"I think they are all homosexual communists in Satan's army...I espect as well they all live together and bathe together every morning and have the anal sex with one another, with the fisting and the guinea pigs." - Manuel Estimulo
"I can never quite tell if the defeatists are conservative satirists poking fun at the left or simply retards. Or both. Retarded satire, perhaps?" - Kyle
"You're an effete fucktard" - Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom
"This is the most pathetic blog ever..." - Ames Tiedeman
"You two [the Rev and el Comandante] make an erudite pair. I guess it beats thinking." - Matt Cunningham (aka Jubal) of OC Blog
"Can someone please explain to me what the point is behind that roving gang of douchebags? I’m being serious here. It’s not funny, and doesn’t really make anything that qualifies as logical argument. Paint huffers? Drunken high school chess geeks?" - rickinstl
I just came to the conclusion that except for oddities and occasional fill-ins, I will probably never "work" for anyone except wife, cats and whim again, and I shockingly realized that I actually don't give a fuck. In fact, feel pretty good. It's been surreal, real, fun, occasionally real fun but mainly just tedium and putting up with a fine broth of idiots, assholes, and asslickers. Going to the cafe to join Rhett Miller and Soren Kierkegaard, Chris Hitchens, Brian Jones, Mr. Jennings and Socrates...
As Mr. Miller and the boys so eloquently put it ....
Gettin out of the house. Im gonna go for a ride, Cause I got me a five-o Ford and the good Lord knows I tried to make friends with you and evrything went wrong. Yeah, Im goin Im goin Im goin Im goin Im gone.
Goin down to the tracks. Im gonna hide out for a while. Gonna have me some ranch-style beans From a tin can hobo-style, Forget your face, If that can be done. Yeah, Im goin Im goin Im goin Im goin Im gone.
And youll find you a boyfriend And he wont like my cat. And youll try to Pretend that you dont want me back. Right now Im leavin So youd better say, So long. Yeah, Im goin Im goin Im goin Im goin Im gone.
Gonna find me a boat And a brand new name. Im gonna find some wall-eyed, Weak-kneed European dame. Shell be my wife And youll only be a song. Yeah, Im goin Im goin Im goin Im goin Im gone.
And youll find you a boyfriend And he wont like my cat. And youll try to Pretend that you dont want me back. Right now Im leavin So youd better say, So long. Yeah, Im goin Im goin Im goin Im goin Im gone.
Yeah, Im goin Im goin Im goin Im goin Im gone.
Yeah, Im goin Im goin Im goin Im goin Im goin Im goin Im goin Im goin Im goin Im goin Im goin Im goin Im gone.
Jesus. Well, what do ya do about a string breakin Oh, nothin
So, to steal a line from Graham Nash to Steven Stills back in the No Nukes Movie and you're looking for an executive like me, well, "Steven, if you need me, call. And Steven, don't call."
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead. In peace there's nothing so becomes a man As modest stillness and humility: But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Then imitate the action of the tiger; Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage; Then lend the eye a terrible aspect; Let pry through the portage of the head Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it As fearfully as doth a galled rock O'erhang and jutty his confounded base, Swill'd with the wild and wasteful ocean. -- HENRY V
True story: Although I get queasy when I think of the modern Republican party in general, in 2000 I changed my registration from Independent to Republican so I could vote for
John McCain in Washington state’s closed primary. Interestingly, by the time Washington rolled around, McCain’s fate had long been decided; however, I still voted for him. I respected him as an honorable man and an American hero with a principled, bi-partisan and practical approach to things. I have some minor tweaks and twinges from my service – I have no idea how someone as wracked with pain and trauma and injury as McCain is can be as active and aggressive as he is. Of course, he’s a bit sociopathic – but then, he was a fighter pilot and they all have their issues. McCain is a throwback to guys like my Dad and his generation. I’d love to sit down and have a cup of coffee with him and just bullshit. It would be wonderful – he’s a man’s man.
But, I have spent a lot of the last five and a half years being pissed off at John McCain. He did something totally frivolous by selecting Sarah Palin; he compounded it by running to the right of his absurd opponent in the Republican primary for re-election to the Senate; his desire to be president had trumped country first when he rejected John Terry’s overtures to join the campaign on a national unity ticket in 2004 only to lust, LUST, after Liebermann and on and on and on. He endorsed Mitt Romney whom he is known to hate, which is just sad; he continues to oppose most forms of gay rights despite the best efforts of his wife and daughter to get him to think; he hasn’t raised unholy hell about Arizona’s drift to insanity whether with the Papers Please thing, the birtherism thing, and so on so much as drifted along on that current. He’s been a spoiled brat whining at Obama. What the hell happened?
A lot of times, when someone has a sea change in their personality, particularly an older and physically challenged man – and McCain has lots of those considering the torture in Vietnam, the cancers, and general stress – one might suspect a series of small strokes re-wiring the brain. Well, from the Maverick who went his own way representing the potential for limiting corruption in government through campaign finance reform and transparency, John McCain morphed into some sort of John Kyl ignoramus and Mitch McConnell corporatist clone. He didn’t embrace Ayn Rand, because frankly, the role of the patriot and soldier in her universe is to be a moronic tool of the wealthy. McCain isn’t a rocket scientist or a constitutional expert or a Stoic philosopher. HE’S A GOODAMNED WARRIOR WITH THE FAULTS AND VIRTUES but HE’s NO ONE’S FOOL!
Now, a lot of the McCain"s an ass stuff that’s emerged over the years has been silly in some ways. McCain is not a reflective scholar personifying cool and irony. The guy boxed at the academy, he was a freaking Navy Fighter pilot. These guys, with a few exceptions, are impulsive, hot-tempered, kind of vulgar types, in the sense of being down to earth and gritty. They curse, tell dirty jokes, make fun of their friends and embarrass themselves, their wives and their kids in public. Politically correct, they aren't. McCain might have been Naval royalty, and he was – but, the services tend to knock the roy- out of you and turn it into LOYALTY. Loyalty to friends, to comrades, to country, to belief. They sit around and drink and bullshit and tell silly jokes. They are impulsive, they speak and act before thinking. A lot of fighter pilots are assholes. A couple of Navy fliers told me how much they hated TOP GUN, largely because the portrayals were so true. McCain was probably a lot like Maverick; Stockdale like Ice.
Admiral Stockdale may have become a modern American Montaigne or Marcus Aurelius, but his very exposure to philosophy came by impulse while doing a graduate program at Stanford. He wandered into the philosophy department and got his mind bitchslapped by a different way of thinking. Stockdale personified detachment and coolness in a way that Aurelius did for Rome. There doesn’t appear to have been a lot of love lost between McCain and Stockdale; so what? Different generations, different backgrounds. And, by becoming a Stoic philosopher who actually practiced that philosophy, Stockdale transcends things. Stockdale walked away from the Citadel because he decided that they were crazy and he wasn’t going to hang on to that at the price of his soul. I suspect McCain would have gotten to the same place, but it would have been messier.
I also suspect that McCain has been fuming over the Supreme Court and Citizens United for as long as it has been on his radar. It declared his signature legislative accomplishment unconstitutional and basically turned politics back to the 1850s. If McCain is reminiscent of any historical political figure, I suspect he reminds us of Teddy Roosevelt. TR wasn’t exactly smooth, but he was passionate, honest an didn’t shy away from fights. McCain, I suspect, has been somewhat muted, licking his wounds from 2008 and wondering why the hell he’s bothered. Not being a deep thinker, that was probably uncomfortable. Loyalty binds him, and he couldn’t really say what he thought about that ruling without slamming the entire system and the Republican ascendency. If John McCain gives you his word, he will deliver – couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t. So, he undoubtedly despises people like Boehner and Cantor and McConnell; we know he regards Willard as something he’d scrape off his shoe. So, it’s time for one more fight.
By joining Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island in filing a friend of the court brief supporting Montana’s claim to be able to control the flow of money into state politics, McCain is throwing down a gauntlet. We’ll see who picks it up; I suspect that a revisit to the case might easily result in a complete reversal; Roberts is concerned about the Court’s Reputation and both he and Kennedy could swing based on the experience. They underestimated the cupidity of the rich and powerful by several orders of magnitude – however, John McCain called it when the decision was rendered and he’s been relatively quiet about it. I wish he’d stood and applauded when Obama called the Court on that nonsense, but I can understand why not. But now, he’s being John McCain. For the first time since 2000, McCain is letting himself be McCain – Country First, Straight Thinking and Straight Talk.
