Put a bird on it

 

The whole "Elon Musk takes over Twitter and immediately pilots the bird in controlled flight into terrain" thing is remotely fascinating. 

To me, anyway.

I really don't have much of a fighting-dog on that particular flight. I don't use the app personally (I'm here, still blogging away like the refugee from the Nineties I am, or on Facebook - largely only because I still have long-distance friends that the Metaverse lets me stay in touch with...) so whether it lives or dies in a spectacular collapse is kind of a matter of indifference to me.

So the interest here at the Fire Direction Center is purely academic and out of curiosity.

But I am fascinated, in a sort of bemused way, watching a whole bunch of things very "21st Century America" slam into each other in this Twitter crash.

1. The whole tech-"genius"-worship thing.

I've never "got" the Musk-fanboi. The guy owns a company that builds...ohmigoadSpaceRockets!

Yeah, well, so did that old Nazi Werner von Braun.

But somehow this seems to have created a club that looks at this joker as some sort of culmination of The Buddha, Johnny "The Wadd" Holmes, and Croesus. Mostly because of the space rocket thing.

(There seems to be a subset of fans of his cars, but the rockets seem like the big draw).

But...c'mon. 

Einstein's Wall means that manned space flight is a nonsensical macguffin best left to science fiction, and since the end of the big NASA programs the inevitable consequence of letting plutocrats take over - space tourism - turns the whole Right Stuff legacy into WTF? Stuff. 

The fact that the USG has let this fuckstick take over the launch of communications satellites is infuriating, mind you. It's the astronautic equivalent of what we've let Republicans and greedy privatizing bastard (but I repeat myself) do to the Post Office; turn what should be a public good - communicating with each other - into a cashbox held by a greedy bastard.

Turns out that you don't really have to be that much of a "genius" to own a rocket company. You can be a greedy bastard and clueless outside your lane so long as you start by being a rich greedy bastard. Turns out that the best way to make millions is to start with millions. Who knew!?

2. Tech.

We're Americans. We're enthralled by shit that goes fast, makes noise, or beeps when you push its buttons. Twitter is just another tech gimmick, albeit a fairly useful one for talking to other people.

The notion that it's something "important" seems a fairly accurate metric of the sort of thing that the American public finds "important", and runs concurrent in my estimation with the amount of time that the recently-concluded election spent talking about "transgender".

There are such things as transgender people.

They're a tiny subset of the set "people", and they - like all people - just want to live their lives. Some happily and productively and sensibly, some madly and dramatically, some...well, just like everyone else.

In a sensible world, we, the "rest" of us, would mind our own fucking business and let them mind theirs.

Instead, because of a bunch of nitwit wingnuts, we've wasted an immense about of time, money, and intellectual throw-weight fretting about them.

It's the same with tech.

Twitter is a postcard. Facebook is a letter. TikTok is...sort of a postcard with moving cat pictures.

The platform is just another way of talking to one another. The "how" may be gee-whizzical. But the "what" is the same old-same-old that Sumerians did with clay tablets.

Which is to say, if not Twitter? Something else will be there to talk through.

Clay tablets, maybe. Whatever.

If we were willing to think of it that way, we'd realize that what's important is what we say and show and do, rather than the how.

And that brings me to...

3. "Free speech"

Supposedly the whole nonsense began because a) Musk was baked, and b) pissed off because one of his favorite right-wing assholes had been STFU by The Bird, so he c) did some dumb things that forced him into paying way more for this thing than he should have, so here we are.

Supposedly this all started because Musk (who may have been baked, remember...) wanted to "Free the Bird".

And yes, all the wingnuts have been raving for a long time about "freedom" and "their freedoms".

Those "freedoms", so far as I can tell, are largely the "freedom" to fuck around and not get kicked in the ass for it. To do rude, stupid, destructive-to-the-commons stuff and then not have to hear the non-rude, non-stupid, and/or non-destructive bystanders tell them they're being rude and stupid.

(kinda looks back at the whole "transgender" thing here...)

The "open-carry" fucknuts? The "rolling coal" d-bags? The sorts of people who want to pry into your bedroom, or your uterus? The white-is-right open racists, the "wimmens-is-stupid" misogynists?

Yeah, all those assholes.

They're cranky because they were told to sit down, shut up, and stop being rude stupid assholes.

Y'see, I grew up in the Sixties, when ALL that rude, stupid stuff was just "how Americans are". 

I remember hearing and using the expression "Jew him down" for bargaining; it wasn't "racism", it was "how Americans talked". 

I remember hearing my Chinese friend described as a "slope" and not immediately pounding the speaker senseless because that was "how Americans talked".

I remember seeing how badly the black kids in my school were treated, how girls "did this not that", how there were one set of rules for rich and powerful and another for everyone else, and that ws just "how America is".

Then, slowly, painfully, sometimes violently, incompletely, some "Americans" started pushing back against that rude, stupid shit.

It started to become unacceptable to call people playground names, because, well, that IS rude and stupid. 

It became less-acceptable (if not completely UN-acceptable) to treat people like shit because of their skin color, or their gender, or because of who they liked or loved.

And the rude and stupid people haaaaated that. So they fought back.

They found a natural ally in "conservative" groups - since most of the "conservative" groups believed, like them, that "bitches" and "faggots" were icky and that the Good Old Days when you could just call them "bitches" and "faggots" and beat them up were Good - and turned their rude stupidity into "free speech" so they could push back the pressure on them to be less-rude-and-less-stupid by slamming it as "woke" and "politically correct".

So all these rude, stupid wingnuts have been foaming at the mouth in anticipation of Musk turning his new Twitter toy into a place where everyone can be rude and stupid to the people that wingnuts hate.

And that seems to be happening.

And if that's not "America 2022" I don't know what is.

A rich, greedy rude (and, it now seems, pretty stupid) "genius" makes a dumb move while baked because his rude and stupid fanbois are fapping to him making the dumb move, and in the process takes something that other non-rude, non-stupid people find useful to communicate and makes it ruder, stupider, and worse.

The fucking Post Office?

Medical care?

Politics?

It seems like there's nothing that 21st Century America can't find a way to let - or encourage - rich, greedy, stupid douchenozzles to make ruder, stupider, and worse.

So.

I'm hopeful that the good (not-rude, not-stupid) people I visit on Twitter (hi, Arielle Dror! Hi, Mark Hertling! Hi, Scamperbeasts!) don't go away if (when?) the Bird hits the window.

Perhaps that's the most irritating part about all this, and what makes me less "fascinated" and more "irked with the antics of greedy rich bastard"; that all these good people (and cats...) are going to take it in the shorts because some baked knucklehead has a bunch of rude stupid asshole fanbois.

But people, eh?

As one of my old platoon sergeants summed it up:

"Some fuckin' people could fuck up a wet dream."

Probably as pithy an epigram for the damned human race as was ever coined, and so, since I can't add anything, here's another cat picture.

I gotta go gas up the Prius. But I'll be back later with more less-rude less-stupidity.

