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.

Red sky at morning

I wanted to throw out a couple of things that caught my eye, in no particular order.

First, here's Krugman on the effect of economies on politics in the Thirties and today:"Europe’s underperformance is slowly eroding the legitimacy, not just of the European project, but of the open society itself." as he notes the recent success of the neofascist Fronte National in the French elections.

Second, David Niewert at Orcinus disputes my characterization of Il Douche as a mini-Mussolini, but notes that The Donald is hitting a lot of the sorts of notes that fascists like to play, and seems very likely to be setting the table for some true Great Leader to sit down and eat.

And, finally, in looking around at the general reaction to the San Bernardino shootings, the latest in public statements from the Obama Administration, and Ranger Jim's worthwhile rumination on "what can/should we do about these damn jihadis?" over at Milpub I note:

First, Ael comments with his usual perception that "Well, I think the answer lies in an educated population who make enough of a living to indulge themselves the leisure of being active participants in a representative democracy." and:

Second, the Republican reaction to Obama's speech the other night which was, pretty much, what Jim's post advocates (other than the what I agree is the fundamental mistaken assumption that "we are at WOAH!" with these jihadi groups).

It was, almost to a degree, completely unhinged. Their universal take was that Obummer was his usual faggot secret-Muslim self for insisting on a reasoned assessment of the actual "threat" and a proportionate response and for not ripping his shirt off, leaping on top of the desk, and screaming "Kreegah! Obama bundolo!" at the top of his lungs, i.e., demanding the extermination of the Muslim brutes.

My personal favorite, by the way, was the response of SEN Marco Rubio, the "thinking man's" Republican: "We are at war with a radical jihadist group, more capable than any terrorist group, more capable than any terrorist group and any armed insurgency this nation ever has confronted."

Now you'll have to excuse me.

Me and Senator Rubio and this piece of fucking dimension lumber here are going into this little room until I have beaten into his pointy little fucking head the following four words:

CONFEDERATE

STATES

OF

AMERICA

"...more capable than...any armed insurgency this nation has ever confronted."

Fuck! THIS...this is the one of the two political parties we have allowed ourselves. This is Ael's educated population taking an active part in representative democracy.

And this is what we're supposed to try and beat into intelligence?

Shit, I've chaptered out privates with more promise than this.

Dolce Vita

Over at the Milpub in the middle of a conversation about the Paris attacks regular commentator sheerahkhan had this to say:

"...the Paris attacks, broadly laid out, were still for the most part so much like the earlier late 60's, 70s, early 80's Bader meinhoff, Red-Brigade, et al. As an aside, giving a lot of press to these guys also happens to elevate ISIS amongst inactive/unmotivated Islamist...however that works, I have no idea, but for some strange reason it does. If we treat them like criminals perhaps we can lower the charm-appeal, and keep the arm-chair Jihadist inactive/unmotivated.

At least I think we can...to be honest, I'm not even sure anymore.

The world has gone crazy, and it just seems like we're B-lining it to WWIII."

That made me stop for a moment.

Sheer is a smart guy, and not a hysteric. But his concern flashed me back to my morning's trip to the lovely Ramada breakfast room, where the cheap and nasty buffet was underlain by a Faux News continuo of hysteria and panic over all the nightmarish dangers of the world (that were only deterred by Strong White Men, but that's fucking Fox for you...)

There's a lot of this hysteria around. Look at the Trump Silvershirts, roaring about "making America great again" as if the fucker was some sort of Somalia with more Chick-fil-a's instead of the most massive and powerful superpower on the planet.

Look at the other whackaloons of the Right, fulminating about trivial problems like abortion and gay rights and the loss of white privilege and scary islamic jihadis. I hear a lot of this "the world has gone crazy" talk from those people, too. Hell, the entire GOP presidential clown car runs on that shit.

But...seriously? Think hard about the difference between today's world and the world of the medieval period.

Is our world crazier than the world of the Black Death? Crazier than the Albigensian Crusade, or regular Jewish pogroms, or the Inquisition, or the Mongol invasions of Europe? Crazier than the wave of death and civilization collapse that followed the Europeans into Africa after the 1500s and the Americas after 1492? Crazier than WW1, or WW2, or the Thirty Years' War?

Let me put it this way. Think about the average FDChief family in Picardy in 1200AD. What were the sort of things that were likely to spoil their day?

Epidemic disease? Check or hold?

Check.

Famine? Check. Random rape or murder at the hands of outlaws or the neighboring feudal lord's men-at-arms on a raid? Check. Peonage? Check. Poverty? Check. Death from minor injuries or childbirth followed by fatal infection? Check. Massive infant mortality? Check. Powerlessness in a feudal society? Check.

Now look at us. Do we have problems and troubles? Check. Are they anything as horrible or threatening as those?

Hold.

No. Our world today is nothing like the frighteningly uncertain, dangerous, and unpredictable (to the ordinary person) world of the 13th Century. So the world hasn't actually "gone crazy". The troubles and problems the world has - outside the massive problem we've created for ourselves in the form of anthropogenic global warming, pollution, and extinction - are no different from those it has always had; wars and rumors of wars, bad government, sickness, natural disasters...

BUT...in 1200 we didn't know all of that stuff. We would be lucky if we had news from the nearest city. The "outside world" would have been vague rumors and tales from random travelers. Now we get all those various horrors beamed straight into our lives 24/7 by an infotainment industry that has every reason to make us as frightened and whacko as possible.

The raggedy jihadis of IS, the tattered armies of Syria, the unruly clans of Somalia and Mali...these aren't "WW3". They're the same old troubles the world has always had...just all thrown at us like they are some sort of huge cataclysm by our modern electronic devices.