Ok, I’m a smart guy who can be very stupid at times. This is particularly true when it comes to physical limits. I know, for example, that enrolling in the ProAM Bull Riding contest would be a serious mistake. I know that. It would have been a serious mistake 20 years ago and there’s no reason to think it might be a good idea now. I know that El Capitan is not in my future unless they build an escalator. I’ve figured that out…
So, of course, I made a wise crack to a guy 20 some years younger than I that the Mojave Free Press ought to enter a team for the Barstow Mud Run. Figured a leisurely job across the desert, splash through some forgiving water obstacles and then pick up a T-shirt at the worst case. At the best case, he’d laugh and say no thanks, he had to cover it for the paper. How hard could it be? What could go wrong?
Most things.
Well, the principal architect of that electronic fish wrapper is a guy named Charles Waybright. He’s a nice guy, but he either has a sense of humor more twisted than mine or he’s very stupid. Charles thought it was a great idea.
So, there we were, Charles, Bruce Klein and me, surrounded by 1000 or so of like-minded lunatics set to take off across the desert to benefit the Barstow Veterans Home and the Barstow Kiwanis. Both of which are worthy of support for their services to this community which really needs it and more of it. Oh, the guys who bailed on the run so that Charles had to recruit Bruce but volunteered to video the thing and provide coverage for the paper, also bailed. Charles had his lovely wife worried that I might not show or be found and that she would have to pick up the banner. She was prescient enough to be glad to see me.
Drove up there from my home. This being primarily a fund raiser for the Vets Home there were lots of guys and gals there who were former Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines who were volunteering, and of course, in charge. One of the nice things about people with military experience is that if someone needs to be in charge of something, and no one else will do it, they’ll step up. At the same time, a lot of times they’ll take charge because they need to be in charge. Of something, anything, doesn’t matter what. I work very hard at not being like that – it’s less tiring. Still, I can understand the tendency. Six to twelve of these guys were directing traffic. Guy who directed me into my parking space and made certain that I was parked on-line with the rest of the cars must have been an Aviation Bosun’s Mate in the Navy, because a couple of those folks shared with me that their primary function underway was to serve as a valet parking lot attendant for airplanes. Deviance from the line was not to be tolerated…
I kind of regretted that this guy wasn’t organizing the start. It gets hot in Barstow, in the sun, in May, and there was limited shade. Like almost none – the crowd mulled around, and the start was in heats. Somehow Charles and Bruce found me, and I pinned up my number, tied my timing chip to my shoe and we muddled our way through. One reason for running as a team – in our case, Old and Fat! – was to support each other, but somehow we all wandered into different heats. Now, back in the day, I was a distance runner. Then my back went to hell or wherever things go when they decide not to work anymore, and I don’t run. I was figuring the high intensity workouts I do in the gym would cover me. I wasn’t planning on setting records. I may have…probably was the slowest finisher. Hit the first water obstacle and found myself running through water and mud but only up to just below the knees. Climb out, over a birm and head for the next obstacle…which was slightly deeper, and had tires that had embedded themselves in the mud at this point. If you are light on your feet, long legged and run with a high knee lift, this isn’t a problem. If you’ve just turned 61, have always had a squatty body, lift weights for sport and have short legs, this is not going to work. Step, spash, fall, get caught in the mud, pull boots out of mud and repeat. This turned into an ordeal. Got out, shook my head, and started slowly jogging toward the next obstacle. More tires and a birm on each end…you get through the first one, and over it and then there’s another one, just like the other one… Crashed on the next one, which may have involved piranha but did involve a water truck raining on you as you fought you way through the mud, tires and so on. Got through, got out and started walking…got to the first water stop, and stood there drinking warm water out of a cup, which frankly didn’t help all that much. I started to feel less bad when I realized that two college girls were there, both wearing women’s cross country team t-shirts, and one of them had just had an exercise induced asthma attack. She probably weighed about 100 pounds. So, on I slogged.
Skipped an obstacle, continued to slog. Got to the water slide thing…slide down the slide into the water, what could go wrong. Well, a lot…as I found out when I landed and slammed my leg into some immovable object –heap of dead bodies? Left-over rocks? Railroad ties? – pinning my leg back. Guy manning the thing in the pond pulled me out of the way, and I realized that I was now golden – I had a low calf/high ankle strain and could hobble through the rest of the course but couldn’t go through any more obstacles. Yeah, buddy – of course, I’m soaking wet, my Palladium BUDS course boots are full of desert and water as well, my ankle is not swelling that much because it is encased in a muddy, tied running boot, but it hurts like hell, and I have a mile or so of desert to cross. And, so I did. Bumped into Charles who was having problems seeing, because he had listened to someone talking jive and decided he had to splash him, primarily splashing himself. Muddy water in the eyes…hot…dirt…he told me that I had mud on my teeth and looked like a caveman in a rugby game jersey. Didn’t see Bruce…I hope it wasn’t him dead in the mud at the water slide….
OK, I can see the attraction of this event. I think it’s important not to over- or under-think the obstacles – one tire obstacle with several non-tire obstacles before the next tire obstacle one for example would be better – more aid teams and watering spots, and more attention to safety would be helpful, and if you decide to run one of these crazy things, I strongly recommend making certain that they are in fact paying a lot of attention to safety. I heard about a couple of broken bones, and the MEDEVAC chopper taking off from near the finishing line was, well, troubling.
But, this is a budding sport similar in a lot of ways to Cross-Fitness – it’s simple, it’s cheap and anyone can play. Even 61 year old men with bad backs and a smart mouth. There were a lot of kids and families which I thought was great. I was particularly taken by the number of kids running with their moms and dads, although I did see more than a few groups where the kids who appeared to be about 9 were waiting for Mom or Dad to catch up. I saw a few people I used to work with who were volunteering and having fun. Interestingly, one guy who used to work for me and resembles Mr. Clean physically and a wimpy weasel spiritually but who always had to be taking time off to take care of his two very athletic boys was there with the boys. He was dry and clean and I overheard him say, “Oh yeah, they did good…”
One of the benefits of the profound ignorance of a large swaithe of the American people lies in their inability to recognize irony. So, when a first term member of congress who is probably looking at being a one term member of Congress pulls something out not from the Karl Rove playbook but the Joe McCarthy playbook, people will miss it. Our political discourse has skipped self-satire and gone straight to slapstick. As Gibbs rule number 7 puts it, "when you lie, be specific." Allan West, Congressman from Mesron and Florida,is now trying to win a redistricted, largely Democratic district by railing against the Democratic Progressive Caucus as "Communists' announcing that he's "heard that 80 member of congress are communists." You see, the American Communist party, the old Gus Hall powerhouse, has said that the Congressional Progressive Caucus is reasonably close to endorsing their goals. (In the spirit of full disclosure, this website endorsed Gus Hall for President in 2008. Mr Hall died in 2000)I'm not sure what those could be, since the Communist Party of the USA was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Soviet Union of Socialist Republics which...no longer exists. Well, the language is degraded by more than West's blathering, but come on. Read something written by somebody not John Birch or J. Edgar Hoover that explains what Communism is as opposed to what you think it is...a vague threat to take your guns, your government health care, your government pension and your government roads, schools, infrastructure and pollute your precious body fluids while letting your children run wild having abortions and contraception and stuff. Dude, Democrats are to Communists in much the way that the Republicans are to the Freemen of Montana.
West also babbled that Barrack Obama is afraid to debate him. Really? Loudmouthed first termer thinks that the President of the United States should get on a stage in South Florida and debate him? Seriously, if the President has a few spare minutes to waste on West, he should devote it to shooting some hoops with his secret service detail or giving Bo a bath with the girls. Total lunacy... Seriously, the man is a deranged, meglomaniacal dweeb and needs to be kept in government cusody to protect himself and his loved ones from his next over the top appearance or action.
