Chaos agents

When radical right-wing nuts run wild and destroy the functionality of the People's House it may be all in good fun.

But when they do the same thing in the public square?

No, it's not. 

These wingnuts aren't elected, though. They're bought and paid for, hired supposed-servants of the public, our "Thin Blue Line" of coppers that supposedly stand between us the Good People of the Earth and anarchy.

What's their beef?

Well, mostly, it seems, that lots of even the Good People don't like them. Here's their spokescop from the linked piece:

“They’re doing what they were asked to do. The public said they wanted less police involvement. The (Portland) School Board kicked them out of the schools. At some point, people should look in the mirror and take responsibility for who they voted for.”

Okay, first; fuck you runnin', you lying Dick Tracy wannabe.

No, the coppers weren't "asked to do" less policing.

They were "asked" to do less shitty, racist, violent, assholish policing. The kind of policing that the Portland Police Bureau had (and has) done for decades. The kind of policing that got them in dutch with the feds and won them a sort of supervised parole agreement that they've conspicuously ignored.

So, yes; I agree with one point Duin makes in his piece; part of the problem is that the Portland cops are way understrength. There's just too few cops for the number of troubled people running around in public.

But one big reason the PPB is so understaffed is that nobody wants to work for the outfit that a large number of Portlanders neither trust nor respect, largely because of that outfit's own shitty behavior. The Bureau attracted lots of violent, racist assholes because that's how they rolled; those people felt welcomed and at home there.

When large numbers of Portlanders weren't okay with that anymore, those sorts of people had a little hissy and left, or never joined.

And the Bureau has not changed enough to attract any other kind of person.

But here's the thing; like I pointed out earlier in this series; even before their little quiet quitting the Portland cops didn't do a pantsload of "policing". In Duin's piece he cites what's supposed to be a devastating statistic:

"As officers focus on homicides and shootings in the city, property crimes are generally ignored: The bureau’s clearance rate for property crimes dropped from 17.1% in 2009 to 4.4% in 2021..."

Okay, now, four percent is pretty crap.

But notice the clearance rate in the Good Times?

Yeah. Less than a fifth of all thefts - burglaries, car clouts, thievery in general - got solved. That was the "big time" stat for Portland cops. That was their championship season. That was them killing it.

And the perps?

Largely dopers and hoboes. "Professional" thieves, like all professionals in any field, probably make up a pretty small minority of all thieves.

So basically these are poor people who can't or won't work for a living stealing stuff to by food and dope.

And what have We the People done to make that less attractive as a way to get by?

I'll wait.

Here's the point.

It's not fucking rocket science. How do we move towards making this problem less of a problem?

Well, having better cops would help. Burning the existing Bureau to the ground and rebuilding it with fewer shitty, violent, Proud Boy-loving MAGAts and racists.

Then getting the new coppers better, smarter training and methods to deal with people. Getting them more help; Portland Street Response - a program designed to give public safety options other than sending armed coppers to deal with loonies and drugged-out whackos - has been underfunded and mis- or un-used since it was set up. Duin notes correctly that the Detox Center - the tank where narced-out gomers used to get dumped in to get them off the street - has never been reopened.

(Possibly because it's worth noting that the coppers used it as an unlicensed jail. People who didn't meet the bar for actual jailing used to be dumped in Detox, where they could be held for a day without charge. It was partially that sort of abuse that got it closed in the first place.)

But, again...and I know this keeps coming back around every time I write these things...the real issue is money.

Money to find these dopers and hobos work. To get them off the dope. To make places to live. To pay for more courts and diversion programs and Street Response unarmed intervention squads and rehab centers and social workers and daycare and school programs and...well, about a gajillion other social services.

And, yes; cops. And jails.

The bottom line out in Portland Streets isn't really that much different than in the U.S. House of Representatives.

We know what needs to happen to make our lives in general better.

But there's a vocal minority who refuse to consider that loudly being short-sighted, greedy, selfish assholes is not, actually, good public policy, and they continue to stand athwart those things shouting "stop".

