Like A Trailer Park

... with nuclear weapons.

On Leaving Afghanistan

Generally, as kind of a default, I'm in favor of going out of our way to help when a fledgling new government is trying to stand up a working democracy.

But no matter who you are, there's always a couple of problems with that, and especially so when you're the dominant power on the planet:

1) We can't be everybody's guardian - everybody's mentoring uncle. We have to choose our projects a lot more wisely, and then do it a lot better.

2) Our good intentions are usually worth exactly diddly-shit when there are assholes like Dick Cheney and Tom Cotton in on the deal - guys who wear The Helper mask so it's hard to recognize them as The Conquerors they truly want to be - so we'll always draw some harsh criticism for throwing our shit around.

 

Anyway, here's a piece from Slate lining it out pretty well.

We Now Know Why Biden Was in a Hurry to Exit Afghanistan

He made several missteps, but on the big picture, he was right.

There was a moment in Tuesday’s Senate hearing on the withdrawal from Afghanistan when it became clear why President Joe Biden decided to get the troops out of there as quickly as possible.

It came when Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explained why he and the other chiefs—the top officers of the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines—all agreed that we needed to pull out by Aug. 31. The Doha agreement, which President Donald Trump had signed with the Taliban in early 2020 (with no participation by the Afghan government), required a total withdrawal of foreign forces. If U.S. troops had stayed beyond August, Milley said, the Taliban would have resumed the fighting, and, in order to stave off the attacks, “we would have needed 30,000 troops” and would have suffered “many casualties.”

And yet, as Milley also testified on Tuesday, he, the chiefs, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, and other military officers advised Biden to keep 2,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan beyond the Aug. 31 deadline. The difference is that those troops wouldn’t be attached to any “military mission.” Instead, they would “transition” to a “diplomatic mission.”

However, it is extremely unlikely that the Taliban would have observed the semantic distinction. In their eyes, 2,500 U.S. troops would be seen as 2,500 U.S. troops, regardless of whether their mission was officially said to be “military” or “diplomatic.” Therefore, the Taliban would resume fighting, as Milley said they would, and Biden would then have been faced with a horrendous choice—to pull out while under attack or send in another 30,000 troops.

Some historical-psychological perspective is worth noting. In the first nine months of Barack Obama’s presidency, the generals were pushing for a major escalation of the war in Afghanistan—an increase of 40,000 troops—and a shift to a counterinsurgency (aka “nation-building”) strategy. Biden, who was then vice president, was alone in suggesting an increase of just 10,000 troops, to be used solely for training the Afghan army and for fighting terrorists along the Afghan-Pakistani border. As Obama recalls in his memoir, Biden urged the new and relatively inexperienced president not to be “boxed in” by the generals. Give them 40,000 troops now, and in 18 months, they’ll say they need another 40,000 to win the war. As Obama later acknowledged, Biden was right.

And so, as Milley was advising Biden to keep 2,500 troops in Afghanistan, even while acknowledging that another 30,000 might be needed if the Taliban resumed fighting, it’s easy to imagine Biden thinking, “They’re trying to box me in, just like they did before, just like they’ve always done since the Vietnam War,” which was raging when Biden first entered the Senate in 1973 and has shaped his views on war and peace ever since.

Milley and Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, the head of Central Command, both acknowledged at the hearing that the U.S. military was flying blind through much of its 20-year war in Afghanistan, the longest war in American history. The officers of the day tried to mold the Afghan army in their own image, making them too dependent on U.S. technology and support, so that once we withdrew, collapse was inevitable. Milley also noted that he and the other officers paid too little attention to Afghan culture and to the corrosive effects of the Afghan government’s corruption and lack of popular legitimacy. So, Biden might well have been thinking, why should he pay attention to anything these guys had to say on the war in Afghanistan, which they’ve been wrong about from the very beginning?

Biden made several missteps, some of them disastrous, in the pace and sequence of the withdrawal. Most of all, he should have pulled out all the spies, contractors, U.S. citizens, and Afghan helpers before pulling out all the troops. But on the big picture, he was right, and the generals, as they now grudgingly admit, were wrong.

And that last bit is the operative principle - generals make the plans, but the civilian command authority makes the decisions.

