The Great Experiment

 Came across this...

...in the Xhitter feed of this guy.

And even given my long attention to and understanding of the fundamental shallow and rapacious shittiness of "conservative thinking" I was kinda gobsmacked.

WTAF? Seriously, National Review? Lights on in your heads, dumbfucks!

"Grand social experiment"..?

Really, which part of high school civics were you Rushbo-wannabees sleeping through that you missed the whole "American Experiment" thing?

"The establishment of our new Government seemed to be the last great experiment for promoting human happiness."
George Washington, January 9, 1790

The promise of these United States - the only thing about them that has value, the implicit promise the Founders didn't realize they'd made - is the idea of the grand noble experiment in self-government for all of We the People.

No kings. No popes. No lords and ladies, no hierophants, no rigid social framework where those born to rule rule those born to serve.

The entire, central fucking IDEAL of the United States, the core tenet of the values that supposedly make this nation different, is that We are embarked in a "grand social experiment" to see if that can work.

The fact that we've fallen far short of that value doesn't decentralize it. The fact that we have to, that we need to, make reparations to those who, because of our prejudices we wrote into our laws and baked into our society, were held back and held behind the ideal of equal justice under law, doesn't change it's importance.

The armed forces of a Republic are representative of - must represent - the ideals and goals of that Republic. If they do not, they must be held to a higher standard than the civil society around them in hopes of reforming that society. Not the other way around.

For those reasons alone Harry Truman ordered the desegregation of the Army over half a century ago.

I'm sure the National Review tut-tutted that "grand social experiment" that time, too.

In the Age of Trump it's increasingly difficult to hide the vicious racist stupidity behind "conservative" politics. But this was stupidly racist even for these gomers.

I think I hated them a tiny bit less when they were just openly honest Klansmen,

When They Tell You Who They Are...

Fred Kaplan has a piece up at Slate discussing the one real tell in this whole Israel-Hamas donnybrook; the West Bank settler murders.

It's not a bad piece, per se, but, well...

"Israeli officials must (arrest and try the murderous settlers) to dissociate the Israeli government from these killings, to make clear that it does not equate Palestinians with Hamas and that it is committed to protecting innocent Palestinians in the West Bank.

If officials do not do this, then they are asking for the world to conclude that they do endorse (or at least don’t much mind) the settlers’ killings, that they draw no distinction between Palestinians and terrorists.

There is a great moral distinction between Israel and Hamas. Israel at least warns civilians before dropping bombs; Hamas does nothing to protect its own subjects from those bombs and even deploys them as human shields. Israel’s targets are not Palestinian people per se, even when their airstrikes (disproportionately and unforgivably) kill quite a few; Hamas leaders say that the aim of the Oct. 7 raid was to kill as many Jews as possible and that their ultimate aim is to wipe the state of Israel off the map.

However, if the Israeli government does not denounce, arrest, and prosecute the settlers who have killed Palestinians in the West Bank, then its officials should feign no surprise when more Palestinians are radicalized; when still larger numbers of people elsewhere—who already criticize Israel’s airstrikes in Gaza as a “disproportionate” response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack—come to view Israel (or at least this Israeli government) as a criminal enterprise; when, in short, they, justly or not, draw moral equivalences between Israel and Hamas."

...Kaplan misses the point - that the current Israeli government clearly DOES "equate all Palestinians with Hamas".

So, as thoughtful as the whole piece is, he might as well be discussing commercial applications of phlogiston chemistry. 

As I said earlier; the only point of the current plan of the Israeli war in Gaza is for there to be no survivors, or as close as possible. 

The Israelis intend to do this the Roman Way; "make a desert and call it peace".

Now. I think that's a  stupid plan, as I've made clear. It won't work.

But I also think that it's clear that that IS the plan. 10/7 has, apparently, knocked off whatever pretense or lip-service the Netanyahu government gave to the whole "Palestinians are humans with human rights" thing.

So any other expectation?

Go ahead, make a plan based on that. I'm retired. I got time. I'll wait here.

Like I said before; revenge. I get it.

But like the saying goes; before you go hunting for vengeance, dig two graves.

If I were Israeli, or Palestinian, I'd probably be okay with that as a plan.

As someone who is neither? 

Fuck, no. That's still a stupid plan.

But the Israeli government has told us all by their deeds what they believe.

We should believe them, and base our foreign policy on that, rather than some naive belief in a world that exists only in our heads.

Like I said; I'll wait.

Belonging Task Force

 

 This morning I got a corporate-wide e-mail.

Now my guess is that this is intended to be some sort of "diversity/equity/inclusion" group, and that's fine. Frankly, entirely too many of us geologic/engineering types are straight white dudes.

But the branding?!? "Belonging Task Force"? Seriously? Am I the only one old enough to immediately channel Tom Lehrer's "Folk Song Army"?

"Oh we are the Folk Song Army
Guitars are the weapons we bring!
To the fight against poverty, war, and injustice;
Ready! Aim! Sing!"

But that wasn't my immediate thought; instead it was "Why is this a thing when the first question that comes to my mind when I think about my corporate culture is "What the fuck is your malfunction?"

Stuff like this makes me wonder if the people in the C-suites really have any clue what's happening out on the shop floor.

Whoa-oh-oh, it's magic!

  

In my other avatar (soccer punditry on the topic of Portland's women's soccer team, the Thorns, and you can read that stuff here if you have a mind to; it's under "Thorns FC:", it's good stuff, and there's not even a subscription fee, so, go, read!) I've been constantly running into this person who is violently opposed to the way the U.S. women's soccer is set up.

Because, you see, it screws over the players; the ur-scream about this comes together in a piece entitled Drafted and Shafted: Life in the NWSL in the online magazine Twentytwo.

And here's the thing about that; yes. I totally agree. 

The way American women's soccer is set up, the rules under which it operates, is designed to keep player salaries low, in much the same way that the rest of the U.S.'s economic life is designed to keep a thumb on the pay scale of everyone outside the C-suite.

But in the National Women's Soccer League the thumb is brutally visible because there's a side-by-side comparison that isn't as brutal to the players, and that's the big European women's leagues; the English FAWSL, the French D1F...in fact, most of the European leagues work very differently from the one here.

And I keep pounding on her about that. The primary reason that the U.S. leagues and the E.U. leagues are different is because the U.S. leagues and the E.U. leagues are different. 

Not better. Not worse. Just different.

The European leagues came together through a long period of accretion, and the primary factors that dictates their forms, and drives their economics, are 1) the ubiquitous nature of soccer in Europe, and 2) the promotion-relegation system.

Europe is soccerland.

Across the continent no sport is as popular, no sport is as rich, as soccer. That's where the money is. That's where the best athletes go. That's where the fans are.

There's a huge pot of cash sloshing around there...and...there's about a gajillion teams sucking it in.

