This Land Is My Land

To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings; -- US Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 17

It's difficult to find a single thing about the bird-sanctuary "militia" that's even remotely agreeable, save the basic notion that mandatory minimums are bad policy and worse justice. Not that any of these self-righteous clowns would oppose mandatory minimum sentences for, say, a low-level drug dealer (especially if they're black).

It's true that these are ridiculous people, clowns even. And all the Vanilla ISIS/Y'all Qaeda/Yokel Haram smackdown is fun. But these people are serious, and heavily armed, and deeply committed to their deranged vision. And the supposedly tyrannical federal gubmint keeps letting them get away with it.

There is nothing patriotic or respectable about these people and this movement. Cliven Bundy and his ilk are nothing but a bunch of freeloading peckerwoods who sponge off the same gubmint they profess to hate. The senior Bundy hasn't paid his grazing fees -- already one-tenth of private market value -- in over twenty years, which prompted the last standoff with these assholes. Ammon Bundy has a half-million dollar SBA loan on his business. Since the old racist has fourteen grown children, it's entirely likely that more of his burgeoning brood grift the taxpayers in one way or another, and complain about it the entire time.

World On Fire

The Republicans are basically the proverbial car-chasing dog who, once he's caught his quarry, has no idea what to do with it. If they really want to stick with their formula of Johnny Walnuts having a permanent seat at the Sunday morning follies, the usual think-tank monkeys agitating for war with whoever looks good, and Ted Cruz making an ass of himself at every turn, hey, go with what you know, guys.

It's become a well-worn truism that football (yes, American football, dammit) has become more dangerous in recent years not in spite of better technology, training, and protective gear, but because of those things. Instead of average-sized men holding off-season jobs to make ends meet so they can play football for a couple months in the fall, you now have superbly conditioned, freakishly proportioned men colliding with one another in suits of technologically sophisticated armor, at much higher rates of force and impact than in the era of Chuck Bednarik.

Similarly, the rapid advancement of drone technology has emboldened the hawks to instantly assume that airstrikes and drone-bombings are the "safe" option. And they are safe -- for us. Drones give policy-makers, armchair generals, and average joes alike the ability to just not think about there being any consequences to military actions. Not that they think about those things unless they or one of theirs is in the line of fire.

It's bad enough that we have been bombing -- maybe not indiscriminately, but not all that carefully either -- civilians in remote areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. But airstriking Iranian nuclear facilities means hitting cities. Tehran and its suburbs have somewhere around 20 million people. The nuclear labs have been quite deliberately placed in populated areas, albeit mostly underground. They make it sound so simple, we'll just "take out" their facilities, knock out their program, end their attempt at regional hegemony. Done and done.

Did we not just finally extricate ourselves from a decade-long clusterfuck that was sold as a slam-dunk, one that we'll be paying the financial, ethical, and medical costs for the next generation? Is the region not worse off in every way since we barged in and gave them their sweet, sweet freedom? Is there really a preponderance of 'murkins that thinks it's a simple and good plan to "surgically strike" the Iranians pre-emptively, that moral considerations aside, it would even just accomplish what its advocates say it will accomplish, nothing more, nothing less?

I don't think anyone has any illusions about what Iran is up to here. They really are moving, quickly and with purpose, to expand their influence in the Middle East. They are Bashar Assad's lifeline; they do flex nuts in Beirut, Damascus, and Baghdad -- and now in Sana'a, Yemen. They are surrounding the Saudis, waiting for the off chance that they flinch and provoke the Iranians, or more likely, waiting for ISIS to continue streaming into Saudi from the north, radicalizing an already radical citizenry, overthrowing the petrocrats, sending that country and probably the world economy into (to put it lightly) a turbulent situation.

So no one's saying that they're the good guys, the mullahs. But when the very same people who got us into Iraq are insisting that we simply must start it up with Iran, that it'll be quick and precise and work better than any other option, well, that's the time when you look at the people and politicians in this country, the United States, and see if they're ready to fall for that one again, so soon after the last one.

Some of them will; some of them are always ready to fall for whatever affirms their assumptions about how the world works. Some of them have trouble remembering that while we are friends to Israel (and they have the checks to prove it), our foreign policy is supposed to protect our interests first. But if it's a majority that's in favor of that mess, then you have a real problem.

Cotton Pickin'

Tom Cotton fits in perfectly with the current iteration of the Republican party, in that the more you get to know him, his stances on various issues, and the idjits he rolls with, the less you like about him. Like good ol' Fredo Arbusto, Cotton seems to be determined to undermine whatever credibility remains in a Hahvahd pedigree.

I mean, when you consider the standard media propaganda model, it makes a twisted sort of sense that Bill Kristol gets so much air time. Like the political class he clucks about, Kristol is a pedigreed, sinecured schmuck with the track record of a county fair chicken crapping on a bingo sheet. He's perfect for helping his insect corporate overlords sell pharmaceuticals, outsized trucks, and hemorrhoid crèmes. (And perpetual war for perpetual peace. With other people's kids, of course.)

But the idea of someone who actually affects policy and decisions taking Kristol's advice, not just with a block of salt but at all, such a person has instantly disqualified themselves from serious consideration. I have a ton of misgivings about Obama's foreign policy acumen; he seems to think it's chess when it's really poker. But Kristol isn't even playing Stratego, more like fifty-two pickup.

Israeli Gears

It's nice that Joe Lieberman thinks his role as Asshole Emeritus entitles him to have a say in how the government should be run, even though he, you know, retired a few years ago. The beauty of being a professional buttinski is that you no longer have to go through all the expensive, ritualized bullshit of running for office, you just pen an op-ed or become a Fixed Noise common-tater, start your own agony column for fellow birdbrains, what have you. This is the beauty of the perpetual campaign industry -- pretty much everyone gets a voice, if they holler loud enough.