In Congress they posture and preen and shove their prejudice and superstition into legislation to prevent anything they hate from happening. Far better to do nothing than to do anything the 14th Century wouldn't approve of.

In Portland they refuse to tax themselves and to allow anyone else to consider how best to use those tax monies to make those changes I've laid out. Far better to piss and moan about homelessless and crime than to make Nike go short a dime.

And until those chaos agents - in both places - are ignored and despised and discarded, we're going to be stuck right where we are.

As Duin says; welcome to the jungle.

The problem being, the problem that he doesn't mention, is that among us are those who are objectively pro-tiger.

If you can keep it...

 

Fun meme.

But the actual reality is less amusing.

I rag on the GQP a lot because...well, they play stupid games for stupid prizes. More plutocracy. More THEocracy. Made-up nonsense about sex and gender. Ignorant prejudice and idiotic things like their anti-vaxx shiny object.

The stuff they want is objectively loathsome for anyone not already in a two-yacht family.

And, frankly, they gyre and gimbel in the most ridiculously fatheaded ways. The contemptible farce they enacted when they hucked this lamebrain into the Speakership was a perfect example.

But.

There's a dark side to their lunacy, and it's that enough other lamebrains in this benighted nation elect them to local, regional, state, and federal office. There they can do a shit-ton of damage to the sane and thoughtful who want nothing so much as for these goofballs to go scrawl their shit-screed on their OWN walls.

Well, the Angry Children's Caucus has taken their pound of flesh, and now the rest of us will have to see how they cook it up for us. As Scott LEmieux says at the link:

"It’s...very plausible that whatever chaos agent eventually ends up getting the job will simply discredit Republicans further and create a more favorable political climate for 2024. On the other hand…there are a lot of ways in which an even more insane and inept Speaker than McCarthy can do material damage to the economy, and that will hang to some degree on Biden. I can’t predict with any confidence how this will play out but there’s a lot of potential dangers here."

 Very much yes.

We're fortunate here in Oregon in that our Republicans are so utterly revolting that anyone within sightlines of "normie" will scurry away from them like they would a rotting carcass (which, come to think of it, is a pretty good metaphor for the Oregon GOP's moral and political flavor...). All they can do is marinate in their rural styes and run from the legislature whenever anything remotely like "legislating" is proposed.

But the federal government is infested with these gomers and their nonsensical, 18th-Century-Articles-of-Confederation-cosplay of what the government of a ginormous complex industrial nation is supposed to do...other than ladle tax monies to rich fucksticks.

And now they're going to compete to see which looney gets to run the People's House.

I can't wait.

Some things never change

I woke up this morning worried.

Mostly because my Bride's employer is talking about layoffs. Again. And since she's not just the only regular income at this point but - even more critically - our medical benefit provider that's a little scary.

So, like hanging, the possibility of sudden poverty concentrates my mind wonderfully.

That said, I can't help shaking my head at two fucking haven't-we-done-this-before irritating national news items.

The "big" news item is the now-traditional GQP woody over using the ridiculous "debt ceiling" gimmick to screw the rest of the country out of the New Deal.

I'll spare you my usual "now pay attention" lecture on the why of the New Deal. Suffice to say that the U.S. public, monstrous fool that it is, has no idea what the gutting of Medicare and Social Security would look like because it's been almost a century, but, hint...it looked like this:

You think we have a "homeless problem" now? Yeah...just wait for the New Hoovervilles. Maybe we can call them "McCarthy Manors" to bring the conversation up to date.

The fact that anyone not some sort of lunatic Republican (but I repeat myself) has to argue against the idea that the federal budget needs to be reduced by impoverishing and sickening regular people and not by raising the top marginal rate back to where it was in the Eisenhower Administration and mothballing a couple of carrier air groups just goes to show how utterly fucked our supposed national conversation about this whole business is.

No Republican should be able to even begin to make that nitwit argument without getting pied in the face. That they don't - that the "argument" is actually listened to for more than a nanosecond - tells me that we're pretty fucked already.

So there's that.

