which can only be done by the government.
Once you've opened up that can of worms, you might as well say that government has a responsibility to the poor, the victims of racism, et al. The NRA has undermined the ethos of the white warrior tribe without even understanding that.
Now now, Effem, we must believe as Americans that any charity is more efficient and well-intentioned than any socialistic scheme of big government, so starving the latter to force-feed the former must be a virtue. Not only that, but the Christian Right for decades has been teaching its inner corps that the rich should pay lower taxes than the poor, because the rich must make better economic decision otherwise they wouldn't be rich (!). Therefore, it is entirely consistent for the right-wing movement that rich people should have total freedom to control the country with their spending, tax breaks, and donations to charities that promote... the right-wing movement!
We have to end the popular myth that the rich want what's best for the rest of us. They obtain multiple advantages from lording over a bankrupt and terrified population, which seems to be more of a sure thing than investing their wealth in a stronger commonwealth. Perhaps their increasingly inbred and autistic libertarian ideology and the accompanying manufacture of bullshit data to support it makes them feel better about this unnatural state.
"American political life has always been haunted by a fear of weakness and a conviction that Americans are condemned to vulnerability in a world full of anti-Americans eager to destroy them.”
Or substitute Germans or Japanese. Perhaps the world is full of one's enemies, but once it becomes the primary point of one's politics, madness ensues.
Thank God you mentioned well depletion rates. Nobody understands how important the depletion rate is with these exotic extraction technologies. Generally, gas wells deplete very fast no matter what type, and the new enhanced recovery oil wells deplete faster than the earlier types. Ignoring this creates the illusion that cumulative growth in production is possible for long.
So the question is, are those ALEC scum simply acting as a cynical industry lobby, as when they push obviously profit-driven legislation, or is there a deeper agenda, as I believe is the case with ALEC's role in pushing prison slave labor.
You create a profitable class of convict slaves, then you need a segment of the public that views themselves as deserving to be the masters.
The test case, as I've always said, would be what would happen if a group outside the right-wing white-dominated patriarchy were to organize a gun culture as pervasive as that of American right-wingers - in other words, a rival armed militia. If ALEC just represents greedy gun makers, it should welcome the arms race. If it views a restoration of white supremacy as the way to complete its vision of returning America to the 19th century, then these interlopers will be denounced as terrorists and gun laws will be written to discriminate against them.
According to our classical liberal ideology, we form societies for the sake of security while maintaining as much of our freedom as we can. So it matters to the citizens of a country that so many of them die at the hands of other citizens, not because they were trying to drive from one place to another, but because they wanted to kill them. The question is, what does this mean about our relationship to and obligations to one another?
Well, when your country is so full of crazy people that certainty of punishment is no longer sufficient deterrent against murder, what's left?
But the people opposed to disarming civilians are usually the ones most opposed to reducing their countries' militaries. Ron Paul's contrary attitudes about that are now a small minority view within the very Tea Party movement he's credited with starting. It's all about the fear of the "other", an ideology about the threat from within or without your borders, easily flipping like a switch based on sensationalized events.
The striking thing about Michael Moore's movie "Bowling for Columbmine" is that he argues the problem is indeed not guns per se, but American gun culture. A simple trip to Toronto shows a universe of difference in attitudes about crime and guns. He even opens people's doors at random to show that not everyone in Toronto bothers to lock them. Does this mean that robberies don't happen in Canada? No, it means that people there are acculturated to not letting fear of violence rule their lives - which is why they rarely use their guns on each other.
Of course, once you have the culture, people will buy far more lethal guns, setting off an arms race between every citizen.
It's when it crossed over from the football games to the baseball games that I got scared.
Sorry, that's "Sukarno", not "Suharto". It's fading into the mists of memory.
The far right is working day and night to infiltrate the US military as well. I think when their dreams come true, it will be via a military coup, and the militias will do the dirty work of exterminating enemies on the local level. Recall Indonesia, where the Army overthrew Suharto, and then 600,000 ethnic Chinese and Communists somehow got hacked to death by Malay civilians. Was the Army really doing nothing during all that, or was it directing traffic?
Like a lot of things in the US, the debate about guns is hiding another dispute over who is a "real" American and who is an inferior.