So it's Lieberman's turn to ring the bell and stump for a political leader he actually believes in. Now, Netanyahu and his nation are in a pretty tough pickle right now, with virtually every country east and west of them for at least a thousand miles blowing the hell up. Chances are Netanyahu, if he had his druthers, would just start a bombing run due east, through Iraq and into Iran, before swinging back around through a Saudi Arabia that is about to get real weird, and on to Libya. And there's a roughly equal chance that the usual yahoos in Congress would be happy to throw in with him.

Israel certainly has a lot to answer for with its ongoing abuse of Palestinians. They struck a devil's bargain with the settlers and the ultra-conservatives, and they're continuing to reap the whirlwind on all that. But the bottom line here is that this is just a foreign leader using this opportunity as a PR prop, and our federal legislature using the same opportunity to further embarrass and obstruct the administration.

There are still some Nader-baiters out there, cooling their jets for the inevitable "you must vote for Hillary or else" campaign we'll all be subjected to next year. Make sure you remind them of what they wanted for vice-president that fateful election. Lieberman would have been better than the Cheney shit sandwich we all got, but only by a matter of degree.

Cities of Salt

By now no doubt most people who are interested in geopolitical goings-on, beyond the usual "the Middle East is burning while Obammy fiddles" Chicken Little plaints, have read this exhaustive analysis of the ISIS movement. It's a valuable take on a subject that is simply too complex for a teevee -- or even most print outlets -- summary of the situation.

It takes some doing to go to London and Melbourne and sit down and listen to these cold-blooded psychopaths, who are using their religion as an excuse to fuel their apocalyptic fantasies, and address grievances that are legitimate, but are really the grievances of their parents and grandparents.

That said, I think the freshest thinking and writing on the subject is from John Robb at Global Guerrillas. Graeme Wood postulates in his Atlantic article that a theological movement whose doctrinal weight must eventually place it in a situation where it can no longer operate in the way it intends. Robb, on the other hand, sees these "open jihad" things as stigmergic, constantly iterative, with a clear short-term goal of taking down the Saudis, at which point they obviously are in a real position to write their own rules.

(Not that the Saudis have been great friends or anything.)

It should be clear by now that where the US has failed in its war on terror is in more or less the same mode as the Soviets failed in Afghanistan:  the approach has been rooted in ideology, rather than in a practical application of systems theory, as Robb approaches it. The Islamic State actors embrace both things almost equally well, which is another clear indication that a good part of their success is attributable to the Iraqi Army regulars who have defected to that cause, since we managed to fuck the dog so thoroughly in putting a corrupt Shiite gubmint in charge of what had been a mostly Sunni command infrastructure.

In other words, our obsession with de-Ba'athification post-Saddam worked in perfect congruence with the destabilization of Syria in the wake of a record drought (and please don't ask about who controls all the water that flows into Syria and Iraq). When people ask whence ISIS sprung and gathered momentum, those are the two big conditions that fed the beast.

In hindsight, it would have been wise to temper our expectations about the "Arab Spring" of a few years ago, so it would be wise now to carefully consider our viable options now that that false promise has faded into a haze of chaos, violence, recrimination. The usual right-wing armchair tough guys want to blame Obama for all that, and they're right insofar as geopolitics doesn't seem to be Obama's strong suit.

But, uh, it wasn't Fredo's strong suit either. I don't think anyone has the right answer, because the foreign policy of the hegemon is mostly all or nothing, especially since you can't use checkbook diplomacy with these Islamic State creeps. At the same time, you can't just let them overrun the Saudis either (and yes, all the precious oil). Iran and Saudi are mortal enemies, of course, which makes the dynamics of all this so much more compelling -- and dangerous.

The US has obviously had no talent for knowing which corrupt petro-douche to throw its support behind, and how (or how much). Strangely, it may turn out in retrospect that the biggest missed opportunity was to not have gotten the Russians involved to help strike a balance of great powers to assist in stabilizing the region (which again has not worked out too great so far, but look what's happened with no presence at all).

Putin did us a solid in helping dial down Bashar Assad's chemical assaults on his own people (not that that's stopped the Syrians from just dropping barrel bombs on "rebel" entities, who of course are hiding among civilians). And while the Russians' actions in Ukraine over the last year have been contentious, to say the least, there's been zero effort on our part to work any of it out, no acknowledgment of the fact that Russia considers a NATO state on its borders as unacceptable as we would consider Mexico becoming a Chinese or Russian satellite.

So what do you do about this region, and how? Our previous bungling empowered and cleared the way for these psychopaths, we have some moral obligation to at least think about options to help the captive populace. Forget the idiots from western countries who are going over there for jihad; no one will miss them if they get droned.

But more practically, maybe it's time to get serious about renewable energy sources, to dump Marshall Plan money into a Great Project -- akin to landing on the moon or Mars -- to make those sources viable and scalable. What powers the Middle East is oil revenues, and the second those are gone, the wealthy Saudis and Kuwaitis will get out one step ahead of the surging mobs, escape to their Greek island hideaways, and those places will sort themselves out. There will be voices calling for us to jump in, and again perhaps we have a moral obligation to do that in some respect. But it has to be done with the knowledge that innocent people will die, regardless of our good intentions, no matter how careful we try to be.

And it has to be done with a systems outlook that is responsive and agile, that adjusts as quickly as they do. It could all end up in another decade of chasing shadows in a miserable moonscape regardless, but that approach is the only way you stand a chance against a faceless, implacable foe.