The other, national-but-sort-of-local thing is the ridiculous posturing over the murder-by-cop of the latest poor bastard to have been found guilty and executed for the crime of Driving While Black.

Specifically...that somehow what completely exonerates the entire history and existing society of the United States is that the murder cops were all Black themselves.

Okay, now I get that about 99.8% of the American public knows about history what a goat knows about calculus, but the entire notion of one group working for another group (and killing others in theor own group) is as old as...well, Rome, for one. 

Those Black coppers are no different from some Gallic foederatus carrying a sword for the legions against his Belgae or Suebi neighbor. In return for their own protection the foreign mercenaries can and will happily ruin and kill their own; it's one of those deeply human fucked-up things that people do.

This kind of ties in to the nonsense about "critical race theory" being some sort of commie propaganda instead of explaining exactly how - in a nation where a group of people were once defined as 3/5ths of a human because of their skin color - you can end up with that group of people as a largely dispossessed and disenfranchised target of the weight of social, economic, and political punishment but still used as foederati by their masters?

I'd like to think that the people pushing that bullshit know better and are just blowing smoke.

With these knuckleheads it's hard to tell.

And - since we're on this subject - can we just stop with the whole "let's take cops who already think like an occupying army and make them into some sort of Rambo-fantasy outfit designed to occupy fucking Fallujah" thing?

Beyond the stupid idea of WANTING soldier-cops the entire notion that somehow making more and more dangerously-soldierly cops is somehow "keeping us safe"...who fucking thinks that?

The copaganda We the People suck up every day makes it difficult to recognize that, as I said three years ago, these cops AREN'T some sort of "thin blue line" between us and anarchy.

WE are the line. We're, by and large, good citizens and good people. If we weren't no number of soldier-cops could hold us back short of nuking the place from space. 

The cops?

No.

Cops by and large don't "solve" crimes - clearance rates for most city police departments, in every crime category, are embarrassingly low - and they, in the current drive-by-policing-mode of most big departments, don't "prevent" crimes, either.

They largely do what they're designed to do; keep the smelly poor away from the nice white people who pay their salaries, and defend property.

And that's fine, if that's what you want, and many, possibly most Americans either do want that or don't care enough to make a fuss about it.

But that's how our country is, by and large. 

If we don't like it, we need to do the hard work to change it. If we don't want to do that, we should at least have the honesty to tell the poor and dark people who are going to take the pounding that it sucks to be them and then let them decide whether it's worth dying on their feet rather than living on their knees.

I know.

That's pretty bleak.

But I'm feeling pretty bleak this morning, so there it is.

A Mess of Pottage

 

The U.S. Congress has, in the usual scatterbrained and dysfunctional way that body seems to work, taken up the issue of repealing the 2002 "Authorization to Use Military Force" that was the legal cover for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the mess-o-potamia that followed.

I trust that no one who regularly visits this place has forgotten the appalling clusterfuck that resulted from that cynical bit of Great Power stupidity, so it's obvious on its face that it is time and past time to flush the boneheaded and dangerous thing, full of more lies than nuts in a fruitcake, and I wish they'd 86 the 2001. 9/11, version while they're at it.

The notion of having a political rule just lying around that provides any U.S. government who wishes the "legal" authority to start throwing projectiles around the globe seems dangerously stupid. It's not like illegality will stop a cabal that wishes to do that, but to give them a sort of real-life "C'est par mon ordre et pour le bien de l'Etat que le porteur du present a fait ce qu'il a fait."?

That 's a Bad Idea.

Both of the 2000's AUMFs are Bad Ideas spawned by my country's weird and ugly combination of geopolitical hubris and laziness, the sort of mindless aggressive response to any sort of provocation that makes every problem a nail to be militarily hammered.

It's unfortunate that the mindset that produced them cannot also be repealed. But at the very least - given the lessons that the mindless ruin and merciless hatred that the two have spawned should have taught us - these two loaded guns need to be unloaded.

We'll see if there's enough political sanity left in the U.S. capitol to do that.

An Open Letter to Speaker Pelosi

"I've already contacted my Representative, Mr. Blumenauer, but I wanted to reach out to you directly to let you know how critical I believe your role in upholding the republican institutions of this nation is now.

