No, it's not radio silence...

 ...it's the damn Frontiers post.

How this joint - blog and country - feels at the moment.

I've finally got to the crux of the biscuit - the collision between the German "strong right wing" (the three right wing feldarmee) and the Allied left (principally the French 5re Armee and the British Expeditionary Force).

The thing is (to give away the plot) that there were several critical reconnaissance problems that affected the way both sides maneuver forces assembled, moved, and fought, and to analyze them I had to break the last half of August 1914 into a ridiculously granular level - literally day-by-day - of detail, and that's taking forever.

While I'm doing all this my country is going completely to a madman's Hell in a handbasket, and I'm not sure what else there is to say about it.

Put aside the usual GOP MAGAt bullshit - the basso continuo of stupidity, greed, racism, sexism, xenophobia, half a dozen other fucking toxic -isms - and it's the jaw-dropping stupidity of the Second Fraudulency Administration's cunning plans that hits so hard.

Seriously.

It's not the greed. It's not the criming. It's not the fascism.

Those were baked in from the moment this fucking country re-elected Felony Fats.

It's the utterly pointless, pinheaded, stop-me-before-I-shoot-myself-in-the-dick moron-grade dumbfuckery.

Let's gloss over the whole insane "Get Greenland!!!" side arc and focus on the real Krown Jool of Boneheadedness that these fucksticks are chasing;

"Mass Deportation Now".

Stop and think for a moment.

Who does this whole lets-chase-down-brown-folks-and-disappear-them benefit?

More to the point...how in Beelzebub's Fucking Hell does deporting random geezers, bodega grannies, drywallers, tomato pickers, and busboys even benefit you and me, Joe and Molly Lunchpail, Mister and Missus Average American? 

Are these people "criminals" in the "roll you for a nickel and stab you for the extra dime" sense?

Ohhellno. We've been over and over this. It makes no sense for 99.9% of anyone in this country illegally to go around criming and getting a police spotlight shining on them. Most undocumented people are the opposite; trying to keep on the downlow and below the cops' radar so they can make a living.

Are they "taking your..." fill in the blank here; job, house, tax dollars?

Pretty much no. The jobs most of these people are doing are those that legal citizens are largely loth to do; farmwork, meat processing, construction, "hospitality" (read hotel maids and waitstaff). They can't collect entitlements without, again, popping up on radars they don't want to attract. They're not manipulating the rental and housing markets. How? They rent houses or apartments just like citizens, and the cost of those rentals is determined by the owners and landlords, the availability by developers and zoning rules.

So how does 86ing them in job lots help you and me..?

 .

 .

. 

Take your time. I'll wait.

Okay, now. Here's the one place I'll agree with the fucking idiot Trumpkins: having a mass of people in a country who lack citizenship is troubling.

I've written about this over and over, and can't express it better than I did in 2017:

"...to be a stateless person, a non-citizen, in a foreign nation is not a good thing.

It's not good for the person, who has no civil rights, who is outside the protection of the civil law, and who is, therefore, hideously vulnerable to all sorts of malefactors.

And it's not good for the nation, that has this indigestible mass of non-citizens within it prey to crime and violence, exploited by employers and living in fear of taking part in the civil life of the community.

So. The bottom line really is; if you are a citizen of Mexico, or Ireland, or Bali...you belong in Mexico, Ireland, or Bali unless you are a legal resident or visitor of where-ever-it-is-you-are; in this case, the United States."

Yep. Still true. 

In a sane polity We the People would have a simple, orderly process for people who want to come to this nation, regardless of who or what they are, to get on the track to citizenship. Learn the Common Tongue (English) speedily, become conversant with the conventions of citizenship...

(and as a note here, the appallingly low level of civics knowledge of the supposed citizenry in this country is, or should be, a scandal. Way too many MAGAts get away with talking the shit they do because Joe and Molly don't have the fundamental understanding of the principles contained in the founding documents or a knowledge of this nation's history to refute the traitors' bullshit.)

...and become part of the quilt of people and culture and ideas that are the promise of this nation; equal justice under law. Liberty and justice for all.

The surface trappings of all this Trumpian lunacy - masked ICEstapo goons in the street, ridiculous lies about eating pets, secret prisons - is just the foam on the Latte' of Mindless Racist Xenophobic Stupidity of the MAGAt horde. Meaning that we could arrest, convict, and jail Felony Fats and his entire coterie of fools, assholes, and Nazi pals, and we'd still have this problem...because of the millions of the fucksticks around us who luuuurve them this nonsense.

So, nope.

We're not getting out of this with One Weird DeTrumpification Trick.

ICE.

Tariffs.

Antivaxx loonies.

"Entitlement" cuts to finance tax gimmees for fatcats. 

"antifa".

Greenland, Venezuela, Panama, Gaza, Iran...

They're all going to be problems for decades. The plutocrats who are the force that gives MAGA meaning are getting their tax giveaways and deregulation. The Christopaths are getting the Bible-banging. The MAGAts are getting the "I love eating shit so long as the people I hate have to eat more shit" they crave.

Between them the rest of us are fucked.

And, like I've been saying over and over; it's not just that we're caught in the MAGA dystopia.

It's that this is Stupid Dystopia. This is getting handed your ass because you let the world's most ignorant hillbilly chucklefucks into the control room of the nuke plant because you were pissed off that your email signature could include pronouns.

Christ on a fucking crutch.

 

Why we can't have nice things.