The framing of the NRA, et al is that there is an implied "criminal" race, and a non-criminal "American" race, with no crossing over, no shadings, no ambiguity. If the Good Americans simply out-firepower the Bad Americans sufficiently, then the war on crime is won, just like the war on Indians. The fantasy about militias is therefore the next logical step. The fantasy about militias overthrowing a government that refuses to strip Bad Americans of their false equality is the next insane step.
Instead, the Good Americans are deeply flawed, paranoid people who shoot their spouses, children, parents, and best friends when they lose their tempers. When that happens these Good Americans magically become Bad Americans, who all along were hiding in disguise among us like Communists and child molestors.
The point of it all, of course, is that the militia advocates have no intention of allowing blacks or Hispanics or gays or leftists or atheists avail themselves of the 2nd Amendment in the same way that Good Americans can. The instant that those undesirables form militias to counter right-wing militias, they will simply be labeled terrorists, treated completely differently under the law, and no one will blink.
I'm afraid this is all going to become irrelevant in a few years, because people will be able to manufacture guns at home.
You've probably noticed articles about home 3-D printers lately. That's because this is an industry that's taking off, which means each year will bring printers that can use a wider range of plastic materials. That's on top of the proliferation of CNC machines that can handle all the metal parts of any gun you've ever seen.
If mass murderers, as Prof. Cole implies, are impulse buyers of guns, then they really don't need the guns to be durable. In the future you will get mad, download the blueprints with a click of a mouse, and pump out many plastic-barreled guns from the 3-D printer that you got for Christmas 2015 because everybody had one. Even worse, they might pass through a simple metal detector.
The implications for mass civil conflict are even more heinous.
Outstanding comment. Yes, we're this bad.
The gun cult (which has sucked the casual users into its orbit with the fear of confiscation) views all the victims you mention as necessary casualties in a perpetual war to defend America's manly soul. They wouldn't flinch if they had to escalate to all-out civil war to crush deviance.
Unfortunately, not only do we have all the guns we need to defeat every form of gun restriction, but we have all the guns we need to fight that civil war. It's like when Saddam Hussein threw open the doors of his armories to ensure the incoming Occupation would be drowned in sectarian war.
All that lies between us and that abyss is what we choose to believe about our fellow citizens. If that could be changed, the guns would be no more dangerous than they are in Canada. But the government does not have the power to change how we feel about each other. Usually, it is the war itself that changes that.
You're on the mark here. I think that there is a dark shadow on our society that goes back to its origins, and that is the American meaning of the word "freedom". I think that far too much of our history shows it to mean "the power of life and death over inferior creatures". Crazy people just categorize who is inferior and who is superior differently than "patriots", corporations, and fundamentalists. But the gun manifests that power for everyone who lusts after it.
And yet everywhere in the media, the headlines scream "UNIONS CAUSE HOSTESS BANKRUPTCY!"
Headlines written by members of the same elite class as these thieves, going to the same golf clubs, putting their kids in the same private schools. Because it is the same caste of men who run the media, the think-tanks, and the US Chamber of Commerce.
The key here is that Israel's economic ties are very different than its political ties. America supplies Israel with ambition, arrogance and impunity, but not oil. Israel exports creepy military and police-state technology to America and other countries, but otherwise it trades to the Mediterranean world, where it has run out of friends.
Are you Swedes bombarded round-the-clock with commercial propaganda extolling your corporations as the source of all good, and a deranged TV "news" network and thousands of churches damning the workers and democratic government as the source of all evil? Are your corporations continually blackmailing local and state governments and playing them off against each other for more favorable legislation against workers?
It's hard to keep people joining unions under those (American) conditions. As for why your corporations haven't simply abandoned Sweden entirely, I guess American investors are further down the road to the commoditization of all relationships, predicted by Marx.
Juan, you might recall Jimi Hendrix's song "Machine Gun", where he sang from the point of view of the Vietnamese peasants under Yankee firepower: "Wanna pick up a gun and fight like a farmer." This from a veteran of the 101st Airborne.
It's foolish to say that the Right is amending its positions until one can say who actually controls that function on the Right, and what their agenda is.