In re: Gates vs Gates

The weird thing about Bill Gates is how he seems like a poster child for late 20th Century “American innovation”.

He seems to have been a moderately decent coder and programmer, though I’ve read that people like O’Rear and and Greenberg did more of the fundamental DOS construction that made the original produce work with PCs.

His primary talent seems to have been marketing; so basically he was a salesman, a traveling show, hawking his product…which, frankly, is kind of a kludgy mess; crash-y, easily hacked, prone to deconstructing over time – it’s primary “value” is that it provides an Apple/Mac interface over a DOS so it freed you up from command-line but without the craftsmanship of the actual Mac OS and it let you buy a computer without mortgaging your home. That’s not a bad thing…but consider what we got in return.

I mean, think about what he “created”; a product that you legitimately expect to die on you at any moment. I’ve heard MS-DOS described in comparison to almost all the other things we use in our daily life as “imagine you’re driving along and suddenly your car engine simply dies…and to restart it everyone has to get out of the car, close all the doors, open the doors, and get back in. You’d sell that junker for pennies on the dollar as too much of a pain in the ass to be worth driving.”

But we’ve made him richer than the most rapacious medieval robber baron.

The mere existence of the fortunes of people like Gates make me nostalgic for the days of the 90% top marginal income tax rate.

Those were the days, my friend...

"The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man’s making shall be the servant and not the master of the man who made it. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have called into being.

No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar’s worth of service rendered-not gambling in stocks, but service rendered. The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size, acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means. Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective-a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate."

~ Theodore Roosevelt, 1910.

Try. Just try and imagine Mitch McConnell or Paul Ryan or Ann Coulter or Newt Gingrich or Donald Trump saying that today.

You can't, can you?

The "true conservative" of today is the radical reactionary of 1910, the Gilded Age plutocrat to whom the very idea of taxing unearned inherited wealth is horrific, and to even suggest to the unwashed masses that they should be the "master" of property and "control the mighty commercial forces" is worse than the worst collusion with hostile foreign powers.

Just your daily reminder that these people are your enemies. They are not "fellow citizens", they are not "Americans" in the sense that the ideals of this nation define citizenship. They are the ci-devant aristos, the allies and minions of the malefactors of great wealth. They see you as their cattle, their prey, and will gleefully use your stupidity, venality, racism, and more than anything else, your fear, to prey on you.

For the promise of this nation to be realized the GOP must be destroyed.

It's really that simple

Update 1/30: Paul Waldeman of the WaPo does a good job of explaining this:

"The real contested ground is the upper left or populist quadrant (29 percent of the electorate), where social conservatism meets economic liberalism...where there are persuadable voters — those who might choose either candidate — that’s where they’re mostly located. The battle for those votes will likely shape the race.

Democrats will go after them by arguing that Trump pulled a con on them in 2016, an argument that has the benefit of being perfectly true. Trump has been more eager to do the bidding of the wealthy and corporations than any president in modern times, and has run a spectacularly corrupt administration.

Trump’s strategy to hold on to them will be simple: race and immigration. He ran a campaign of xenophobia and hatred in 2016, tried unsuccessfully to do the same thing to save Republicans in 2018, and he’s going to do the same thing in 2020."

Here's the thing; that racism, xenophobia, and hate is a hell of a drug. The fascist parties of Europe have been using it to slam the economically populist parties successfully over the past decade.

A LOT of Americans are racist shitheels. The Trumpkins are counting on that, and I'm not convinced they're wrong.

Destroying the modern GOP is essential to the American Dream.

Doing it is going to be somewhere between "damned difficult" to "virtually impossible".

Post-Trump Ruminations

Frank Moraes has a good post up about the direction that progressives might take in light of the minority rejection of "liberalism" last Tuesday and, specifically, the problem that is being widely discussed about how - outside of the open racism, xenophobia, and misogyny what are, let's not kid ourselves, a big part of Il Douche's appeal to a basketful of deplorable white people - to fire up the Democratic base.

His first point, on the Electoral College, is indisputable. The damn thing is nothing but a ridiculous vestige of the slavery era. But, since it was designed specifically to over-represent the slaveowning South (and, thus, white landowners in particular) but has morphed into overrepresenting rural whites, for the Republicans that’s a feature for them not a bug.

Frank seems to think that they'd be good with 86ing it. I'm not so sure. For all that they make mouth-noises about how much they haaaaaate it it’s worth noting that it’s 40% failure rate was a felix culpa for the Party of Personal Responsibility. If the GOP was being honest I think they’d admit that they don’t reeeeally want to chance relying on the popular vote in presidential elections...

----------

Here’s the thing on the “Democratic base”, and the same problem I have with all the morning-after analyses that blame the Democratic Party for not being more responsive to the “economic anxiety” of the white working class.

If the Democratic Party doesn't want to become the straightforward "non-white party" there has to be some appeal for non-racist, non-xenophobic (basically, "non-asshole") whites. One problematic element for Clinton was her close ties to things like globalization and "free trade" agreements lile the TPP and NAFTA. The single strongest arguments that Bernie Sanders' supporters are using for this loss is that Clinton did nothing, or even attempt, to deploy Bernie's populist, anti-globalization/offshoring, anti-inequality platform.

The idea is that if the Democrats provide ideas to help with "economic anxiety" that they could have peeled off the non-asshole white voters from Drumpf.

The problem of non-intellectual/semiskilled living-wage jobs isn’t going away. The “problem” isn’t so much that those jobs are being stolen by Mexican rapists (tho the willingness of undocumented immigrants from the southern tier of the Americas to take piss-poor-nonliving-wage-jobs DOES have a lot to do, IMO, with the continuation of those jobs as piss-poor-nonliving-wage-jobs) but that
1) barring tariff protections, restrictive trade legislation, and a massive forceful reduction in capital mobility those jobs are going, or gone, and won’t be coming back, and
2) many of those that ARE here are being rapidly automated.

A Democratic party that stood for an end to that would have real problems. The press, neither knowning nor caring to know the technological and fiscal issues, would hammer it as the Party of Luddites and the Party of Protectionism. The People of Wal-Mart would shriek like gelded hogs as the price of cheap plastic crap soared. Manufacturers would whine and squeal about being forced to employ buggy-whip manufacturers...

Don’t get me wrong; I think that the Democratic Party needs to think hard, and come up with SOME kind of better solution to issues like global trade, trade agreements, deindustrialization and offshoring than they have.

But I think the problem is that, very much like climate change, this is an insanely tough challenge, a very, very complex issue and one that would require a massively complex, interlocking system of legal, economic, social, and political changes to solve...if, indeed, it IS solveable.

And you also have to factor in that our political system is ridiculously poorly designed to solve problems like that. Our public is ridiculously poorly prepared to inform itself, think through, and vote intelligently on problems like that. Climate change is, IMO, the canary in that coal mine and We the People have done horrendously on that issue.

So...while I agree that the Democrats need to do “something” about this whole “economic anxiety” problem I’m not sure that they can arrive at a solution that will carve off enough of the white nationalists who want to hear Trump tell them that he’s gonna build that big, beautiful wall and bring all those jobs back in a shopping cart also filled with rainbows and cuddly puppies.