Because the other part is that there's no way for some Richie Rich to "create" a team out of nothing. There's no empty place waiting for soccer; every little town and city has its own team playing in whatever league it plays in, from the megalopolis - usually the capitals - where there may be half a dozen huge clubs, to the tiny little villages where the baker is the goalie and the local gigalo is the star striker. 

There's no way for a team to come into a soccer league by "expansion" the way, say, American hockey or baseball or football leagues "expand".

So what you do, if you're a Russian criminal oligarch or a grubby Tuscan plutocrat or an Emirati oil sheik looking for secondhand sporting glory, is you buy into an existing team and turn on the firehose of money to buy good players and fancy facilities and take advantage of "promotion"; the system where if you finish on top of your little podunk-y league you move up to the next bigger one.

And up, and up, until finally you're in whatever your country calls your top flight, "Premier League" or whatever.

And then you keep splashing out the cash to win trophies (and money from broadcast fees and endorsements and everything that goes with being a Big Side) and get spots in "Europe"; the UEFA Champions League that brings you even more money.

One problem with this - for the sheiks and oligarchs - is that there's a downside - "relegation".

Your team has a shitty year? Down you go! Back to the second division, where your TV money is less and your endorsements are crappy and you're out of "Europe". If you're really unlucky you might have to sell your good players to cover expenses. You might go out of business! It's rare, but it's happened.

And the other downside is that because there's no league-wide rules on pay for any of these leagues...you're in an open bidding war with the other owners for those good players. You have to pay them the heavens and the Earth. The last figures I read suggested that a typical US soccer team in Major League Soccer passes on something like 40-50% of the revenues in the form of salaries, while a typical top flight English club (a Premier League team) has to pay out something like 70-80% to the players.

The recent attempt by the big European clubs to form a "Super League" was largely about changing all that.

The idea was to create a structure more like American sports. No promotion or relegation, no risk of losing out on the big paydays. What do you bet that the next step for the SuperLeague would have been a pay cap?

 

Right now, the way they're set up, the European leagues are good for the players, not-bad for the owners and the league, and not all that great for the fans.

Outside of their passion for their clubs, a lot of French and British and Italian fans will tell you about the way those clubs, desperate for money, strip-mine their wallets. Punitive ticket prices. Broadcast rights - many of the biggest E.U. clubs have set up their own streaming channels that you have to pay for if you want to see the away matches. You're gouged on matchdays and away days both.

We do things differently here in the U.S.

Here things are set up for the owners (well...sorta except in Major League Baseball, where the owners were too stupid to realize that the Reserve Clause was a fiction until the Messersmith Case tore down the free agency wall and set the players loose upon them. But the collusion the baseball owners replied to Messersmith with shows that they haven't given up trying to regain the whip hand over those damned players, and though MLB doesn't have a hard cap it has a "luxury tax" that tries to do the same thing).

Every other U.S. league has a hard cap. Every league restricts free agency in some form. Every league has a "draft" system by which players are brought in not through negotiations between the player and all the clubs in the league but through a system that funnels players at the drafting clubs. Every league is a closed system into which new clubs can come only through "expansion" - meaning cash on the nail.

That puts the players behind the owners in line for the lolly, which sucks for the players.

It also puts the fans in a weird position; dependent on the largesse of the owners for a way to be there to support the professional team of their choice. Their ticket prices don't depend as much on the paydays of the players as the profits of the club. And there's the problem of access; unless your city has a rich person who wants your sport in that city...you don't have it. Most U.S. leagues prevent fan ownership of professional sports clubs in that league.

IT also kind of sucks for the fans because the relatively low pay in the U.S. soccer leagues is a big incentive for the best soccer players - who have the option that the baseball and football and basketball players don't, of going outside the U.S. for a bigger paycheck - to leave the U.S. teams and fans behind for greener playing fields.

Why am I telling you all this?

Because in my conversations with this person they kept crying out with anger at the way the U.S. women players were being screwed and demanded that change to the way the European leagues work.

And I kept repeating that to change the way the players got paid you'd have to change the way the U.S. leagues work to the European model, and that was exactly what the people who controlled the league didn't want and wouldn't allow, so that this person might as well demand that we all get rich, be cute, and get a pony. 

Nice idea, not gonna happen.

And that as a fan this person might also want to be careful what they wished for, because if that change that isn't gonna happen DID happen the competition within U.S. women's soccer league would also very likely change to what the way the competition in the European leagues work, or, more accurately doesn't work; a tiny handful of top clubs bankrolled by criminal oligarchs and plutocrats and oil sheiks would win all the time, and a collection of impoverished tomato cans would constantly lose to the rich fatcats.

In the top French women's league the fatcat is Olympique Lyonnais Féminin, owned by some plutocrat named Aulas. This outfit has won their league fourteen years - fourteen fucking years - in a row (their rivals, Paris Saint-Germain, finally kicked them off the top step this past season to stop them going to fifteen) and that's not uncommon.

So alongside the chance that such a change would be financially good for the players but not the fans, the chance that such a change would be also not be good for the fans of most of the clubs who want their clubs to actually win something worth a shit is pretty high.

We bang on about this every time the subject comes up, every time we do I say all these things, and every time it makes absolutely no impression on this person. 

They insist that the magical solution is just to change things! Change things! Then everything - for owners, players, fans - will be better! Change is better! Just change things in the U.S. women's league to be more like Europe that in some magical way can totally just happen regardless of the social and political and economic differences and the utterly incompatible priors and all.

Not only can't I convince them that the change they're demanding aren't just improbable but impossible...but that if they could happen they might not be good for them. Good for the players, good for the league, good for the owners...but not for them.

They are completely certain that the something they want is both just a matter of wanting to do it bad enough and when it happens it will make the magic and everything will be better for everyone.

And the reason I went through all this?

Is because I'm seeing more and more of this sort of magical thinking on all kinds of subjects other than soccer.

Climate change?

Even if you don't slam head-on into the Great Wall of Republican Stupid, there's a crap-ton of people, here in the U.S. and elsewhere, that somehow think that we can have the Late Holocene Thermal Maximum without changing our Netflix viewing habits.

The idea seems to be that somehow we'll all magically be juuuuuust fine when the oceans rise three feet. The idea that our Pacific Northwest forests might burn? Yeah, well...ummm...

A third of our citizenry refuses to be vaccinated against a global pandemic? Sure! That'll be fine!

Allowing private equity execs the freedom to further advance the Second Gilded Age? Sure! What could go wrong?

Auditing votes all over hell? Sure! That'll Stop The Steal, which is totally a thing, and just needs the right magic and you people will see!

Look.

I get it. I mean, religions are concrete proof that humans ever since Olduvai indulge in vast amounts of magical thinking. It's not that I don't understand that people still cling to seeing the world around them as what they want it to be.