So my "news" is alive with "revelations" that the tax outfit that worked for the Trump Organization for a decade or more has bailed.

Yawn.

Here's the thing; all this sketchy Trump shit has been right out there for decades. 

He was a joke in the Eighties when he was bankrupting casinos and running as Veep for looney third party candidates. 

That, and he was an obvious ginormous asshole personally. 

He was a nitwit then. Spy magazine was the one that christened him the "short-fingered vulgarian" and everyone who didn't have to depend on him for income laughed. He was a punchline. 

He was also mobbed-up - mind you, it's hard to work in Manhattan real estate without being mobbed-up, but Trump was a freak even then by being out and proud about it. He was too much of an asshole to even hide it or have the social grace to pretend to be ashamed about it.

But that was Trump; lots of people knew him, lots of people despised him as a worthless, idiotic, asshole-ish if supposedly-"rich" dirtbag.

But now he’s got a third of the country willing to commit treason for him.

 

How fucked up is that? 

 

In a weird way I can get being in thrall to a hero conqueror like Julius Caesar or a charismatic maniac like Adolf Hitler, or a grim tyrant like Josef Stalin. 

 

But to be barking mad enough to go to war, to kill yourself with COVID, to try and overthrow your republic for Donald Fucking Trump? 

 

That’s like being willing to die for the Trix rabbit. Or a box of granola. 

 

That’s just so far beyond “stupid” as to change the meaning of the word “stupid”. 

 

I just don’t get it.

 

I mean...I get that the average GOP voter is all about "owning the libs". 

 

(That's kinda all they have at this point. Who's gonna vote for more COVID, or another tax cut for plutocrats?)

 

Problem is that if the result is that Trump is out there “leading” you in "owning the libs" a person with anything more than a room temperature IQ should have their bullshit alarms shrieking like a horn concerto. 

 

Buying ANYthing Trump markets is the political equivalent of dining at The E.coli Buffet.

 

Of course, these nitwits have been letting Rush Limbaugh take a dump in their skulls for the past thirty years, so there's that.

 

But that's kinda the problem. We're infested with these bucketheads; damn near a third of the public. That's enough to be a problem in and of itself, but in an open society like ours, where it takes a small handful of assholes to utterly fuck up the public space for everyone else?

That's lethal. There's no way a civilized society can work with that level of dysfunction.

 

Movement conservatism is a repulsive shitpile of Gilded Age plutocracy, Jesus humping, racist bull crap and magical thinking. But when somebody like Barry Goldwater was the figurehead you could, looking at it, at least pretend that an otherwise normal human could buy into it.

 

But when your god is fucking Trump?

 

You’re a turnip-grade moron who shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce.

And yet...there they all are. All the Second Amendment Solutions in the world won't solve them, and short of an extinction-level genocide event, what else you gonna do..?

Nope.

WAJSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSF. 

So since I respect all Internet traditions here's a picture of a cat.

Talking to the hand

 One thing that has come up repeatedly in discussion of the current state of the Second Civil War - in the "cold war" phase, but, still... - is "how do you back the public away from the abyss" or, as Ael likes to put it, how do "...you start (really) talking to them."

I'll say upfront - I'm all in on jaw-jaw as better than war-war.

My point, and our problem, is that I don't see how there's a "jaw-jaw" that works with the 30% of the US public that's currently stroking their Trump flag and dreaming of revanche.

Back in 2016, when Trump was the frontrunner for the GOP, I characterized it's and his "platform" (as much as there was anything there other than Trump's million lies about criminal Mexicans and his beautiful health care and Infrastructure Week "plans") as fluffing plutocracy and tossing red meat on social issues to the Base.

I think we've seen that proven beyond a scintilla of doubt over the past four years. 

Trump's approval level and the 2020 popular vote suggests that about a third of the US public is hardcore Republican. That tracks with the base-level "crazification factor" of 2008 - about 27% of the public still "liked" Dick Cheney by that point. 

If you're all in for Darth Cheney after eight years of the Dubya Shitshow? You're a hardcore Republican.

So, now that we've seen how many of us they are, and what they are and what they want, what can we do to "really talk to them"? How many will talk back?

Let's take them as the groups in which they present themselves.

The Plutocrats.

The keystone of the GOP Archway to the Gilded Age are the fatcats. The 1%. The plutocrats and wanna-be oligarchs of business and finance. The people that the "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act" of 2017 were written for.

These folks were the ones that were shaved by FDR back in the Thirties and had to bend the knee because an infuriated public had the examples of the Soviet and Italian revolutions to look to, and were at least potentially likely to go to communist or fascist revolution if the US government hadn't done something to ease the brutality of the Dickensian/Randian crony capitalist society of 1929.

They hated that haircut, and have worked tirelessly and successfully to largely reverse it.

The Left has nothing to offer these people except safety from the popular mob. And the current lack of danger from the Left - there's nothing remotely resembling the weird coalition of muckraking journalists, militant (typically socialist or even communist) labor, and political strength ranging from Huey Long every-man-a-king "populist" to noblesse oblige aristos like FDR - means that the "danger" there is nonexistent and the need for "safety" is, as well.

The Rich have neutered "populism" by monkeywrenching the delusions and racism of white people. And since they have nothing to fear from the pop mob they have no real reason to compromise or even talk to the Left. They've succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of the aristos that wrote the Constitution, so why give ground now?