----------

This goes for Bernie and the "Revolution" movement, too, by the way. I think his message on trade agreements and economic inequality was and is a good one. I think the Democratic Party needs to embrace it, and become more openly...perhaps not "counter-globalization" but more intelligent on globalization. Right now the DLC/Clintonist message is "Globalization! It's What's For Dinner!". That's fine for the sort of Democrat that books a suite at Davos, but the rest of us? We're not getting much out of that, and the lack of enthusiasm showed bigger than hell this past Tuesday.

But. Even if Bernie closed the trade loopholes, kiboshed the TPP and NAFTA, and got a top tax bracket back in the 90's...the problems of deindustrialization and automation wouldn't go away, and I'm not sure whether Bernie and the Sanders Movement has thought about what happens the day after the TPP is burned down to ash, either.

I'm saying that I think the the Democratic Party needs to move Bernie-wards on trade and globalization. I'm ALSO saying that I'm not sure that solves the problems that make this issue such a perfect one for a demagogue like Trump.

Varsity Drag

Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns & Money...

...makes a hell of a frighteningly good point:

"...a huge social problem, which is made all the more difficult by a consensus, broadly shared across the ideological spectrum, that more education is the solution to an almost unlimited number of economic and social problems. For obvious reasons, those peddling these cures — which as he says is almost everybody in and around the world of education and employment policy — are not eager to consider that a large percentage of the population is not going to be helped by ever-more elaborate treatments along these lines."

Five years or so ago I wrote up a little post about one of the mortally wounded in this losing battle;

"This is the Debatable Land, the very distant fringes of the warm, sunlit uplands of education that you see in the television specials and that politicians and educators tell you is the hope of the future. This isn't Manifest Destiny, the broad horizon and limitless opportunity that the land speculators of pedagogy are selling you; this is the dark hinterlands of learning, the Mountain Meadows of education, where ignorant armies of harassed, poorly prepared, overcharged students scramble to learn by night from equally harassed, poorly paid instructors. This is the recruit depot for a beaten army, where with my jaded sergeant's eye I can pick out the walking dead from the likely survivors. This one, she wears her body bag around her head like a shawl, her puzzled eyes already glazed with the dim awareness of danger and failure around her.

She's not going to make it."

Campos points up the most damning statistic for those who want to cling to the Pollyannaish belief that enough "education" will solve the problems of capital flight and the enforced decay of the middle-class-wage jobs; that pay for college graduates has remained virtually unchanged over damn near 40 years. If a "college education" was the solution to the problem of corporate flight and the deliberate selection of capital over labor then you'd expect that that value would have risen steadily over time, as have prices, costs, and profits.

They have not.

This is not some sort of "inevitable" outcome, some sort of natural progression in the market economic cycle.

It is, instead, what happens when you choose to let the people who own businesses - including education business - do things that are in their short- (and medium-, or even long-term) interest but which are not in the interest of the society as a whole.

The implications of this slow-motion disaster seem obvious. An increasingly desperate citizenry is faced with an increasingly unpayable cost to try and grab and hold on to an increasingly unprofitable and decreasing number of jobs. This citizenry can be reliably counted on to be easily panicked by, and to be easy prey to, the least scrupulous, most vicious demagogue that promises whatever pie-in-the-sky the poor bastards think can save them and their children.

Are you scared? I'm scared.

Fuck, the whole idea is as scary as a secondhand plumber's pickup truck full of ISIS headcutters armed with nuclear machetes and hordes of venomous snakes carrying Ebola.

Why the hell CNN isn't all over this I...oh, wait.

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

This is why we can't have nice things. This. Is fucking why.

And, surprisingly, it's not "Short Time" Sam Alito's Himalayan-massif-like mountain of stupid that is the Hobby Lobby v. Burwell decision.

And, yet, it is, but not for the reason that most of my friends are furious about it.

Yes, it privileges one sect of Christianity over others, including other non-fundie Christian sects, thus violating the Establishment Clause. Yes, it's a remarkable dick-slap in the face of women and especially women not born to the two-yacht family. Yes, it's hypocritical, given the business' owners support of other contraceptive manufacturers. Yes, yes, yes...

But you know what the REALLY insidious thing about this gelatinous mass of fucktardry is?

That it equates ignorant credulity with intelligent reason.

Here's the deal. One of the main points that the Jesus-pesterers who own this outfit objected to was that several of the forms of birth control purchaseable under the ACA were, in their opinion, "abortifacients" - they popped little blastocyst-Americans out of their proto-mommy's womb like teensy pry-bars and thus made Baby Jesus cry or something.

The facts were completely in opposition. These things - including the "Plan B" pill and a couple of IUD's - prevented implantation rather than "aborted" an actual fertilized zygote. Doctors and researchers from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists noted "...there is a scientific distinction between a contraceptive and an abortifacient and the scientific record demonstrates that none of the FDA-approved contraceptives covered by the Mandate are abortifacients."

Pretty straightforward, right? You can get to fight this because you don't want to pay for your employee's birth control (and good luck with that, given both the case law and popular opinion...) but not because you don't like the idea of funding her post-hootchie time abortion...because what you're paying for is NOT abortion. You just BELIEVE it is.

Now Sam Alito comes along and makes his bid for the imperial crown of Emperor-for-Life of the Stupids:

"It is not for the Court to say that the religious beliefs of the plaintiffs are mistaken or unreasonable."

Got that? Your "belief" may be completely in opposition to cold, hard, established fact. You may believe that dogs are ducks. You may believe that the Sun is a giant heat-lamp in God's bathroom. You may believe that women are life-support systems for a womb. And...if you really, really, really believe that, then Sam Alito's Supreme Court, the highest seat of legal opinion in our nation, isn't going to tell you you're as full of shit as a three-day-old-diaper and to knock it the hell off and grow another brain cell.

Now. What's interesting to me about this is that on the comment thread about this on my Facebook page, one of the wingtards opined: "Labeling the people who disagree with you "stupid" is as bad as labeling the people who disagree with you "immoral"." Which is basically what Short-Time Sam is saying. You want to believe something impossible? Something ridiculous? And, more importantly, you want to make people who are dependent on you, who may not believe in that stupid ridiculous belief act in line with your stupid belief? Fine. We, the highest court in the land, are not going to tell you that you are a fucking idiot and that you need to smarten up, stop doing stupid things, and stop trying to make smarter people around you do those stupid fucking things.

No. We're going to tell you to go ahead and go Full On Stupid, because Jesus tells you to.

I have NO problem labeling that "stupid". It IS stupid. When my ignorant opinion is accorded the same weight as your fact? That's stupid.

That's one reason we can't have nice things; because a pantsload of our fellow citizens are doing Full Stupid because they believe Jesus (or whatever the heck they worship; God, Allah, Zoroaster, Mammon, Ayn Rand, who the hell knows...) tells them so.