Deeper Into The Woods

"We ain't outa the woods yet" is pretty much the hallmark of understatement for 2020.

I think we may be only about halfway to the darkest shittiest parts of the woods right now, and without some pretty great leadership and extremely adept maneuvering, no amount of bread crumbs will get us safely out of this mess.

Observing Joe Biden these last few weeks, I've been thinking about how his usual "happy warrior" demeanor just isn't there in the same way it's always been. I've found myself wondering if it's because he's lost a step or two, but then I figured (and had partially confirmed) that as the presumptive nominee, he's been getting security briefings.

We all imagine how fucked up things are - can you imagine what it must be like to get your worst fears confirmed, but then hear there's a shit load more that's even worse than your worse fucking fears?

I can only guess, of course, but it seems obvious to me that Joe's got the weight of the whole world on him right now.

So anyway, here we are, not quite two thirds of the way through 2020, and we've got a pandemic killing one of us every 55 seconds, we have a battalion of Daddy State monsters loose in the corridors of power, we've got Murder Hornets, Derechos and now Fire Tornadoes.

But the really bad news is...

...Wade Davis, Rolling Stone:

Never in our lives have we experienced such a global phenomenon. For the first time in the history of the world, all of humanity, informed by the unprecedented reach of digital technology, has come together, focused on the same existential threat, consumed by the same fears and uncertainties, eagerly anticipating the same, as yet unrealized, promises of medical science.

In a single season, civilization has been brought low by a microscopic parasite 10,000 times smaller than a grain of salt. COVID-19 attacks our physical bodies, but also the cultural foundations of our lives, the toolbox of community and connectivity that is for the human what claws and teeth represent to the tiger.

Our interventions to date have largely focused on mitigating the rate of spread, flattening the curve of morbidity. There is no treatment at hand, and no certainty of a vaccine on the near horizon. The fastest vaccine ever developed was for mumps. It took four years. COVID-19 killed 100,000 Americans in four months. There is some evidence that natural infection may not imply immunity, leaving some to question how effective a vaccine will be, even assuming one can be found. And it must be safe. If the global population is to be immunized, lethal complications in just one person in a thousand would imply the death of millions.

Pandemics and plagues have a way of shifting the course of history, and not always in a manner immediately evident to the survivors. In the 14th Century, the Black Death killed close to half of Europe’s population. A scarcity of labor led to increased wages. Rising expectations culminated in the Peasants Revolt of 1381, an inflection point that marked the beginning of the end of the feudal order that had dominated medieval Europe for a thousand years.

The COVID pandemic will be remembered as such a moment in history, a seminal event whose significance will unfold only in the wake of the crisis. It will mark this era much as the 1914 assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the stock market crash of 1929, and the 1933 ascent of Adolf Hitler became fundamental benchmarks of the last century, all harbingers of greater and more consequential outcomes.

COVID’s historic significance lies not in what it implies for our daily lives. Change, after all, is the one constant when it comes to culture. All peoples in all places at all times are always dancing with new possibilities for life. As companies eliminate or downsize central offices, employees work from home, restaurants close, shopping malls shutter, streaming brings entertainment and sporting events into the home, and airline travel becomes ever more problematic and miserable, people will adapt, as we’ve always done. Fluidity of memory and a capacity to forget is perhaps the most haunting trait of our species. As history confirms, it allows us to come to terms with any degree of social, moral, or environmental degradation.

To be sure, financial uncertainty will cast a long shadow. Hovering over the global economy for some time will be the sober realization that all the money in the hands of all the nations on Earth will never be enough to offset the losses sustained when an entire world ceases to function, with workers and businesses everywhere facing a choice between economic and biological survival.

Unsettling as these transitions and circumstances will be, short of a complete economic collapse, none stands out as a turning point in history. But what surely does is the absolutely devastating impact that the pandemic has had on the reputation and international standing of the United States of America.

In a dark season of pestilence, COVID has reduced to tatters the illusion of American exceptionalism. At the height of the crisis, with more than 2,000 dying each day, Americans found themselves members of a failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government largely responsible for death rates that added a tragic coda to America’s claim to supremacy in the world.