The way arrant nonsense like "trickle-down economics" and "tax cuts create jobs" have succeeded with the public just confirm their wisdom. They're not going to fold unless they lose the bulk of their coalition, of which the next segment we'll talk about are

The Idealogues.

I'm not sure to what extent "true believers" make up any significantly large group within the Republican Party or the US Right in general. To the extent they do I'd have to say that they're living embodiment of Chief's Third Law of Republican Politics: "Any sufficiently ridiculous Republican idea is indistinguishable from magic."

(The other two are "Nobody went broke betting on the stupidity of the Republican voter" and "Never give a Republican the benefit of the doubt.")

I mean...you can't really believe ludicrous stuff like the contents of Atlas Shrugged or the Laffer Curve or the Ledeen Doctrine. Well, I suppose you can, but you'd be such a complete wanker so as to be unable to appear in public because you'd be too stupid to figure out how to unlock your front door.

But to the extent there are people who pretend enough to get the cosplay close to real, well...if you do believe this stuff I can't see a way to wrangle you out of that cult by talking sense to you. 

That sort of belief depends on utter disregard for actual practice and life experience, factual evidence, and common sense. You believe it because you WANT to believe it. It's like a religion or, more precisely, like a cult, and like both of those it's not about "talking" it's about belief.

Which brings us to two related groups,

The Bible-bangers and The QANuts.

I'm sorry, but to me there's no true distinction between "talking" to these two groups of fanatics. They both believe impossibilities so they can both be convinced to do atrocities and they can't be talked down out of their trees.

I'm not talking about nice suburban Presbyterians or douce Catholic church ladies. I'm talking the reeeeeal red-meat foursquare megachurch fanatics and the QANut-Pizzagate-conspiracy-threory-wingnut hordes.

Ever tried to discuss how unrealistic the basic tenets of monotheistic religion are with a real hardcore fundamentalist believer of any faith? The responses are either to simply shut off the conversation, or to respond by saying that faith is belief beyond reason.

I'm not saying "religion is bad"; religious faith has been the engine behind some of the great works of art, music, literature, and even politics in human history. It's also been behind some of the most appalling atrocities and horrors, which simply points up that it's 1) not "religion" per se but the tenets of the religion and 2) not religion but the people who are involved. 

One person creates a transcendent work of art, another slaughters other people for their "sins".

But regardless of the person involved, "talk" is a another term for "debate", and faith isn't debatable, it's based on emotion, not reason.

There's a rather sad little story in a recent NYT about some sort of QANut "meme queen" (paywall, so no point in linking) but the author sums up the whole futility of "talking" to these people pretty well:

“These people aren’t drooling, mind-controlled cultists,” Mr. Rothschild said. “People who are in Q like it. They like being part of it. You can’t debunk and fact-check your way out of this, because these people don’t want to leave.”

There's a sort of bizarre subset of these groups, or a parallel to them;

The Trumpkins.

MAGAts. Trump Cultists. People who either genuinely or performatively believe that Trump is like a living God.

I have NO fucking idea how to "talk" to these people. If you're literally in thrall to this mook after his four year reign of terror? I can't possibly have anything to say to you that you'll listen to, or whether you can get through to them with anything short of those "deprogramming" things they use on other culties

So, "talking" to any these cultists? Not really helpful.

 

The Racists.

Yeah, well.

The only real disconcerting part is how the sheer number of these sonsofbitches seems not to have dwindled since the Civil Rights Era and how, despite all the talking we're already done since the 1950s (and before), how they're still the same goddamn ignorant shithead racist sonsofbitches they were then.

Good luck with trying to talk to them about being less racist sonsofbitches. I'll go get some coffee and wait for you here.

The Gun Nuts.

I'd like to think that there's a reachable discussion here, simply because I'm a gun owner and enjoy both hunting and target shooting.

I think the problem is that there's a couple of subgroups within the larger assemblage of "gun owners" whose obsessions drive them into wildly and irretrievably into Right Wing politics; the "Second Amendment" cultists who have managed to completely blank out the "well-regulated militia" portion of the amendment as well as the documented reasons that it was added, the "Fallujah-cosplayers" who want the military hardware without the nuisance of actually having to join a service.

The bottom line is that there's no demonstrable reason to assume that the Founder and Framers wanted to reserve the "right" of Joe and Molly to overthrow the US government. 

(Hint - That's why we have fucking voting..!) 

But these people - and I think this includes the weird sub-subgroups like the "open carry" loons and sovereign citizens - believe they did, and seem to have gone way too far into the weeds to be talked back; they're the American equivalent of those post-WW2 Japanese troopers who hid out in the jungle.

And the thing is that I've been involved in "talking" to the real hardccore gun cultists and there's always something. You mention background checks and there's always a hardcore that tells you it's a slippery slope to confiscation. It's all paranoia about "confiscation" all the way down, no matter how reasonable you start. The notion that any and every jamoke can tote a semiautomatic assault rifle knockoff isn't really a good idea can't even get through the door because if so, confiscation is next.

I'm not sure these people are gettable. I'd like to think so and I think it makes sense to try and have a sensible discussion of "what is a reasonable well-regulated firearms policy". But given my experience when I've tried? 

I'm not super hopeful.

The Social Conservatives.

I'm calling these the "gays-are-icky" group. They're not the American Taliban-type religious nuts from above that think anything but penis-in-vagina sex is a Sin and that God Hates Fags, but the "I-think-we-should-all-dress-and-act-normal-like-me" people who have been convinced that electing "liberals" mean every kindergartner will be forced to have Drag Queen Story Hour every friday after naptime.