As Ruth Ginsberg said in her dissent: "Would the exemption…extend to employers with religiously grounded objections to blood transfusions (Jehovah's Witnesses); antidepressants (Scientologists); medications derived from pigs, including anesthesia, intravenous fluids, and pills coated with gelatin (certain Muslims, Jews, and Hindus); and vaccinations..?"

Based on Emperor Sam of the Stupids, yes, apparently.

So that's all very idiotic and depressing but, no. Here's the thing that really depresses me. Here's the real reason that the rest of us can't have good things:

Okay, this is the last point: What are the costs? What are the consequences of this, other than just that it’s an oppressive system and it sucks to live in a small town where Wal-Mart is the only retailer, and it sucks to be a farmer who’s having your livelihood crushed. What are the costs?

The costs are the end of democracy, the costs are the end of liberty. The real issue with Wal-Mart is not that it sucks to live in a small town, it’s that the Walton family now controls as much wealth as 41.5 percent of all Americans. One family with as much wealth as 130 million Americans. Now, who’s gonna get listened to when they show up on Capitol Hill? Or in the State House? Or the Town Hall? Is it Mrs. Smith? Or is it going to be the Walton family?

Of course.

And all this accumulation continues still. This accumulation of wealth and power is getting worse and worse and worse. So, the cost is the loss of our democracy and the loss of our liberties.

So: this is how the great populist period of the 20th Century ends; not with a bang. Not even with a whimper, but with the sound of a cash drawer closing on the nation we grew up in.

What's infuriating to me is that this isn't a surprise, this isn't a black swan. We've been here before, been under the boot of the plutocrats and the malefactors of great wealth. We know that that's bad, for us, anyway, and we know how to change that, and we're choosing not to, we're choosing instead to slide restively but quitely into the New Feudalism, the New Gilded Age, rather than to fight...because there IS nowhere to fight. The popular press is owned by the same people who own everything else, and there is no other path to public attention; the failure of Occupy proved that. If you cannot gain the licking of the lickspittle press you will be drowned out, turned away, ridiculed, and emasculated. You cannot hope to gain the attention, let alone the furor, of the huge unmoving slorg that is the American Public.

The gates are high, and the gatekeepers are all paid to keep us out.

And the alternative is what the People gave the Bourbons and the Romanovs. And we know how those ended; with Men on Horseback, ruin, and merciless hatred.

It's late, and I'm tired, and unhappy, and dispirited. I wish I could see another end to this story, a happy, sunshiny ending full of rainbows and sparkle ponies. But I can't and I don't. All I can do is rail at the blind stupidity of people like the Walton clan and Short-Time Sam Alito, Emperor-for-Life of the Stupid People, and the owners of the Hobby Lobby and the Teabaggers who love them. They are dragging us down to a damnation of their own making in the name of Freedom! and salvation and though I will be safely in my dirt bed by the time their promises are fullfilled all I can see is the yawning Pit and the fire and the hell that await my children.

Missing the point

As I was thinking about blogging, the past year, and this one I realized that one of my least favorite pastimes had and has become both observing and commenting on the state of the Union here in the Land of the Big PX.

The simple reason is that what I see happening, and what I see and hear from all around me, are vastly different and cripplingly troublesome.

What I see as the single, comprehensive, massively important issue is the seemingly-inexorable slide towards the New Gilded Age.

This change affects everything in the United States - our politics, our economics, and our society - and in a way that as a member of the breaker-boy-and-match-girl segment of that society I find somewhere between appalling and revolting.

Somehow We, the People, seem to have lost sight of the fact that it is not in our best interests to vest an immense pile of wealth and, through that wealth, power, in a relatively small handful of people at the top of the demographic heap.

I don't see this as some sort of force of Nature or simple swing of the politico-economic pendulum. Instead I see it as a generations-long project driven by the greed and selfishness of the rentier-class at one end and propelled by the fuck-stupid ignorance and prejudices of the Duck Dynasty-class at the other.

The oligarchs are what they have always been; rapacious. In that rapacity they are also as they have predictably been; shortsighted. The lessons of 1789 and 1917 have largely faded far enough into the past for them to have forgotten why the Western democracies chose the welfare-state model in the first place.

While I don't particularly blame them for that I don't trust them, either.

Like British admirals, every generation or so they need a couple of heads on pikes to deliver the sharp encouragement to mind their civic manners and show some politesse to the proles. Instead they have been allowed to beaver away at the social contract here in the U.S. where it has become louche for even a Pope to remind these Mammon-fellating bastards that (if they are notionally Christian) by the very words of the text they profess to revere they can be rich, or Christian, but not both.

And the stupids are...well, stupid.

I can't exactly blame them for that, either, although it helps when the Stupid is directed towards despising the Idle Rich and their political lackeys rather than sucking up to them.

But the Teatards manage to be some sort of political Perfect Storm of Stupid; either too fatheaded to see ol' Sam Walton's kids waiting up there at the top of the chute with the humane killer, or too vitriolic in hating on the Niggers, the Queers, and the Lib'ruls to care, or both.

Between the two - the modern Bourbons at the top and the modern Australopithecenes at the bottom - we have managed to shove ourselves a hell of a long distance closer to the nasty conditions we last saw in 1929 than I would ever have thought possible.

And the third utterly rotten part of this is the degree to which our supposed press has managed to largely miss this entirely.

Instead - when we're not being simply fluffed with ridiculous nonsense - the news organizations have adopted the "both sides do it" nursery rhyme of "centerism" and the mindless stenography of reportage without ever managing to connect these dots of news into the larger point; our nation has become a vast Skinnerbox for maximizing wealth for the wealthy and power for the powerful to the detriment of everything else for everyone else.

Wonder why the U.S. can stumble about into foreign expeditions seemingly without any sort of strategic vision?

Wonder why the U.S. can gin up vast, unaccountable programs of foreign and domestic espionage?

Wonder why the U.S. can increase defense spending while cutting taxes, prosecute petty drug dealers with life sentences while letting wealth financiers walk for laundering millions in drug profits, fret endlessly about who puts what in whom, where, and how often while whistling unconcernedly past naked acts of crony capitalism, environmental despoilation, and violent "law-enforcement"?

Look no further than the old Latin tag: "qui bono?"; "who benefits?"

Or, rather, "Who is harmed?"

None of the problems you read in the news harm, or really even affect, the Truly Wealthy.

Their sons and daughters aren't dying - either of boredom or land mines - in Southwest Asia. Their mansions aren't soaked in spilled petroleum or mine tailings. They are not desperately looking for work after losing their job to offshoring, downsizing, or mechanization. Their doors are not knocked down at midnight, their cars not pulled over, their careers not destroyed by prison. They could care less about abortion - if they or their daughter needs one they can get one; safely and silently - or homos, or guns, or public prayer. Their wealth is not tied to their work, so the relative decline of wages, or of work itself, does not touch them.

They're doing juuuuust fine, thanks.

So, to me, all the random ranting about farkling about in Southwest Asia, or some homo marrying some other homo, or who can't buy that nifty rifle with the bayonet lug misses the point, too.