For the first time, the international community felt compelled to send disaster relief to Washington. For more than two centuries, reported the Irish Times, “the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the U.S. until now: pity.” As American doctors and nurses eagerly awaited emergency airlifts of basic supplies from China, the hinge of history opened to the Asian century.

Davis goes on to lay out just how fucked he thinks we are.

And while I can't say he's wrong to think what he thinks, I will say that we've been down before.

The one thing 45* has been right about - the only thing, and he's warped and perverted it almost totally beyond recognition - but the one thing is that we just go on. We fuck up. We fall on our face. We get back up. And we keep going.

Of course, it'd be nice if we could recognize the need for some fundamental change once in a while, and it'd be really nice if we could see the need and make the changes before all the shit hits the fuckin' fan.

Anyway, we have to make some real adjustments. Trump just pretends he's some fuckin' cat that jumped up on the table and landed with all four paws in 4 different bowls of steaming hot soup, and then tries to make like he meant to do exactly that, and what are you guys laughing at - you're the idiots, not me - oooh look, a mouse.

And that's kinda what we've allowed fuckups like Trump to pull. We have to try harder not to let them off the hook this time. If we want government to be held to account, then we have to dig in and insist that some of these big fish get fried.

Tune For The Day

That's How Every Empire Falls - (John Prine) cover RB Morris

A bitter wind blows through the country
A hard rain falls on the sea
If terror comes without a warning
There must be something we don't see
What fire begets this fire?
Like torches thrown into the straw
If no one asks, then no one answers
That's how every empire falls.

Off The Radar

So, quickly, about that Greenland thing: Trump wasn't just being his usual stoopid self. He wasn't just fuckin' around trying to create a distraction - even tho' all of that is part of it.

He's seriously talking about annexing territory. He intends to expand the empire, possibly because John Bolton &/or Mike Pompeo &/or the joint chiefs put a bug in his ear about growing concerns over Climate Change and the increased "strategic threat" posed by clear water in the Artic Ocean etc etc etc. But mostly because he's Putin's boy in more ways than one.

Anyway - in the meantime - happening out of sight:

The Independent is reporting on more shitty behavior at CBP.

At least three migrant children being held in detention centres have died after suffering from flu, but US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has said that it does not plan to vaccinate detained immigrant families as winter approaches. 

Further reports suggest children are being molested in some sites while in the care of the government.

“In general, due to the short-term nature of CBP holding and the complexities of operating vaccination programmes, neither CBP nor its medical contractors administer vaccinations to those in our custody,” a CBP spokeswoman said in a statement emailed to the CNBC news channel.

People you take by force into your custody are to be treated humanely.

And let's be clear - they are people.

The shitty things going on are intended to be shitty things so they can be used as propaganda; as a warning to potential immigrants that not only are they not welcome here, but that we'll do shitty things to them and their kids if they come here.

Cult45 is turning us into that which we claim to despise.

The Geejy Bird

I have to return to this one every so often, as a reminder to check my perspective.

Every government is a geejy bird.

The geejy bird is a strange creature; it flies only once in its lifetime, but that flight is a spectacle to behold. The geejy bird appears suddenly, standing on a limb, young, elegant, proud and respectable.  Surveying the horizon, it spreads its majestic wings and swoops upward in a wide graceful curve, with magnificent wing flappings and loud glory whoops.  When it reaches maximum altitude, it begins its elegant descent, an ever narrowing spiral.  It makes smaller and smaller circles in the sky until, suddenly and mysteriously, it vanishes through its own asshole.

No one knows where geejy birds go - probably back where they came from.  Unfortunately, when they go, they take us along.  We are all subjects of one geejy bird or another; we are born and live and die during one of these mad flights.  To be born early is, at least, exciting; the air sparkles with hopes and dreams, and there are worthwhile things to be done.  To board the flight in the soaring stage is next best; there is a fresh wind and a feel of strong wings and a dizzying view of the world.

But what about those of us who are born near the end of the flight?  We can't jump off; the fall would be fatal.  In vain we scream, "Turn around, great geejy bird! Turn back in thy flight!"  Too late.  There is nothing to do but make the best of it.  We snap to attention, salute, and begin to sing our stirring anthem.  "God Bless Our Geejy Bird!"  Together we enter the turd tunnel to oblivion.