 Here's the thing about them.

They can't have what they want.

They can force the trans kid into a certain potty. They can force the gays or lesbians back into the closet, and by that I mean in any way. They need to accept that other people's behavior (that doesn't involve physical or political danger to others) is neither their business nor their problem.

If they can be willing to buy into that? Fine.

But if "talking" to them includes throwing all those non-cis-het-"normie" people under the bus?

No. That's not okay.

So there's "talking"...but the "talk" has bounds, and if they're not willing to accept those, the talk probably won't convince them of much.

The Rest.

This is where I lump the generic "conservative"; not a wannabe Roeckfeller, not fanatically religious, not a conspiracy theorist, not a crazed Trumpkin, not a lunatic gun-humper. These people are as close to what used to be called "Rockefeller Republicans" as 2021 can come. The groups above probably call these people "RINOs". They accept the fundamental tenets of the New Deal - that unrestrained "capitalism" is dangerously punitive and you need to balance it with intelligent regulations and some sort of "safety net" to help the people run over by corporate power.

It's pretty much what the Master Chief was until Newt Gingrich's Contract on America drove him out of the GOP because he could see through the transparent bullshit.

Can we talk to these folks? Sure. They're not going to agree on everything - they'll want more guns and less butter, for one thing - but they'll agree on enough of the basics that we can at least agree to disagree.

But...how much of the GOP is left for them?

It's pretty obvious that the real nutjobs - the cultists of whatever sort - are by far the dominant force in the GOP right now. I'd say that something like half of the GOP are MAGAts, QANuts, Christopaths, or some version of the gun-nut/sovereign citizen/Klansman type. Another half of the remaining half are plutocrats. 

That leaves only about a quarter - so something like 7-8% of the US public - as the sane conservatives we can talk to.

Which is why I keep coming back to how utterly fucked we are.

If a third of the public doesn't care even though they've lived through the GOP's malfeasance killing hundreds of thousands during a pandemic disease.

And three-quarters of the remaining third are too far gone to even get to the table, much less to some sort of accomodation.

How the hell do you have a "We, the People" left out of the remaining third-and-change?

I truly, honestly, frustratingly don't know.

I know you have to for a functional democratic republic.

But if you don't...if you can't?

That's what really worries me.

Ice cream castles in the air

Among the people I check on over the electronical internet is someone named Sexton. He's smart, he's knowledgeable, he's been "yelling at the right buildings" for a while now...but I think he gets this one very, very wrong:

"There is no both-sidesing a political landscape where a vast majority of Americans believe in reality and science and democracy and a violent minority is gnashing its teeth and demanding everyone join their sycophantic death cult."

It's the "vast majority" thing where he trips and falls.

Nope. Nopenopenope.

No.

Just no.

Assume that there are about 239 million Americans of voting age. Discount as a rounding error the disenfranchised (felons, the legally incompetent) and a total of about 152 million voted in the presidential race, about 79 million and change for Biden, 73 million and change for Trump. That's about 64 percent of the total eligible voters.

So, right off, more than a third, 87 million people, don't "believe in reality and science and democracy", at least not enough to be arsed to get off their duffs to vote in perhaps the most consequential election in more than eighty years. 

You can make all the excuses you want about voter suppression and the difficulty the US puts into voting and the pandemic and the lack of a truly inspirational choice. This was "MOAR PLAGUE!" versus "Less Plague, thanks..."; that's not exactly a tough call there. If you have to go down to the Safeway to pick up a six-pack of "vote" to keep a complete whacko from burning you alive inside your house, that's a must-make grocery run. Simple as that.

Now throw in the 73 million who actively voted for MOAR PLAGUE!

These people sure as fuck don't believe in science and reality, and given their meeching enthusiasm for the ridiculous "vote fraud!" lies they don't actually believe in "democracy", either.

So, not just no but fuck no. The vast majority of Americans aren't rational actors who love and cling to the ideals of the Constitution and equal justice under law. 

The "vast majority" - about 67 percent - of the American public is either crazier than a shithouse rat and somewhere to the right of Reinhard Heydrich on the subject of "democracy", or just could give two shits so long as they get their supersized bag of Cool Ranch Doritos over to the couch before "The Masked Singer" comes on.

The bulk of We the People are somewhere between "utterly worthless" and "shoot on sight, like a rabid weasel".

Makes you wonder where the hell we're going to go from here.

And it makes you wonder even more if you really want to find out.

But most of all it reminds me of this little Twitter vignette:

"Quote by a forest ranger at Yosemite National Park on why it is hard to design the perfect garbage bin to keep bears from breaking into it: “There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and that of the dumbest tourists.”

 

Damn.

Dr. Donald J. Trump on the subject of viral intelligence, April 10, 2020

“This is a very brilliant enemy. You know, it’s a brilliant enemy. They develop drugs like the antibiotics. You see it. Antibiotics used to solve every problem. Now one of the biggest problems the world has is the germ has gotten so brilliant that the antibiotic can’t keep up with it.

We’re fighting…not only is it hidden, but it’s very smart. Okay? It’s invisible and it’s hidden but it’s…it’s very smart.”



Something is intelligent...but I'm not sure it's anything (or anyone) involved in this statement.


And this is the head of state of the most powerful nation on Earth.


We are so, so, so, so, so, so, SO fucked.