There is only one real story in the U.S. right now; will we be ruled by our own wealthy or will we rule ourselves?

And right now the answer doesn't look good to me, or to you, if you're not reading this on the computer inside your 6,000-square-foot palazzo.

So, frankly, I can't see any point in my throwing out more posts about politics, or economics, or how society in the U.S. is going to hell for the next year. We know why those things are happening to us, and it's not because of the blacks or the queers or the muslims.

And after that the only question left for me to ask is:

What are we doing about it?

The tumult and the shouting die...

Charles Pierce said that at least they were shouting at the right buildings.

And they were.

The problem was that after the shouting was beaten down there was nothing left.

Bob Reich has a decent post-mortem of the Occupy movement that sums up what went wrong:

"Occupy put the issue of the nation’s savage inequality on the front pages, and focused America’s attention on what that inequality was doing to our democracy. To that extent, it was a stirring success.

But Occupy eschewed political organization, discipline, and strategy. It wanted to remain outside politics, and outside any hierarchical structure that might begin to replicate the hierarchies of American society it was opposing.

So when mayors, other public officials, and university administrators cleared the Occupy encampments by force — encampments that had become the symbol of the movement — nothing seemed to remain behind. Some Occupiers made plans for further actions, but a movement without structure, discipline, and strategy proved incapable of sustaining itself."

That's too bad, because the political reality is that there were, and are, natural allies of Occupy all around us. The Occupiers were too impressed with their own purity to look around and find them.

Two years later and the 1% is 1-percentier-than-ever. The United States looks increasingly like a nation that is headed towards an unbridgeable divide between the Haves and the Have-nots. Between the bought-and-paid-for influence that the American wealthy have in both main political parties and the complete and utter anti-government insanity of the Right - seeing as the only potential counterweight for large private organizations such as businesses is the power of large public taxation, regulatory, and legal enforcement free of the influence of those organizations - there appears to me no potential for changing this direction.

I think we will look back on this failure to recognize that the real enemies of "our freedoms" are not sitting in a cave in the tribal areas of Pakistan or in some beige cubicle in a federal office building but in boardrooms and lobbying congresscritters as the great tragic failure of our age.

Because if we do not or cannot act we are looking at our oligarchic masters and the political structures they have co-opted for the rest of our lives. Reich sums it up: "Occupy served an important purpose, but lacking these essentials it couldn’t do more. Inequality is worse now than it was then, and our democracy in as much if not more peril. So what’s the next step?"

What's frustrating is that this should be simple. Both the remnants of the actual Left as well as the Tea Party Right should agree that corporatism - the unholy alliance of government and big business - is bad for those of us not in two-yacht families. The tragedy seems to be that while the Left is willing to at least give things like resurrecting Glass-Stegall and breaking up the "too big to fail" banks and retooling tax and tariff policies to favor wages over "investments" and actually creating jobs instead of creating tax shelters and calling that "job-creation" the Right won't touch this stuff. It's "more government", see, and government is Bad.

Mind you, I can't find a movement Conservative answer for this "Return to the Gilded Age" that doesn't depend on magical ponies and sparkle fairy dust. But...government is Bad, so...FREEDOM!

So I hate to keep banging this drum but...if those of us lacking a key to the executive bathroom can't or won't find a way to agree on figuring out a way to change our direction we will find ourselves, we petty men, walking under the huge legs of the Wall Street Bull and peeping about to find ourselves dishonorable graves.

Men at some time are masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Headshot

I was watching the Beeb last night about the protests in Brazil, comparing them to the protests in Turkey, and wondering about my own country.

Because it seems to me that two far-distant places are experiencing much the same political problems; both are democratic republics, both have a legal system in place for the citizens to vote for change. But in both a substantial minority of the people believe that their "votes" are meaningless, and that the way the system of government is currently set up that they have no hope of bettering the lives (or affecting particular issues they see as worsening their lives) within the democratic process.

So they take to the streets.

We had that here, not so long ago, with the Occupy protests, and to my mind the only real difference was in the reaction of the governments. In Turkey and Brazil the police agencies had and have a long, ugly history of brutal reaction to public protest. The initial beatings and gassings had the effect of reminding Turks and Brazilians how much they reeeeeally hated the way their cops beat and gas them, and the protests became as much about that as about the initial grievances.

Here our coppers have learned to be crafty and patient. Protest met with a riot baton wrapped inside a comfy pillow is protest that gradually loses its vitality. If it doesn't lay you out cold a rap on the skull just pisses you off. But an indifferent stare is boring. The U.S. coppers knew that the way to defuse Occupy was to make it boring, and they did. The U.S. public lost interest, Occupy lost it's momentum and has already faded into insignificance.

Which in my opinion will be remembered as a tragedy. The Occupiers had one burning insight; that from the mildly benign oligarchy it had been from 1932 to the late 1970s the U.S. is rapidly becoming a predatory toxic oligarchy through the rapaciousness of its oligarchs. This insight was lost in the foolish cacophony of noise the Occupiers generated and the criminally negligent reportage of the courtier press. I believe that we will one day regret that we did not pay more attention to the rise of the modern aristos.

The result has been a continued slide back to the rampant inequality and social division of the Gilded Age, with the concurrent erosion of the sort of stodgy bourgeois middle-class attitude of the "rest" of the U.S. public as it sees it's decent-wage jobs, it's pensions, it's influence, and it's security ever more crammed down and eroded away. Combine that with the overwhelming sense that gold now makes the rules and that the reopening of government to massive inflows of cash has made individual voting almost meaningless and you get a public that seems to me daily more vulnerable to a demagogue, a "man on horseback" that promises to make those changes that they can't.

And that vulnerability makes me think of perhaps the saddest image I've seen from these recent protests:

This young woman was first said to be an Egyptian visiting Istanbul; since then the Egyptian embassy has devowed knowledge of her. So we have no idea of who she is - or was, since she must have suffered massive head trauma from the direct gas-canister hit and is very likely dead - or why she was there, or what she was doing and thinking at the time that the heavy metal can turned that day into endless night.

Whatever drove her into that street drove her to her own doom.

That seems to be pretty much what happens when desperate, vulnerable people take to the street. Few popular rebellions seem to end well; as bad as conditions were before the Revolution it seems hard to imagine that Napoleon is an upgrade over the Bourbons or Stalin over the Tsar. The defenestration of oligarchy usually seems to produce autocracy and war, not liberty and law.

The promise of the United States is the chance to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. Not to win them, but to pursue them.

But it seems to me that that promise now stands in the street we've built to let some of us drive towards increased wealth and power.

Will they collide violently? Will the streets explode in anger, as they have in Brazil and in Instanbul?

Will the result be that promise ending up lying in the street as she lay, dazed and barefoot, dying?

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.

Skeptical Inquirer

For some reason my Facebook page has been overrun lately with people posting me things about how eeeeevil Monsanto is.

Now let me say for the record; I'll be the first to suspect Monsanto of any and all of the sorts of corporate malfeasance that corporations have got up to since the first couple of Sumerians got together to lowball the other guys in the Tigris Co-op.