Now, as I listened to the video (let's hold the musing on that trope for another time), I got the sense that a good number of Mr. West's constituents were laughing at him. It's possible that this is gem came out not so much as a Michelle Bachmann unsolicited bit of insanity as a response to poking the bear. West is not exactly known for reasoned discourse, a sense of balance or proportion and measured response to provocation.
Now,the guy could have been court martialed for war crimes instead of being given a slap on the wrist and allowed to retire -- should have been court martialled for war crimes, since he fired a pistol at a prisoner of war in order to make him provide information -- and has disgraced the nation ever since. He was a Lieutenant Colonel in Army; he was in a command position in combat; and he ended up relieved of command and given the opportunity to retire -- which he took. I think West is suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder of an incredible magnitude and should be treated with respect for his service, compassion for his condition while being protected from himself and his demons. Well, Gulf I gave us Timothy McVie; Gulf 2 is giving us Allan West, Republican congressman from Florida.
This is where the Republican leadership needs to step up, get West under control or expect a far rougher response than the sort given so far. This is pretty funny, actually. "Chellie is a Democrat, a farmer and a Lutheran but no, she is not a Communist," said Willy Ritch, spokesman for Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine), also a vice chair of the caucus."
(Note: In the spirit of full disclosure, and as a one-time student of Luther and the Protestant Reformation, I should point out that Luther had some commie-pinko-tendencies prior to the Peasants Revolt. The whole concept of grace in the Pauline-Augustinian-Luther tradition has a pretty strong egalitarian twist to it. But in general, in Wisconsin, yeah equating Lutheran Deomocrats to Communists is like equating Allen West to Allen A' Dale, which I guess would make Boehner Robin Hood and Cantor Little John.)
As that great American political commentator Bugs Bunny would put it, "What a maroon!"
The condition of man... is a condition of war of everyone against everyone. Thomas Hobbes
To be educated, a person doesn't have to know much or be informed, but he or she does have to have been exposed vulnerably to the transformative events of an engaged human life. Thomas More
Can you say AN/PDR-27R? ALPHA-NOVEMBER-PAPA-DELTA-ROMEO-TWO-SEVEN-ROMEO.
Those veterans among us have no problem with that, since it’s basic military phonetic alphabet and is the name of a pretty common piece of stuff that most were exposed to at one time or another. It’s the Geiger Counter used by the military in its various configurations over the years. For a part of my career as a grunt, I had to use these things as a Chemical Operations type – NO LIGHT TOO BRIGHT/NO BLAST TOO FAST/SO UP YOUR ASS/WITH BUGS AND GAS! (Being the unofficial motto of the Army’s Chemical Corps.) Training people to use these things was part of the gig, and they’re frighteningly easy to use wrong; they’re reasonably delicate and fairly easy to contaminate or peg. Walk up to a hot source and check it with the meter on one of the lower scales, and bad things could happen. Open the shield to check for beta radiation, and pass it to close to a blade of grass, and you risked puncturing the shield. IF the numbers get high, you get out if you can.
While there are lots of emitters – particles that have become radioactive or are by their nature radioactive such as uranium – the primary ones monitored for in the field are GAMMA radiation, which is the most immediately deadly, Beta radiation which can be very hot but has a real limited range of its emissions, and then Alpha Radiation which is most dangerous if it gets inside the body. Think of barriers – lead is a great barrier for gamma; beta can be blocked by clothing and dust masks and goggles. Alpha is pretty insidious – the meters to detect its presence are specialized and primarily available to emergency reaction teams who would respond to a nuclear accident or a dirty bomb. IF it gets into the water table of the food chain, it can be a problem. If you inhale it or it gets into a cut, it can be a problem. Not quickly, but down the road a piece.
OK, welcome to the modern world. We have to deal with dirty water, dirty air, global climate change, extreme weather, decreasing availability of cheap energy, overcrowding, pandemics, potential famine, potential shortage of potable water…everything except the viral crop of right wing, isolationist, brain dead bigots that currently infect the US and indeed the entire civilized world. Thomas Hobbes and Thomas More weren’t exactly contemporaries, but I’ve come to believe of late that the Tea Party and their ilk, the Grover Norquist-Herman Cain-Joe Walsh axis of that world, mistook the two. They read Leviathan, and then they read Utopia and then got confused as to which one was supposed to reflect the good idea and which the bad. (This is kind of like confusing The Joy of Sex with The Joy of Cooking, but more dangerous to civil society.)Hobbes believed that in the absence of a strong central power, “Life is nasty, brutish, and short,” and advocated a very strong central government as essential to a civilized society. More described an ideal society – Utopia – where the absence of distractor and distinctions allowed for a classless and a rather bland society. But, he pointed out in the book itself that it was an intellectual exercise and in real life, he advocated a very strong central government. When that central government decided to execute him, his final speech was brief and to the point, saying in large part “I die the king's faithful servant, but God's first.”
There is a rhetorical tool called reduction ad absurdum that doesn’t work with these people. We’ve seen it several times this year in debates; the famous “Let him die!” crowd cheer in the Republican debate in response to Ron Paul’s brief hesitation in his response to Wolf Blitzer is the most distinct. I’ve had it happen in discussion with students who hold these beliefs; I first felt the change in argument when I said to one of the folks who was paying my salary by attending class on a mix of GI Bill and Pell Grants and Federally Guaranteed Loans that “Look, the government needs to be able to help people. No one wants to see beggars and kids starving…” The guy responded, “Who cares? That’s their problem.”
How do you argue with that sort of stuff? More, I think, encountered the same thing, as did Hobbes. More’s comment is more immediately apropos, since this was a student in a graduate business economics class –“One of the greatest problems of our time is that many are schooled but few are educated.” I’d like to think that I had the same thought and possibly did at the time, but it was probably punctuated with obscenities, curses and commands to get his ass off his head and back where it belonged. I kept quiet – you don’t get to curse students until you have tenure. But, I think Hobbes again adds clarity to the argument, about the role and responsibility of government. “The obligation of subjects to the sovereign is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth by which he is able to protect them.”
OK, Brother AXE, how exactly do you get from Geiger counters to the Tea Party to Hobbes and More and beyond. Well, it’s relatively easy…all it takes is following More, being transformatively exposed to an engaged human life…
The discovery came in the midst of the largest federal effort to date to clean up uranium mines on the vast Indian reservation. A hearing in 2007 before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform led to a multiagency effort to assess and clean up hundreds of structures on the reservation through a five-year plan that ends this year….Yet while some mines have been “surgically scraped” of contamination and are impressive showpieces for the E.P.A., others, like the Cameron site, are still contaminated. Officials at the E.P.A. and the Department of Energy attribute the delay to the complexity of prioritizing mine sites. Some say it is also about politics and money… “The government can’t afford it; that’s a big reason why it hasn’t stepped in and done more,” said Bob Darr, a spokesman for the Department of Energy. “The contamination problem is vast.” Leslie MacMillan, NY Times, April 1, 2012.
The article describes another moment in the timeline of exploitation and destruction of Native American culture and people by corporate and government greed and indifference. In this case, during the great uranium boom of the 1956-period, the government not only allowed but encouraged various people ranging from major mining interests to irresponsible nutjobs – not that the two are mutually exclusive – to seek deposits of uranium on reservation land in Arizona, Utah, New Mexico and Colorado. When the boom died, the various mining interests left – and since then, it became obvious that they left a lot of junk behind poisoning the land. Hey, the Navajos have a lot of space, who cares? Well, that sort of lasiez-faire nonsense fails to consider the Navajo cultural and religious ties to the land. I am not an expert on Navajo religious beliefs, but their origin myth has a very strong tie not only to nature but to the very ground itself and what is beneath it. The Old Man of the story is as close to a god figure as we get here:
The Coyote of the east came where the people were and asked Old Man where he came from. Old Man told him from three worlds down below and also told Coyote how he came up, also saying “If you (Coyote) are a clever man, I will teach you all we know about our religion, etc.” So he taught him everything.