Quo Vadis II: Desperation Boogaloo

So yesterday I posted my thoughts on the GOP. Trump or no Trump, that sonofabitch is trouble and the short answer is, simply; needs to be taken out behind the barn and shot in the head.

But...

Here's my concern.

The problems inherent in a post-industrial economy are genuine. Forget that the idiot Trumpeters are responding with the Wrong Rage, baying for a moronic pussy-grabbing caudillo whose very stupidity will ensure that he will be a tethered balloon for the oligarch-pandering wealth-whores that run the rest of the GOP and, thus, end up doing nothing or worse for the poor meatheads who pine for him. Concentrate on the economic cause of that rage.

The last time the United States was run as an open oligarchy it was a complete shitshow for everyone else, and it was turbulent in a way we've completely forgotten in our cushy era of labor-management peace and relatively level inequity. Outside the people who didn't count - the wommens and the darkies of whatever complexion (the red, yellow, and brown were included in the outcastes) - the period between the 1870s and the 1930s were distinguished by a welter of riots and strikes and the every-present threat of "anarchy" in the form of scary bearded anarchists (definitely foreign, probably Jewish, suspiciously dirty in some vaguely Slavic or Latin sort of way...) lurking under the tablecloth with smouldering bomb in hand.

And this didn't even count the ACTUAL scary foreigners in places like Communist Russia and Fascist Italy or Germany. Until the recent mania for "Islamic terror" we've seen nothing like the sort of social panic that "anarchy" caused and the resulting Red scares and things like bloody strikebreaking and police spying and ethnic hatreds and lynchings and...well, you get the idea. It was a bad time not to be a Rockefeller or a Carmody and let's not return there.

It seems to me that there needs to be some sort of political alternative for the sort of people who broke for Trump this election, one with less open racism and xenophobia.

And there is, by the way; Sanders Progressiveism, featuring all the nutritious populism and economic egalitarianism without the toxic racism, sexism, and xenophobia! But the Trumpenproletariat won't take it because, well, eeeeew, Dhimmicrats and Defeatocrats and Feminazis, oh my!

So even if the Sanders progressives were to capture the Democratic Party as the teabaggers captured the GOP there's no way forward there.

What else?

Libertarians are, frankly, nuts. Anyone whose party platform calls for abolition of both the income tax AND all federal firearms regulations shouldn't be allowed to play with cutlery, much less the national debt. The simple notion of these libertarian idiots (but I repeat myself) trying to fund enough law enforcement to round up the sorts of people who would go out and buy an M240 Bravo to put behind the razor wire next to the fucking mailbox makes my head hurt.

Greens? Perhaps when they cut their ties with antivaccination goofballs.

And there the realistic political options end, at least for now.

I find all of this very depressing. I can see the problems, and I can see solutions...but not a viable way to get the U.S. public from here to there.

WASF.

Fortunately it's almost 5:00pm, so I can begin to start drinking heavily.

Spy vs. Spy: Bay State Fathead Edition

Well.

Good to know that only the most cunning and hardest-core of the fiendishly cunning hardcore Mooslim evildoers lurking behind the arras of Islamofascism can evade our highly trained Homeland Security colossus and harm us;

"After being read Miranda rights, the Boston bombing suspect in custody, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, has stopped talking to authorities, officials tell the Associated Press. "The surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings acknowledged to the FBI his role in the attacks but did so before he was advised of his constitutional right to keep quiet and seek a lawyer, U.S. officials said Wednesday,"

This guy has been in the U.S. since he was nine and has never, EVER watched a TV police show. Or cop movie.

Ever.

Had NO clue that crime suspects lawyer up and dummy up.

Until they told him.

Remind me - how the hell did this fucking idiot figure out which side of the pressure cooker to put the boomy-stuff in?

And this is the latest Fiendishly Cunning Mooslim Evildoer? Man, they gotta be vacuuming the bottom of the gene pool over there in Scary Islamofascistic Caliphate-wannabe Terrist Land^TM.

(h/t to Doghouse Riley for the update.)

One Last Reluctant Post on the Recent Clusterfuck in Gaza.

The discussion on the whole question of who did and is doing what to whom in the portion of the Middle East where Jews and Arabs butt heads has gotten rather huffy, which is frankly what I expect whenever this issue comes up. As I've said here, and there, repeatedly, there IS no solution outside genocide of one faction or the other OR a massive concatenation of impossible actions on the part of a dozen different parties in the dispute.

For example, here's my friend Lisa, a brilliant and lovely person whose opinion I respect in every sense, commenting on this post;

"The very tiny nation that is Israel could not be defended without the Golan Heights."

Which just makes me tired and sad. Here we are, sixty years after watching two insane World Wars that were ginned up to a great extent because of Germany and France repeating this about Alsace-Lorraine, and look at where it got them.

The sad thing about the argument that we've been having here and at MilPub is how it just convinces me how insoluble this problem is.

Lisa - for all her wisdom and humanity - refuses to see the Arab residents of the former Palestine as anything but "the problem", and meanwhile here are bb and Ael - for all their intelligence and decency - saying exactly the same thing in reverse about the Israelis.

Here Lisa is equating "liberal sympathy" with the Pals with anti-Semitism, while here are the guys - who I have to assume from mere politeness if nothing else are not arguing from a base of "Jews suck" - arguing for sympathy for the Pals because of the actions of the Israeli Right.

I don't think either one of them is "wrong"...and yet, in terms of solving this clusterfuck, they're BOTH appallingly and terribly "wrong".