Is the Right the capitalist class on the top, the yuppie libertarian cult that worships capitalism that actual, cynical capitalists know is a fantasy, the ugly racist populism of older working class whites, or the religious extremist movement that tries to unite them all under its opiates?
We must assume that in a capitalist country, capitalists have an agenda. They certainly have the resources to choose which other special interest groups to manipulate and fit into its plans. The logical interest of a capitalist, personal values aside, is: (a) cut wages, (b) increase sales, until he has all money and we have none. Which is impossible, as Marx pointed out, thus leading to the boom & bust cycles of the laissez-faire era that radicalized the workers before the New Deal.
Let's say that those capitalists who lack a social conscience wanted to go back to that unworkable past model. How would they get us to stomach it when our ancestors rejected it? Whom would they need to get on their side to pull that off? Whom would they divide and conquer?
and if they found their allies were insane, how far would they plunge the nation into insanity to obtain short-term profits?
Remember, the global financial system, which can be knocked over by some amateurs flying an airliner into a skyscraper, will not survive the market fluctuations caused by increasingly unstable weather. It's like the insurance industry, which also won't survive.
Unfortunately, that wealth is what is needed to finance the environmental reconstruction required to save us. Instead the rich will stubbornly use their wealth to lobby against any change at all until it's even too late for them.
My guess is that the rich are plotting to build the City of Domes from "Logan's Run", or the all-fatso starship from "Wall-E", and the 10% of the rest of us who will survive will be their peons.
'Cap & trade' was a rhetorical device manufactured by libertarians for the purpose of proving that there was a free-market solution for every problem caused by human greed, and thus protecting their beloved ideology. I'm sure they had every intention of hypocritically reversing their position as soon as cap & trade had performed its purpose of sabotaging more 'socialistic' assaults on the CO2 problem.
The problem with China is that it never throws anything away, because it wants nothing but accumulation. Thus ancient, dirty factories producing shoddy goods stay in business while very advanced automated factories get all the TV publicity. They can't imagine replacing coal with any other form of power when they can simply try producing all forms, dirty and clean, simultaneously and pumping up those GNP stats that determine whether party officials get promoted or fired, and keep the Shanghai stock market rising.
They want to accumulate wealth at double-digit rates until they have as much stuff as us, and then negotiate new values. It will be too late by then, but they feel entitled, and most other societies in the same position would act the same way.
Tea Party hates American car companies.
Tea Party loves Big Oil.
Big Oil wouldn't be what it is today without those car companies, and vice versa.
What's the difference between them?
Is it that the auto industry is seen as contaminated by being located in Negro-infested Detroit, and being unionized?
Yet Big Oil is sucking all kinds of money out of the US and has, as a necessary cost of doing business, empowered all sorts of nasty regimes overseas. How is this more patriotic than what the car companies do?
Are right-wing Americans really now required to hate their 5000-lb 4x4 pickups and SUVs, yet love the foreign petroleum going into their tanks?
Or maybe... they like what Big Oil justifies. The ridiculous giant gas guzzlers Detroit built all these years exemplify the cult of American exceptionalism - but their fuel requirements DEMAND American exceptionalism: the military domination of the Middle East, dovetailing into the Crusader castle known as Israel, and the plain of Armageddon.
And that means a $750,000,000,000 annual expenditure on military matters, money that they can then demand be extracted from everything else they hate about America and modern life: social programs, poverty programs, public education, science and research. The war machine employs them in myriad bizarre little right-wing companies working on killer robots and armor for Special Forces, America's faux knighthood.
Most of all, the movement is about helping the movement, and Big Oil helps fund it, and electric cars will replace Big Oil with new elites that might act differently, so why even take the risk when it's so much easier to poison the air and water and terrorize the planet?
What this is about is the need of the right-wing movement to terrorize anyone who attacks cranks like the makers of the anti-Mohammed video.
This is simply the movement protecting its great strength: a vast number of ostensibly separate extremists, supposedly acting only out of the goodness of their hearts, and clearly intimidating us normals by the aggressiveness of their convictions, all putting out the same lies on cue. This appears very convincing to those person already disgusted with the way their lives are going under late capitalism, but too in love with the idea of inequality to ever blame it on capitalism.