But, silly me, I thought that the whole point of the Enlightenment and the primacy of the hard sciences was an indication that the practical alternative to all this magical thinking was actual observation-analysis-deduction-conclusion. That the point of universal education was to make the vast majority of us comfortable with the idea that we don't have to believe in "belief"; that we can examine physical conditions and evidence draw the most-logical inferences from them.

But apparently not.

The problem here is that in the 14th Century us humans had a lot less raw physical power. We could change things; cut down trees, dig canals, build cities...but only to a fairly limited extent.

Now?

Christ, we can destroy ourselves and our planet if we choose to with the push of some buttons.

We're insanely far above and beyond the global Apex Predator. We're an unstoppable force. We're the gajillion-pound gorilla. We're on track to change everything from our climate to our ecology, and we seem unable to get past the way we thought 10,000 years ago when thunder was a message from the gods, in everything from soccer to social order.

That's...probably not good.

Build That Wall!

It has been somewhere between mildly depressing and exceedingly annoying to watch and listen to the idiotic "national debate" on the issue of Those Brown People - that is, "immigration" - play out in the media.

The annoying part because of the nursery-school level of the "debate" itself, which as I have pounded on again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and fucking again...is much more complex, nuanced, and difficult to actually resolve (as opposed to using as a ballpeen hammer to ring the empty bell-like heads of racist dimwits and "economically anxious" (i.e. "racist") mouthbreathers) than any of the usual network or cable-news talking heads manages to convey.

We'll leave "FOX News" out of this because asking Pravda their opinion of Stalin's Five-Year Plan is perfectly pointless. And as for Trump, well...asking Stalin about the Five-Year Plan...

The depressing part because this process of relentless hammering on the "OMFG THE SCARY BROWN PEOPLE ARE INVADING!!!" theme is working. Even people like that old war-hating warhorse Ranger Jim are talking about immigration as if it's a "problem".

I want to suggest that we're talking about the wrong problem.

We don't have an "immigration problem".

We have a huge "capitalism problem".

Typically for the people who frame this as an issue of border control and sovereignty, the bottom line is that hordes of undocumented aliens are swarming over the walls like Picts ravening down from the north to ravage Eburacum. Or, in this case, to take jobs from Real Americans and create a sort of lawless free-for-all in "sanctuary cities" and Fifth Column foreign enclaves. The image is one of "American" character diluted, and finally destroyed, by polyglot armies of transients unconcerned with the norms of constitutional republicanism and unwilling to assimilate into (presumably) a sort of Father-Knows-Best suburban conformity, complete with teenagers playing baseball and a cocker spaniel.

This is what is suppose to have kept Trumpkins awake at night, imagining a Smallville full of sharia law, taco trucks on every corner, and a gabble of incomprehensible foreign languages in the Safeway aisles (which are full of scary, smelly foreign food instead of Spam and French's mustard). Which is why, supposedly they 1) voted for him in the first place, and 2) are happy with the knuckling he's giving to people who came here from Mexico as six-year-olds and are Cambodian grannies working the stock at the corner bodega.

I won't rehash all the facts that make this trap-and-drown-the-pesky-brown-people an expensive exercise in futility.

What I do want us to think about is why all the pesky brown people are here.

Because we all want to stay where we are, right? We all want to be with people we know, in places we know, doing things we know how to do. Only a tiny handful of us are so infected with wanderlust that we voluntarily pick up and move hundreds, or thousands, of miles from our homes, to places where the people speak a different tongue, where the food and the clothing and even the fucking weather are different from what we grew up with.

Since we've agreed that these immigrants to the United States are not the Mongol Horde here to conquer and pillage - and if you disagree you can stop right now; first, because your brain is on vacation and living in la-la land and, second, because to consider this issue further you have to start from some sort of rational point, and the idea that these people are an invading army is simply nonsensical - why do these people want to come here?

I get the sense that it's two main reasons; economic opportunity, or physical safety, or a combination of both.

Physical safety drives the people fleeing places like Guatemala, or Syria, or Somalia. Those people are going to try and flee here not so much because they want to be here but because they don't want to be there; there, where they're in the middle of a war, or as in Somalia in a chaotic failed-state that isn't so much in a "war" as in a sort of horrible Hobbesean state of nature where all are preying on and warring against all.

That's not a capitalism issue, directly. Those people are going to go wherever that can to escape mortal fear, and the U.S. is just the biggest, stable-est, wealthiest refuge around. There's literally nothing any U.S. citizen can do about that, other than try and decide what those people's lives are worth. If Our conclusion is "not a moment of my time or a nickel of my money" then that's that. It makes us kind of shitty people, but people are allowed to do and be that if they want to. Nobody has decreed that We the People have to be decent or kind or generous.

But for the refugees it's pretty much all push. We can decide how much we want to push back, but that's pretty much it. The impetus is not under our control.

No, it's the "other" immigrants I want to talk about, the "economic opportunity" ones.

Those are the ones that the Trumpkins are most likely to be angry about, the ones "taking our jobs", many of them from Mexico and the close-by Latin American nations. There's a reason that Orange Foolius' signature issue is that Big. Beautiful. Wall.

For those people the impetus is mostly "pull". There's a hope for a better life here, and, like every human since Olduvai Gorge, they want that.

So...why is that a capitalism issue?

Because the simplest explanation for how and why these people are in, or want to come to, the U.S. is because our economy has been set up to exploit their desire for a better life, and to use that to use them.

None of the people coming here from Sinaloa wants to work for starvation wages and live fifteen-to-a-room. But to do the sorts of jobs we want them to do; to pick the crops, to make the motel beds, to leaf-blow the lawns and sheetrock the cheap apartments, we need to pay them shit and make them suck that up. We the People have been happy to sit by and let our economy change to make that happen.

Look at meatpacking.

Working in slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants used to be decent-paying union work done by native-born (or legal immigrant) citizens largely in cities in the American northeast, midwest, and west. Now it is nearly entirely Southern and rural and almost entirely done by undocumented - illegal - immigrants.

Why?

Because, to make a long story short, to run the meat business the old way, with citizens, in union plants, was expensive for the owners. Who would, in turn, pass the expense on to Suzy Homemaker and Sammy Grillmaster.

So outfits like Hormel shuttered the plants in Detroit and New York and San Francisco and moved to Cornhole, Alabama, where they employed first fiercely antiunion Southern whites and then, when the citizens began wanting more money, replaced them with illegals (who could be feared-up with the theat of La Migra).

Is this an oversimplification?

Yes. There's a lot more there over a thirty- or forty-year span of time.

Is it inaccurate?

No. The bottom line is that to keep meat cheap the business had to cut costs, and worker's pay is typically the single biggest cost of any business.