The simple reality is that Israel is and always will be a Middle Eastern colonial solution to a European social problem.

Israel may very well be "warred upon" - certainly the Arab residents of the Levant chose to fight rather than accept its existence - but what the fuck else could the Zionist founders expect? They were Normans in England, colonists in New England, Portuguese in Brazil. They tried and succeeded in doing what hadn't been done since the late 19th Century; founding a colony. And this was just as the rest of the world had turned it's face decidedly AGAINST colonialism.

Now I'm more than willing to own my own country's atrocities and vileness in genociding the pre-1492 residents of the place I live. If a native American "terrorist" organization started rocketing North Portland and blowing up Tri-MET buses I'd shake my head in grim sympathy - before arming up to exterminate them like vermin. In that fight I'd completely understand WHY my enemies were fighting, and at the same time understand that there was no middle ground there; we both wanted exactly the same thing, and for them to win I and mine would HAVE to lose. And I'd choose for their women and kids to die rather than mine.

But at the same time, I'd also understand that that would make me a monster. I wouldn't make excuses for myself. I would be doing wrong, and willingly, because that's the nature of colonialism.

The very nature of Israel and its situation in the Middle East makes for monstrous choices. Lisa has made hers, Ael and basil have made theirs. And so it goes.

But here's the thing; as a citizen of the U.S. I don't HAVE to make a choice. I can blithely wish a curse on both the houses in this colonial mess. I can wish that everyone involved in the business had made better choices. I can wish that Truman had offered Utah to the Zionists. I can wish that David Balfour had choked on a kipper at the age of 16. I can wish a lot of things, and none of them will made a half-damn's worth of difference.

But one thing I cannot do is change the utterly-fucked condition of the eastern Levant, and the only thing I mourn is that it sets my friends at each other's throats.

Blue Screen of Death

One thing we seem to keep returning to at MilPub, as a dog returneth to his vomit, is the apparent inability of the United States - both its people and its governing classes - to either formulate, or even discuss intelligently, any sort of geopolitical or military strategy.

A formula or discussion, that is, that doesn't involve someone shrieking "911! Scary! Brown! People!" at some point, usually early in the process after which all ratiocination flies out the window.

I am one of those who suspects that this is a feature, not a bug, of American society. And pat, like the Fairy Queen in pantomime, comes David Ignatius on the front page of my daily newspaper's editorial section, to remind me of why I think this.

The point of Ignatius' little screed seems to be to whip up worry about the nefarious plans of the Yellow Reds, who seem to be intent on developing a Chinese Commie Space Death Ray (read "...space weapons, lasers, pulses and other directed-energy beams") along with cunningly oriental "cyberattacks" and electromagnetic disruption aimed at knocking out our precious bodily fluids PCs and related digital command and control systems.According to Ignatius

"The nature of warfare is nearing another "hinge point," due to the advance of technology. Just as gunpowder, cannons, airplanes, rockets and nuclear power changed the face of combat, so too will a new generation of weapons that are on the drawing boards -- not just in America, but in China, India and other advanced technological nations."

Um. Well. Gee.

In a sense this is nothing new. Every generation of wonder weapons is supposed to "change the face of combat"; the arquebus, the machinegun, the aircraft, the nuclear weapons, the tank, the freeze-dried combat ration...all were supposed to do some magical thing that would make warfare...different. Replace infantrymen with tanks. Replace tanks with aircraft. Make war at sea a hidden duel of submarines.

But in another sort of sense this is depressing. Ignatius, while certainly an idiot about militaria, is a well-respected idiot, a fully-paid-up idiot member of the Beltway punditocracy. If Ignatius is saying stuff like this, then it goes a long way to suggesting that this sort of thinking is not an aberration amongst the political classes in our nation.

And this is nonsense, of course. A "beam weapon" is a gun. A cool, high-speed, low-drag, Buck-Rogers-space-ranger-slicky-boy gun, yes, but a gun. It exists at Point A and it's task is to project destruction to Point B, which is essentially the same function as the first gunpowder weapon.

It has one significant advantage; it's "projectile" can move from A to B at the speed of light, obviating the need for complex ballistic computation and negating the target's evasive maneuvers. But it has several offsetting disadvantages. The old-school ballistic projo carries a self-contained source of energy that is used and expended at the beginning of the fire mission; the beam weapon requires an external power source that must be both several orders of magnitude more powerful and must be kept online for the entire mission. Unlike the ballistic projectile, the beam weapon can be dissipated by smoke, fog, or particulates, or reflected by a simple mirror.But the bottom line is; it's a gun. It has no more chance of "changing the face of war" than the rifled musket, the machinegun, or the mortar. Possession will remain 9/10ths of the Law of War, and a man or woman with a gun, standing there, will remain the bailiff's process servers.

He has a minor point, and a point I've talked about previously, in his comment about "...aircraft-carrier battle groups -- that will soon be vulnerable to the new weapons." But he misses the point that we're already several generations into an OLD weapon - the supersonic sea-skimming missile - that proved highly dangerous to large conventional hulls in the Falklands almost thirty years ago and may pose a significant threat to our carrier decks. Unlike Ignatius' silly Star Wars scenario with the Red Chinese Death Stars beaming destruction on our fleet carriers from space, all these nefarious Asian rascals may need is better stealth technology for their submarine fleet.