News of the Whirled

It's odd, yet somehow fitting, that Brian Williams gets caught "conflating" his war stories at almost the exact same time as Jon Stewart announces that he's leaving The Daily Show. Who knows, maybe the impending demise of Williams' career played a part in Stewart's decision. Obviously the two are good friends, and Stewart walked a fine line in lampooning Williams' gaffe, and presenting a greater context for it.

Williams seems like a nice enough guy, and with his appearances on 30 Rock and Daily Show and such like, he's cemented that perception in the public mind. Given his position as corporate news reader, making such appearances is more crucial to career stability and advancement than, say, actual journalistic research. Stewart, on the other hand, may literally be the closest thing to an actual journalist this country has on television, though John Oliver has jumped in impressively and taken it up a notch, with deeper digging and no filters at all. And David Carr's recent untimely passing is a reminder of what real journalists do.

What we've become accustomed to thinking of as "journalism" most often involves video, rather than audio or (god forbid) print. Judicious editing and tight narrative replace nuance and context. The corporate logo, by definition, requires hewing to an establishment line. No doubt Brian Williams considers himself a serious journalist, and even though the helicopter he was riding in did not get hit, he still rode in a helicopter in a combat zone. Not that it matters; the most important subtext of a combat embed is that you're not showing a thing without the approval of the military and the government.

And it's not a minor detail that the conservatools bleating the loudest about Williams' typical lamestream perfidy are mum about the many prevarications of their latest and greatest totem, Chris Kyle. They do not care that Kyle almost certainly fabricated several image-building war anecdotes (one of which ended in a fat judgment against Kyle's estate in the favor of Jesse Ventura), and likely at least embellished some parts of his combat record.

To that point, actually I don't much care about Kyle's lies all that much either, insofar as they don't negate the things that Kyle did that are verifiable. And that's part of the point about Brian Williams. He's merely a product of the machine he works for, a machine that by design employs and promotes team players such as Williams, affable faces to provide a semblance of information between commercials for a tired, bored populace that wasn't going to rise up anyway. This is how consent is manufactured, and pharmaceuticals and automobiles are moved. It's not rocket science.

Nor is the cable commentary circus anything approaching rocket science either. So when a toxic dickhead like Rudy Giuliani starts running his filthy cakehole one more goddamned time, it's tough to get mad at Giuliani, any more than you can get mad at your dog when you leave him in the house and he shits on the floor and chews up your couch pillows. He's a fucking dog, you're the dumbass for not understanding that dogs do what they do when given the opportunity.

Giuliani is just one of countless professional buffoons whose stock in trade is ventriloquizing the moronic delusions of a demographic that deserves everything they're getting -- aggrieved maroons who, in between collecting their gubmint checks, begrudge everyone and everything else, and scribe fanciful tales about the Black Satan in the White House. The idea that Obama is a closet Muslim is ludicrous; the idea that he's a closet atheist, and understands exactly how shit would blow up on him were he to even hint at such a thing, makes much more sense. But we'll never know, because these coddled, cosseted dipshits literally would not be able to handle the truth.

It's unfortunate that the only barrier to entry in becoming a political meme or talking point these days is simply being something that can be described, digested, and shat out in under ten seconds, just long enough to get someone riled up about some nonsense. They would much rather send other people to fight and kill an enemy they know nothing about, make an awful situation even worse, so they can go back to what they were doing, which was absolving themselves from their ongoing fuck-ups.

Network and cable teevee news is all just marketing and public relations, properly diluted and vetted for mass consumption, something to keep people placid yet attentive enough to listen to the words from the sponsors, whether it's the Koch Brothers or Big Pharma.

Tout Le Monde N'est Pas Charlie

If you run a blog, one geared primarily toward current events, it makes sense that when events occur, you jump on it with a quickness and register some sort of observational analysis, one that pinpoints your approval or disdain, ultimately. Counter-intuitively, I find myself more and more inclined to wait, to bide time, to consider as many elements, if not all "sides" of the event or argument. This is less a matter of some high-minded mission to craft the ineffable pronunciamento, and more of a recognition that, no matter how obvious something might appear at first, there is almost always more than initially meets the eye.

The initial base reaction to the mass murder of the Parisian satirists at Charlie Hebdo magazine is (and should be) revulsion. Brave stand, I know. Seems like an easy thing to condemn, like human trafficking, or animal cruelty. Setting aside the official iniquities of Balfour and Sykes-Picot and their policy heirs, ordinarily people have the right to be angry and disgusted not just at this massacre, but at other such horrors perpetrated, if by isolated cells of radicals, still radicals of a generally like-minded bent -- to kill, to destroy, to hurt and maim, not necessarily against "westerners," but against any and all people who are inconvenient to their murderous ends.

Run Silent, Run Deep

Let's take a breather from pontificating about the cop-shoot-unarmed-black-citizen (though if you're a white person firing a real gun and pointing it at cops, they'll find a way to bring you in unharmed), and throw in on this latest instance of The Most Transparent Administration Evah getting dissidents under its thumb.

In 2009, Barrett founded Project PM, “dedicated to investigating private government contractors working in the secretive fields of cybersecurity, intelligence, and surveillance.” He was particularly instrumental in using documents obtained by the hacktivist collective Anonymous to expose secret collaboration between the government and various contractors. The covert factions Barrett’s work threatened are powerful, and fought back. Two years ago, Barrett was arrested and threatened with 100 years in prison—yes, you read that correctly—allegedly for threatening an FBI agent, concealing evidence, and linking to a website that contained stolen credit card numbers.