The conclusions of the Mueller investigation and, in particular, the shamelessness of the Republican Party in evading and denying those conclusions as they relate to the criminal conduct of this President, make it clear that if this is not the moment for impeachment there never will be, and if the House Democratic caucus does not use the impeachment process to uphold those institutions that they will not BE upheld.

Regardless of the foreseeable betrayal of the nation by the Senate GOP there is no reason not to begin proceedings against this President and his failure to faithfully uphold the laws of the United States.

Impeachment. Now."

Impeachment

After today's release of the investigation into the 2016 election and the despicable performance by the lickspittle who is notionally my nation's chief "justice" officer, the choice of the way forward is brutally clear.

Either the United Stated House of Representatives opens impeachment proceedings against Donald J. Trump.

Or the United States becomes Putin's Russia, where "truth" is what The Leader says it is and the residents are subjects, not citizens.

Forget the man's obvious senile incapacity. Forget the self-dealing, the lies, the performative cruelty, the emoluments. Simply concentrate on this; a foreign power meddled in the internal politics of this country. The current President knew of it, did nothing to alert those responsible for preventing it, and, instead, expected to profit from it.

Does that excuse the U.S. meddling in other nations' internal business?

Of course not.

Does that justify turning a blind eye to the current Administration's role in what happened in 2016?

Of course not.

And then...consider all the things I've cautioned you to forget. The lies. The corruption. The vile eagerness to run the nation only for the rich, the white, and the notionally-Christian. The brutal vindictiveness. The crass eagerness to embrace Naziism. All the other lawbreaking, including recommending that federal officers break the laws and promising pardons if they do. The reality that the orange sonofabitch thinks he's a king.

If this Congress does not impeach, we might just as we stop kidding ourselves about being a "republic of laws, not men".

It's really just that simple.

I am an Oregonian!

It's this kind of guy that makes me a proud Beaver (or Duck, whatever - Oregonian..!)

"...Jim Weaver, who was an Oregon congressman in the 70s and 80s. Weaver, who was the grandson of the 1892 Populist presidential candidate of the same name, was a sort of iconoclastic liberal who was mostly known for being quite pugnacious and even obnoxious to his opponents. Anyway, Weaver and Reagan’s diabolical Secretary of the Interior James Watt hated each other. Weaver would lambaste Watt during hearings, outraging his Republican colleagues. Watt was of course the bête noire of the environmental movement in the 1980s."

Apparently Loomis discovered the gem below in Weaver's papers. You have to enlarge the sheet to read the typed text, but trust me; it's well worth it.

U.S. politics is sadly devoid of the Jim Weavers today, although Donald Trump appears to have all the pugnacity with none of the brains. I regret that I never met Weaver, although I'm proud that he represented my state in the Congress. I suspect that he, in his retirement somewhere in Lane County, surely has a truly memorable take on the present State of the Union.

Tings Bruk Down, Part 2

I'm sitting at my desk here at work. Not working, obviously, but just waiting for the clock to run down. My Timbers are playing tonight and I'm idly wondering whether to go. I've been immersed in soccer lately. Copa America. EURO 2016. The local teams, Timbers and Thorns. As well as writing the Thorns for Slide Rule Pass. So I'm honestly torn. I'd kind of like to see the match. And I'd kind of like to go home and do nothing.

As I sit I'm reading the Internet. News, opinion, various blogs and websites I enjoy.