As long as the ties between these seditionists are too complex for laymen to decipher, as long as the ones who are "too extreme" can be plausibly denied as being representative of the movement's aims (for now), as long as genuinely independent cranks are inspired by the professional haters to keep spewing new hate on new media, the bad guys create the alternative universe which you folks are all complaining about, in which Fox News worshippers are steadily prepared to accept ideas even more hateful than what can be pinned on Fox.
Yes, Obama's people tried to take a cheap shot at the video cranks, but we all ought to be doing that because this is war right here at home. As for all of you Gaddafi-lovers who are playing along with Fox to get revenge on Obama for not bailing out your hero, well, when the far right takes over thanks to your sabotaging our own unity, you will end up in the same death camp as me. The right's fanaticism is an excuse to action, extremism, and the most monstrous and Herculean acts, while the left's fanaticism is an excuse to cop out, to be lazy, to use facts to justify disunity and perpetual pissing on any Democrat who can gain any traction among the mainstream Americans you hate so much.
It says a lot about the nature of our problems that the only hope for humanity is to scrap various of our existing technological systems - and thus the existing elites that own and operate them. In his book "American Theocracy", Kevin Phillips proposed that societies that attain great power via a particular energy source eventually rebuild their culture around that source, such that they can't move forward on more advanced alternatives until their competitors have already ruined them:
Netherlands - wind & sail power
Britain - coal
USA - petroleum
The aforementioned World Health Organization report is the truth of what Israel is very carefully carrying out: to eliminate the Palestinian population by 2020.
Stop stealing Palestinian property - and give back what was stolen - and there will not be Palestinian retaliation.
Oh, that't the part of the story Americans aren't allowed to talk about. Never mind.
Remember the good old days when all Russians and Chinese were assumed to be mad dog killers who would nuke us at the drop of a hat no matter how massive our retaliation would be?
That's dehumanization of the enemy. We dehumanized the Iraqis until we could pretend that they would try to nuke us so we could invade them. Now Iran's turn.
Your mistake is in assuming that the US and Israel are sincere in wanting to live peacefully with Iran's current government. Given they don't, it is actually useful to them to make Iran more of a threat, not less.
The logic is that Israel has always intended to make the Arab population of Palestine disappear (see: Jabotinsky's remarks that the Zionists must do unto the Arab as the U.S. of Americans did unto the Indians). All Israeli actions are consistent with making the lives of Palestinians impossible so that they all move away, yet avoid outside retaliation. Why else did Israel help to create Hamas as a way to destroy a PLO that was getting too much outside support, then several years ago send weapons to the PLO to overthrow an elected Hamas government? Over and over again, until they're all dead?
If you refuse to accept that this is the logic of the Zionist historical mission, then I don't understand you either. Now that mission might be amended one day, but Israelis have been too richly rewarded up to this point to reverse their reenactment of white America's Manifest Destiny.
Before the regency of Dick Cheney, oil company heads were no friends of Israel. I guess their old ties to the Arab monarchies and the fact that their industry was not particularly staffed by Jewish-Americans made them very nervous about Israel disrupting their production arrangements.
However, before Cheney became VP he gave a speech to a petroleum group in his Halliburton capacity in which he warned that state-owned oil companies would interfere with the need for massive increases in oil production in the 2000s. Simultaneously his PNAC cabal argued for the takeover of Iran and Iraq to give America permanent global hegemony, and some of that cabal worked for the Likud developing a new paradigm of replacing Arab regimes with pro-Western puppets.
It seems that Cheney masterminded the conversion of the oil elite to active support of Israeli-US conquest of the oil states as a final solution to the problem of Arab instability and resistance. This simplified the GOP's ideology by putting Big Oil and Christian Zionists and militarists on the same page.
I think inciting violence is exactly the goal of racist leaders, both the Israeli and US examples given. They need the occasional slave revolt to keep the masters desperate for their brand of leadership, and the provocations that cause the revolts are very profitable acts of economic exploitation. There is no downside for the bad guys until stronger forces intervene.
Hey Simon, you actually used "right of return". Meaning you admit that Israelis stole Palestinian homes.