But a lot of this stuff just seems...insensate.

For example, one person posted a link to some beekeeper who had his colonies confiscated by the Illinois Agriculture people. The article stated that this was connected in some nefarious way with corporate Big Ag; Monsanto was mentioned because of a connection between the Roundup pesticide and colony collapse.

"The Illinois Ag Dept. illegally seized privately owned bees from renowned naturalist, Terrence Ingram, without providing him with a search warrant and before the court hearing on the matter, reports Prairie Advocate News. Behind the obvious violations of his Constitutional rights is Monsanto. Ingram was researching Roundup’s effects on bees, which he’s raised for 58 years. “They ruined 15 years of my research,” he told Prairie Advocate, by stealing most of his stock."

Which makes absofuckinglutely no sense at all.

Look, I'll happily convict Monsanto of poisoning wells and sacrificing babies to Moloch. But pollinator and especially honeybee deaths are terrible publicity for the company; every time someone brings up honeybee problems pesticides are one of the major villains.

Why the hell would a company making pesticides want to stop someone from researching how to develop pesticide-resistance in honeybees?

I'm not saying that they didn't. I'm not saying that couldn't.

I'm saying that on its face the charge makes no sense. The saying in geology is "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". If you were trying to prove that Monsanto's Roundup was killing honeybees then it'd make sense for Monsanto to want to shut you down. But the article is quite specific; "...they (the bees) could have been turned over to Monsanto to ascertain why some of his bees are resistant to Roundup." Roundup resistant bees? Whoa! Monsanto for the win!

Why the hell would Monsanto want to stop that kind of research?

I'll buy that they could - but you're going to have to produce a hell of a lot of proof before I do.

Along with this anti-Monsanto agitation there was a general irruption of anti-GMO posts, almost all of them talking about the horror of GM organisms. There was little if any actual biology involved. Here's a typical one: GMO Wheat Found In Oregon Field..How Did It Get There?

Well, duh.

A sensible person would answer "It got there the way any other volunteer plant gets anywhere, probably; bird or animal ate a seed, pooped it out in a corner of the field. Somebody dumped a pocketful of GM seed out on the ground. Wind. Act of God..."

The "why" - which is the breathless center of the whole fevered article - doesn't seem to be the real big issue here.

The bigger question that this article doesn't address is "Is there any evidence - hard, scientific evidence - that this GM wheat is a "problem"; that it endangers the mainstream wheat genome, that it produces harmful effects when ingested, that it has problematic genotypic characteristics that, if allowed to diffuse into the wheat genome, might cause trouble down the road"?

And why?

Well, because that's a goddamn hard question. And it probably doesn't have a quick or easy answer. Or one that lends itself to scary headlines about spooky GM wheat suddenly appearing like Freddy Kruger in a slasher movie.

There's a much, much better article tucked away in Scientific American that asks "What DO we know about GM organisms, what don't we know, and why don't we know it?"

"For a decade their user agreements have explicitly forbidden the use of the seeds for any independent research. Under the threat of litigation, scientists cannot test a seed to explore the different conditions under which it thrives or fails. They cannot compare seeds from one company against those from another company. And perhaps most important, they cannot examine whether the genetically modified crops lead to unintended environmental side effects."

Humans have been modifying organisms for millennia. We can now do it in a single generation unlike the previous breeders that had to work in lifetimes. And those changes are and should be daunting; who knows what genetic twist will torque a simple organism into the next Spanish Influenza, a new Potato Blight?

But how is the best way to deal with this to simply fear and forbid them? To demonize and scare-tactic about them, to set up a counter-anti-science in opposition to the GM organizations' anti-science? Is a blanket condemnation any better than the GM companies blanket denial of independent research?

Anyway.

About the same time there was also a flurry of "March Against Monsanto" posts in my in-box, and apparently this past Sunday about one-fourth as many people wandered around downtown Portland marching against Monsanto as turned out to see the Portland Thorns FC play the Washington Spirit a couple of weeks ago.

I didn't go. Neither did this guy, and he has a terrific post explaining why:

"Monsanto isn’t out to poison us or the environment. They are just one part of a system that is meeting demand for plentiful, cheap food. If Monsanto went away tomorrow, our food system would look almost the same, including all the problems. I believe that most people who went to marches today are actually concerned about the same thing I am: how do we produce enough food, fairly, for all with minimal impact on the environment? How do we achieve that? Setting up cartoon villains isn’t the way to do it."

That's kind of the crux of the biscuit, isn't it?

My Facebook friend(s) that post this stuff, and my bride's dear friend who shared her "MILFs Gone Wild" weekend, seem to have the same sort of thing going on. They are concerned. They protest, they agitate about certain causes, they march, the write letters. They do change their own lives; Geochick is a strict vegan and her family is, too.

But for all that they don't seem to be able to go further than "setting up cartoon villains". Wall Street. Monsanto. Obama. FOX News. GM wheat.

But they never seem to be able to actually change the things that power up those villains and their villainy.

A lot of these "villains" are villainous because the world and our society makes their villainy profitable. If it wasn't them it would be someone like them. To change the villain isn't enough. There must be a change in the world that profits the villainy.

But that sort of change?

It won't happen because three thousand of you march around Lloyd Center.

It can happen when tens of thousands of you storm prisons, and palaces. It can happen when you destroy those prisons, those palaces, your life and the lives of those around you. But that sort of change is fearful; it often replaces the bad with the worse, and the Tsar is overthrown only to set Stalin in his place.

The great promise of the U.S. is that it offers the public some of that change without the need to destroy. You can vote. You can woo and threaten and try and influence legislators. Hell, you can even buy one or two; ain't tradition wonderful?

I don't know what the hell to do about GM crops. But I do know that running and hiding in pure fear of them isn't a good option.

And using laws and patents to stifle research on them and prevent skeptical inquiry about them isn't one, either.

And most of all I wish to hell I thought that the U.S. circa 2013 was in any condition to make an intelligent and reasoned decision one way or the other.

Don't Fear The Reaper

The summer has finally arrived in Portland.

Now generally this is a Good Thing. For all that we made our bones being cold and rainy, we Stumptowners like the warm sun as much as anyone. We like trading our raingear for shorts and T-shirts, and our boots for flip-flops and topsiders. And especially this year, with the winter SO wet and lingering so long.

The only downside is that the grass then begins to grow.

And in the fertile valley at the end of the Oregon Trail, the bastard doesn't just grow. It metastasizes like a frigging green melanoma; a verdenoma that goes utterly bugnuts when the sun arrives to warm the rich soil and all that rain-soaked vegetation.

And this is what has happened to the little "Rain Garden" at my kids' elementary school. By last Saturday the grass was, in some places, two feet high.

Now that in itself is kind of sad.

First, take a look at the linked page to see what the big deal about this "Rain Garden" is. When we first moved here the courtyard between the wings of the school was this fugly asphalt rectangle; awash in the winter, baking in the early autumn and late spring, and just butt-ugly all year round.