The Rape of the A*P*E* (page 174) --Allan Sherman

Feel The Love

This world map shows who feels most threatened by whom.

hat tip = Facebook bud Doug R

Almost In Passing

I've been trying to think my way through all this Mike Brown / Eric Garner stuff; crashing around in my head looking for some boiled-down guiding principle to apply that might help me sort it out.

And then: The law must be a shield, not a sword.

For a good 2,000 - 10,000 generations, The Law was used and abused as a way to rationalize Might-Makes-Right.  As long as I had some reasonable expectation of being able to take you in a fist fight, I could jack your shit; and fuck you if you don't like it cuz fuck you, that's why. All the big guys did it cuz that's just what a big guy could do.  And it worked - Egypt, Assyria, Greece, Rome, Britain, etc etc etc - you get the idea.

Unfortunately, saying it that way makes it sound like we'd have to look way far back to find good examples, and that makes me think we're feeling a little too comfortable about ignoring the need to examine our motives and our reasoning, and our willingness to shrug it all off like a buncha fuckin' Eloi.

But gosh, it seems we don't have to look back very far to find some examples of people doing some pretty fucked up things because they had the juice to make the law do whatever they wanted it to do in order to pad their bank accounts or act out their domination fantasies or whatever their issues were at the time.

--slavery in America was lawful; and so was Jim Crow after that.

-- the genocide committed by Nazi Germany was mostly lawful under German law, and according to most written international law in effect at the time.

-- apartheid in South Africa was established by law.

-- Saddam Hussein claimed at his trial in Baghdad in 2006 that his order mandating the execution of 148 persons in response to an attempted assassination of him was lawful.

-- the Israeli military justified their heavy use of cluster bombs during the 2006 war by stating that “[a]ll the weapons and munitions used by the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] are legal under international law and their use conforms with international standards” (Shadid 2006, A01).

-- the 2003 US invasion and occupation of Iraq was lawful according to American interpretation of law.

The law has to be a shield.  It has to be there to protect us from overbearing, over-reaching, evermore ambitious and power-craving despots.  When the law instead protects the police (eg) from being held to the same standards of justice as apply to everybody else, then the law has become a sword against the people, and it will be changed by the people one way or another.  It has to be changed because it's become a contradiction.  And while contradictions exist, they can't prevail.
(all you 'conserva-tarians' might recognize that one from the Sacred Texts of Our Lady Ayn of Rand)

For my own self, I kinda like The American Exceptionalism way, and I'll keep trying to do it that way.  But if it has to be changed the old-fashioned way, then I'll be sadly watching from the bench, unsurprised.

I just really hope we can get back to being that exception.

Connections

I wonder if this:




...might hook into this:



Big O has been really really careful never to say the word 'torture' in any public setting - not that I can recall anyway (update*).  So I have to wonder why he's saying it now, and I don't think it's solely because it's come up and he's trying to do the damage control thing by blaming Bush or whatever.  That said, tho', the guy can be crazy stupid good at political judo, and keeping in mind that it's never just about what they tell us it's about, here's a few possibilities stumbling thru my brain clutter today:

• he's floating the torture thing to counteract the impeachment thing.  "you fuck with me on impeachment, and I'll fuck you back even harder by arresting Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and a hundred others and I'll personally deliver 'em all the The Hague to face charges for their war crimes". (you'll notice Liz Cheney popped up on DumFux News almost immediately to slag the Prez for a good 4 minutes - talking about torture and making no mention of her dear ol' dad - of course)

Anyway - back to stumbly thingies:

• he's angling for better support from his own wingers.  The guy does an awful lot of Hippie-Punching, and so he's throwing a bone to the Left Wing to get 'em all out to the polls this fall.
• he's finally getting around to addressing the post 9-11 madness.  And so this is all about trying to signal an attempt to make up for doing nothing about it; or he needs to move a little closer to traditional foreign allies in order to get something from them(?) - maybe shore up support for sanctions on Russia and Iran and/or slapping Israel(?)