The same is true of nearly any business you look at that employs significant numbers of undocumented people. Construction, landscaping, agriculture, "hospitality" (meaning hotels and restaurants). These are places where cost competition is cut-throat, and the business owners are largely making a buck off the skins of their workers.

This isn't anyone's "fault", or, if it is, it's Our fault, We the People. We've forgotten that it's the nature of capitalism; you can hope to charge everyone a premium and go broke, or you can skin your costs down to the bone and make them affordable to Joe and Molly. It's why commercial aviation sucks. It's why WalMart. It's why the guy running that leaf-blower snuck in from Michoacan.

And, frankly, that's been how it's worked every time We the People have let it. Dickens' mill owners probably didn't WANT to starve people or work kiddies to death. But they had costs and profits, and the best way to make profits was to cut costs, so if that meant that somebody starved or died...well, to make a person all you needed was a man, a woman, five minutes, and a flat piece of ground. There would ALWAYS be more people.

So unless we plan to start paying what we'd need to pay to give all those citizen busboys, maids, drywallers, chicken-gutters, and tomato-pickers a living wage the reality of people coming here outside the legal process is going to continue.

The Trumpkins will hate that. But until they're willing to eviscerate hogs, wipe asses, and wash dishes for what the business owners are paying those Mexicans and Guatemalans?

They can kiss my fucking ass.

So there's only one real, long-term way to "solve" the "problem" of illegal immigration; we need to Build That Wall.

But the Wall is the wall around the "job-creators"; specifically, walling them off from their ability to "create" shitty jobs that pay so poorly that only people who have grown up in a shotgun shack in Sinaloa can afford to work them.

Mind you, given the ridiculous degree to which the "magic of the market" propaganda has saturated the U.S. public the chances of this actually being enacted are damn near zero. The wealthy white guys who designed this country's government made damn sure that there are enough veto points to keep the wild-eyed radicals from roping in the plutocrats. Hell, the bastards impoverished the nation in 1929 but managed to slime their way back into power to the extent that they were damn near able to do it again only eighty years later.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not talking going full Marxist here.

But the idea that the "market" is magic, that the way the everyone gets to Millionaire Acres at the end of the Game of Life is to just unleash the job-creators is visibly, obviously nonsensical.

Hell, the market isn't working now. For most people their wages have leveled off even as their productivity, and the profitability of the places they work, have gone wild. Untrammeled capitalism has been a misery and a burden to everyone outside the owner class everywhere and every time it's been practiced. Unregulated capitalism produces foul water, filthy air, dirty land, and overworked, underpaid people, because none of those things make "profit".

Corporations are people, my friend; sociopathic people, whose only built-in controlling interest is short-term profit. Intelligent managers and owners can make them act intelligently, but that's a bug, not a feature. We've already seen what happens when they are "unleashed", and it's not pretty.

We should know better by now, and yet, we don't act like it.

So there is a solution to this "immigrant problem". Only it's not with the immigrants, and it's not going to make old, white people happy.

So it won't ever happen.

Update 2/25: Todd Miller has a good summary of the persistence, and idiocy, of this border "war". His take, though, is that it's all About The Money.

Oh, tempora! Oh, mores!

The lunatic stylings of Roy Moore and his fanbois reminded me again what a strange world we live in.

For one thing, it's the bizarre upwelling of tribalism in a world where "tribe" functionally means less than ever. Humans are interconnected in ways inconceivable even a generation ago, and yet “Evangelical Christian” has stopped being a religious faith and become a “tribe”. It’s really as simple as that.

So just like the Mongol who could stop on the way out of his yurt to play with his sister’s little kid before mounting up to go slaughter the Polish peasants in the village over the ridge, these folks have convinced themselves that they are a tribe, and the "others" out there are not just another tribe, but not really "people". It's like how tribal societies usually have names for themselves that mean "People"; the implication being that if you're not in the tribe you're not "people".

To top that off, these gomers have convinced themselves that they're not just a tribe, but a threatened tribe in a dangerous, frightful world against which only deadly violence can protect them.

A lot of this is an ugly combination of human nature – we’ve been tribes for a lot longer than we’ve been nations, or religions, or scientists, or whatever (along with human foibles in general – remember that “average” intelligence means that half the human race is BELOW “average”) – and way too much exposure to electronic media, which thrives on fire and murder.

But, still...the degree ti which that combination drives us to stupid behavior sometimes seems beyond any sort of rational sense.

I can’t remember what the actual incident was but I do know that it was one of the usual acts of distant violence, maybe an Islamic State attack somewhere, that caused a friend of mine to exclaim about how horrible and violent the world is today. She’s a smart person – “above average” – and so I bothered to talk to her about this.

“So…had one of those pesky barbarian invasions again last Tuesday, then?”

“No. What?”

“Didn’t get the massive pandemic this week? No Black Death, no whole-family-wiped-out-by-smallpox, eh?”

“Wha…what the hell do you mean?”

“So I take it that your city didn’t fall to the besiegers and you’re not currently being raped before being faced with a sort of “bad or worse” outcome of death or slavery? The famine caused by the summer’s crop failure not facing you with a hideously slow death to starvation? The rapacious king hasn’t taken up half your neighborhood in the corvee again?”

“What the hell does this have to do with (violent act in distant place)?”

“What it means is that we, we in the First World, really live in an insanely, historically unprecedentedly peaceful world. We are almost impervious to common disease. Medicine and public health have made pandemics hugely rare. Massive volkerwanderungs that caused continent-wide death, such as the mfecane in southern Africa or the Gothic invasions of western Europe or the Mongol incursions into western Eurasia haven’t occurred for centuries. We live, in general, under a rule of settled law; we don’t run the risk of a robber baron in Salem looting and murdering us on I-5 between Portland and Eugene. There ARE still horrible things that happen…but to those of us not able to afford our own mercenary bodyguards they happen less than almost any time in human history.”

“But…terrorism! School shootings! Urban gangs!”

“Happen. Yes. But…you’ll note that they happen in little bits and pieces in places all over the world. Remember that until probably two generations ago you would never have heard of those places at all, much less of some awful thing happening in them. Think about it; which of these horrible things happened to someone YOU know, personally. Someplace within, say, three days walk from you?”

“Ummm…”

“Thought so. So the world’s NOT “the most dangerous ever”. You just hear MORE of these dangerous things ever, because that’s what the “news” thinks will keep you watching their broadcasts so they can sell more airtime to the marketers of payday lenders and erectile-dysfunction pills. So your very best option is to chillax and have a nice dark ale with a whisky in abeyance and read something thoughtful.”

Mind you, I don’t think she bought it.

That's a huge part of the problem.

I have no idea what the hell you can do about that.

Another opening, another show!

I've got a longer post up about this at the MilPub, but I couldn't help laughing at the latest in Little Theater at Camp Runamuck; the Great Syrian Air War!