....

Eventually, Barrett signed a plea deal on three of the lesser charges against him, the other charges were dropped, and the threatened sentence reduced from over a hundred to eight and a half years. His sentencing hearing has been repeatedly scheduled and then delayed, and is currently set for December 16.

More here. The sentencing has since been pushed back to January 22nd. Brown now faces 8½ years, rather than over 100, which is nice, except that's still a long time to spend in Club Fed. They'll fix his wagon, just like they fixed Jeremy Hammond's wagon, and maybe Michael Hastings. Gee, I wonder why Ed Snowden prefers to wait it out in Russia.

(Just to add to any possible conspiracy guy conjecture about Hastings' death, the linked article mentions how Hastings' Mercedes leaped the median on N. Highland just south of the Melrose intersection, into the palm trees. Here's what that looks like, courtesy of Google Maps:

I don't know which exact spot Hastings dies, but I know this area, have driven through it many, many times over the years, and it's nothing, it's cake as far as urban LA streets go. That's just a few hundred yards south of Melrose, here's another couple yards south:

So yeah, in an age where vehicle computers can be hacked, yeah, I'd say it's fairly hinky that a guy who followed a high-ranking general around a war zone suddenly loses his shit driving around a fairly sedentary Hollywood neighborhood. Maybe it's paranoid, maybe we can see what happens to people who get too inquisitive for their own good.)

I'm in the middle of reading Cory Doctorow's Information Doesn't Want to Be Free, which is quite good. So far, Doctorow describes the venal shenanigans perpetrated by tech mega-corps (cough Apple cough) in the name of "copyright" -- not only is it basically illegal to hack your iPhone and disable the tracking software on it (which is vulnerable to spyware and rootkit viruses, plus it tracks you), but the music you think you're purchasing outright from iTunes are merely "licensed"; you don't actually own them like you would a physical CD or vinyl record. Why? Because those physical objects can't be tracked the way an MP3 can. And life is too short to read and parse the EULA.

So that's the benign side of the matrix, what do you imagine the deep-state implications are, the level of collusion between government and private contractors. The whole reason government outsources everything from war to cybersecurity is because government is still at least theoretically accountable to its constituents (though in reality that's laughable), while a private contractor can cloak itself in proprietary "security" mumbo-jumbo, protected by rather liberally applied digital copyright laws, which go far beyond anything applying to dead-tech physical media.

Remember, this has largely taken place or accelerated under the supposed commie librul preznit; aside from maybe Rand Paul, what do you think it'd be like under any of the Republican goofballs? They'll leave your guns alone, but go overkill on hackers and dissidents.

This Must Be the Transparency They Spoke Of

No administration ever turns out to be as responsive and transparent as they promise to be. It's practically impossible, especially for a commander-in-chief with zero military knowledge or experience. It makes sense that Obama will always defer to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on these matters.

There is almost no chance that the ISAF (and jeebus knows my dick gets granite-hard at the limitless ocean of sometimes recursive acronyms that the modern military is truly all about) will be more than minimally "successful," by whatever no-doubt-shifting criteria they choose to measure that. There's probably a variety of reasons, some of them measurable within the overall expenditure in question.

Maybe some of the Afghan Forces trainees are Taliban saboteurs. Maybe some of the money gets siphoned off here and there to grease the palms of local warlords, or Karzai and his family. Maybe all of the above. One thing Afghanistan -- like any other collection of human beings, but two generations of war has amplified it there -- has no shortage of is pelf and power and venomous shitheads who would fuck their own country over for a fistful of dollars.

So let's say that you, Tonstant Weader, are the preznit of these here Yewnighted States, and have a fine degree from Harvard Law but zero military experience. And Stan McChrystal or Peaches Petraeus tells you that the most efficient way to kill American enemies without endangering American soldiers is to deploy a fleet of killbots high above the Hindu Kush, controlled by some guy with a joystick in a trailer in Tampa.

Sure, there's always the chance that the hellfire you rain will kill some people who already want to kill you. But you won't have to send in more troops. That's the choice being presented to you, the president, by people who have a lifetime of experience with this shit. You can't tell them no without a better plan, one that you can take to the press and try to convince millions of people who hate you on a deeply personal level.

Or they tell you that these special military programs operating halfway around the world in an extraordinarily problematic part of the world, likely run by their handpicked protégés, need to remain classified because too much information would undo all the good work they've done, and intend to do. Knowledge is power, and in this case would empower the bad guys.

So what are you gonna do, smart guy? Tick-tock, you have to make a call, and soon, because as the song says, choosing not to decide still counts as a choice.

I'm not in any respect sticking up for Obama or his chickenshit acquiescence to many of these policies, which have only increased in scale and degree, and will only continue to do so. We'll know we're at the saturation point when drones are used to attack (don't worry, it'll be spun in the media as "defending" against thuggery) the next Ferguson riot. But in the meantime, it's not that difficult to see how these wrong-headed decisions get made.

Doing the Same Thing Again and Again, Expecting a Different Result

The civilian body count in Gaza continues apace, despite the unsurprising revelation that the incident that triggered the current round of conflicts was not perpetrated by Hamas after all. It will end after some number has been reached to generate sufficient outcry by the rest of the world at Israel.

Not that that absolves Hamas in particular -- they really do dig tunnels and stockpile missiles in civilian areas, specifically to goad the Israelis and gin up world outrage, while the Hamas leaders sit in Jordan or Qatar or wherever, and watch it all take place on TV.

