Kansas has the only Manhattan where Trump is still welcome.
— Adam Parkhomenko (@AdamParkhomenko) February 9, 2020
Feb 10, 2020
Today's Tweet
Kansas has the only Manhattan where Trump is still welcome.
Feb 9, 2020
And On It Goes
We've been warring in Afghanistan for over 18 years - 219 months - coming up on 7,000 days.
Cost to Veterans
The cost of veterans’ medical and disability payments over the next 40 years will be more than $1 trillion, according to Linda Bilmes, a senior lecturer in public finance at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The cost of caring for war veterans typically peaks in the three or four decades after a conflict, she said.
More than 320,000 soldiers from Afghanistan and Iraq have traumatic brain injuries that cause disorientation and confusion, as of 2018. Of those, more than 8,000 suffered severe or invasive brain injuries, and more than 1,600 soldiers lost all or part of a limb. More than 138,000 have post-traumatic stress disorder. They experience flashbacks, hypervigilance, and difficulty sleeping.
On average, 20 veterans commit suicide each day according to a 2016 VA study. The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America found that 47% of its members know of someone who has attempted suicide after returning from active duty. The group considers veteran suicide to be its top issue.
Cost to Economy
The war in Afghanistan is second only to the $4.1 trillion dollars (inflation-adjusted) spent during World War II.
Unlike earlier wars, most American families did not feel impacted by the Afghanistan War. There was no draft and no tax imposed directly to pay for the war. Future generations also will pay for the addition to the debt. Researcher Ryan Edwards estimates that the U.S. incurred an extra $453 billion in interest on the debt to pay for the wars in the Middle East. Over the next 40 years, these costs will add $7.9 trillion to the debt.
Companies, particularly small businesses, were disrupted by National Guard and Reserve call-ups. The economy also has been deprived of the productive contributions of the service members killed, wounded, or psychologically traumatized.
In the backdrop of peace negotiations to end the 18-year long war U.S. aircraft are bombing the hell out of theTaliban and other militants as the warring parties slog through never-ending discussions to bring the fighting to a close.
According to U.S. Air Forces Central Command, U.S. aircraft dropped 7,423 munitions in 2019 — that’s the highest number of bombs released in nearly a decade.
In 2018, U.S. warplanes dropped 7,362 bombs — the second highest total in a year thus far since AFCENT began publishing the number of munitions released in Afghanistan.
We still have 10,000 - 13,000 uniforms there, and they're still being killed.
22,000 casualties, with 2,200 dead.
The cost of veterans’ medical and disability payments over the next 40 years will be more than $1 trillion, according to Linda Bilmes, a senior lecturer in public finance at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The cost of caring for war veterans typically peaks in the three or four decades after a conflict, she said.
More than 320,000 soldiers from Afghanistan and Iraq have traumatic brain injuries that cause disorientation and confusion, as of 2018. Of those, more than 8,000 suffered severe or invasive brain injuries, and more than 1,600 soldiers lost all or part of a limb. More than 138,000 have post-traumatic stress disorder. They experience flashbacks, hypervigilance, and difficulty sleeping.
On average, 20 veterans commit suicide each day according to a 2016 VA study. The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America found that 47% of its members know of someone who has attempted suicide after returning from active duty. The group considers veteran suicide to be its top issue.
Cost to Economy
The war in Afghanistan is second only to the $4.1 trillion dollars (inflation-adjusted) spent during World War II.
Unlike earlier wars, most American families did not feel impacted by the Afghanistan War. There was no draft and no tax imposed directly to pay for the war. Future generations also will pay for the addition to the debt. Researcher Ryan Edwards estimates that the U.S. incurred an extra $453 billion in interest on the debt to pay for the wars in the Middle East. Over the next 40 years, these costs will add $7.9 trillion to the debt.
Companies, particularly small businesses, were disrupted by National Guard and Reserve call-ups. The economy also has been deprived of the productive contributions of the service members killed, wounded, or psychologically traumatized.
And we're right back to being stuck - just like the hippies warned us. DOD has reported that recruitment and retention are lagging because of the effects of the persistent stalemate in theater.
And, of course, we've fallen into the bullshit brain trap that says we're not getting it done on the ground so let's drop lots more bombs - cuz we gotta do something(?)
In the backdrop of peace negotiations to end the 18-year long war U.S. aircraft are bombing the hell out of theTaliban and other militants as the warring parties slog through never-ending discussions to bring the fighting to a close.