The school district took about $100,000 and ripped out the asphalt and made the thing over into a garden designed to work in Portland's cool-wet-winter-hot-dry-summer climate.

The idea was that rather than a typical lawn (which, around here, would be dead grass and dandelions by August) the thing would contain "...trees, shrubs, grasses, and wildflowers selected for their tolerance to dry and moist soil conditions."

Here's a picture of what it looked like when it was finished.

And here is was Saturday afternoon:

The first couple of years a group of parents who were involved in the construction continued to look after the Garden; weeding, watering in the summer (since despite what the brochure says the "hand pump" was never installed and the cistern was used as a compost bin, so the watering required City water), raking leaves in the fall.

But after their kids moved on to middle and high school that group fell away. Last Saturday there were four adults there to try and attack the mess; Mojo, and myself, and two other moms.

And it IS a mess.

Three years without attention and rough field grass have overtaken the native plants almost everywhere. Weeds - especially our hated Himalayan blackberry - have grown up in the planters. The mound at the west end - what I call "Hamburger Hill" - is covered in knee-high grass that makes walking or sitting on it a chore.

Because of the uninhabitable condition the teachers have stopped using the Garden completely. Mojo did a quick survey two weeks ago; not a single teacher was interested or willing to use the Garden in its existing condition.

For all practical purposes, over one hundred thousand dollars and hundreds, probably thousands, of parent, teacher, and donated contractor work-hours are, at present, utterly wasted.

My bride, lovely woman that she is, has taken an interest in this patch of weeds. She, and two of Missy's kindergarten pals moms, hauled me and the kiddos over on Saturday and began to hack away at the rampaging sea of grass with hand tools and a tiny residential trimmer.

I could have sat down and cried.

First, because there are something like 500 kids at Astor Elementary school. Assuming that half of them have two involved parents the potential labor pool runs to about 750 adults. And yet here were four people giving their time to try and rescue this expensive, wasted space. We were not just the 1 Percent; we were the 0.53 Percent. Of the some 750 parents with children at that school no more than four - and two of those parents of the same kids - could find time on a weekend to pitch in to gift that school some of their time and labor.

And, second, because much as I admired the gals' intentions, I couldn't believe their methods. Faced with a weedy Hannibal running wild they were trying to beat him by picking off one Carthaginian at a time with a boot knife.

Well. Sod THAT for a game of soldiers. The Army didn't teach me tactics and logistics for me to pull grass one clump at a time.

I told them flat-out that I had no intention of squatting on my hams like Luke the Gook pulling one clump of grass at a time.

And than I drove up to Columbia Boulevard and rented a big-ass gas-powered weed whacker, returned that afternoon and waded into the grass with my wailing scythe and reaped the damn stuff like Alaric.

So now Hamburger Hill is mown as level as a fairway, and the remainder of the Garden is flat as a putting green.

Until the next time.

Because there is still nobody at Astor in charge of the place. There is nobody to coordinate, implore, cajole, and direct volunteers, like me, to continue to maintain the place. There is nobody to coax teachers into using it, or children to visit it.

So while it has been reaped, there is still nothing in place to sow the future of this once-lovely little Garden. Instead it lies fallow, slowly deteriorating under the warm early summer sun.

And I put it to you that the story of the Reaper in the Rain Garden is one of America, circa 2012, writ small.

Begun with great publicity, on grant money and borrowed labor, and then thrown away through a combination of inattention, mismanagement, carelessness, and indifference. What might be a pretty little place for learning gone to waste for the lack of people who care enough to get off their dead asses and do some work for the common good, and "leadership" that would rather preen and posture than get down and do the hard work of getting those dumb bastards to understand that if we don't hang together we will surely, at the pleasure of our corporate masters, hang separately.

And while today our work on the Garden has reclaimed it, for the moment...

...the patient grass grows tall again as you read this. And we are still without a plan.

Eating Soup with a Sieve

Robert Farley has a new article up at World Politics Review about his thoughts on the coming Department of Defense budget circus:

"Perhaps the most important takeaway from the white paper is the official recognition that the size of the defense budget itself represents a threat to U.S. national security."

says Farley,

"In theory, this should not be such a remarkable insight; one common narrative explaining the end of the Cold War is that the United States drove the Soviet Union to economic ruin by forcing it to maintain an unsustainable military budget. As Bernard Finel suggests, the United States has now committed itself to a degree of dominance over potential rivals that may be unsustainable in the long run, and that in and of itself poses risks."

Well enough. But I don't know if he has thought this through far enough.

Specifically:

First, I think he's giving the flacks too much credit - simply saying this will happen is far from a guarantee that it WILL happen. Military overstretch is nearly universal in the decline phase of imperia; almost the first symptom of post-vitality in a large or imperial polity is an excessive amount of revenue devoted into military forces and a decreasing return from that "investment".

That is; as empires first grow they often find that war "pays for itself". Imperial troops extend the borders, bringing home slaves and tribute, incorporating rich lands and peoples into the empire. This wealth then translates into more, better-equipped forces, which are more effective against the barbarians, bringing more people and more wealth into the empire. Wash, rinse, repeat.

But over time the combination of imperial social and political arteriosclerosis, bloated elites devoted to their own interests at the expense of the common good, and the vicious effects - on both imperials and colonials - of ruling the subject populations reduces the gains and expands the costs. Subsequent rulers desperately try and find ways to reduce these costs, only to find that in armies, in in every organization, what begins as a relatively lean, cost-effective organization over time becomes overstuffed with useless dunnage that contributes little, if anything, to the actual business of warfighting.

But, second, it is difficult or even impossible to reverse this without immense outlays of political prestige and will. I cannot think of a historical example of an empire that voluntarily restructured its armed forces, in a short time, as the result of a deliberate serious analysis of its geopolitical interests. The Marian Reforms? Except they were more-or-less purely organizational. The conversion of the U.S. to a global superpower in 1945? Helped that just at the moment we had the world's largest army, navy, air force, and a nuke or three lying around.

I'm not sating it can't be done - just that it's damn deadly difficult and the successful examples are so few I can't think of any, And throw in the toxic political environment of the 201s United States? It seems beyond unlikely; it is likely to be absolutely impossible.

Overall I tend to agree wholeheartedly with his conclusion:

"Defense budget politics has increasingly become a field of narrow contestation between experts, elites and interested actors, rather than a field in which different visions of the political good engage with one another. This has resulted in a prioritization of bureaucratic interest and parochial concern, both of which are enemies of real grand strategy."

...but tend to see this not as a bug but as a feature. In my opinion throughout MOST of U.S. history our military budgets have been decided this way.

For most of U.S. history that's been fine. We didn't need much in the way of geopolitical strategy to lick the natives of North America; some smallpox and a railroad or two would work just swell. Ad-hoc assemblies of forces would do to swat the Mexicans, Spanish, and Filipinos. You can sum up our geopolitical plans during the period 1918-1940 as "have a big Navy and don't fight anyone worth shit".

WW2? I'll give you that - well done, FDR, George Marshall. and Congresscritters all.