Why does the Hebrews' right of return count but the Palestinians' doesn't? Does the Dred Scott Decision still live?
This is the truth. This is what wars look like between the First World and the Third World. First worlders throw increasingly advanced techno-terrors at the Third Worlders and run up ever more one-sided kill ratios, but consequently their taxpayers feel entitled to fewer and fewer body bags coming home. Why? Because their politicians can't honestly explain why the conquest of Third Worlders is worth genuine sacrifices. They can only hint that the enemy are so subhuman that the life of one of our boys is truly worth the lives of 100 of theirs.
Thus to paraphrase how Willard put it in Apocalypse Now, we're in suburban high-tech pushbutton warfare comfort growing softer, and Charlie is squatting in the bush growing stronger. Charlie, in the global sense, is outreproducing the ability of our robot killers and smart bombs to hold him back.
Further Tesla info for those who are interested.
Firstly, your range will vary. The EPA just introduced a tougher mileage test, under which the big-pack Tesla's range fell from 300 to 265. We don't know how the smaller packs will do; it depends on how much lighter they make the cars.
Tesla uses cheap Panasonic laptop batteries; in order to make these safe they require their own climate control system. But Panasonic is not going away, and laptops will keep getting smaller. So each year Panasonic introduces batteries which weigh about 10% less and also cost less. So by the time your Tesla's pack is worn down to maybe 70-80% of original capacity, supposedly after 100,000 miles, there will be a much better Panasonic pack waiting, as opposed to what you get if your gas car's engine needs an overhaul then.
Furthermore, a pack that's still got 80% of its capacity is not useless. Nissan is trying to develop a re-use plan which thus further drops battery costs. For instance, as a storage system for solar energy arrays.
Much of the right-wing anger against the car is about its cost; the cheapest version only has half the batteries as the version now being delivered, and that's $57,995 before the hated Federal tax credit. However, when a prominent magazine declared the Tesla S the most important car since the Ford Model T and got denounced along similar lines, I pointed out at a forum that in 1908, the T cost $850, and the per capita income of the US was less than half that. Ford's enormous expansion and ingenious cost cutting brought the car's price down to $260 by the early 1920s. Such a huge drop is certainly not possible for Tesla, but batteries are getting cheaper, and that's likely close to half the price of the current model.
Seriously, Joe, do you think anyone can hide anything big from the CIA? We know all about Israel's nukes and lie about those too. Look at the Valerie Plame case, where the CIA had an elaborate network of fake arms dealers to catch these kinds of activities before Dick Cheney sabotaged it to destroy a personal enemy.
There's also a book called "Your Government Failed You" by retired intel official Richard Clarke, hardly a liberal, in which he described being involved in the discovery during the Reagan era that Saudi Arabia had purchased Chinese IRBMs and was building a base for them, presumably with nuclear warheads on the way. Private messages from the Administration got the Saudis to dismantle it before anyone found out - but we did end up building Desert One for them instead.
The point is, how does the US arbitrarily decide which countries it enforces supposedly-unbiased international law upon?
Thanks for running this story. I have been following Tesla's efforts closely, and found an owner's forum where production figures are being closely tracked.
http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/showthread.php/10224-Production-Rate-(incl-manufacturing-waves)
These are sharp and obviously affluent people who want Tesla to work out its startup issues and proceed to create cheaper models for the masses. They do have their own jargon, because Tesla arranged production to get the most expensive versions on the road first, besides the waiting list. So you have reservation numbers based on that, and VIN numbers that are a better indication of how many have been built.
Musk said his break-even point would be about 160 cars a week; the research at this forum indicates they've gotten to 200 cars a week. Tesla currently inspects and tests cars very closely, which is time-consuming. A second shift is currently being trained, so production could double.
After that, a medium-sized SUV, and down the road, a compact sedan meant to compete with the BMW 3-series.
During my prolonged and ultimately unsuccessful process to get a job in the European analysis office of the CIA (couldn't get Top Secret clearance), my would-be supervisor explained that my job as a 24-year-old analyst would be to tell clients - Congressmen and higher - what they should think, because they didn't really know anything about the matters they came to us about, but didn't really want to admit it.