Because the Thursday cruise missile strike on the Syrian government airbase at Shayrat is such an utterly perfect summation of the U.S. "foreign policy" in the Middle East as to be a tiny little exploding jewel-box-like portrait of foreign policy derp that it just makes me want to walk around smiling all day in that grim, sickly, "isn't that fucking special" kind of smiley way.

Militarily useless? Check. Because, although he may be a grifter with the soul of a can of Chef Boy-ar-dee Spaghetti and Meatballs, the Tangerine Toddler isn't clinically insane his administration is reported to have warned the Russian government prior to the strike to ensure that we didn't send any random wingwipers of the Voyenno-Vozdushnye Sily Rossii home in a box. The Russians, unsuprisingly, passed the warning on to their Syrian clients. So it's extremely likely that what the strike did was flatten some empty hangars and scatter bits of the buildings across the runways.

Tomahawks, so far as I know, are not equipped with delay-fused runway cratering warheads, so this couldn't have acted as an airfield-denial strike.

In fact, I'm hearing reports that the Syrian Arab Air Force operated out of Shayrat today. You'd think that Assad would have at least pretended to limp around a little after getting up to make it looked like Trumpwar had given him an owie, to help out his pals Pootie and Trumpie, but nooooooo. What a buddyfucker.

Geopolitically worthless? Check. Even supposing that this DID attrit the Assad government's ability to fight the civil war. Late on Thursday both Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster made it clear that these strikes wouldn't have any major effect on the actual political situation in Syria.

And, of course - as we should have learned in Libya, the enemy of our enemy isn't just not our friend but is probably a bughouse crawling with vicious factional hatred and political dysfunction. A handful of damaged Flankers won't make the Syrian rebels any less rabid, the Islamic State any less gonzo, or the hatred between the first two and the Kurds any less toxic. The vicious civil war will roll on.

A fat paycheck for our defense contractors? Check. At about $1.5m a shot 59 Tomahawks set the Navy back about 88 million bucks. This, of course, isn't an actual loss-leader but a promissary note to Raytheon-McDonnell-Douglas for 59 new units.

Just a fiscal note: the 2017 budget request for the National Endowment for the Arts was about $149 million. It's kind of nifty that although the current Administration has publicly stated that it intends to zero out that budget that it's willing to throw down about 60% of the expense for an equally useless piece of political theater.

A big happy piece of domestic dick-waving? Check, and double check! The real value of this stunt appears to be that it has convinced the media outlets that His Fraudulency is "presidential", since nothing says "Chief Executive" like blowing dusky savages up, and has excited the sorts of voters whose fourth-grade "understanding" of the Syrian Civil War is limited to imagining the place as some sort of dytopian Agrabah populated by various species of "headchoppers".

What's really sad is how little this nonsense depends on the juvenile personality of the current President. From Obama's droney pursuit of Afridis where they run to Dubya's Mess-o-potamia to Clinton's Operation Desert Fox to what seems like every administration back to Eisenhower defenstrating Mossadegh and storming ashore in Lebanon...it just seems like this crap is what the U.S. does, and particularly in the Middle East.

If I thought that the Orange Napoleon had some sort of "strategy" in mind...yeah, I know. Who are we kidding?

The real bottom line, though, is that there really IS no "strategy" short of Full Roman that would "work" in Syria, even if His Fraudulency's crew could find one without both hands and a flashlight. Assad with sarin is only a degree more loathsome than Assad without sarin. The rebels are largely takfiri bugnuts. They all hate each other and the vicious civil war has poisoned whatever well of goodwill existed before the kiling began.

In other words, there's less chance of a random one-off bombing raid on Syrian government forces helping lead to a stable, peaceful, non-dictatorial Syria than I have of being elected Dragon King of Bhutan, and we've already been over the likelihood of that before.

WASF.

Dopeslap

I can't really do better than Ben Wittes on the horrific clusterfuck that is His Fraudulency's executive order barring entrance to the United States of nationals (including resident aliens and persons with valid visas) from seven Muslim-majority nations.

"But in the rational pursuit of security objectives, you don’t marginalize your expert security agencies and fail to vet your ideas through a normal interagency process. You don’t target the wrong people in nutty ways when you’re rationally pursuing real security objectives.

When do you do these things? You do these things when you’re elevating the symbolic politics of bashing Islam over any actual security interest. You do them when you’ve made a deliberate decision to burden human lives to make a public point. In other words, this is not a document that will cause hardship and misery because of regrettable incidental impacts on people injured in the pursuit of a public good. It will cause hardship and misery for tens or hundreds of thousands of people because that is precisely what it is intended to do."

But I do want to stop for a moment and point out one specific point from this tissue of diaper gravy the Tangerine Toddler seems to have scraped out of his britches that pounds home the points that 1) this was not intended as a national security measure, and 2) if it was intended as a national security measure as such it is a complete, utter, moron-grade-stupid fail;

Iraq.

Why the fuck, if you had so much as a functioning hindbrain, would you put all Iraqi nationals on an "anti-Islamic-terrorism" no-entry list in 2017?

Iraq is, at the moment, at least notionally a fucking U.S. ally. The U.S. spends millions subsidizing the Iraqi government and military. Thousands of GIs are now, right now, at this very fucking minute, in the field alongside the Iraqi Ground Forces, fighting those very booga-booga Islamic bad guys the Islamic State.

A tenth of a second of real thought - which appears to be a tenth more than the Fraudulency Administration put into this goddamn thing - would reveal that any Iraqi national holding a U.S. visa, or a green card, or applying for refugee status, has about a 99.9% chance of being or doing so because he or she worked for the U.S. government. Translator, liason, contractor...the chances are fucking impossibly huge that anyone you'd catch in your cunning terrorist-catching net would be some former heroic translator who had spent years risking his ass alongside those troops you purport to support and love.

I could go on. Why the hell throw Iran into this pottage and leave off Pakistan and Saudi; chock-full of wahhabi madrassas cranking out fundamentalist kooks by the turbanful?

But screw that. It's Iraq on this idiot bucket list that tells me that this had nothing to do with actual security. It was just about Il Douche and his merry band of Trumpeters taking their Islamophobic dicks out for a bit of a wave.

I lived with asshole officers for twenty years. Interspersed with true combat gods a lot of these jokers lived to thrill themselves with their own importance, showed a ridiculous enthusiasm for getting their troops killed for Duty, Honor, Country, and whose shoulder insignia often looked to my lowly enlisted scum self a hell of a lot like chips.

I got used to the idea that I could get killed because somebody in command of me was an evil, callous, careerist assholic sonofabitch.

But stupid?

I always resented and still resent the idea that my life could be endangered because one of these fuckers was just too bone-stupid to walk and breathe simultaneously.