The Cold War was sort of a no-brainer, too. The Soviets were big so we had to be big, and we were already big. They had a blue-water navy and so did we. They had ICBMs and intercontinental bombers and so did we, or we developed them. It wasn't as big a no-brainer as giving smallpox-blankets to the Sioux, but, still...

So we're down to this particular time in history; post-Cold-War, 1991-2012.

And here's where our historical traditions; lack-of-planning, empire-in-a-fit-of-absence-of-mind, foreign-policy-as-an-outgrowth-of-domestic-policy are biting us on the ass. We are suddenly faced with a non-binary choice and an undefined future, a cloud of potential problems rather than a simple "threat". Teasing sense out of the chaotic multipolar world of the 21st Century and translating that sense into some sort of intelligent military policy is the sort of things that asks for a Talleyrand, or a George Marshall.

And instead we're awash with Rick Santorums.

So it occurs to me is that if reducing the U.S. defense budget growth in a sensible, strategically-planned, geopolitically coherent way relies on the sorts of gentlefolk of the sort much found in the U.S. Congress or in charge of the various executive agencies today making some sort of rational choices based on national interests and the cold calculation of economic and political realities we would be better off hoping for a pink magical pony to appear in a cloud of pixie dust, soar overhead and crap out lemon-verbena-scented golden nuggets of budgetary savings.

Die erste achtundvierzig Stunden...

Occupy Portland is over.An ad-hoc force of police from several places including Portland Bureau today cleared the two downtown parks that Occupy had occupied. The protesters have regathered in several other downtown sites to "discuss" their next move, but in my opinion this is the end for Occupy.

For more than a week the local pols, newspapers, and television outlets have been voicing increasing impatience with Occupy and, truthfully, it seems hard to imagine how the "protests" would have done anything more than they have which beyond generating a sort of unfocused unease amongst the chattering classes has been no more than an irritant under the silken drawers of the rich and powerful.

It's been more than forty years since the mild insurrections of the U.S. Civil Rights era, half a century since the "nonviolent" protests of the Indian National Congress forced Britain's release of her Indian colony, a full century since the end of the violent strikes and near-rebellions that empowered the American labor unions.In the interim we have forgotten that "peaceful" protest is exactly as effective as "peacefully" resisting a savage beating unless you have your "peaceful" beating carefully planned to maximize your PR value - and it helps if your opponents are frigging morons, or politically and financially exhausted.

The civil rights marchers won because the Southern bigots were stupid enough to physically attack well-dressed men and women on national TV and newspapers. The Indian factions won partially because BG Dyer was a fucking bloodyminded idiot and partially because the Empire exhausted itself fighting two world wars. You could argue that the labor unions didn't actually win, but rather reached a sort of armed truce that lasted until the plutocrats shat the bed in 1929 and helped elect a labor-friendly administration.

Occupy had none of these to help it. Instead, it faced a massively corrupted and paid-for military-industrial-congressional-financial complex that is doing quite well under the present system. Any hopes of an FDR moment disappeared early in 2009 when it became obvious at least to me that the current Democratic administration had no interest in even trying cocking a snook at the banksters. The New New Deal this wasn't.

And the Occupiers forgot the other lesson of those earlier protest movements; that the public could give a shit about your politeness. The relative discipline of the Occupiers ended up looking like meekness, and regardless of what the Good Book says the meek won't inherit jack shit without a pair of brass balls, friendly press, and a sackful of bricks and cobblestones hidden away in case all the politeness doesn't work. And Occupy Portland had none of those things.

And ask the Paris Communards how even WITH those things, if the government is willing to ignore you when you're weak - and kill or arrest when you're strong - you you will lose.So the banksters have proved that a camel can leap laughingly through the eye of a needle. They have bought all the government they need, they or their lickspittle brownnosers own the media conglomerates, and the U.S. public is about evenly divided into thirds, and while one third is ignorant and indifferent one of the other two-thirds is actively hostile, either hoping to curry favor with the plutocracy or, tragically, mistaking the random helium in their guts for wings; by the time they fart away their good luck they will be plummeting too rapidly to have the time for regrets.

Occupy might have had more hope if the public was more intelligent and their enemies less powerful. In the first couple of days, or weeks...

But no matter. That hope is gone forever.

In March, 1935 the tiny German Army marched into the Rhineland, the first of Hitler's Thirties gambles. And it was more than a gamble; Hitler and his commanders knew how tiny their little force was. As hapless as the French Army of the Thirties was, and it was a fairly ginormous clusterfuck, a whiff of grapeshot in the old Napoleonic style would have seen the Heer packing across the Rhine and, probably, the end of the Hitler Era two years after it began.

But the French were too meek to make that move, and Hitler's success propelled him all the way to the wreck of the European world ten years later.

And here again, the first couple of days - "Die erste achtundvierzig Stunden" is how Hitler phrased it - were key.Once the larger public failed to rise in the first couple of days the Occupiers proved to have no strategy to force the issue or force their enemies to submit and their attempt to tame the bulls and bears is done.

Update 11/14: Upon further review, I had a couple of thoughts.

The antiwar protests of the Sixties have something a answer for in what they've done to the U.S. left. The protests were far less effective at "ending" the war than they seemed at the time (and have been mythologized since) - Nixon's concerns for the economy and the public's indifference to the Vietnamese were more crucial. But the result is that somehow the notion that merely marching around and sitting-in would be enough to effect political change and the record of those actions since then have proved this to be the nonsense it is.

The civil rights protestors, the INC activists, the labor movement radicals all had a collection of things that the post-'72 U.S. protests haven't:

1. An actual strategy that involved an entire range of acts, from pure theatre to violent protest, and some notion of how and where these would be applied. If OWS had anything other than "be there" I haven't seen it (mind you, the combination of vast public indifference and active media ignorance/hostility made it difficult to see how they could have done anything else effectively). And to orchestrate this these groups also had

2. An actual structured leadership - often fractious, even infighting, but the leaders were there actively planning the attacks on their opponents. The OWS seems to suffer from the goofy fuzzy-logic cloud-leadership that is to my mind the very WORST hangover of the Sixties protests. People like Lewis and Nehru and MLK were in many ways very unlikeable, manipulative, cunning sons-of-bitches. The OWS people seem to have absorbed the wrong lesson, which is that to get to a beneficent end you need to be a beneficent person. Couldn't be wronger. Many, perhaps most, of the people who have done "good" things for the mass of humanity have themselves been real bastards. You have to break a lot of eggs sometimes to make a good omlette...

Sorry that I'm such a little ray of sunshine today. But, as Matt Taibbi points out, the things that OWS is pointing fingers at aren't minor issues - they go to the very heart of the corruption of the crony-capitalist scam that has been driving the U.S. (and much of the Euro nations) back towards the Gilded Age. I'd have liked to see the U.S. and other western publics "get" that. But this doesn't seem to have happened, and at this point I have to conclude that it ISN'T going to happen. And for someone like me, who is and whose kids will be, part of the 99%, that looks like a bad thing for the future.