But Israel also needs to get it through their heads that, between Gaza and the settlements, the outrageous treatment of Palestinians in their daily lives leaves them quite literally with nothing to lose. Anyone would figure that if there's no reward for good behavior, only more punitive actions, then you might as well try another tack.

At the end of the day, though, Israel really is the only thing resembling a democracy in the region, and certainly more democratic than its neighbors (excepting perhaps Lebanon, which tends to be too weak to avoid meddling and infiltration by Syrian and Iranian entities). The world may be repulsed at the civilian body count Israel is producing, but most are also repulsed at the radicalized Islamist "culture" perpetuating right in Israel's backyard.

It's okay to be objective and call horrible things and people for what they are. What ISIS and other radical groups do in the context of Islamic religion or Arab culture should be separated from those things specifically. What those groups do and impose on their hapless people is nothing more than raw power. Sure, there are things about decadent western society that repulse even most decadent western sensibilities.

But the difference is that we don't force, with violence or the threat of violence, our women to wear beekeeper suits, or beat them if they leave the house unaccompanied, or whip or stone them for having sex. That would be at least one way in which you could differentiate one culture as being objectively superior to another, especially one that hasn't produced anything useful or innovative for hundreds of years.

Back to Gaza. Israel is going to have to make a good-faith effort not just to stop the fighting, or to make concessions entirely contingent on the cessation of any and all hostile incidents, but to curtail the activities -- again, at a local or even neighborhood level -- of settlers and ultra-Zionists, who make the lives of Palestinian residents as miserable as possible. If they do something about that, they might not find themselves back in this fix every year or so.

We Just Disagree

The settlers are dicks. So are Hamas. This nonsense will continue until the Palestinians get that they are basically the Washington Generals playing the Harlem Globetrotters, over and over and over again, destined never to win. There will always be these radicalized events that escalate into official violence, and when neither side is willing to give in on its most egregious tactics, you're going to get what you got, which is one side with a missile defense system that actually works against the constant barrage of rockets, and another side whose death-cult propaganda allows for their kids to be martyred. In turn, the rest of the Arab Middle East uses the plight of the Palestinians for their own propaganda purposes, while studiously refusing to take any of them as refugees.

A frequent tactic of modern religious believers -- evangelicals in particular -- is to contrast death counts between believers and atheists, comparing the hundreds of years of religious wars against the 20th century totalitarian systems that murdered millions of people for the sake of atheist ideologies. It would be easy enough to characterize this most recent spate of violence in Israel as a Jews vs. Muslims religious cage match, or the ISIS insurgency as Sunni vs. Shi'a internecine bickering.

The root of these issues are really just the usual old things -- power, control, water, territory. Religion is part of it, sure, as are culture and history, and the inability to drop a fucking grudge. But it always comes back to monkey killing monkey over pieces of the ground.

All Poodles Are Dogs, But Not All Dogs Are Poodles

I've seen Ayaan Hirsi Ali in a number of interview and panel segments over the years, and I get where this writer is coming from, in that Hirsi Ali is one of the more caustic critics of Islam in general, and militant Islamists in particular. I suppose having one's clitoris forcibly removed, and having a friend murdered in the street, with a death threat to oneself attached to said murder victim, will sort of do that to a person.

That said, it is a crude comparison at best to categorize the collective lumping of over a billion individuals in with the few thousand most violent practitioners, with anti-Semitic or anti-gay criticisms. It shouldn't even need to be said that, while perhaps Jews and gays no longer face the horrors of genocide or systematic violence, it really hasn't been all that long since they did face those things (and in fact still do in many countries -- how are gays faring these days in, say, Uganda or Iran?).

It is not fair to insinuate that all Muslims are responsible for the actions of a small but virulent percentage of lunatics, but when seemingly nothing at all is said or done in that regard, it doesn't absolve them from any responsibility whatsoever to address the issue. The experiences Hirsi Ali has endured in her life, both from outdated "cultural" traditions and from ideological fanatics, are real, and for many areas in the world, still normative. I mean, ten bucks to the first person who can guess the religion of the folks behind this, or this.

I don't know what to make of people who emigrate to other countries that already have long-established legal systems, and expect those new places to conform to the female-hating third-world holes they left behind. It can be difficult to parse cultural norms from religious precepts in many instances, but uh, I can assure you that as a decadent, hedonistic westerner, I am a great deal more offended by the consistent treatment of women as illiterate chattel, than they are by a satirical drawing of the prophet (PBUH). But since I am a rational person, and not guided and goaded by this or that collection of Levantine folk tales and regressive sky-buddy whispering, I can fight their bad ideas with better ideas, and still express my resentment at my own gubmint thinking that it can and should handle the situation with a fleet of killbots raining hell on villages. Some of these folks seem not to have made that seemingly modest intemellectual leap.

It might be more productive for concerned Muslims to address the fanatics in their attic already, instead of raising false equivalences about what sort of speech is offensive, as if the typical respective reactions to being offended were remotely the same -- someone maybe losing their job for talking shit about Jews or gays, versus riots and violence over comic strips and movies.

Off-topic but still fun, given the post title:  the one and only Ken Ham discourses on poodles.

Dicko Uncheneyed

I think it's just swell that there might still be someone out there who still gives a shit about Dick Cheney's opinion on anything.

Conspiracies in Plain Sight

You know I loves me a good conspiracy theory as much as the next prole, but I think brother Orlov might be reaching a bit here (though his deeper insights as to the history of Russian-Chechen enmity is certainly interesting). It's not that it's inconceivable that people in the gubmint could and would conspire to do horrible things -- it is a business that seems to attract casual psychopaths -- it's that they are simply too organizationally inept and individually talkative to pull something like that off. There's always (okay, usually) one sane individual in any given room that says, if only to themselves, "Wait. What the fuckety-fuck!?!"