Every so often I check into my Facebook for good stuff like this:

Lee: I lost my electroporation virginity today - although my partner was electrifying, it was brief and shocking and I won't know for days whether I'm satisfied. ‪#‎scienceporn‬

Comments
John (a.k.a FDChief): I have this mental picture of you reclining on the lab table in nothing but a lab coat and cigarette holder while the device intones (in the HAL voice from 2001): "Procedure complete, Lee. Are you sure it was good for you..?"
Lee: That sounds like every day in my lab, John.
John: Well your work is a damn sight more fun that mine, Lee. WTF? GEOLOGY was supposed to be the place to major if your primary interest in science was primarily intoxication and reproductive anatomy. When the hell did you biologists get so lascivious?
Diane: Does HR know?
Lauren (Lee's daughter): I swear, you and John Lawes could write a book on things your offspring never want to hear
John: But not, alas, cooperatively. Apparently biology is the New Sexology and I appear to have completely missed THAT memo...
Lauren: You should ask her to recite her diatribe on pornographic pollination. I was scarred for life after that one. I swear, parents say the darndest things
John: That's the point. You get to be pains in our ass when you're little; we get to be pains in yours when you get big...It was worth the price of admission explaining to my daughter about puberty.
Lauren: My mom drew me a scientifically accurate diagram of the uterus and phallus. It was very educational
John: Knowing your mom...I'll bet. And probably pretty funny.
Lee: I don't remember any of that...

Some people give good Facebook. Some people post reams of fucking cat pictures and links to everything and nothing. It's like letter-writing. Remember those? Let me tell you; I could write a terrific letter. Most people? Not so much. That translates over to the electronic version of epistolary friendships, too, and I'll let you guess which is more enjoyable.

But here's the other thing I found on FB today:

"Democrats appointed to the Democratic Party’s Platform Committee by Hillary Clinton and the party’s chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, defeated a ban on fracking on June 24."

This was from my friend (and commentor here) Mike's feed. Mike and a lot of the comments on the original post were, understandably, furious.

It just made me sad and sick at heart.

Because I just don't see that there's a real hope in hell of "doing something" about anthropogenic global warming (or "AGW" for short...) through our political process. And if that's not possible...well...I'm not sure what this planet will look like with a return of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum and I'm not sure I want to.

That, in turn, got me to thinking about what look like very similar electoral situations; Great Britain's "Brexit" referendum and the people who wanted out of the EU, and the coming U.S. general election and the people who want Trump.

In both cases there seem to be a fairly good prima facie case for opposing both Brexit and Trump. Both appear to be based largely on rumors and lies and fed by nativist anger and racist rage. Both appear to be like hitting yourself in the face with a hammer to swat a fly on your nose.

But in both cases there's the arguments my friend Mike and other lefty pals employ against HRC; that the "Remain" argument for the EU (and the "better than Trump" argument for Clinton) are, in effect, demanding your vote for something deeply flawed, something that rewards the rentier class that has effected a silent coup.

Mike and the Sanders supporters make good points about how the current system is horribly skewed against the "regular" Joe and Molly. How things like trade deals and crony capitalism strip people of jobs and wealth, and how people are sick of being "ruled", in effect, by unelected corporations and capitalists. I agree. The current economy isn't "good" for people like me, or my family.

The current system isn't "good" for the planet in terms of accelerating climate change. Both need to be changed.

But what bedevils me is...how?

Republics and democracies aren't good a big, radical changes. They're not good, either, at demanding that their citizens do things that they don't like to do in the short term to make things better in the long term. Remember when Jimmy Carter asked us to turn down the thermostat and put on a sweater? The average U.S. citizen knows perfectly well that things like eating McDonald's rainforest-beef hamburgers, driving an SUV, and living in a 3,500-square foot house with a quarter-acre lawn in a city built in a fucking desert are bad ideas.

They just don't want to not do them.

And - short of war - it's hard to either make them or persuade them TO do them.

That's why I eventually bagged on Sanders. Because I'd read things like this:

"We need a president who will vigorously support international cooperation that brings the people of the world closer together, reduces hypernationalism and decreases the possibility of war. We also need a president who respects the democratic rights of the people, and who will fight for an economy that protects the interests of working people, not just Wall Street, the drug companies and other powerful special interests.

We need to fundamentally reject our “free trade” policies and move to fair trade. Americans should not have to compete against workers in low-wage countries who earn pennies an hour. We must defeat the Trans-Pacific Partnership. We must help poor countries develop sustainable economic models.

We need to end the international scandal in which large corporations and the wealthy avoid paying trillions of dollars in taxes to their national governments.