Maybe that's why I'm more irritated by this as an example of His Fraudulency's stupid incompetence rather than his evil racism, xenophobia, and authoritarianism.

I can hate Darth Cheney as an slimy immoral bastard and yet in a backhanded way respect and fear him as a true Evil Boss, a dangerous and wily enemy.

But Trump just makes me want to shift my rifle into my off hand and dopeslap his idiotic toupee off the back of his head like Moe does the other Stooges, growling "Get your shit together, you stupid fucking oxygen thief! How the hell did you get this job, you goddamn brain-dead numbnuts?

Update 2/1: As just another example let me throw in this story from Tucson, Arizona, about a little family that barely beat the ban into the U.S., but whose extended family is now stuck on the outside.

Why is this another dopeslap on Hair Furor and his Bannonidiot?

Because the people are Syrians, yes...but they're Syrian Kurds.

For fucks sake! The Kurds - in case you've been asleep for the past, oh, fourteen fucking years - have been the U.S. most effective and consistent military and political partner in the Fertile Crescent of Iraq and Syria.

Keeping Kurds out of the U.S. because they're Syrian makes as much sense in 2017 as forcing Free French back to Vichy made in 1942.

How the fuck does His Fraudulency and his idiot band manage to keep from lighting the whole damn White House on fire?

I have no damn idea.

Final Fantasy IV; Malheur Moron Mulisha Edition

This article talks about the Malheur Moron Metal Mulisha and how their cunning plan was to Free the Federal Lands! from the oppression of the Evil Empire of the BLM and then a thousand Make America Great Again flowers would bloom in Harney County.

(h/t to Nancy Nall who linked to it today)

There was only one teensy-tinsey little problem with that; geography and topography. Which is to say...reality.

Because Harney County – just like every other deserted shithole part of rural America – is WAY the hell out in the middle of nowhere; it’s almost perfectly equidistant from anywhere in the Northwest where people live and people want to live; the population centers of Oregon to the west, Nevada and Utah south, Idaho and Washington north and east. Shipping anything to market is punitive, given that wetter places (better for timber, grain, and livestock) are closer to those markets.

Badtux the Rural-travelin' Penguin encountered a similar sort of place out in the Mojave, of which he notes:

"These people are stranded, like so many other Americans, stranded in the desert of what was once the American Dream but now is just a hardscrabble existence in a harsh and brittle place. I haven’t looked around to see if I can see lots of red caps. But I bet I’ll find plenty of them there. Because where the American Dream has died, something evil this way comes."

Harney was homesteaded back in the 19th Century and an overwhelmingly large number of those operations failed. The distances were too large, the transportation grid too poor, and the water too scarce. The place is scenic as all hell…but not great for small farming or ranching without serious white-people welfare (a.k.a “farm subsidies” and below-market-low grazing fees).

What makes it even more fucked-up is that the collapse of places like Harney County wasn't a mistake or an accident. It was engineered by a combination of greed, stupidity, and unscrupulousness.

The “great plains” and the intermontane deserts of eastern Oregon were shrub- and grassland steppe for a reason and the Plains tribes and the high desert outfits like the Northern Paiute weren’t horse nomads because they were easily bored with the local scenery.

Without large-scale irrigation the bulk of the lands West of the Mississippi and east of the Sierras/Cascades are too arid to support tilth agriculture. Even pastoralism (for European cattle, anyway...) was fairly iffy in a lot of places.

But “real estate developers”, manifest destiny floggers, and grifters – the 19th Century Trumps – conned tens of thousands of proto-Trumpeters into believing nonsense like “rain follows the plow” (the theory that tilling semiarid grasslands releases soil moisture that then returns as rain. Seriously; I shit you not people believed that stuff…). Plus the U.S. government wanted white farmers to replace the Dangerous Savages.

So what would happen is that every couple of decades North America would get a change in the ENSO (the “El Nino/La Nina” variation) and the Plains would have a couple of wet years or five...enough to get a bunch of sodbusters through the winter. And the homesteaders would proliferate; suddenly Harney County was Great Again!

Aaaaand…then the climate would return to the semiarid norm, crops would fail, cattle starve, the homesteaders go bust. The bank would foreclose, everybody would move on...until the next wet cycle.

Wash, rinse, repeat; this happened something like 3-4 times between 1865 and the beginning of widespread irrigation in the Fifties - a change that was hugely supported by those damn imperialists of the BLM and the U.S. government irrigation programs.

As P.T. Barnum would have said; there’s one born every minute…

IF the federal drylands were opened the only real claimants would be the big timber and big ag outfits, if them, simply because only those deep-pocketed corporate entities would have any hope of making a go in Harney County and that only because of their ability to cover bad years and their economy of scale.

Nope.

The fantasies nourished by Bundys across the West (the so-called “Sagebrush Rebellion”) and the people in these dying places are as invasive, useless, and destructive as the tumbleweed that we mistake for authentically Western but are, in fact, a pernicious Russian weed…much like our new President-elect...

Some ideas are too stupid to die and can't be killed.

Apparently there's a nutty little cluster of fuck buried in the U.S. State Department (from CNN via Pierce):

"More than 50 State Department officials signed an internal memo protesting U.S. policy in Syria, calling for targeted U.S. military strikes against the regime of Bashar al-Assad and urging regime change as the only way to defeat ISIS.
The cable says that U.S. policy in the Middle East has been "overwhelmed" by the continuing violence in Syria. It calls for a "judicious use of stand-off and air weapons, which would undergird and drive a more focused and hard-nosed U.S.-led diplomatic process."

The memo calls on the U.S. to create a stronger partnership with moderate rebel forces to battle both Assad's forces and ISIS, which would change the tide of the conflict against the regime and "increase the chances for peace by sending a clear signal to the regime and its backers that there will be no military solution to the conflict."

It also warns that as the regime "continues to bomb and starve" Syria's Sunni population, the U.S. will lose potential allies among Syria's Sunni population to fight ISIS. Moreover, it says, U.S. failure to stop the regime's abuses "undermines both morally and materially the unity of the anti-Daesh coalition" and "will only bolster the ideological appeal of groups such as Daesh, even as they endure tactical setbacks on the battlefield."

It's...it's hard to tell where to start with this ridiculous level of horseshit.

Maybe here: "judicious use of standoff and air weapons"..? Judicious? How the holy fuck do you use a cruise missile "judiciously"? Tack a get-well card to the nose? Ensure that it has a jihadi-seeking sensor in the guidance package? Who the hell thinks this? State has seen a damn sight of war since 2001. It's been fifteen years of nonstop bombing and shelling and killing-wogs-in-kinetic-ways in the Middle East. Have these people learned nothing from all that so-far-prodigiously-unproductive bombing, shelling, and killing..?

Judicious?

If you can show me a "judicious" way of throwing high explosive long distances I will carry your rucksack from here to the Halls ofMontezuma and kiss your ass when we get there.