According to U.S. Air Forces Central Command, U.S. aircraft dropped 7,423 munitions in 2019 — that’s the highest number of bombs released in nearly a decade.
In 2018, U.S. warplanes dropped 7,362 bombs — the second highest total in a year thus far since AFCENT began publishing the number of munitions released in Afghanistan.
And the kicker - in the view of John Sopko, IG for Afghanistan Reconstruction, we've created an incentive for the guys on the ground to paint nice blue-sky pictures for their bosses up the chain that morphed into flat-out lies.
(This should start at 51:30, thru about 54:00)
45* asked, "Where's my Roy Cohn", and he's got him now.
I'd like to know, "Where's our Daniel Elsberg"? But then, it doesn't seem to matter because we've known for quite a while that things aren't going well, and we just stay at it.
A self-licking ice cream cone.
Feb 8, 2020
Fouling The Nest
It's summer in the southern hemisphere, and yeah, it's supposed to be warmer. But it's not supposed to be 65 fucking degrees in fucking Antartica.
WaPo:
It’s been an eventful year for climate extremes, and we’re only on Day 38 of 2020. January was the warmest on record globally, according to atmospheric monitoring group Copernicus, with records shattered in Europe and Asia. A number of locales in Eastern Europe and particularly Russia wound up more than 12 to 13 degrees above average.
Additional extreme warmth is likely in the Antarctic Peninsula in the coming days. Temperatures some 40 to 50 degrees above normal are predicted by some models.
Today's Tweet
Winner
When your head only fits partway up your ass. pic.twitter.com/AJfH4kakRj— Middle Age Riot (@middleageriot) February 8, 2020
Nancy Bangs
The Washington Post, Opinion
Speaker of The House, Nancy Pelosi:
For more than 200 years, our republic has endured, not only because of the wisdom of our Founders and the brilliance of our Constitution, but because of the generations of patriotic Americans who have had the courage to risk their lives to defend it.
But, tragically, the American people have watched President Trump and Republicans in Congress dismantle the Constitution that we cherish.
The House impeachment managers, led by Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), presented to the Senate and the public an incontrovertible truth that the president himself has admitted: President Trump abused the power of his office to pressure a foreign power to help him cheat in an American election. And when he was caught, the president launched an unprecedented coverup to block Congress from holding him accountable. The president’s actions undermined our national security, jeopardized the integrity of our elections and violated the Constitution.
The Democrats in the Senate under the leadership of Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) patriotically voted unanimously to honor the oath to support and defend the Constitution. They, along with Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), deserve our gratitude for their moral courage.
The president’s lawyers all but concede his misconduct. Their argument was only that Congress and the American people have no right to stop him from using his power to cheat in our elections. With their vote, Senate Republicans embraced this darkest vision of power: that if the president believes his reelection is good for the country, he can then use any means necessary to win, with no accountability or consequences.
For weeks, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and the Republican-controlled Senate have made themselves accomplices to the president’s wrongdoing by suppressing additional evidence and rejecting the most basic elements of a fair judicial process. In declaring their loyalty to the president over our Constitution, Republicans have made a farce of the old boast that the U.S. Senate is the greatest deliberative body in the world. And they have joined the president in normalizing lawlessness and rejecting the checks and balances of our Constitution.
The House of Representatives voted to impeach the president because our institution believes in the sanctity of our oath and the urgency of protecting our republic. One chamber of Congress held the president accountable. President Trump is impeached forever, disgraced in history for his abuse of power and contempt for our Constitution. He will go down in history as the first president to be impeached with the support of a majority of Americans, and the first to ever face a bipartisan vote to convict him in the Senate.
Our Founders put safeguards in the Constitution to protect against a rogue president. They never imagined that they would at the same time have a rogue leader in the Senate who would cowardly abandon his duty to uphold the Constitution.
Sadly, because of the Republican Senate’s betrayal of the Constitution, the president remains an ongoing threat to American democracy. He continues to insist that he is above accountability and that he can corrupt the elections again, if he wants to.
The People’s House will continue to defend democracy for the American people. We will uphold and protect the checks and balances enshrined in the Constitution, both in the courts of law and in the court of public opinion to preserve our republic “if we can keep it,” to quote Benjamin Franklin.
And we will always insist on this truth: that, in America, no one is above the law.
Read more:
Dana Milbank: This vulgar man has squandered our decency
Feb 7, 2020
Today's Tweet
Brand new thinking - to me. Sounds like the wrap up from a good mystery movie.