Well, one thing Old Man did not teach Coyote was how politics work. In most cultures, including the western culture we supposedly represent, when you make a promise you fulfill it. The relationship between the US and the Navajo isn’t simple – no relationship between sovereign states where one is in fact subservient to the other can be simple. But, the role of the US in this equation is to protect the Navajo and to act as stewards so that they can maintain their way of life. Obviously, the great Uranium rush resulted in a lot of undocumented craziness in isolated backlands. Problem is, many of the reservations people live out in those backlands and are pastoral in existence…sheepherders. Sheep need to roam, and one might wonder if the reservation is huge enough to support a relatively large population in the high desert of the American Southwest. When you poison hunks of the land, it’s difficult to maintain and use. When you don’t tell people the hazards you are exposing them to, you risk exposing them to patterns of illness and sickness that they may not recognize or have the resources to care for.
The EPA has done a lot more than would be done without it, but these areas are environmental disasters. The Navajo don’t have the resources or the money or the expertise to handle 6-7-9=800 documented and undocumented hazmat sites. No one does, except the US. If you can identify the company that poisoned and failed to remediate the site and the company is still in business, you can take them to court if you’re either the Navajo or the US government and force them to remediate it. However, a lot of these diggings are anonymous or were dug by individuals 50 years ago and are no longer in business. I suspect it’s obvious – the US has a responsibility to fix this; someone needs to get incensed and question whether or not the senior member of the partnership of sovereigns in this case is fulfilling its responsibilities.
Of course, the Navajo people are American citizens. If the government of the United States allows and encourages Bob’s Radioactive Mining and Waste Creation service to dig up and contaminate my back yard, I have a valid claim for the US government to honor. If I get sick, I have a valid claim against Bob’s – who either goes bankrupt or has died – and against the US government.
So, the problem is money. Let’s turn briefly to another money issue.
When the Army was made up of draftees and folks who “volunteered” to avoid being drafted, drawing down after a war wasn’t a problem. You pointed at the door and said who wants to go home first. However, after Vietnam, a lot of enlisted guys who become commissioned officers found themselves being told that they weren’t needed as officers; they could, however, stay on as NCOs. And, as a benefit, they could continue to serve in the active, individual reserve so that when they retired they could do so at whatever reserve officer rank they achieved. I know a lot of guys who were Staff Sergeants and Sergeant First Class and even a few Sergeant Majors and such who retired as…Lieutenant Colonels. In one case, the only person who could rate a SFC in my section was the Brigade Commander, because he was senior to everyone else. Weird. Most of these guys were great soldiers, but there was always some fear and resentment, no so much on their parts but on the part of the guys who were now giving them orders.
Minor problem. Solved by 1981 or so; but the problem is greater when you have a volunteer force that you’ve used in the longest war in the Nation’s history and the Iraq war. These folks have been told they are heroes, that the nation is forever indebted to them. They are also literate and engaged human beings – they realize that they are facing a period of arbitrary eliminations and downsizings. They also are learning that the quality of life for those who remain on active duty will decrease significantly. This makes them unhappy.
As it should. It always has…you want to see a portrait of a lost soldier, check out Rome on DVD or Blue Ray and see what happens to soldiers who suddenly and without reasonable transition find themselves tossed into society. Read about what went on with the various paramilitary groups in Germany after World War I. One reason our friend Winston Churchill was able to find a small army and call it a police force, deploying it to Ireland to handle the Irish Revolution was because they had tons of veterans who had no way to make it as civilians after four years in the trenches and the Army was drawing down because of peace. So, the Black and Tans entered Irish history – it may seem a benign mixed drink of lager and stout here, but it Ireland it’s something else entirely.
Now, I served through one peace dividend, the post Soviet Union-post Gulf I drawdown. Operations Temp became absolutely insane for units, particularly in the support base, Intelligence, Logistics and Maintenance for the Army. As a First Sergeant in a Corps Support Brigade in Germany, I was deploying people to Africa, Greece, the Balkans and Belarus on a monthly basis. It was slightly crazy. The OPTEMPO increased when Bosnia and Kosovo came into the picture; when I returned to Fort Lewis, I got another Company as First Sergeant, and went through the same stuff, deploying people to every place from Port Au Prince to Princeton. We were as an Army and as a military far busier during this period than we’d been during the Cold War.
However, since 9/11 the military has been on continuous insanity as an OPTEMPO. What I see in my various wanderings is a force that is largely stressed by insecurity and craziness imposed by a chain of command and then further stressed when they hear that 70000 soldiers will go home this coming year, that standards for weight, PT, body art and so on are going to ratcheted up and that any screw-up will result in getting the boot. Posts are becoming overcrowded which will negatively impact both mission and quality of life. Benefits are being cut. The services are showing their loyalty to the nation and will continue to do so; but, they’d like something in return. Fulfillment of what is seen as promised –Old Veterans can smile cynically but it’s not because we don’t agree with them. It’s because we know. We’ve known since Socrates mustered out in Athens; Kipling said it for all of us --
Yes, makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep Is cheaper than them uniforms, an' they're starvation cheap; An' hustlin' drunken soldiers when they're goin' large a bit Is five times better business than paradin' in full kit. Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, 'ow's yer soul?" But it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll, The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll, O it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll…
For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck him out, the brute!" But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot; An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please; An' Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool -- you bet that Tommy sees!
Now, as a special disabled veteran and a retiree, I have a doctor at the local Army installation, in this case, the clinic at Fort Irwin. Now, Irwin in some ways reminds me of Fort Apache…the Army has done a tremendous amount to make it more livable, but the fact remains that you’re forty miles not from civilization but from the interstate. I make the drive when I need to see my doctor or when I need to pick up a prescription. When I was in to see my Doctor recently, she informed me that she was leaving because her husband was retiring from active duty in June and she had no idea what staff they’d have after she left but was sure they’d find some good ones. She also handed me a prescription for one of my medications, written for a civilian drug store, telling me that the Pharmacy wasn’t going to stock it or many other drugs that had been a normal item in their formulary. I was curious as to this, thinking that the drugs were things that were normally used by retirees and frankly, that made sense. I have had a number of conversations with the soldiers working in the pharmacy over the past couple of years as well as several with the senior officer in the Pharmacy, a Captain. I had to pick up something else, and got a chance to talk to a young sergeant with a close combat badge and a 10th Mountain combat patch. She’s in her early 20s and would like to make this a career but said, “they’re throwing soldiers out and they’re cutting back support to the rest of us. What the hell, First Sergeant?” The Captain was very direct with me; when I said I’d leave her name out of this piece she said, “I don’t care!! I’m getting ready to PCS and the command loves me because I always come in on budget. They know what I think, but it doesn’t matter. If I make the budget they’re happy with me.”
It takes a lot to bitch slap me with a piece of reality, but I’d never heard about the number one thing on an OER for a company grade officer being “come in at or according to plan.” That’s a civilian bean counter approach. But she told me that the particular thing I’m now getting through RiteAid -- Androgel, I am seriously old although not as old as Gordon or Trowbridge, hehhehehe – is used by a lot of younger soldiers. The reason for the reduction in formulary –drugs carried in the pharmacy – is simple; her budget has been cut by 40% with minimal warning. Of course, the patient load is increasing.
I find this somewhat disturbing on several fronts. If it’s only retired old farts who need something, of course, send up to the pharmacy in town. The co-pay is unpleasant but I can live with it. But, a soldier on active duty, a spouse, a child who’s treatment is delayed while finding a way to Walmart (50 miles away) or waiting for a delivery through ExpressScripts is unconscionable. More than that, the feeling becomes more that they – the Army, the Nation, the People, the Congress, the Government – don’t care.
So, when the House Armed Services Committee grill the Joint Chiefs wanting to know why the Army and the Marines aren’t looking for new tanks and a new generation of tanks in what is supposedly a time of austerity, you have to wonder. The Army says no thanks, we got lots of tanks and nobody to really fight with…with tanks. The Abrams and Bradley and to a lesser extent the Stryker are excellent platforms and weapon systems and WE HAVE ALL WE NEED. Then, the Budget Committee led by Paul Ryan who looks like a cross between a weasel, snake and Eddie Munster to me from some weird progressive sci-fi novel, ignore the Joint Chiefs and say in effect, “They’re lying to us!” as they flood more money into the defense budget, you have to wonder. I personally wouldn’t tell General’s Dempsey, Odierno, and Amos that they were lying to me unless we were playing poker. But Ryan felt comfortable with this gem. General Dempsey’s response would scare me if I was simpering chicken hawk like Ryan and his gang…
"We don't think the generals are giving us their true advice," Ryan had said, according to Politico. "We don't think the generals believe their budget is really the right budget."