We need to create tens of millions of jobs worldwide by combating global climate change and by transforming the world’s energy system away from fossil fuels."

...and I'd think, yeah, you're right. That'd be great. That'd be awesome.

How the fuck would you do that?

I mean, how does President Sanders go to Congress...the same Congress that has a House full of shit-flinging flying monkey wingnuts and a Senate that has enough of the same to prevent cloture, remember?...and tell them, yep, I want to cut the Defense budget and spend it on solar and wind energy. I want to reform the tax code to prevent capital flight and return the top marginal rate to 90% like back in Ike's day. I want to cut CEO pay. I want to raise tariffs to prevent offshoring and job loss.

These are fucking people who think that the problem is that there's not enough oil drilling in fucking National Parks, for fuck's sake. These are people who are elected by even stupider people who think that the world was created 6,000 years ago and that Jesus wants you personally to have the full tank of gas that those dirty, smelly Mooslim people stole and hid under their deserts.

Add to that the people, like the people who voted "Leave", think that "international cooperation" means Brussels telling them what shape their bananas should be.

And you have to convince all these people; the good folks, the worriers, the activists, the goofballs, gomers, nativists, racists, ignoramuses, conspiracy-theorists, ding-dongs, and low-information knotheads to be patient, compromise...and to give up their styrofoam cups and cheap plastic crap from Wally-Mart and NASCAR and put down their Confederate flags and ride the fucking bus to work.

What president could do that?

Hell, Jesus riding on a velociraptor and carrying an AR-15 couldn't fucking do that.

That's what kinda drove and drives me crazy about Bernie. Yes, these are all good things. Now...how do you get them? How do you convince people or coerce people or force people to stop building suburbs? To stop driving to work? To stop buying disposable diapers? To stop living in McMansions? To stop voting for people who tell them that they don't HAVE to stop doing all those things because "global warming" is a lie?

I want to hear not an uplifting speech. I want to hear a plan. I want to hear an actual strategy. How are you going to beat down FOX "News"? How are you going to force-feed Michael Savage and Rushbo and Coulter and Malkin and Beck and every other talk-radio moron a nice, hot cup of STFU? How are you going to get people who don't want to accept the science of climate change to accept it and live the lives they need to live to help change things? How are you - in detail, now - going to get people to ask for more taxes and less cheap Chinese-made crap and more equity?

I'm not saying that we shouldn't keep working for this good stuff Bernie talks about.

I'm saying that by its very nature it's a ridiculously difficult, painful, time-consuming body of work. That you're going to get beat. A LOT. And that you're going to have to grit your teeth and work with people you don't like...like goddamn DLC triangulators and people who want fracking regulated rather than banned.

And that's fucking hard.

So hard that I'm not sure it can ever happen.

And that, in turn, really depresses the shit out of me. The worst are, indeed, full of passionate intensity. And the best...well, they're getting sick and tired of trying to roll that rock uphill.

I want to believe that there are ways. Real ways, practical ways, workable ways, to make all the good stuff that Bernie wants happen.

I just can't see anyone actually producing them.

No. No, no, no. FUCK no.

Proving that like the Bourbons the people that constitute the "leadership" of the United States government learn nothing yet forget nothing the Obama Administration has gone to the poo-flinging monkeyhouse technically known as the United States Congress for a new authorization to use military force, this time against the congeries of wanna-be Sunni Muslim theocrats that go by the nickname "Islamic State".

"President Obama asked Congress on Wednesday for new war powers to go after the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria...The president’s request would replace the 2002 legislation that authorized the Iraq War but leaves in place a very broadly worded resolution passed in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks."

Proving that you don't have to be a dry-drunk simpleton driving a short-bus-full of rage-drunk idiots and conniving weapons-grade-moron Machiavellis to fail to understand the words "don't", "involved", "land war", and "Asia" as well as the catastrophic decade of clusterfuckery that has followed Dick and Dubya's Most Excellent Middle Eastern Adventure the Obamites seem to believe that they can repeat the procedure without repeating the results.

I have absolutely no idea why they would believe this.