Dunno, but things happen for a reason, and maybe this happened late on a Friday so it wouldn't get much coverage, which means it'll generate very little heat, which means  everybody's expecting the Press Poodles to keep it on the down low because there's a coupla dozen trainloads of politicians and operatives and bureaucrats and Press Poodles who should rightly be in prison because they took an active part in the shittiness or they actively avoided doing anything to prevent it, or they made sure we didn't notice or whatever.

As long as you can make it look like everybody's responsible, then nobody can hold anybody accountable for anything - ever.  Welcome to America's Imperial Era.

*Update = From Little Green Footballs:

Obama’s statement on torture wasn’t really news; in May 2013 he said pretty much the same thing: Remarks by the President at the National Defense University | the White House.

Meanwhile, we strengthened our defenses — hardening targets, tightening transportation security, giving law enforcement new tools to prevent terror.  Most of these changes were sound.  Some caused inconvenience.  But some, like expanded surveillance, raised difficult questions about the balance that we strike between our interests in security and our values of privacy.  And in some cases, I believe we compromised our basic values — by using torture to interrogate our enemies, and detaining individuals in a way that ran counter to the rule of law.

Still seems kinda odd to me tho'.

Larry Wilkerson

"...the invisible hand of Adam Smith in "Wealth of Nations" is not an invisible hand - it's now the hand of oligarchs..."

One of the great mysteries of the colossal cluster fuck known as the George W Bush administration is that (apparently) nobody was listening to Larry Wilkerson.

Or was it that Larry wasn't speaking quite as clearly then as he is now?  Dunno, but we'd better start listening to him now if we're to have any real chance of stickin' around long enough to find out.

Anyway, from The Real News:

Imagine That

Pew Research has found that 55% of Russians think it's unfortunate that the Soviet Empire is gone.

55%

Most Russians think they'd rather return to theirs lives under "communism" than keep things the way they are now under Putin and the new Russian aristocracy.

Our Glorious Empire

If this pic doesn't enbiggen very well for you, go to Federacion de Asociaciones Cannibicus for a better look.

A Little Light Reading

Aha - suckered you into a post about science.

From The Verge:

Beams of light are usually speeding along at around 186,000 miles per second, but for one minute, researchers in Germany brought some to a screeching halt. Using a crystal frozen to temperatures below negative 450 degrees Fahrenheit, a research team managed to hold light in place for a full minute — marking a drastic increase from the previous record of just 16 seconds. The technology will eventually be applied to quantum computing as a way to retrieve and read data, but it'll have to work on a much smaller scale and for much longer periods of time before that can happen.

And here's a Peer-Review paper for any uber-nerds who happen by.

Now I suppose I need to ask all you 'conservatives' to stay calm and try not to get too frightened by all this.  I realize you guys can take just about anything and turn it into a massively spooky conspiracy aimed at contaminating our precious bodily fluids or some such nonsense, but really, you don't have to feel threatened by every fuckin' thing that comes around the corner.

And BTW - how come this is the kinda thing that gets done in Germany, and not here in USAmerica?  This wasn't a "pure science" thing - it's happening because there's an application in mind - but this is exactly what we need to be funding in some pretty big ways.  If we just kinda let the smarts guys do what they do, maybe we could find a really great use for the ability to store light that doesn't have to be about blowing shit up or knocking shit down.  Could we at least try that for a while?

Connections

At the confluence of Free Market and Privatized Government:

Mark Ciavarella Jr, a 61-year old former judge in Pennsylvania, has been sentenced to nearly 30 years in prison for literally selling young juveniles for cash. He was convicted of accepting money in exchange for incarcerating thousands of adults and children into a prison facility owned by a developer who was paying him under the table. The kickbacks amounted to more than $1 million.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has overturned some 4,000 convictions issued by him between 2003 and 2008, claiming he violated the constitutional rights of the juveniles – including the right to legal counsel and the right to intelligently enter a plea. Some of the juveniles he sentenced were as young as 10-years old.

Ciavarella was convicted of 12 counts, including racketeering, money laundering, mail fraud and tax evasion. He was also ordered to repay $1.2 million in restitution.

His "kids for cash" program has revealed that corruption is indeed within the prison system, mostly driven by the growth in private prisons seeking profits by any means necessary.

Expand your thought patterns a bit, and think about the hundreds of "terrorists" being held in Gitmo because they had neighbors in Kabul who maybe held a grudge and figured it was OK to sell them out to the CIA for the reward.