Army General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took issue with those comments.
"There’s a difference between having someone say they don't believe what you said versus ... calling us, collectively, liars," the general told reporters on Thursday, according to the Wall Street Journal. "My response is: I stand by my testimony. This was very much a strategy-driven process to which we mapped the budget."
Lest someone say something along the lines of “you can’t have it both ways, Brother AXE!” I have to explain something – they’re not interested in improving quality of life for soldiers on the Hill; they’re interested in keeping the Defense Contractors happy. My own representative is Chairman Buck McKeon who is pretty much on the dole from Lockheed, Boeing and Northrop Grumman. The only reason they would be interested in maintaining the formulary in the Army Medical System is if Merck and Pfizer weighed in. Total BS – these are the guys who want more tanks, more systems that don’t require soldiers but cost a lot of money, more defense contractors doing things soldiers can and should do. Rachel Maddow made the comment on the Jon Stewart show that she didn’t think the Army needed people from KBR peeling potatoes; we could probably figure out some way to have soldiers do that. We don’t people from Cubic managing airspace or logistics. A lot of these people are great folks – lots of former military and retirees. But, they’re doing work that should be done by soldiers.
The number of broken promises and bad judgments made over the last 30 years is incredible. Each bad judgment ends up causing more broken promises. However, the majority of the problems I see – crumbling infrastructure, lousy schools, increased long-term unemployment, mounting debt, lagging modernization, lack of a coherent energy plan and so on and on and on as well as what has happened to Native Americans, Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsman, Civil Servants, Labor Unions, and on and on comes from the idea that we don’t have the wherewithal to pay for what we need to do. That is bullshit. We may all be Travon Martin to some extent; we are also all General Dempsey being insulted and talked down to by Ryan who now claims that he misspoke. Yeah, he’s sorry if General Dempsey didn’t understand what he was saying…if General Dempsey was offended, he’s sorry that General Dempsey was offended.
"General Dempsey and I spoke after that, and I wanted to give that to him, which was that's not what I was attempting to say," Ryan said on CNN. "What I was attempting to say is that President Obama put out his budget number for the Pentagon first ... and then they began the strategy review to conform the budget to meet that number. We think it should have been the other way around."
We are all the early 20s spouse who’s told that while her husband is deployed to Afghanistan and she’s just taken her child to the emergency room at Fort Irwin for some condition that she’s going to have to drive in to beautiful to get the medication the kid needs; we’re all the poor pharmacy specialist who has to deliver this news to a scared and lonely woman. We’re all the school teacher who has to buy supplies for her room while trying to pay student loans and for a Master’s degree that she’s required to have but is also required to pay for. We’re all the Navajo farmer who just discovered that his sheep have been munching contaminated grass and have to be put down…
What we’re all not is Paul Ryan. What we’re all not is Buck McKeon. What we’re all not is Mitt Romney – we’re closer to Shamus on the trip to Canada. We’re not the Koch brothers. We’re not worrying about how many millions of dollars we can make in bonuses; we’re not wondering about how much money we need to put into the Cayman Islands this year. We’re not GE, with a 1000 people in their tax department figuring out how little tax they can pay; we’re not the head of Goldman Sachs mortifiedthat the word has gotten out that we’ve financed a human trafficking website…
There are things that we can do to solve our problems. First of all, we have to acknowledge that taxes are too low and the lowness is progressive. I have no problem with current tax rates so long as at the top end, they are flat above some limit. No deductions. Sorry. So if you’re Mitt Romney, you can claim standard deductions on some portion of your income – say the first million – but the $277M after that should be taxed at the full 35%. Capital Gains up to some limit can continue to be taxed at the current rate – say, up to $2M but above that, it should be taxed at the normal income tax rate. Have somebody rational calculate the shortfall and come up with strategies to overcome it. The SHORTFALL IS NOT SOME NUMBER THAT PAUL RYAN COMES UP WITH. IT NEEDS TO BE BASED ON WHAT WE ACTUALLY NEED TO DO SO THAT THE SOVERIEGN ENTITY CAN FULFILL ITS FUNCTION ACCORDING TO HOBBES.
In Romney’s case, under my plan, assuming he’s able to deduct everything up 1 Million and all but a half million total is capital gains, he’d still have well over $180 mil in income this year. I think they could get by, just fun. Failing to do something like this, and letting the Randian nutcases and economic libertarians/Austrian School reactionaries and malefactors of great wealth continue to get away with things will result in another Hobbesian diagnosed problem …
During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that conditions called war; and such a war, as if of every man, against every man.
Well, what needs to happen to get there? That’s the next piece. I’ll have it posted in a few days.
Fleshy, the Defeatist's official cat, demonstrates that until Engineering Schools learn to accomodate felines, we're probably safe from total domination. And all along, I thought it was opposable thumbs that we had to worry about. I think MIT is a lower bar entirely -- evolution does take a while unless you buy divine intervention and frankly, Tiffany has better things to do these days...Justin Bieber or Adele? Leggings or torn jeans? It's hard being an eternally 15 year old chubby girl with hormonal swings. They can outsource the damn actual construction, and hell, some Republican dick like Rick Santorum or Mitt Romney would be happy to operate the damn things for their feline overlords. So, I guess this is a good time to stock up on mice, catnip and tuna...
Among the many abominations foisted on us is the merging of Lincoln's Birthday with Washington's and calling it President's Day. Frankly, we need more holidays, and Federal Holidays should be made mandatory paid holidays. Like in civilized countries – double time for workers and everybody else is off doing their thing. Now, celebrating Lincoln and Washington makes a lot of sense – but, Jerry Ford? Grover Cleveland? Warren G. Harding? John Tyler? James Buchanan? Seriously, give us back our holidays and make the bastards give them to workers…
There is method in my madness, by the way. Reduce work hours and you'll spur hiring to maintain productivity. It's a fairly simple idea and works very well especially when you're trying to maximize employment. If you have an idle assembly line, well, if you need a hundred employees to run it, and you cut the hours of 1000 employees enough to reduce productivity to where profit is affected, it will make economic sense to hire more workers. It probably does on a macro scale anyway – as Paul Krugman and other non-Friedmanesque economists keep saying, it's demand, stupid. No demand, no need for supply to keep up. No money, no demand…why is this hard?
I was wandering through various interweb sites this morning and discovered a number of things at places I don't always visit. Probably the best way to be exposed to new thought and new thinking is to just go out and look. I recommend Twitter for that – follow some of the links that are twittered and be prepared to be amazed, enlightened and generally entertained.
When you're working in a group, it's hard to know what you truly think. We're such social animals that we instinctively mimic others' opinions, often without realizing we're doing it. And when we do disagree consciously, we pay a psychic price. The Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns found that people who dissent from group wisdom show heightened activation in the amygdala, a small organ in the brain associated with the sting of social rejection. Berns calls this the "pain of independence."
Take the example of brainstorming sessions, which have been wildly popular in corporate America since the 1950s, when they were pioneered by a charismatic ad executive named Alex Osborn. Forty years of research shows that brainstorming in groups is a terrible way to produce creative ideas. The organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham puts it pretty bluntly: The "evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups. If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority."
This is not to say that we should abolish groupwork. But we should use it a lot more judiciously than we do today.
A while back, I did a post on politics over at the Defeatists recently. One of my frustrations with blogging and one reason that I have cut back is the lack of feedback, by the way. Comments are welcome, good, bad or indifferent. Anyway, most of the comments over there seem to come from people who are trying to sell something like Gucci handbags but have been fascinated by some brilliant thing one of us said, either recently or a couple of years ago. We're about due for the annual "How dare you say anything bad about boy bands, you misogynist bastards, especially you, Commandante AGI!" which has some interesting semiotic undertext in it. However, this one was from a real human being who was interested in what I said and conflicted…I might be right, but what the hell…
Here's the conversation. Any emphasis is mine…
Good post, good post...but what if the "middle" is, objectively moronic and absolutely wrong? The middle says:
"We need to invade Iraq and kill or displace a million people and turn the country over to the Shiite theocrats, but we will do so with properly audited spending and well-trained troops who will follow the letter of the rules"
The middle says: "Medical care funding in this country is broken so let's require people to buy overpriced private insurance with their minimum wage jobs".
