Love Her Hate Her Whatever

Donna Brazile is well known for two things: losing elections, and standing in the wreckage yelling, "We was robbed!"

But she knows things. She had a front row seat last fall. The bit about the Russians (starting about 28:30) is very interesting and way fuckin' scary.



And never mind the fact that she takes a nice big dump on the Press Poodles for being lazy enough to buy into the Follow-The-Popular-Drift bullshit (thank you, Donna). Way too many of the big news outlets here in USAmerica Inc are operating on the Show Biz model, where the coverage is guided by what's trending on social media instead of what's real and/or important.

Flocks of Bots (many, if not most, of which are controlled the Russkies) are practically dictating what we do and where we go - and they're very useful for "winning" elections.

Automated Rapid Response on a hyper-industrialized level.

Whoa

Tim Johnson, McClatchy DC

The Pentagon won’t yet say how the USS John S. McCain was rammed by an oil tanker near Singapore, but red flags are flying as the Navy’s decades-old reliance on electronic guidance systems increasing looks like another target of cyberattack.

The incident – the fourth involving a Seventh Fleet warship this year – occurred near the Strait of Malacca, a crowded 1.7-mile-wide waterway that connects the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea and accounts for roughly 25 percent of global shipping.

“When you are going through the Strait of Malacca, you can’t tell me that a Navy destroyer doesn’t have a full navigation team going with full lookouts on every wing and extra people on radar,” said Jeff Stutzman, chief intelligence officer at Wapack Labs, a New Boston, New Hampshire, cyber intelligence service.

“There’s something more than just human error going on because there would have been a lot of humans to be checks and balances,” said Stutzman, a former information warfare specialist in the Navy.

So allow me to reiterate: 45* keeps making all kinds of stoopid noise about beefing up the US Military's ability to wage war in MeatSpace, when the fight is going on in CyberSpace.

Iraq-mire

NYT:

WASHINGTON — In a major shift of focus in the battle against the Islamic State, the Obama administration is planning to establish a new military base in Anbar Province, Iraq, and to send 400 American military trainers to help Iraqi forces retake the city of Ramadi.

The White House on Wednesday is expected to announce a plan that follows months of behind-the-scenes debate about how prominently plans to retake Mosul, another Iraqi city that fell to the Islamic State last year, should figure in the early phase of the military campaign against the group.

The fall of Ramadi last month effectively settled the administration debate, at least for the time being. American officials said Ramadi was now expected to become the focus of a lengthy campaign to regain Mosul at a later stage, possibly not until 2016.

The additional American troops will arrive as early as this summer, a United States official said, and will focus on training Sunni fighters with the Iraqi Army. The official called the coming announcement “an adjustment to try to get the right training to the right folks.”

--and today's Understatement-That-Makes-It-Sound-Like-Ya-Really-Don't-Give-A-Fuck award goes to:

The United States Central Command’s emphasis on retaking Mosul depended critically on efforts to retrain the Iraqi Army, which appear to have gotten off to a slow start. Some Iraqi officials also thought the schedule for taking Mosul was unrealistic, and some bridled when an official from the Central Command told reporters in February that an assault to capture the city was planned for this spring.

A slow start - from 2003.  12 years.  That's not a slow start.  That's not a start of any kind.  That's an ending, and it's called "petrification"; or "putrefaction"; or some other term we use to indicate that it's over.

Iraq has no army, and Iraq has nothing out of which anybody can hope to build an army; because there is no Iraq.  Iraq exists only as the memory of a few arbitrary lines the British drew on a piece of paper 90-some years ago.  It's Done. It's Kaput. It's Finished. It's Dead Dead and Fucking Dead.  Give it up already.

And gee - it's almost as if somebody put the whole thing in motion on purpose; like they figured on it being one big unfixable FUBAR; and they'd leave it for the Dems to waste time and resources trying to tidy up for a while; and when enough Rubes are ready for the Etch-A-Sketch move, they amp up the rhetoric with, "well - it's Obama's problem now - been Obama's problem for a while - he can't just blame it all on Cheney forever - looks like leadership trouble to me - y'know the Bush Doctrine is good policy, but Obama's incompetence blah blah blah..."

This is a very standard play. 

• Fuck something up
• Point at it and say, "Hey look - it's all fucked up"
• "I have a plan..."

But let's be sure not to talk about any of that.  And let's definitely not concentrate on how our mighty military will once again be showing us their Selflessly Courageous Awesomeness by going back to some desert shithole to fight and to bleed an to die so Halliburton and Royal Dutch Shell and Northrup Grumman can add a coupla nickels to their Quarterly Earnings Reports, and then turn around and use a good buncha those hard-earned Blood Dollars to create an even more reliable generation of Coin-Operated Politicians.

Let's just keep blabbin' about what a wonderment it is that there can be so many voters in the big squishy middle who can't quite make up their minds about all this.

Fuck me silly, Bubba - I just can't stand this shit sometimes.

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.

Another Milestone

Well not quite yet.

Next year will be the 70th anniversary of Nuclear Weapons.  Woohoo.

Here's a cool little animation by Isao Hashimoto that's just scary as fuck:

Face It

This clip is embedded so it fast forwards to where the really bad shit starts (at about 28:30). Kinda like the really bad shit doesn't actually start til after the war is "over".

And don't you dare look away.  This is what we did.  This is on us.



Gosh - it seems Iraq is all fucked up.  Just like some of us said it would be.

And some of the people we turned into the tools we used to fuck up Iraq are all fucked up too.



But we just walk away.

About The Drone Thing

As usual, Hayes gets pretty close to what it's about.



The main thing to remember is that process counts.  The US was set up to put Process in front of outcome.  If we take care in how we get to the conclusion, we stand a much better chance of getting to the right conclusion.  That seems pretty important when we're trying to figure out who's next in line for a Hellfire Anal Probe.

We gotta get this one right, and I'm not convinced Obama's gonna get there for us.  Seems like he's willing to do some good Democrat things (equal rights, gun regulations, etc) but just as you start to think he's really pulling in the right direction, he cuts back and does something like this extra-legal assassination-by-drone shit.

I guess I'm just really hoping he's trying to rearrange the legalities - not to make it easier to blast somebody we don't like - but to be a little more sure that we blast the right guy(?), and to be a little surer about knowing who pulled the trigger and why they targeted any given dude.

Also hoping this isn't just another cynical move to defang the usual Repub attacks on Dems as being insufficiently BadAss.

Hacked By Iran

So here's something I hope somebody on our side's been working on really hard.

From Empty Wheel:

I’ve been saying for some time that America’s hubris about drones will end as soon as one of our antagonists figures out how to hack them.

Which is why it’s interesting that Iran has updated its claims to have “shot down” an American drone to suggest they had “brought it down.” (Note, I found this statement on the Mehr website, but not the Fars one.)

And won't it be interesting in a few years (maybe a lot sooner) when we start to hear about the need to build a defensive shield capable of shooting down enemy drones which could be launched from any seemingly innocuous vessel from a few miles off the shores of Virginia or New York or or or.

I've been worried that "our enemies" would develop a way to deliver an EMP device into the general vicinity of over-flying American aircraft, which would disable the avionics (for even a short time), which would result in our planes falling from the sky in large numbers.
Now I see we have a fuckload more to worry about.  Ain't that just won-fuckin'-derful?

It's the dawning of a New Golden Age of Paranoid Isolation in America.

(hat tip = The Agonist)