And then maybe we could throw this one in for good measure, now that we're being all expansive and all:

Now go ahead and tell me how different it is here in #1 USA; let's hear all about American Exceptionalism, and how much better we are than everybody else in the world.  Yay us.  C'mon - let's hear it.

But y'know what?  We are better than this shit.  Maybe we could start acting like it again.

We're Number - What?

hat tip = Addicting Info

(And here's why Maureen Dowd's panties eyes get moist when she waxes romantic about what she wishes Obama would do for her):


BTW - Aaron Sorkin ain't the only dude been sayin' it:

Kaboom

Speaking of shit - which I kinda do in the next post down from this one - I've had this one in mind for a good long while.

This is a screen shot from Google Maps of an area to the northwest of Las Vegas and to the southwest of Papoose Lake in Nevada:

Every little round-ish feature (they look like barnacles to me) on the above pic is where the US detonated a nuclear bomb of some kind, to test it out; to make sure it worked as advertised.

And this is just Nevada.

Meanwhile, Back At DumFux News

Everybody's favorite opportunity to indulge in a little Arm-Chair Psycho-Junk-ology:



From Little Green Footballs:

This is just sad. Generations of anger passed on by abuse and beatings resulted in hateful demagogues like Sean Hannity and Michelle Malkin, who pass on the legacy of abuse to their own children and preach it to others on Fox News.

Ya gotta be careful about this, but sometimes it's just too plain to ignore.

Coupla things:
1) I have no idea if Malkin or Hannity were ever actually on any kind of team at any level other than PeeWees or whatever, but I'm thinking if they had been, then they'd know that a good coach never ever abuses his players.  And that a great coach can be stern and hard-ass and flinty and demanding and and and - but he makes sure his players know he likes (even loves) them and that he respects them; and that he'll teach 'em what they need to know so they can do what seems impossible while never simply commanding them to do something they're not capable of doing; or gets them hurt or makes them look or feel lousy in front of their peers.

2) DumFux News is not putting this up to complain about The Wimpy Libruls and how all this PC crap is making us weak - although that last bit - making us weak - is the key.  Remember, this shit doesn't happen by accident.  This is on Fox air for a reason, and at the risk of making too much of a leap, and drawing too obvious an analogy, here it comes.

The message is: Here at Fox, we know all you little people out there are suffering and taking a tremendous beating, but you need to suck it up, ya buncha cupcakes.  Look at Sean and Michelle.  They're in really peachy circumstances; they're wealthy and pretty and powerful; and they took the beatings.  Why should you be exempt?  You don't wanna be a moocher.  You don't wanna be unworthy of what you get.  You wouldn't want something for nothing, would you?  Of course not.  So if you deserved a better job (or a job at all) or some kind of security for your retirement, then you'd already have them because you would've earned them.  This is a meritocracy after all, and so you get what you deserve.  If you earn cookies then you get cookies.  If you earn shit then you get shit - and you can be grateful we care enough to show you the error of your ways.  We're just trying to get you to be better people (like us).

(In the end, it gets turned around to mean: if you're taking a beating, it's because you deserve that beating)

Hey - you voted for us - the beating is obviously what you wanted.

Can there be any question about why Republi-Cons and Theo-Cons go so well together?

Today's Movie

A morality tale, and a peek at the need for bread and circus as an empire begins to collapse.



If you watch this movie, you'll need something sunny and happy and cuddly afterwards - you've been warned.

Podcast

Decode DC - Some very interesting stuff here.

The idea of protecting people's intellectual property is a ridiculously important one.  You have the right to profit from your own work, and this was built in to our Constitution.  But this guy mentions The Mickey Mouse Provision, which extends Copy Right exclusivity for 75 years after the death of the Copy Right owner.  To me, that's exactly what we weren't supposed to do, because it contributes to the creation and perpetuation of Aristocracy - where the only thing some people have to do for a living is to be born to privilege.  That's not what this joint's supposed to be about.

Chris Hedges

I'm not completely down with all of his conclusions, but the guy speaks to some very uncomfortable points, which generally makes me think I should at least stop to consider what he's trying to say.