Sometimes, to parpaphrase Jim Hightower, "the only thing in the middle of the road are yellow lines or dead armadillos"
And...do you really see any Democratic Party politicians with any position or any influence in the party (which means...Jesse Jackson does not really count) as being anywhere near as crazy as the current GOP? Really? Which ones? I can't think of any...I'm a little younger than you but I remember Jimmy Carter and Dukakis and their ilk...and they are NOT Santorum or Gingrich, let alone Bachmann.
The middle is also gung ho about the upcoming hot war with Iran...either run driectly by the United States or by our good buddies in Israel. (Another nuclear power. Hmmmm....why is Israel "allowed" to have nuclear weapons?"
Not sure where the middle is...you see it further off to the right than I do. Oddly, we could take either Eisenhower or Nixon and their social policies as a starting point for the middle, and we'd look pretty leftist today. Imagine the New Deal or the Fair Deal or the Great Society in swing today...but, of course, what we got is what we got and determines what we're gonna get near term and possibly long term. What that doesn't do is allow us to just give up. I remain convinced that the lesser of two evils is the better choice. By having Bush beat Gore, how did Nader make things better? Devolve for 8 years and here we go again? (Nader is not to blame completely for Bush -- lots of things conspired to make things this bad.) However, the difference between John Kerry and George Bush can be summed up with two names -- Samuel Alito and John Roberts as well as one Supreme Court Decision -- Citizens United. A Democrat wins in 2000 or in 2004, even an uninspiring Democrat like Kerry, and money doesn't equal speech. However, it's probably time for my periodic Yeats post...
I wished I believed things could be "reformed". I think Chalmers Johnston nailed it. Even as things devolve and crash and burn, the people that benefit from the system still have plentiful opportunities for looting and rent seeking. And, the system promotes sociopaths (no...I am not saying everyone in government is a sociopath...but still, there are a lot of 'em).
People like Obama merely provide a cover, a gloss, for the ongoing predation. Arguably, Obama has made things worse in that the "anti-war left" (a feeble force given America's history as a violent culture based on conquest)) was lulled to sleep and ineffectiveness.
You can refuse to play either of their terrible games. You can resist them. Most of all, you have the power to give up the deception that Barack Obama is a hero because he might murder "fewer" innocent people. The crucial difference between voting for Obama in the real world, and choosing to allow him to murder only 3 preschoolers in the example above, is that the example above describes a terrible choice being made one time only. The presidential farce is recurring. Imagine the preschool example, but this time imagine that it happens every day. Times ten or fifty or a hundred. Every day, you go by the preschool, and every day the madmen execute either 3 or 5 children--your choice. At what point do you stop choosing? At what point do you stop playing along and say, "Enough"? At some point, it must become apparent to you that the game is never going to end.
The children are going to keep dying--there will always be new madmen willing to take the hostages, make the speeches, and carry out the killings. Choose your decade. Choose your war. Choose your murders. Choose your "party." How long can you justify this morbid farce? How long will you play the terrible game with the killer? Go back to Vietnam, if you like. Go back to Hiroshima and "choose" which rich, powerful national leader you want to press the button. Go back to the invasion of the Philippines. Go back to the Mexican American War. The fucking crusades, or the genocide of the neanderthals. Count the bodies. Is it ever going to end? Are you ever going to say, "Enough"?
Every day you walk by the school. Every day the madmen are there. When are you going to stop giving them what they want? When are you going to stop validating not only the deaths they cause, but their entire horrific game? It will never stop unless we stop it. If we keep supporting it, year after year, always justifying it as "a little less murder than we could otherwise commit," it will never end. When you refuse to vote, or vote for someone else, you are a grain of sand. But at some point, change has to happen, and it will take individual people willing to refuse to support the killing. A few crazies, at first, who refuse to compromise by saying, "I guess it's fine if Obama kills people, because he'll kill fewer than Gingrich will." (This is, essentially, what that haughty piece of shit George Clooney is saying as the televised 2012 contest approaches) A few crazies, and maybe someday, more. It's as daunting a task as any, but it has to happen for the killing to stop: human individuals--without an automatic, reassuring group consensus--refusing to support killing any longer.
I'm guessing Brian isn't the High Arka, but HA is definitely invited to the conversation…
This bothered me, and I was blogging about it. However, I was composing on Typepad, which my Defeatist brothers continually caution me against because a couple of times a year the Google or the Typepad Hobbits decide to fuck me over and eat everything I had written. I learn for a while, and then revert to form…so, I have brief moments of sanity, interspersing the Einsteinian standard insanity of doing something again and again and being surprised when it goes wrong. Terribly wrong. So, I dropped it for a while.
However, it's still bugging me. I'm a lifelong Democrat who thinks that Jefferson, Jackson, both Roosevelts and Truman were among the great presidents, but the greatest was Lincoln. Lincoln would have serious problems in today's Republican party of course. In fact, he'd probably either be a Democrat or possibly something further left. It's fun to imagine him with David Boies, arguing Citizen's United against some Koch brothers mercenary. Of course, as Jesus wouldn't be allowed to preach in modern Christianity, Lincoln could never be admitted to the bar. Paul Tillich, the Existentialist Christian theologian and philosopher wrote in the introductory remarks to his most approachable work, The Dynamics of Faith, a series of lectures given at Cambridge in the 50s that "Today, faith is more productive of disease than of health. It confuses, misleads, creates alternately skepticism and fanaticism, intellectual resistance and emotional surrender…"
One reason that I admire Lincoln is simple – he personifies human compassion. Lincoln wasn't overtly religious publicly, but he was a man of deep spirituality and concern. Tillich contends that "Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned. The dymanics of faith are the dynamics of ultimate concern…" Lincoln's ultimate concern was justice which he saw as fairness, compassion, compromise and the acceptance of the other side's humanity. He was generally disappointed, but he strove to achieve that world by doing what he could to maintain the union based on that idea of justice – not because the Union was itself just, but because he saw the potential for justice as lying in the Union, depending on it, deriving it's future from it. And, in order to preserve it as source of ultimate good, he was willing to risk everything, including his soul and sanity and sense of self to preserve it. Had the South been victorious, would he have been treated like a hero by the North? He'd have been hung…he was risking his life, and the irony of his assassination lies in the reality that Wilkes egotistical madness created.
Today's political world is based largely on something that goes back to the beginning – between those who are ALWAYS RIGHT and those who suspect quietly that they could have made a mistake. I don't think Lincoln ever signed an execution order easily or without struggle; we know that George W. Bush had no such concerns, and that Rick Perry was almost gleeful about it at times. And, we know that the people who go to Republican debates cheer executions. Where would Lincoln have been on that? I suspect he'd have vomited…
I've been doing some reading about Afghanistan and our continued adventures there. Now, I have colleagues who are 9/11 Truthers, which I am not. I have colleagues who think Osama bin Laden was killed years ago and then dumped in the Ocean for a propaganda victory; I have colleagues that believe that Israel and the Mossad did 9/11 and got us into the various mid-eastern debacles. Well, if I were Israel I would probably have reacted to the news of 9/11 attacks with some restrained glee especially if I was concerned about the US cutting a separate deal that would be to Israel's disadvantage. Churchill confessed to a feeling of relief and happiness when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Do we really think Churchill planned Pearl Harbor? I know that the Israelis and their various lobbies in this country really want Iran to go away – and, they'd like us to do it. However, as Zbigniew Brzezinski argued on Hardball on Friday we're facing a reality. There is nothing that makes sense about backing an attack on Iran for us; lots to make it a really bad idea; and, exactly what does Israel get out of the attack? NBC's chief "go get shot at" correspondent Richard Engle was in the same segment, and he indicated that the political leadership in Israel might be really excited by the possibility of an attack on Iran, but the actual soldiers and covert operators think it would be stupid, that their focus needs to be on Egypt and Jordan. Brzezinski argued that Iran may be crazy, but that particular empire in various incarnations has been around for 0ver 3000 years, and do we really think they're suicidal? He also points out to those who say "Israel can't live under the threat of nuclear attack" the degree of fatuous reasoning. We did it for over 40 years as did the Soviets and Western Europe. If Iran gets a bomb and uses it, do they expect to survive? Everybody in the neighborhood who counts, including Israel, has a credible nuclear deterrent, as well as delivery systems. The Iranians are depending in so far as they are on anything, on North Korean technology…what the hell. Let them spend themselves into oblivion, which was Reagan's strategy in the 80s. It works…unless you screw up and spend yourself into oblivion.