This is not to say that Orlov's assumption of false-flag absolutely can't be true, just that it's extraordinarily unlikely, that there's zero reliable evidence of such, and that at least one of his corroborating links appear to be babble and bullshit poached from WhirledNutDaily. But hey, it's a free country, it's okay to ask questions, even if they turn out to be the wrong questions. One thing people across the political spectrum can agree on is that historically, the powerful have tended to resort to unsavory means in order to retain or expand their hold on said power.

Now, all of that said, it is not tinfoil-hattery to point out that the incredibly militarized response in Boston should give one pause. In an urban area that has its share of armed assholes shooting one another routinely, the town went into martial-law lockdown with a fucking quickness, to hunt for a kid who might or might not have a gun and/or a jerry-rigged pressure cooker.

This is not to minimize the threat that the Tsarnaev brothers posed at a time of genuine chaos, but rather to suggest that this is a case of the creeping paramilitarization of municipal police forces. You want the good guys to have more and better weapons than the bad guys, but we're looking at zombie-apocalypse measures being utilized on a city of over half a million people, in response to a vicious crime, but one that is routine in many countries, the way gun massacres are routine here.

These extreme measures should be cause for some concern -- what, every time some asshole figures out how to make an IED or a pipe bomb in his basement, the entire city has to squat in their hovels while SWAT teams and private security firms wave their automatic weapons at every window?

And while Orlov's assumptions may appear to be off-base, his rationales have at least some credibility. The implosion of the empire continues apace, Dow 15000 notwithstanding. The oligarchs have made it clear that the planet is their cash cow, and they don't feel like sharing, because fuck you. Notions of pay commensurate with strenuousness and difficulty of work are whimsically archaic; in the Excel paradise, the man with the golden algorithm sets the earning curve.

But imperial maintenance is costly, and as noted, the donor class only shells out money in order to rent pols to do their bidding; maintaining infrastructure and creating jobs is your fucking problem, hoss. Capital mobility is king, and you are but a serf. What happens if gasoline prices hit six, seven bucks a gallon here, and supply chains start getting iffy? You ever take a look at how your food supply chain operates, how heavily it depends on the affordability of petroleum? What is the official response when the plebes start rioting for reals, when the cheez doodles are no longer on the shelves? What happens when the financial racket finally blows out like the bald tire that it really is?

And the debates over whether Boston was false-flag or not can continue as more evidence (or "evidence") comes in, but one fact comes through regardless -- this was a golden opportunity for gubmint to flex nuts and test civil response mechanisms in case of extreme circumstances.

Since there were no reports of anything untoward during the lockdown, one can assume that compliance has been found sufficient. Regular programming can resume.

Rule of Law

"We must be careful about what we pretend to be." -- Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

So let's see if we have this straight:  some two-thirds of the remaining prisoners in Guantanamo -- most of whom have been cleared for release, yet not released all the same -- continue to rot in their subtropical dungeon, without charge nor trial, for over a decade now. The only way for them to get out of their Orwellian sentence is suicide, and some of them have managed to take that path.

Now those who remain get force-fed, nasally. Perhaps this is because it was deemed to be even more painful and humiliating than being force-fed anally. Who knows? Nothing makes sense about this situation anymore. Except that nobody seems to give a shit whether these people will spend the rest of their lives stuck in some legal limbo that no one is in much of a rush to rectify.

Either they are guilty, or they aren't. Either there is evidence against them, or there isn't. Put them on trial and have done with it if they actually did something, or admit a mistake and set them free, and close this place already.

Just as we executed enemies who waterboarded Americans during World War 2, but reserved the right to use the same form of torture when it suited us, so the application of basic jurisprudence appears at this point to be nothing more than a polite affectation. Again, either we -- and our endlessly dithering constitutional law scholar of a president -- believe that it is wrong to imprison a human being without charge, trial, or proof of crime, or we believe it's perfectly fine to do such a thing for no better reason than political convenience and cowardice.

This is yet another in a long (and getting longer all the time) line of issues where Obama continues to whiff. If he wants his legacy to be something other than "Congress wouldn't let me" then he needs to sack up and by god do something about anything.

Seriously, dude, no one's expecting loaves and fishes. Create a few decent jobs; take some steps to alleviate the impending clustersomething that health care deform will perpetuate, since it does nothing at all to address the usurious racket comprising the American health care system; enforce basic party discipline to keep retiring Democrats onboard with simple background-check measures for deadly weapons; maybe pressure Harry Reid to insist on actually having to get your ass up there and spend time filibustering, rather than this lame "threat" dodge the goopers get away with routinely. Take a bold stand that civilized nations don't lock people up without charge and lose them in an offshore gulag for a decade or so.

Put these people on trial; if they're guilty, shoot them as enemy combatants. Whatever. But do something, ferchrissake, something slightly bolder and more principled than strapping a person to a table and jamming tubes up their nose to force-feed them like a foie gras goose. The fact that said person may not only have been supposed to be released, but may very well be innocent in the first place, and spent a decade of their life in hell because of someone else's chickenshittery, is a disgrace.

You can make fun of Dubya's ridonkulous Liberry and its self-serving exhibits, but what's Obama's library going to look like at the rate he's going, a cartoon of Barry O getting pushed around by Mitch McConnell and Jamie Dimon for eight goddamned years?