Or...how about this one; "moderate rebel forces"? Moderate based on what metric? 50% less headcutting? 100% How many of their raggedy-ass "fighters" have read Atlas Shrugged? Where are these paragons of virtue? Can anybody find me someone, anyone, who is "moderate" in the damn cesspit of ruin and merciless hatred that used to be "Syria"? Can anybody tell me why I should trust ANYone there to tell the truth about their "moderation"? I mean, any State Middle East hand to believes any local between the strandline of the eastern Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf who boasts of their "moderate" credentials should have their fucking head examined.

According to CNN, "The 51 officials who signed the memo are mostly from the rank and file of the department, many of them career officers in the foreign service who have been involved in Syria policy over the past several years either in Washington or overseas." which, frankly, tells me a hell of a lot about why our "Syria policy" has been as fucked up as a football bat.

One thing I will give the last Adminstration credit for; in general it has resisted sticking this country's head further into the Middle Eastern tarbaby. I have often wondered why it has insisted in sticking to the ones it is already attached to. But this idiotic memo is perhaps a good reminder of why it's so hard to stop being stupid.

Because there's always people in critical positions who think that their contrarian idea is contrary because it's too clever for everyone else to recognize how clever it is and not because everyone else realizes it's completely moronic.

Down and Out in Schofield Barracks

A friend of mine put this up on her Facebook feed with the observation "This is a good point":

I see some variation of this stuff from time to time and usually just snort and move on. I have no idea why it pissed me off so much this time. Maybe it's that the Portland coppers are in the process of chasing our local homeless people out from under the Steel Bridge, one more round in the endless "We aren't willing to spend money to try and figure out a solution but we're fine with spending money to kick the problem-can down the road again" game we play here in the Land of the Free to Steal Bread and Sleep Under Bridges.

Maybe it was reading Jim Wright's terrific column discussing the whole nonsensical yet fucking insanely irritating obsession of the roughly-one-third-of-my-fellow-citizens who think of all taxes as theft...unless they're going to pay for killing people and breaking shit in which case, hooah!, America, fuck yeah!

But whatever the reason, it really, really pissed me off.

First, because it's a straight-out, brass-faced, fell-off-the-back-of-the-crapwagon bullshit lie.

Because the poor sad little broke GI or Marine (I add "Marine" because that the person that originally posted this thing has some sort of "jarhead 4 jarhead" header) doesn't "just" get paid $8.85 an hour.

Snuffy and Chesty also get free medical and dental care, free housing, and free meals. That's huge. Like, tens of thousands of dollars a year huge. and that's not all.

The poor little fellow's work clothes are paid for. He walks to work, so he doesn't have to have pay for a car, or gas, or insurance unless he wants to. He gets two weeks paid vacation a year and can spend it paying Motel 6 rates at Fort DeRussey at Waikiki Beach of he wants to fly there. And she doesn't even have to pay more then ten bucks for her vacation travel, either, if she flies space-A, a privilege kinda out of reach of Burger McFlipperson.

Poor little underpaid Joe and Molly are also working towards a guaranteed 50% base pay retirement after only 20 years service (meaning an 18-year-old private is only 38 at retirement) when he or she gets a huge veterans preferment for almost every civil service job.

If he makes 30 years he gets 75% of what is a pretty sweet top-three-grade pay and allowances.

Not to mention the fact that most American troops aren't ragged dog faces out in the tules, but truck drivers, IT techs, wing wipers and sailors who sleep in a bed and go to work in an office.

Plus everybody thanks his GI and Marine ass for their "freedoms" even though the last time an American soldier killed anyone for "freedom" was in 1945.

And second and last, this little screed pisses me off as a sad attempt to belittle the working poor, who have it way worse than 99% of the folks who wear a uniform, and that's coming from someone who wore one for 22 years.

This goes back to Jim's point about the nonsensical notion that paying taxes for tanks and aircraft carriers is a "public good" but paying taxes to help prevent a critical mass of your fellow citizens living in poverty and sickness and ignorance isn't. That somehow nations with lots of weapons are "healthy" and "strong"" even though they may be riven with social dysfunction from fostering a permanent underclass and a poorly educated, unhealthy, credulous citizenry.

That's nonsense, of course. Not that I'd expect a "conservative" to see that. But nonsense all the same.

Hey, I love GIs, too. But a lot of those GIs are gonna get out and find that they're going to have to try and make ends meet flipping burgers or making beds or stocking shelves and trying to do that while paying for their food and clothing and rent and aspirins, so being a dick about how poor people should be poor? That's...well, that's just being a dick.

So. As far as I can see the only "good point" this damn screed makes is the one that every GI figured out long ago;

If you crossbreed a "conservative" with a gorilla what you get you get is a retarded gorilla.

Ha! And you thought I was going to make that joke about Marines, didn't you.

April Fool.

Butter domme

Just when you thought that there couldn't possibly anything stupider than believing that the pyramids were grain silos...

...or that magical Green Lantern powers will convince Mexico to build a border wall, there's this:

"Inside every single woman are hormones called copulins that are used to drug a man and control his mind. The vagina produces a thick fluid known as copulin that has actual mind control effects on a male’s brain. If a man is exposed to a woman’s copulins, over time she will be able to...change, remove, or insert memories in a man’s mind...(t)ell the male what he sees, hears, feels, smells, tastes....(i)nsert subconscious thoughts that will surface as “his own ideas” or behavior later, and...(p)lant trigger words or actions that can cause thoughts, actions, or sensations in the male at later dates (days, weeks, even months)."

How about that, hunh? Who knew?

Our intrepid investigator has even tracked down the tell-tale aroma of this horrible va-jay-jay vitriol:

"[S]imply by being around women they are releasing these hormones into the air. Apparently they smell like butter which is the smell I notice when I’m in any place where I notice girls walking around in their mid to late teenage years. I’m guessing those are the years when they they release the most of these hormones when they are approaching peak fertility."

Mmm. Butter. Who doesn't love butter?

Mind you, the whole "mid- to late teenage girls smell like buttery mind control juices" thing is, well...extremely squicky. But sometimes extremes must be pushed in the need of Science! Thank the Patriarchal Lord that brave men like this fellow have exposed this frightful puff-puff potion and opened our timid male eyes (and, umm, whatever...) to this threat to our Male Sovereignty.

Although some of us may feel a trifle differently.

I, for one, welcome our buttery-flavored overladies.

(h/t to bspencer over at LG&M...)

Heart of Derpness

Paul Krugman defines "derp" as: "...always saying the same thing, regardless of circumstances, and regardless of past errors."

I'm going to add that it can also include doing the same thing, et cetera. It's a version of Einstein's supposed definition of insanity; repeating the same mistake and expecting a different result.