This is relevant to Afghanistan for a number of reasons. I know that the administration has agreed to stop combat operations sooner than later, but I'm really wondering why not now! It really helps to have some historical awareness, and the only tactic that has worked with Afghanistan is the punitive raid. Get in, fuck up the bad guys and anybody in the vicinity, threaten worse if they do it again, unass the AO. Invade and try to make it better, and you'll just make it a helluva lot worse, and you'll suffer for it. By April of 2002, the Taliban is gone from power although still there; al Queida was severely damaged there; Pakistan is/was/will be totally fucked up; and we're there because…we're going to turn it into a Jeffersonian Democracy? As soon as the Taliban was defeated and Osama bin Laden et al were in Tora Bora, we should have declared victory, given them a check, possibly re-established the monarchy and gotten out. The Afghan people don't want western culture; they don't want women to have any rights; they don't want to not kill each other. It's that simple – we're trying to impose an improvement on people who see no reason to change and regard the "improvements" as evil. NATO and the US would be further ahead to fund emigration to some reasonable location – Barstow, California for example – for those who want to live under something other than Sharia law. That'll assuage some consciences. But whether we leave now or in five years or in ten years, it will be the same…only worse.
The piece from Susan Cain is very relevant here. We got into Iraq due to a rush to judgment and the influence of Ike's military industrial complex combined with green, hubris and myopia. It's interesting in comparing our Iraq-Afghanistan experience to the Soviet experience. Unlike the Soviets, we did have a reason for attacking within Afghanistan – they were harboring a threat, and we had a just reason for wanting to eliminate that threat. The Soviets had been dithering around with the Afghans for years and chose to invade because of the Brezhnev doctrine that once a Red Block Country always a Red Block combined with the belief that they could control matters. They sold themselves a bill of goods. The Soviet experience looks a lot like US experience in Vietnam – lots of people with good intentions and an absolute inability to see the consequences of their actions. I've been reading former British Ambassador to Moscow Rodric Braithwaite's Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-1989 with a degree of déjà vu combined with a strong sense of WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE DOING? Working from Russian sources and interviews, Braithwaite has a history of a cosmic comedy of errors that looks and smells a lot like Vietnam. Lousy policy, self-delusion, group-think run amuck, combined with inefficient tactics, lousy planning, and dumbfounding mismatches between outcomes, methods and resources. The good news for the Soviets was that Spetznaz was really well honed in Afghanistan. The bad news is that they failed to achieve any of their goals while turning the Red Block essentially into Cuba and North Korea. We achieved our initial goals, dithered and screwed around for the next 10 years and are still looking for a goal that we can achieve. Somebody in power needs to stop talking, listen to the record and the history and start focusing on ultimate concerns, desired outcomes – I define a desired outcome as something that can be achieved within the reasonable constraints of blood, time, treasure and lost opportunity. The most desirable outcome today is not to listen to the congressional storm or the media tumult but to listen to the inner voice of reason and make the sort of courageous decision that Lincoln made routinely. And, don't wait for elections or consensus. Do what's right, now…for Lincoln's sake.
Braithwaite begins the third portion of his book, the Long Goodbye with a poem by one the Russian Afghan veterans, Igor Morozov. It reads, in part –
Down from the heights we once commanded/ with burning feet we descend to the ground/ bombarded with calumny, slander and lies/ we're leaving, we're leaving, we're leaving.
Farewell you mountains you know best/ what prices paid while we were here/what foes unconquered still survive/what friends we had to leave behind…
I generally find Russian poems and song lyrics somewhat of a blend of overly didactic and overly romantic…peasant and soldier poetry. The Soviet Army and its soldiers deserved a better use; so did the British with Lord Elphinstone in 1820. The Soviets in many ways repeated the British experience. We repeat the Soviety experience…if history repeats itself with the first time as tragedy and the second as farce, what exactly is our experience going to be? Tragical farce? We deserve better, and if someone listens not to the crowd but to the inner voices or reason, creativity and common sense, we may get it. I remain pessimistically hopeful…
This is the Romney Bot 10000 or what Mitt Looks Like with the Makeup Removed...Is it too early to point out that Romney's big win of barely meeting expectations in Iowa and New Hampshire have netted him a total of 6 possible delegates. ( The Iowa delegates can actually do any goddamn thing they want to do...they're not bound to the candidate at all. So it's about 6, +/- human nature? Or have two small to medium somewhat oddball places solved the problem of democracy? Who the hell knows? But the media seems to see Romney as a jaugernaut just chewing up the terrain in a Harvard Business School Blitzkrieg. Yeah...Well, things can happen, if we let them...
There is a marvelous article online at the Economist that makes a really simple suggestion -- stop worrying about the dogfight in the Republican party and pay attention to and force Romney to say in simple declarative sentences what it is that he intends to do as president. Since I personally think he is absolutely clueless as to what he wants to do in general, I suspect that it could be a far more enlightening exercise than wondering about how Newt Gingrich can paint himself as the populist opposing a malefactor of great wealth. Won't happen, but it is an interesting idea...
But then, so is this. They're making a porn parody of Star Wars... I'm wondering how this will impact the world of nerds, nutcases and plain old fashioned strange people who obsess about it. Some of these folks are exceptionally smart; some are exceptionally strange; some of them, as Leonard says of Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory, " one lab accident away from being a super-villain." Most are harmless, since the whole Star Wars/trek/thor/comic book thing is a way of handling their subliminated and frustrated sexuality and drive for power in a world that really doesn't fit them. (Note how easy it is to unintentionally pull the chain, so to speak, when writing about porn.) Given the whole Mormon, holy underwear thing that Romney has going against him, it's possible he might be able to inspire some of these folks...but, probably not, since he doesn't really seem to see himself as and that whole Master of the Universe -Venture Capitalist thing leads to something rather different indeed....
THE ROMNEY BOT HAS A RADICALLY DIFFERENT SELF IMAGE AND DREAM IN HIS ELECTRIC SLEEP!
Since Porno films today tend to go straight -- wouldn't a Star Wars porn film need a lot of homosexual overtones, undertones and so on?--to video anyway, we'll probably be spared a raft of stories about nerves flogging the old dolphin in theatres...or, maybe not.
THIS IS ROMNEY BOT BETA VERSION!
On a vaguely related note, Hostess Bakery is filing for Chapter 11, again. What is Mitt Romney going to do to save the Twinkie? (Actually, this kind of ties into the Star Wars porn thing, if you think about it...and, has anyone noticed how much Mitt actually resembles Max Headroom?) Let the market take it's course? But, what will Karl Rove and Grover Norquist wash down with their bottles of virgin blood and Dr Pepper as they plot the destruction of the social welfare net and the ability of the poor to afford toilet paper while the Koch Bros industies destroy the environment making it impossible to obtain leaves, corn cobs and so on for use in lieu of...)
It's really not fair for me to pick on Romney for being an artifical, androidal rich bastard replicant who has devoted a life to strange cults and oddities like Capitalism and Joseph Smith. Granted, their religious ideology at it's basis is sufficient to make Scientology seem at least companionable and the 72 Virgins thing seem a reasonable alternative. Hell, Catholicism and Buddhism and Unitarianism and any religion has a lot of oddities. I was reading -- finally, I've been inspired by the hype and the Swedish versions of the movies -- to read The Girl With the Dragon Tatoo and was kind of amazed to find out the importance of the Apocrophya to motivation behind various characters. Not as amazed at Calle and Lisabeth, but then, they were kind of sucked into this madness by that point. For the none theologically minded, the Apocrophya are the books that the Jews left out of what became the Old Testament but that survived and continue to influence thinking on these issues. Not unlike the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gnostic gospels...except maybe weirder. Now, religion does odd things. It can do wonderful things, but when you get into all that messy miracle, divine, intervention, afterlife shit, things get strange. Unfortunately, it's difficult to not take that stuff seriously when you're dealing with people who take two years of their lives out to prostelytze and annoy. (Being accosted by American Mormons on McConnell Street in Dublin was an excellent excuse many years ago for some Bushmill's in the coffee...for the next decade!) They believe this stuff... Rick Santorum scares me and his madness is something I grew up with...Pat Buchanan scares me, and his madness is something I actually can relate to quite well...