If they can feel confident about their ability to get inside the ASW screen to launch a massive volley of antiship missiles they won't need some ginormous low-orbit satellite system that would be almost certainly immediately knocked down by USAF antisatellite systems within minutes or seconds of the first faint click of war drumsticks.

And EMP? Christ, we've been dealing with this stuff since the first radios died at Bikini Atoll, Dave. We harden our digital systems. They develop new means to scramble them. We harden them again. Wash, rinse, repeat. Making this into a major point of defense policy is like getting hysterical because of reports of Al Qaeda developing a giant mutant clothes moth to devour our troops' uniforms and make them fight naked.

Honestly!
The entire article is like this. No questions about the global geopolitical strategies, goals, needs, or wants that might dictate the allocation of military funds or the composition and capability of military forces, but lots of bloviating about "legacy systems", "innovation" and silly formulations like the U.S. as "IBM, running big, clunky mainframes, at the same it's trying to be an Apple-like innovator. We can't afford to do both."

Of course we can, Dave. That's what armies have done throughout history. You don't think that the Europeans threw away their swords when the first handgunner showed up on the battlefield, do you? Or the invention of the automatic rifle caused every trooper to throw away his pistol? Gah.

I have no idea how many people inside the Beltway are reading Ignatius and pulling their chins sagely. I hope it's no more than a handful. Because if there's any clearer evidence that this ridiculous piece that, at least in Ignatius' case, on the questions of military policy the entire CPU is toast, I have yet to see it.Makes you want to do a hard boot on Ignatius' brain and see it the damn thing makes more sense afterwards.

(Crossposted to MilPub)

Spy vs. Spy: Beaver State Fathead Edition

So it turns out that I now know a total of something like a dozen people who were in Pioneer Square in downtown Portland when this fucking idiot thought he was committing an act of guerilla violence.

The following couple of days my Facebook page was littered with posts to the effect of "OMG! I was there! Thank you, FBI!" and appended with comments praising God and the solder (or FBI agent) whom we adore.

Perhaps it was because I hadn't the slightest interest is watching the lights go on a big fir tree so I was at home playing Jenga. Or perhaps its because I'm a nasty, cynical SOB by nature. But you'll excuse me if I beg off the universal congratulations to my government for catching the next Khalid Sheik Mohammad.

Because from what I understand;

1. This idiot did everything but wander around Corvallis wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Osama and the legend "I'm With Stupid".

2. Ignoring the First Rule of Internet Hookups ("The chance that the hot sixteen-year-old soliciting for no-holds-barred wild monkey sex over the Internet is actually either a vice cop trolling for morons or a 42-year-old pervert looking to get you to post pictures of your pecker approaches unity the longer you keep searching the Net for loli-porn") the idiot splattered the Web with his jihadi spam until the FBI was unable to continue to ignore him.

3. The feds then:
a. contacted Mohamud in a June 2010 e-mail under the guise of being a jihadi.
b. met with the guy multiple times, where he pushed them to help him with his nefarious plans. Supposedly the agents "cautioned Mohamud several times about the seriousness of his plan, noting that there would be many people, including children, at the event"
c. pretended to help him with logistics, including "assembling" the bomb and testing a smaller version somewhere in backass Lincoln County, Oregon.
d. appeared in a video with him to record his "mission statement".
e. picked up Mohamud to travel to Portland to finalize details of the attack.
f. set him in the seat of his bomb-van with several fake drums of pretend explosives in the back (which the idiot failed to check, proving that he was a no-go at the first performance test of walking-while-breathing, "You need to be smarter than your equipment") which he dropped off near the tree-lighting spot
g. let him make the detonating phone call - twice - and then busted him.

So excuse me if I'm not celebrating the takedown of the greatest criminal mastermind since Professor Moriarty. This moron Mohamud sounds like he might have spent the next five years in his bedroom playing the jihadi version of "Call of Duty" and eating cheetos if the FBI hadn't pretty much handed him the color-by-numbers handbook for would-be jihadi truck bombers. This wasn't fucking Tim McVeigh. This wasn't even your basic Palestinian pay-for-kaboom suicide bomber. This was a fucking idiot who didn't have the basic common sense to check the equipment his suddenly confiding new "friends" procured, engineered, assembled, transported, and emplaced for him.

Don't get me wrong. I'm glad this guy didn't kill anyone. I'm GLAD he is a fucking idiot.

But I'm reading the skittish Facebook responses from the people who were in the square that evening, and wondering what will happen the next time someone proposes some sort of additional security theatre, or profiling the Somali immigrant community, or loosening the entrapment laws, or some other sort of exchange of liberty for "security".

And, of course, demands that all response to the nose-led idiot be based on panic fear and reflexive condemnation rather than skepticism and the Rule of Law.

Or, even better, turns into lynch mob counter-terror and attacks on American muslims because...well...because, y'know, they're terrists!

Because if the study of history and politics has taught me anything, it has taught me that there is no practical limit to the damage to a society that the society can do to itself when prodded by a single idiot.

Update 11/28 p.m.: Greenwald has more, including the vexing details that the FBI 1) may not have actual evidence that the moron chose his moron path and was not entrapped in some form, 2) paid him as part of smoothing his path to Pioneer Square, and that 3) "Here we find one of the great mysteries in American political culture: that the U.S. Government dispatches its military all over the world -- invading, occupying, and bombing multiple Muslim countries -- torturing them, imprisoning them without charges, shooting them up at checkpoints, sending remote-controlled drones to explode their homes, imposing sanctions that starve hundreds of thousands of children to death -- and Americans are then baffled when some Muslims -- an amazingly small percentage -- harbor anger and vengeance at them and want to return the violence. And here we also find the greatest myth in American political discourse: that engaging in all of that military aggression somehow constitutes Staying Safe and combating Terrorism -- rather than doing more than any single other cause to provoke, sustain and fuel Terrorism."