I know his acolytes console themselves that his feckless 11th-dimensional chess mastery is somehow infinity better than whatever shit sandwich Romney and Ryan were cooking up. But only as a mild, eroding bulwark against the eternal predations of the oligarchy, not that Obama has done thing one about them or even slowed them down. In the meantime, every bloody thing you despised about the Bushies -- imprisonment without trial, drone war without end, the ongoing and deliberate ruination of the financial system, the rich getting richer and the poor no longer even getting by -- continue unabated.

There's not much more time for Obama to decide and act on whether he wants to end on eight years of excuses and ineffectual moderation, or to take a risk and do something, anything, pick a direction and grab a shovel. I have zero faith that he'll do the right thing, and it no longer matters whether he wants to but can't, or if he simply was never the transformative figure he was pretending to be. Just another politician, forever chasing the next election and too timid to do anything that might actually impact someone from the non-donor class.

Dumb and Dumberer

Maybe we can all chip in and buy a nice atlas for the Twittard cowboys who can't tell the difference (and couldn't care less regardless) between Chechnya and the Czech Republic. Small distinction there, dipshits. Not to mention the slight possibility that, since so far it looks as if the bombings were committed by two individuals born in Chechnya, and not agents of the actual Chechen government, that a retributive act of war might be, um, como se dice, overreacting?

I promise you, if this had been some suburban asshole doped up on psychotropic meds, tuning up his daddy's AR15, and not a couple of idiots armed with pressure cookers and ball bearings, these same internet tough guys would be singing a different tune about the whole thing. You can use a gun to pile up a couple dozen bodies in a classroom or mall, and the most these guys will have to spew is the usual jabber about liberty, or how it would have been better if all the kids/mallrats had been armed. But a couple of swarthy malcontents cook up some incompetence in their basement kitchen, and we gotsta invade the wrong country, any country, like stat.

What happened in Boston is unbelievably awful, no two ways about it. But what's striking is that the folks who bray the loudest about "freedom" in the wake of gun massacres are the first to want to nuke something, anything, when any other weapon is used. And they're always the first to surrender every other freedom. The gubmint can read their emails and up-arm the local gendarmes, put cameras everywhere and confiscate nail clippers and shampoo in order to fly, so long as they don't get any bright ideas about doing background checks on felons and lunatics. Awesome. That makes sense.

And then you have the Twittard tough guys, as mentioned above, who can't even be bothered to consult a map before running their mouths. I thought war was supposed to be god's way of teaching 'murkins geography. Guess not. These are the sort of bozos who think Volvos are made in Switzerland.

Honestly, I'm amazed that some of these halfwits can remember to breathe. I'm assuming that they own no footwear that require tying laces. Shudder to think that any of them might have positions of any responsibility, or worse yet, children.

Oceania Has Always Been At War With Eastasia

Looking for more reasons to love the successes of the American educational system?

Reason #1:

A war on the Korean Peninsula is unlikely after an American strike, but it is not inconceivable. The North Koreans might continue to escalate, and Mr. Kim might feel obligated to start a war to save face. Under these unfortunate circumstances, the United States and its allies would still be better off fighting a war with North Korea today, when the conflict could still be confined largely to the Korean Peninsula. As North Korea’s actions over the last two months have shown, Mr. Kim’s government is willing to escalate its threats much more rapidly than his father’s regime did. An unending crisis would merely postpone war to a later date, when the damage caused by North Korea would be even greater.

China’s role in a potential war on the Korean Peninsula is hard to predict. Beijing will continue to worry about the United States extending its influence up to the Chinese border. If armed hostilities erupt, President Obama should be prepared for direct and close consultations with Chinese leaders to negotiate a postwar settlement, in a larger multinational framework, that respects Beijing’s legitimate security interests in North Korea. The United States has no interest in occupying North Korea. The Chinese are unlikely to pursue an occupation of their own.

Reason #2:

 

 

 



 I know, right? It's a bit of a challenge to determine objectively who the bigger dumbass is here -- the tenured professor at the state university, or the Herpes Shore candidate who probably flunked out of eighth grade.

Either way, as always, America wins, because we simply refuse to learn. We'll show the world that, despite pouring a decade's worth of blood and treasure into two epic failures, we're not afraid to start up two more, just because we can. I don't think we actually will, but the fact that people still want to indicates that Kim Jong Un and the mullahs aren't the only goofballs in this equation.

Armchair Quarterbacks

So apparently it's the tenth anniversary of Villager Michael Kelly's death in Iraq, which gives cause to review Kelly's pungent arglebargle supporting the aims of a clearly inept and venal administration, and lambasting its opponents. Ta-Nehisi Coates does a perfectly fine job in dismantling Kelly's pissy assertions, so I have nothing to add there.

One bit of easy speculation is as relevant as ever, though. Let's postulate an alternate universe in which Kelly came back from Iraq alive and well, and resumed his career, but the war and its aftermath went precisely as it has done. There should be no doubt that Kelly -- like Billy Kristol and the rest of the pigskin prognosticators who were wrong, wrong, wrong about anything and everything -- would have picked up right where he had left off, gotten back to his career of being smugly wrong about shit, and been well-paid and regularly employed for it. The Village takes care of its own.

Postcards from the Edge

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEaKX9YYHiQ

A study in contrasts, insofar as the insular, single-minded propaganda machine of a totalitarian state (and no, I don't mean Entertainment Weekly, smartass) can have contrasts. Exhibit A, regarding the increased ankle-biting of Dennis Rodman's new buddy:

Kim Jong Un Convenes Operation Meeting, Finally Examines and Ratifies Plan for Firepower Strike
Pyongyang, March 29 (KCNA) -- The moves of the U.S. imperialists to violate the sovereignty of the DPRK and encroach upon its supreme interests have entered a grave phase.

....