But, we should really follow the whole Romney thing not as a personal thing -- although it is worthwhile from a satirical point of view to do so and I'm all for satire -- but from a hard policy point of view. Governor, what exactly do you propose to do about -- jobs? And then follow-up -- there is a rule of thumb in interrogation, quality and so on. There is a significantly limited number of questions about anything that someone who may want to dissemble or is stuck in some ideological world view that they can answer without inadvertently discovering the truth of their beliefs or revealing their lie.
"Yo, Mitt-face, what are you going to do about the Middle East?
"I'm going to put troops back into Iraq, take down the Mullahs in Iran, and support Zion...err...Israel. Yeah, Israel, that's the place.
"So, you're going to re-invade Iraq?
"They'll welcome us with open arms to protect them from al Quieda and the Sunnis and the Shi'ites and the Kurds and the Iranians!
"Sure about that? They told us to leave, you know because we wouldn't agree to their idea of a status of forces agreement. Do you want American soldiers subject to Iraqi criminal justice?
"Nobody wants that."
"Well, that was what the Iraqis wanted to have us stay."
"I'd use more diplomacy..."
"Yeah, ok, now Iran...How are you going to take down the Mullahs? Are you going to invade? Bomb? Use Nuclear missiles? Pray a lot? Keep using sanctions?"
"That's more than one question."
"Not so much questions as a precis of your options to take down the Mullahs? Maybe diplomacy? And, what gives us the right to impose regieme change again?"
"The people of Iran want to be free!"
"Just like in Iraq?"
The problem with the Romney-bot beta version was that it was toooooo smart. Kerry had actually thought about these things. Romney hasn't...and it shows. As Molly Ivins said, and we really miss her and need more people like her and pretty goddamn soon! "Nothin' but good times ahead."
Jerry Harvey, expert on management dysfunction and organizational behavior, has a classic finding called The Abilene Paradox. Basically, it discusses our inability to deconflict -- agreement. We may all "want to do X but there are hidden voices saying, We should do Y because..." His story involves the disruption of a family afternoon in north Texas in the summer because his mother in law figured that he and his wife were probably bored. This resulted in a four hour car trip over beat up roads in a beat up, unairconditioned car to a Rexall Drug Store and Lunch Counter in Abilene. It was hot, it was dusty, it was a lot like the Texas in The Last Picture Show. When they finally got home and collapsed in the living room, there was dead silence punctuated by gas and burps from that fine Rexall Lunch Counter cusine for about 45 mintues. As Harvey tells the story, realizing that he was a trained social scientist with a PhD in Organizational Psychology and Behavior, felt compelled "to make a behavioral intervention." So, he said, "That was fun now, wasn't it?" To which his father-in-law responded by looking at him and visibly questioning the wisdom of letting his daughter marry this clown and then saying as only someone who's from Texas or at least spent a lot of time there can say it, "SSSSHHHEEEEIIITTTT --that was awful." The family did a post mortem, and when their reasoning got exposed -- Momma thought the kids were bored and wouldn't want to eat left overs, the kids didn't want to deny Momma anything, Papa wasn't going to push back against eveyone else so...the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and in the early 70s, the road to Abilene was paved with kind thoughts and care for other people's feelings. Book is a classic, and I recommend it to anyone -- Harvey is one of my heroes along with Keith Richards, Guy Clark and Kierkegaard.
This war was a terrible idea as a use of blood, power, treasure and time. Our soldiers performed incredibly well -- the average enlisted guy in Vietnam served one tour of 11.5 months. Once. In World War II and Korea, once you got there, you stayed until you couldn't fight anymore but there were long lulls between battle and fear. But in Iraq, it was never quiet, never safe, never secure, never lulled -- every day, anywhere, was a day in combat. Everybody hated you, and if they didn't, you figured that there was something wrong with them. As I talked to our kids returning from this cauldron, the general theme echoed one I heard from a British Peacekeeper in 1994 -- "They're all guilty bastards."
Were there problems? Hell yes; war is nothing but problems. This one was fought so poorly that it makes you wonder if Rumsfeld, Cheney and Tommy Franks had bet against at some British bookies...their ignorance, stupidity and basic inhumanity wasn't just criminal. It was of some other dimension -- as if the DOD was run by Reptilian-Alien overlords. Bizzare...
Did we have soldiers do some bad things? Yup -- every war has soldiers do bad things. But, the vast, vast majority of the American military served incredibly well, honorably and effectively. It was a bad idea; it's the Iraqis country; we broke it, we fixed it, and we need to get our guys all home. Now.
So, it was with a certain degree of stunned outrage that the drumbeat from the Republican party managed to get through my skull. The leadership of the Republican party is so committed to reflexive condemnation of anything that this White House does that they're not only willing to destroy the economy of the foreseeable future, the lives and hopes of millions of Americans; they are willing to denigrate the sacrifices of the people in the boots on the ground by saying that this war was in vain because we didn't stay there. Motherfuckers...American values were defeated in Iraq, and American interests were crushed in Iraq. They were crushed when the first bombs fell in Bagdad; they were defeated when the first tanks rolled across the Kuwaiti border. We lost the war then, in early 2003; our political leaders, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bolton, etc., dealt us this defeat as sure as the Austrian high command dealt their army and empire defeat in 1914. Criminal ignorance, stupidity, cupidity, intellectual sloth and emergent dementia later, and here we are...again.
If you recall when the agreement to end the war was signed, GW Bush was president, Condi Rice was Secretary of State, and Petraeus was still in charge of the Army in Iraq. That team didn't negotiate a Status of Forces Agreement; the Iraqis want us gone. We just lost 4500 killed, thousands of lives shortened by wounds both physical and psychological fighting a war to bring self-determination and Jeffersonian Democracy to a nation made up of various ethnic, religious and cultural groups that all hate each other. As a whole, they want us gone, and we need to go.
Of course, these guys are all operating in a vacuum. What we do to them, they can do to us. If we torture prisoners, they will torture prisoners. If we bomb indiscriminately, they will bomb indiscriminately.
It's important as this mess ends that we honor the victors, the American Armed Forces and Veterans who overcame the strategic defeat that was the whole war, and won an operational and tactical success in conditions of incredible difficulty.
So, while I find Barrack Obama less than a success, and I resent the mistake that you can have bi-partisan cooperation when only one side cooperates as being the worst of new age gibbersih made into policy, we need to make certain that he is re-elected but, more importantly, that the Democrats take back the congress, a greater majority in the Senate and begin to work dismantling the Oligarchs on the right side of the Supreme Court.
Or, fuck it. We have backed a mythical monster -- Cthulhu -- an anarchist analytic philosopher --my brother from another mother, Crispin Sartwell -- and a dead Communist -- Gus Hall -- for President. We were being satirical...but, if you can't get your head out of your ass far enough to care this time around, just vote for our new ticket of Gary Busey and Callista Gingrich. What the hell -- he's beyond certifiable and she's obviously controlling Newt through a combination of shiny things and sexual deviance. At somepoint Gingrich will either choke on a ring or she'll suck his brains out; might as well get it over with.
Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son? Oh, where have you been, my darling young one? I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall
Oh, what did you see, my blue-eyed son? Oh, what did you see, my darling young one? I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’ I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’ I saw a white ladder all covered with water I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall
And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son? And what did you hear, my darling young one? I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin’ Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world Heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazin’ Heard ten thousand whisperin’ and nobody listenin’ Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin’ Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter Heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall
Oh, who did you meet, my blue-eyed son? Who did you meet, my darling young one? I met a young child beside a dead pony I met a white man who walked a black dog I met a young woman whose body was burning I met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow I met one man who was wounded in love I met another man who was wounded with hatred And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall
Oh, what’ll you do now, my blue-eyed son? Oh, what’ll you do now, my darling young one? I’m a-goin’ back out ’fore the rain starts a-fallin’ I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest Where the people are many and their hands are all empty Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten Where black is the color, where none is the number And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’ But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’ And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall
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