Hence the title of this post regarding the latest let's-toss-some-more-soldier-bodies-at-the-Middle-East-what-bad-thing-could-happen? "plan" to "solve" the civil war in Iraq.

Mind you, this is the "least worst" version of derp. If you want to go full-on, bull-goose, so-fucked-up-it-disappears-up-its-own-fucking-asshole looney derp you have to go to the likes of Bob Kaplan's fever-dream demand for more imperialism on the Middle East:

"Imperialism bestowed order, however retrograde it may have been. The challenge now is less to establish democracy than to reestablish order. For without order, there is no freedom for anyone."

Bobby, being too young to have ever enjoyed the attentions of a pukka sahib on his nether regions and too purblind to imagine the infuriating nature of such attentions, clearly sees himself as the retrograde-er rather than the retrograde-ee. But he is simply the most honest of these would-be Kiplings taking up the White Man's Burden. Joni Ernst, now free of her responsibility of doing to male hogs what the Belgians used to do to their old colonial subjects, is manned-up in her confidence that Iraq, The Sequel will have a happier ending:

"...having served in the Middle East, I see a need at some point. If we don’t get this situation under control, ISIS will continue to spread. And I think most of our service members understand that, and I think many of them are ready to go back,” she continued. “If that call comes up, they are going to answer that call."

Important safety tip, Joni, (in case they didn't cover this in your last deployment brief, ma'am) if they don't "answer that call" they get the blocks put to them by the UCMJ.

Just sayin'...

What I find immensely frustrating and infuriating about this big-gonzo form of derp is that it is, frankly, not JUST derp but ignorant, uninformed derp. Profoundly, ahistorically stupid derp. A massive abyss of derp that completely misunderstands both the history and the current condition of imperialism as well as the history, ethnography, and geopolitics of the Middle East.

I've gone over this before, but the simple, bloody, inescapable fact that these fucking moron-grade Caesars like Kaplan and Ernst are missing is that:

"Back when it was us having the Maxim gun and they had not it was pretty simple to run an empire on the cheap. But now every dimestore Westbumfuckian Liberation Front can lay their hands on a couple of shiploads of AKs and a bunch of PMD shoebox mines (or just some Semtex and a Palestinian- or Iraqi-for-hire to show them how to wire the things for sound) and all of a sudden the White Man's Burden becomes hard for low-population-growth, expensive Western volunteer armies to bear."

It's Just. That. Fucking. Simple.

It's not a question of "resolve". It's not a question of military hardware, or geopolitical cunning, or strategic "vision". Iraq (and Syria) are now in the grip of a vicious civil war; Sunni vs Shia and Kurds in Iraq, Sunni vs Shia vs other Sunni vs Kurds in Syria.

For the Sunni to lose this game of thrones is to die, or, worse, to be ground under the shoe of the Alawite Shia in Syria or the Twelver Shia in Iraq forever. It will require a bloody generations-long occupation - or a savage, genocidal-level Sri-Lankan-type military defeat and political ratissage in the next couple of years or so - to crush this rebellion.

In today's modern cellphone-video, 24-hour-newschannel world no occupier can apply the level of pure savagery needed to crush such a rebellion quickly and completely. The U.S. does not have the sort of Army that can fight and win that horrible occupation war. Not except at the cost of our national soul, as crushing the Palestinian rebellion has sucked the life out of the soul of the nation of Israel. The 2003-2008 occupation of Iraq was not such war, and anyone who believes it was is kidding themselves. The U.S. Army no more "crushed" the Sunni rebellion than it ever really "ruled" places like Ramadi or Fallujah. To pretend that it ever could short of genocidal savagery is worse than a mistake. It is a crime.

To say or imply that, or to say or imply that somehow that American soldiers could change that history if they were to once again be sent into the maelstrom, is to reveal yourself as either simply an utter fool, as is Ernst, or a cynically amoral monster, which, I suspect, is Kaplan.

I have no doubt that such foolish monstrosity, or monstrous foolishness, will be neither reviled nor rejected by the American public, insulated as it is from the consequences. I have little doubt that more of this stupidity will be poured into the public mind, and that there is little I can do to ameliorate that.

I can only sit here on the ground and tell sad stories of the derp of king-sized idiots.

Today In the History of Bad Ideas...

...here's one I never thought about.

I mean, the headline kinda writes itself, doesn't it?

"Two killed, three injured in nude hot tub waterfall plunge"

And, of course, the now-traditional phrase whenever this sort of fucking Darwin-award idiocy is reported:

"Investigators suspect alcohol was involved."

Sheeyeah.

Too little to fail

So it turns out that - surprise - after former Superintendent Michelle Rhee threatened her teachers and their principals with the axe if they didn't get their students' test scores up (and the students were largely the usual inner-city no-hopers) they did what any sane human being would have done. They cheated.



Sigh.

What the fuck, people? Have I been talking to the goddamn wall here? We've been over this again and again and again; if you make MY success dependent on YOUR performance I will do my best to help you succed. But I will proceed to flog and beat and generally fuck you up if you fail.

And if you are a congenital fuckup to begin with, then I will lie and cheat my ass off to get past your deadweight ass and save my livelihood. I will recognize that I am better off taking a chance by cheating than to trust my future to you.

Anyone who doesn't believe that is true is a fool, or a grifter, or too good for this world.

Michelle Rhee is either one of those, or a bit of all of them.

And I am neither surprised nor disturbed by these "revelations". They were foredoomed from the moment she decided to put the livings of the people who worked for her in the hands of their students.

So he picks up his bowling ball and puts it in the sink...

Gee. I can't imagine how anything connected with this slice of genius pie could possibly go wrong in any way.



What the hell is the matter with the New York Times, giving this moron space on the editorial page?

"China’s role in a potential war on the Korean Peninsula is hard to predict." Gee, we can't figure out which way the large Asian nuclear superpower will react to an aggressive act of war on our part...so let's bomb some of their allies' shit and see what happens?



What sort of goddamn fool thinks that way? Wait, wait...I already know - the sort that thinks that invading a crapped out ethnically chaotic former Ottoman Empire Third World kleptocracy will result in candy and flowers?

Haven't we seen what happens when you listen to that sort of mouthbreather?



"This is the kind of pre-emptive action that would save lives and maybe even preserve the uneasy peace on the Korean Peninsula." Because we've seen how well bombing things without a sensible geopolitical plan for dealing with the fallout and blowback works in places like Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan?



Why, why, WHY can't we have a better press corps?

And UT-Austin...WTF, guys? You PAY this moron? For teaching this kind of stuff? And yet I couldn't get on full-time at the local community college?

Christ, UT, for the money this guy makes I promise - seriously, no shit - I could at least produce something smarter than this. I'll bet there are Aggies who could, too.

Aggies, guys. Fucking Aggies.



Just sayin'.