That was pretty scary, but I realize now that if I'd gotten the job, years later I would have been working for the Bush gang, who promoted analysts who were wrong about Iraq, and forced out analysts who were right. If elected officials are completely dependent on the CIA for their understanding of the outside world, then our democracy is as broken as Mr. McPhee says it is.
The GOP definitely can't use Petraeus now. They're so obsessed with the need for short-term smears against Obama to keep their movement going that they must now explain the adultery of Petraeus as typical of an "Obamanaut" and fellow-traveler, like every other Republican who has cooperated with Obama in customary ways. I hope they're stupid enough to go even further and condemn the Army as a tainted, socialist organization that doesn't want to murder Moslems enough - what with their treatment of Colin Powell. That will derail the unknown plans of extremist theocrats like Jerry Boykin already in the high command.
What scares me is how much we Americans have changed since our successful Occupations of Germany and Japan after 1945. What, do you have to attack American forces with equally advanced technology just so that we will treat you like human beings after we beat you? Or is it that we felt so good about ourselves because Germany and Japan were clearly admitting that we'd beaten them - being totalitarian societies that spoke with one voice - but we never felt that way in South Vietnam, Iraq, etc. where the people never submitted to our wonderfulness?
Or, are Americans, in whole or the part that serves in the military, just more racist and barbaric now?
And yet the aggregate results just happen to nearly duplicate the factional split in the country right now. How do you account for this?
But Grumpy, 120 years ago the Protestant newspapers and clergymen and politicians were all screaming that the Catholics and Jews weren't assimilating at all, and the Chinese were even worse. Prohibition was really a tool to demonize Jews and Catholics - alcohol was proof those people weren't assimilating!
I would argue that the urban immigrants and blacks of that era carried out a veritable Cultural Revolution, one we can't see today because it was completely normalized by mass media (cities), movies (Jews), and the New Deal coalition. In other words, the new guys won and rewrote what it means to be American.
You're right, but how would the Tea Party demographic feel about capitalism the instant that they saw it no longer favoring their race over all others? America's advantage over other capitalisms is that racial wedge that makes poor whites side with their masters.
Bush also began the GOP reign of terror against minority voters, using his agent Hans von Spakovsky to organize an array of dirty tricks to suppress the non-white vote. Obama's election has brought out into the open the belief of many whites that blacks and Latinos must not be allowed to determine the outcome of elections, that by definition this is fraudulent because they're not "real" Americans.
So what the world would think about President Romney's foreign policies will matter a hell of a lot less than what his henchmen at all levels of government do to continue us down the road to Jim Crow Jr. - imprisoning non-whites on the slightest pretext in private prisons, creating more economic barriers to poor voters, and most importantly terminating the automatic citizenship of all US-born children, which will create a permanent Latino serf class. (Stateless?) Do you think they mind what the world will do any more than the National Party of South Africa did for 40 years?
I think what would likely happen to the Romney economy is that his oligarch buddies will suddenly open up the money floodgates they kept closed to sabotage Obama. Then we will have a repeat of the Bush financial bubble.
Most Americans still don't understand how the 2001-2008 bubble scam worked. They don't want to understand, because it's their last hope for a better life. The scam creates the illusion of prosperity because:
1. People are able to "buy" more stuff even though they earn less income. This in turn allows retailers to hire more badly-paid workers, which doesn't permit inflationary pressure from wages.
2. As some of us recall, the mortgages or whatever lending instrument will be weaponized next time will in turn be traded on unregulated markets at dizzying rates of speed, again without affecting inflation. This will create paper wealth that will be lent to more people who will eventually be unable to repay.
3. On paper, homeowners can't lose.
How big was the scam? In 2004, it's said, home equity loans approached a trillion dollars. Now while a few loans were paid off, taking money out of the economy, we can guess that this single financial scam contributed 5% or more to the entire GNP. Yet inflation-adjusted economic growth that year was much lower. The rest of the US economy was SHRINKING.
Without the mortgage scam, the terrible depression would have started on 9/11/2001, not in 10/2008.
Since half the country refuses to accept this, it's bound to happen again. When has Romney or any GOP leader refuted any of these practices? They intend to do it again, and dump another crash on the Democrats in 2020.