Why didn't President Zelensky of Ukraine just do what they were pressuring him to do? ("...do us a favor though")— Woke Pig Media ✨ (@WokePig) February 3, 2020
(answer in video below)#RIPAmerica #GOPCowards #RIPGOP #ImpeachmentHearing #ImpeachmentTrial #ImpeachmentTrials #SenateGOPCoverup #BlueTsunami2020 #OneVoice1 pic.twitter.com/siIBLyTq91
Feb 6, 2020
Whoa
The victory speech.
It took him barely 30 seconds to start taking a giant shit on everybody - including some of the people who helped him.
It took him barely 30 seconds to start taking a giant shit on everybody - including some of the people who helped him.
The Real Blitz Is Coming
McKay Coppins, The Atlantic:
The story that unfurled in my Facebook feed over the next several weeks was, at times, disorienting. There were days when I would watch, live on TV, an impeachment hearing filled with damning testimony about the president’s conduct, only to look at my phone later and find a slickly edited video—served up by the Trump campaign—that used out-of-context clips to recast the same testimony as an exoneration. Wait, I caught myself wondering more than once, is that what happened today?
As I swiped at my phone, a stream of pro-Trump propaganda filled the screen: “That’s right, the whistleblower’s own lawyer said, ‘The coup has started …’ ” Swipe. “Democrats are doing Putin’s bidding …” Swipe. “The only message these radical socialists and extremists will understand is a crushing …” Swipe. “Only one man can stop this chaos …” Swipe, swipe, swipe.
I was surprised by the effect it had on me. I’d assumed that my skepticism and media literacy would inoculate me against such distortions. But I soon found myself reflexively questioning every headline. It wasn’t that I believed Trump and his boosters were telling the truth. It was that, in this state of heightened suspicion, truth itself—about Ukraine, impeachment, or anything else—felt more and more difficult to locate. With each swipe, the notion of observable reality drifted further out of reach.
- and -
We ain't seen nothin' yet.
Here's a link to a 2014 piece in The Atlantic, about some beta-testing that Putin was doing.
At the NATO summit in Wales last week, General Philip Breedlove, the military alliance’s top commander, made a bold declaration. Russia, he said, is waging “the most amazing information warfare blitzkrieg we have ever seen in the history of information warfare.”
It was something of an underestimation. The new Russia doesn’t just deal in the petty disinformation, forgeries, lies, leaks, and cyber-sabotage usually associated with information warfare. It reinvents reality, creating mass hallucinations that then translate into political action. Take Novorossiya, the name Vladimir Putin has given to the huge wedge of southeastern Ukraine he might, or might not, consider annexing. The term is plucked from tsarist history, when it represented a different geographical space. Nobody who lives in that part of the world today ever thought of themselves as living in Novorossiya and bearing allegiance to it—at least until several months ago. Now, Novorossiya is being imagined into being: Russian media are showing maps of its ‘geography,’ while Kremlin-backed politicians are writing its ‘history’ into school textbooks. There’s a flag and even a news agency (in English and Russian). There are several Twitter feeds. It’s like something out of a Borges story - except for the very real casualties of the war conducted in its name.
The invention of Novorossiya is a sign of Russia’s domestic system of information manipulation going global. Today’s Russia has been shaped by political technologists—the viziers of the system who, like so many post-modern Prosperos, conjure up puppet political parties and the simulacra of civic movements to keep the nation distracted as Putin’s clique consolidates power. In the philosophy of these political technologists, information precedes essence. “I remember creating the idea of the ‘Putin majority’ and hey, presto, it appeared in real life,” Gleb Pavlovsky, a political technologist who worked on Putin's election campaigns but has since left the Kremlin, told me recently. “Or the idea that ‘there is no alternative to Putin.’ We invented that. And suddenly there really was no alternative.”
The point is that we're on the receiving end of some truly and amazingly scary shit.
And the question is: do your neighbors - and some of your wackier family members - have what it takes to resist the sophistication and the insidiousness of it? Have they already been sucked into it?
How may Bernie Bros are being manipulated in the same ways?
How will the means and methods described in these articles be adapted to, &/or adopted by, the campaigns of our own homegrown candidates?
How will the means and methods described in these articles be adapted to, &/or adopted by, the campaigns of our own homegrown candidates?
In a D&D fight, the Chaotic Neutral character has a bit of an edge, but it's offset by the powers of a Lawful Good character.
In the real world, it's a lot worse because the good guy is expected to follow rules that the bag guy is free to ignore.
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