For one thing, the Daesh people (NB: apparently "Daesh" is the Arabic equivalent of the WW2 perjoratives "Huns" and "Nips" - it's the name that these guys' enemies use for it, since "Daesh" sounds similar to the Arabic words Daes ("one who crushes something underfoot") and Dahes ("one who sows discord") would like nothing better than for more U.S. joes to stumble around their 'hood killing people and breaking shit seeing as how that worked so goddamn well in Iraq. Doing what your enemy wants you to do is...well, "fucking stupid" are the words that come to mind but "the opposite of strategy" seems like a more measured way to describe it.

For another, well...fuck. IRAQ. Did we learn nothing? The reality on the ground is that the conditions in Iraq and Syria now are worse than when we invaded Iraq in 2003. There is no "government" in any sense of the word. The place has dissolved into a brawling mess of competing groups and semi-decrepit nation states (Turkey and Kurdistan being something of the exceptions...)

There are only two ways this will go.

The U.S. and it's "allies" will raze Sunnistan - the western portions of Iraq and the eastern portions of Syria - to the ground. They will kill and destroy until, as Bill Sherman would have put it, a crow flying over the Sunni lands will have to carry its own provisions. The U.S. will utterly destroy the Sunni capability and will to fight. And then...

...and then I have no idea. Perhaps the Sunni will consent to live under the rule of the other rump states, Alawite Syria and Shia Iraq, as chattel, as the Britons did under the Romans and the Tamils now do in Sri Lanka under the Hindus. That level of violence can produce submission.

Or, perhaps not.

But short of that level of violence?

I have no fucking clue what will happen. Nothing good, I assure you.

My friend Seydlitz says that the powers that be in the U.S. government have lost the ability to think about geopolitics strategically; to assess the economic, political, and military conditions realistically and then plot a course of action that uses U.S. strengths and the weaknesses of the area under consideration to produce a political, economic, and military endstate that benefits the United States.

I have always considered this optimistic. I don't know if the U.S. government has EVER had this ability outside of brief periods when smart people like George Marshall were running things.

But Marshalls seem to be in short supply, while we seem to have a never-ending amount of Dougie Fucking Feiths and Dick Goddamn Cheneys.

And now this.

It's not just the priests...

...that are more concerned with their own power and position than the public weal.

It's the merchants, too.

And the syncophants of all these powerful and wealthy people in U.S. politics as well as the U.S. public in large.

One of the parts of the current U.S. infatuation with "the market" that infuriates me more than the rest is the widespread ignorance of (or willful indifference to, which may be worse) much of the U.S. public to the fairly obvious and simple reality that any person or group of people whose primary objective is short-term profit for themselves is and are going to be indifferent at best and actively injurious at worst to anyone or anything not actively assisting them in turning said profit.

The Great Iniquity of the modern GOP - the worst of the U.S. public in this respect - is its insistence that "government is the problem" because that screed actively smokescreens the fact that only government - that is, only the public acting through its representatives - has the power to act as an effective check to these profiteers when their pursuit of profit comes at the expense of the public good.

But this power is not power when the public doesn't even know what its government should be checking, and especially when its government is involved not in checking this chicanery but acting to facilitate it:

“I have heard the argument that transparency would undermine the Trade Representative’s policy to complete the trade agreement because public opposition would be significant,” Warren explained. “In other words, if people knew what was going on, they would stop it. This argument is exactly backwards. If transparency would lead to widespread public opposition to a trade agreement, then that trade agreement should not be the policy of the United States.”

No duh.

This, this is the poison at the heart of all the harm done by this crony capitalism, this secret spying, this "security"; all these deals and agreements and policies made in night and fog.

A people that rule themselves must know what is being done to them, for them, and in their name. A people that rule themselves must know - at the very least - what their own government is doing, with whom, and why.

A people that is ruled will not, and do not.

A people that will not, and do not, will become a ruled people.

When, and how, are merely details.

While I understand that We, the People seem indifferent to this distinction, I cannot reconcile myself to the fact, and I cannot see anything good coming from it.