He said he has judged the time has come to settle accounts with the U.S. imperialists in view of the prevailing situation.

If they make a reckless provocation with huge strategic forces, the KPA should mercilessly strike the U.S. mainland, their stronghold, their military bases in the operational theaters in the Pacific, including Hawaii and Guam, and those in south Korea, he said. He examined and finally ratified the plan of the Strategic Rocket Force for firepower strike.

....

He said the heroic service personnel of the KPA and all other people, their hearts burning with irrepressible resentment at the reckless war provocation moves of the U.S. imperialists, are now waiting for a final order of the WPK Central Committee, hardening their will to turn out in a do-or-die battle with the enemies.

And here we were given cause for hope from this rundown of flirty spring fashions, just two days prior:

Spring Costume Suitable to Koreans

Pyongyang, March 27 (KCNA) -- A change has taken place in the Korean people's costume with the advent of spring season.

Seen in streets of Pyongyang are women dressed in chima (skirt) and jogori (coat), an elegantly and beautifully looking traditional costume.

In this regard, KCNA met Pak Hyon Sik, director of the Clothing Institute under the Ministry of Foodstuff and Daily Necessities Industry.

Pak said:

People choose to wear in spring clothes convenient for movement, with their colors light bright and soft.

Anyhow, mode of spring costume should be taken to suit one's countenance and figure and one's age.

It is advisable for the people in the 20s or 30s to dress themselves freshly and vividly and the middle-aged to wear light-colored clothes. Chima and jogori is suitable to most of Korean women. The old persons' attire should be neat and comfortable.

My institute works hard to develop colorful clothes of various fashions conforming to the socialist way of life and sentiments of the Koreans.

Awesome. Can't wait for the swimsuit issue. Kerry and Hagel have their work cut out for them with this guy, don't they? Even the Russians and Chinese are at their wits' end with these goofballs. Kim the Third, steeped in generations of top-dog cultism, may be in danger of believing his own hype. He wants to get to the negotiating table, but for what? Didn't anyone steep him in the nuances of Kissingerian/Metternichian top-level diplomacy we typically approach these sorts of situations with, that since only Nixon could go to China there is no way a Democratic administration will risk looking like appeasers to a lunatic?

It's like an entire nation decided to make this their national anthem. The "Ministry of Foodstuff and Daily Necessities Industry", fuckin' seriously?

Then again, from the NK POV, they just watched us spend an entire decade waist-deep in the Big Muddy, not once but twice, spending ungodly amounts of blood and treasure trying to bring down loose collaborations of irregular militias. It's entirely likely that Kim and his generals think that with one of the world's largest armies, a nascent nuclear arsenal, and a healthy dose of weird (if not flat-out cray-zay), they might just be able to leverage whatever the hell it is they think they want out of us.

It's past time to get the rest of the neighborhood at the table, to have an intervention for the local meth addict.

Game of Drones (Slight Return)

You have to give Rand Paul some credit here, for countering the chickenshit trend of recent years, and actually filibustering. Never mind that Paul and his grandstanding friends would probably have been a bit less likely to find his bedrock principles in the face of a Rmoney administration, the fact is that they went ahead and did it.

And sadly, the senatorial cohort did have something of a point; opinions are bound to vary by degrees as to the propriety of extrajudicial killbot assassination. But you can bet that at least some folks might have a change of tune were it, as noted above, we were talking about Rmoney and not Barry O.

It should be noted yet again that, in a long line of truly execrable attorneys general, Eric Holder is a piker. He's certainly no Ed Meese, or even a Thumbscrews Gonzalez. What he is is ineffectual and largely useless; he seems to think that, in a world where the Too Big to Jail claque probably wipe their asses with toilet paper printed with his visage, his priorities should be griefing stoners and finding John Yoo-type parsings of constitutional interpretations.

One might think that an administration headed by a consititutional scholar/lawyer might be more rather than less clear as to where the boundaries of Teh Dronz are actually drawn, if only to prevent the next certifiable retard/bloodthirsty henchman regime from exploiting its full potential, but this is naive, wishful thinking. It implies that there are more than incremental, cosmetic differences between the wings of The Party, and that the horse isn't already way down the road on the subject.

As dismal a place as the world is much of the time, it's certainly better without the likes of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki. The problem is that the precedent Obama and Holder are setting here, Rand Paul's theatrics notwithstanding, is identical to the one Nixon set when he intoned that it's not illegal when the president does it. Clear-cut supporters of this sort of obfuscatory, potentially despotic rhetoric need to keep that in mind on the off chance this nation loses its fucking mind one more time and hands things off to Jeb!/Rubio or Trump/Palin in 2016.

This is yet another of so many areas where technology has drastically outpaced the law's ability to keep up. But even if Holder had openly repudiated the use of drones and/or extrajudicial assassinations, secret courts, yada yada, it is still too little too late. The Fourth Amendment was gutted while people were obsessing over the Second. We accept infringements of personal liberties in pretty much everything already, from peeing in a cup to get a job that doesn't pay enough to live on, to getting treated like a criminal every time you want to travel by plane or buy allergy medication.

Frankly, the real problem with Holder is not that he's an apologist for the worst excesses of covert foreign policy and clandestine mission creep, it's that domestically, he's just like every other pinhead that staked their legacies by jamming up small fry while letting pelf-saturated thieves and scumbags ass-rape the economy over and over again. If anything, he's just another in a long line of examples from "both" "parties" of the evil of banality.

Maybe it's more reassuring to convince oneself about how much better Obama is than Rmoney would have been, and that's true enough for what it's worth, but let's face it -- the Dow hit a record high, and chances are you're not a dime better off.