The problem With Jon Stewart

A clip from one of the segments. with Stewart leading a good discussion that points out some very big elephants in a very small room.

To reiterate that one point - there are no good wars. We can justify the project on certain ridiculously rare occasions, but we have to stay cognizant that there's just never a time when going to war isn't a matter of choice.

Mullens's assertion that we didn't have a debate before we went into Iraq seems to imply that we could've talked about it but chose not to.

If that's what he meant, that's bullshit

There was plenty of pushback from "the left", but this whole country got steam-rollered. We stood up and screamed our fool heads off, and we were immediately shouted down as a buncha hippie has-beens and leftie terrorist-loving blockheads. And the "liberal media" led the way on that one.

We were right about all of it. ALL OF IT. As usual.

6 trillion dollars disappeared during a 20-year splurge that made billionaires out of millionaires, and millionaires out of shiftless no-account grifters.

The real cost of it is always born by the people up front doing the fighting and the bleeding and the dying - and then "when it's over", the guys who spent their time at the broken end of the bottle get to deal with the continuing residual miseries of PTSD and SUD and the multitude of diseases caused directly by their service - all by themselves - ignored and dismissed by the assholes who turn a profit on human suffering.

There's something very wrong with the way we're doing things.

The people who make the decisions about going to war are the ones who profit from it, while everybody else pays the price.

Shit's gotta change.

Small Men, Big Problems

A coupla things about North Korea.

First, it's been less than a full generation since North Korea came relatively close to being wiped out by famine.

Nobody knows for sure what the numbers are - estimates range from 250,000 to 4 million dead N Koreans. That's anywhere from 2% to 18% of the total population. By comparison, what do you suppose happens to this country if somewhere between 3 million and 52 million Americans died over a 5 year period?

Now, some good old fashioned Keynesian Stimulus can do wonders to help you recover from just about anything, so a massive investment in a nationalized push towards (eg) nuclear weapons would definitely boost the economy, but that assumes you have a shitload of credit or the ability to monetize your national debt, neither of which was available to North Korea in the 90s.

One of the big reasons for that famine was the loss of patronage. The Soviet Union cratered and cut their support. China stepped in, but they had their own problems with drought and shortages and lack of hard currency, so they had to bail too.

Anyway, N Korea gets practically nothing done without the help of a Patron State.

Second (to shorten the story), Putin makes out like a bandit if he stirs the shit in SE Asia.

And while he risks creating the monster - a deliverable H-bomb means never having to say, "Yessir, whatever you want, boss" - Uncle Vlad gets a net benefit just by pimping the chaos and looking for the opportunities.

Everybody Wants In On The Act

Reuters:

The German government has approved several arms export deals with countries in the Middle East, including delivery of 23 Airbus helicopters to Saudi Arabia, according to an Economy Ministry letter seen by Reuters on Monday.

On the one hand, there's something odd about being pretty sure that selling weapons to people in the Middle East is a pretty stoopid thing to do; while seeing it happen and starting to think maybe this is just what we do. Like stoopid is the new normal.

But then of course, I won't argue that Stoopid is somehow new, or that it's not particularly normal.

Anyway - it still looked like this was all about "small arms", so that's not as bad as it could be.  But then, Financial Times:

The minister cited a €1.6bn contract to sell Leopard 2 battle tanks to Qatar, “which I unfortunately can’t undo”. The deal, which received the government’s green light in 2013, was sharply criticised within Germany because of Qatar’s bombing of Yemen and its alleged support for Islamist groups in the Middle East.

I can't shake that queasy feeling whenever I see a tank with a Maltese Cross painted on it, y'know?

And the only thing worse is when one of the guys who's supposed to know what's going on just shrugs and says, "Oops - oh well, nuthin we can do about it now."

We are so fucked.

Dude - Chill

First - somebody needs to be a little more careful about keepin' that guy away from the coffee. Jesus - it's like grandma's Chihuahua got into the Aderall.

And I'd dearly love it if the Zombie Lie of "the surge worked" could be laid to rest.

Three things about "the surge worked" that even I know:

1. The sheiks started to get pretty reasonable about not fighting us when we started to pay them to stop fighting us, because...
2. The sheiks realized we were telling them we'd fuck off and leave 'em alone if they cooled it long enough to let us pretend we'd won the thing
3. The propaganda of "The Surge Worked" is what worked.

This guy is doing the classic Deflecting Denialism thing - "our policy didn't fail; we failed to carry through on the policy..."

And it ends up being: "Iraqis are still fighting back and killing Americans, so obviously, we haven't killed enough Iraqis - let's go kill some more Iraqis".

And so, secondly - how many times do we need to learn the same lesson?  You don't kill your way to a solution for political problems.

People have been trying this same shit forever.  It's partly the lesson of The Greater Fool - "I will prevail where others have failed" - and that's all well and good, Skeezix, but ya gotta remember that better people than you have been trying to conquer the world for a solid 40,000 years at last count, and guess what - the world remains undefeated.

So knock that shit off.

Perspective

Via HuffPo:

Interesting that "war" isn't being fought quite the same these days.  Where it used to be all about sticks and rocks and guns and bombs and hyper-active teenagers blowin' shit up, now we use lawyers and trade agreements and Techie Hacker Interns and 30-something MBAs to keep the cost down.  Although one thing seems never to change - there's always a very aggressive media effort to make us think we're all gettin' a helluva deal.

But Conquest by Corporation does no less violence to the populace, it's just that the  infrastructure is left more or less intact - it's much more cost-effective that way - and it looks a lot better on TV.  I hear "Trade Agreement" now, and I'm thinking "White-Collar Neutron Bomb".

Of course, the resulting immiseration effect is almost exactly the same because you can't do greater violence to somebody than to push them down into the abject poverty that has always grown out of the kind of Run-Away Darwinian Capitalism being put in place by Coin-Operated Politicians.  And that last sentence should be more like "being put back in place..." because the world is starting to look a whole lot like the world of the 18th century - you remember, way way back when we decided not to play that fucked up game here; when we promised ourselves to work hard at being the exception to it.

So, trying not to go Full Cynical, and to maintain some glimmer of hope - even if it's only a hope for people I won't live long enough to know - my standard admonition still holds:  A wide variety of assholes have been out to conquer the world for 20,000 generations.  But somehow, the world remains undefeated.

Wasted Weaponry

An unused weapon is a useless weapon.  Could we just stop fuckin' around with this shit now please?

And maybe do something with all that junk that might actually be of some use to somebody?

We really do deserve better than what we're getting out of all this.