Interesting Times

Spent a while on the phone with the Master Chief today talking about the current "financial crisis".

We both agreed on a couple of things:

1. That laying on a supply of pencils or apples isn't a priority. Governments made things worse in 1929 by either failing to act or acting in wierdly inappropriate (can you say "Hawley-Smoot"?) ways. We've learned a lot about macroeconomics since then, and the probability that the U.S. government will repeat the mistakes of the Hoover era is slim. The problems that took down Wall Street in '29 were not well understood at the time and deeply ingrained in the financial world of the day. The problems taking down Wall Street in 2008 are plain enough to see and were well known even before this mess. What was lacking was the willingness to stop the fiscal fiddling that was being used to generate short-term profit taking while setting up long term risk - here's Brad DeLong with a good summary of what has happened over the past year. The economic collapse we're seeing appears to be changing the laissiez faire (Republican for "fuck anyone but meeeeee!!!")approach to fiscal regulation. Finally.

2. The probability of some coming economic pain, though, is very likely in coming, and soon. And we both snarled about the illiberal way that this pain is going to be distributed. My comment was cribbed from a Napoleonic cartoon which has the insubordinate sailor sneering to his captain that he wishes that the roundshot will be distributed the same way the prize money will be: the greatest portion amongst the officers.

One interesting part of the recent tsuris has been the degree I see this as showing how far the U.S. Congress has fallen in terms of governance. The Master Chief disagrees. But my point is that the names you hear in the headlines are Secretary of the Treasury Paulson and Chairman of the Fed Bernanke. Where, you ask, is the Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee? Oh, you don't? Do you KNOW who's the Chairman of the House Finance Committee IS? Did you even know it was CALLED the "Financial Services Committee"? (Admission - I thought it was just the "Finance" committee...)

Or who runs the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee (Senate), Finance (Senate) or the Joint Economic Committee? One thing does seem obvious to me, though: the Congress is no longer primus inter pares. We no longer have three branches of government, seperate but coequal. We know this was true for war but now we can see that in peaceful matters the dominance of the Executive is clear. Perhaps the only remaining standard is in the Hearts of their Countrymen, and in that case, Nancy Pelosi is just a nose behind Dubya in a race for the bottom.

Over at Fabius Maximus the old Roman is waxing poetic on how this is the End of the Republic, how this is the first step towards economic and political caesarism, and that we will look back on the events of autumn 2008 as the last days of American republicanism. It's worth a look in - my man Fabius is always informative and always brings good arguments into the fray even when I disagree with his conclusions. For what it's worth, I agree with him - to a point...

Now you know how I feel about this; the game's been up for quite a while now. What we're seeing is just an open acknowledgement that government of the Rich, the Well-born, and the Able is going to govern for the Rich, the Well-born, and the Able. The Corporate Donor. The Military Contractor. The Friends of George (or John, or Sarah, or Barak...), Patriots, Rangers and all the other "players".

I'm not saying that you or I or Joe and Mary Lunchpail should just stop trying to pull the levers of power. But I will say that this should STFU the Randites and hardy free-marketeers over at Powerline and Instapundit and LGF. Yeah, you're all just economic proles like the rest of us wage-slaves, peckerheads. You and your crappy little house and your crappy little job mean bupkis to the wealthy people in the seats of power in this country. If destroying your job and foreclosing your house and putting your ass on the street will make AIG or Bank of America a nickel's profit, well, hellooooo homeless shelter! As DeLong says:

"...the market fundamentalists...will need to be quiet for quite a while. We have just seen financial markets rife with moral hazard, agency, and adverse selection problems crash spectacularly. Is this a situation in which we should move health care--also rife with moral hazard, agency, and adverse selection problems--toward a free market configuration? No. Market regulation needs to be smart. But first, market regulation needs to be."

I think we're in for a hard, cold autumn.

MWM/MWF ISO hot Republic for NSA 3SOME

Y'know what?

Screw Thuycidides and all that deep, heavy, philosophical metaphysics crap. All you need to know about the 2008 election is summed up in the movie "Booty Call".

Yep. The GOP - McSame and the Northern Exposure - is off on another electoral booty call.

And we know, that based on past experience, that once they get into America's governmental pants they'll do what they always do: flail around uselessly, pleasing only themselves, clueless and greedy, ignoring the mutual satisfaction of their victim in their relentless quest for what's best for them.

And, after they've gotten their nut (deregulated everything in sight for the greater profit of their corporate masters, lined their pockets and the pockets of their cronies, gone as far as possible to satisfy their christopathic legions with back-to-the-Victorian-Era social policymaking) they'll grin at our fury, our impotent anger and frustration with the results of this goatscrew - the battered infrastructure and ripped social fabric and shredded national honor - and sneer "Wassamatter, babe? Am I just too much man for ya?"

Fucktards. God DAMN them!

The problem the U.S. has right now is that the party that has figured out how to win elections can't fuckin' govern worth a damn. And the party whose goals are closer to the general good can't fuckin' win elections.

Good Christ! We're so fuckin' screwed.