They're not the end of the world, and we should really act like it.

Because people panicked by the end of the world do really, really, really fucking stupid things.

Maxim LXXIII

As one might expect, today's news is full of the attacks on Paris claimed by the Islamic State.

As one might also expect, the commentary on this news is largely colored by the same sort of hyperbole that always surrounds these sorts of atrocities. This, in one sense, is unsurprising. The notion of one person setting out to slaughter another that has done him, or her, no personal injury or insult, to murder in cold blood whoever they encounter regardless of age, sex, or competence for some imagined slight or grievance is a truly horrific one, the sort of notion that compels most of us to peer perhaps more deeply into the abyss than we would prefer.

So while I am unsurprised by the outrage, horror, and anger of both the reporting and the punditry - because these murders are, indeed, outrageous, horrible, and infuriating - I am less than impressed at the associated pervasiveness of a sort of aggrieved victimization on the part of reporters and pundits, the loudly articulated sense that these atrocities are some sort of unprecedented, unsurpassingly awful injustice visited on utter innocents like lightning from a clear sky.

This is often accompanied by the specific accusation that the ideology that drove the killers is an uncontextual and uniquely evil force.

The combination of this outraged innocence and angry accusation irks me for several reasons.

First, because it is at best, louche', and at worst, criminally ignorant, to be living in a society whose rulers are wont to proclaim often, loudly, and fiercely, that they are engaged in a "war against terror" and to act surprised and outraged when terror makes war on you.

Wars are like that; you kill them, they kill you. Not nice, perhaps, but also something that should come as neither surprise nor outrage. "Unconventional" wars, guerrilla wars, the "war of the flea" is even less nice, and as such this should have been expected even as it was horrible.

Second, because the context for these attacks is obvious. The West is engaged in warring with this Islamic State. This "state" has neither aircraft nor warships. It cannot, then, as do civilized people, bomb helpless men, innocent women and little children from aloft or crater their towns and cities with missiles from afar. It has little in the way of artillery or armor; it cannot materially harm the armed forces of its enemies. It must, in its conduct of this "war on terror", use, well, terror. This, too, may be horrible but should be neither surprising nor outrageous.

Vile? Perhaps. Vicious, certainly. But to act as though this was some sort of uniquely awful, unforeseen horror is neither intelligent nor useful. To misinterpret your enemy's motives and misprise his tactics is to go a long way to miscalculate your most effective response.

Third, because in a popular form of government the result of sending the public the message that they have been the object of an unprovoked, particularly savage, attack is to produce a public response dominated by insensate rage and mindless hatred, the sort of hatred that fails to draw a line between the enemy and those who look like the enemy, between an aggressive defense and furious, hyperkinetic, self-defeating aggression.

Let me say honestly; I am not a kindly man. I am not, in general, a sentimental man. I have no more than a mild sympathy for the dead of Paris (I did not know them, I have no special care for them) and no more than a dispassionate enmity for their killers.

To me the killers of Daesh are, and in my opinion should be, nothing more than a problem to solve, a danger to negate, like a live electrical cable or a rabid dog. They should be disposed of if possible, isolated and avoided if not.

But my lack of emotion does not vitiate the lesson of 9/11 - if there is one other than "The stupid fucker Richard Cheney and his coterie should really be wearing orange jumpsuits" - is that taking geopolitical actions based on whipping up insensate rage and mindless hatred in the public is a very stupid, very self-destructive thing.

What is needed, instead, is the cold realization that these horrors are the calculated cost of what we, the West, have chosen; to fight a "war on terror" that largely consists of paying others to bomb, shoot, and kill people in places far away while living in a society whose openness allows those people to bring their bombs and bullets in among us to kill us.

There is no "solution" to the Daesh problem in France, or in the United States without changing both without measure. For the West to keep Daesh out would mean changing its societies, closing its openness, in ways that will never be undone.

There is also no "solution" to the Daesh problem by importing our bayonets into their lands. For the West to try and impose that solution to Daesh on the Middle East would mean choosing only between fighting an endless colonial war and genocide. Our sons and grandsons would rule theirs with bayonet and boot, or we would have to slaughter them without mercy, make a desert in a desert and call it peace.

It is that simple. This, or that. One, or the other. There are no other ways.

Treating the Paris attacks as some unutterable, unforeseeable, unequaled atrocity does nothing but obscure that and make a rational way forward more difficult.

We need to step back and see this for what it is; a lost "battle" in a war we - our "leaders", at least - have chosen to fight. Then we, or they, can choose whether to go forward with this "war", whether to look deeply at our "tactics" or our "strategies" to see if either or both are productive, or whether we need to think outside the paradigm of "war" we have allowed ourselves.

But we cannot do that if we let ourselves be blinded by grief, sorrow, rage, or grievance.

Before the Great Terror of 1914-1918 the French were the Daesh of Europe; the invaders, the killers, the butchers, the New Huns. But when one of the bloodiest murderers of that bloodthirsty band sat down to write his maxims of efficient bloodletting he said this of the sort of way one should go about the science and art of slaughter:

"The first qualification in a general-in-chief is a cool head -- that is, a head which receives just impressions, and estimates things and objects at their real value. He must not allow himself to be elated by good news, or depressed by bad.
The impressions he receives either successively or simultaneously in the course of the day should be so classed as to take up only the exact place in his mind which they deserve to occupy; since it is upon a just comparison and consideration of the weight due to different impressions that the power of reasoning and of right judgment depends.
Some men are so physically and morally constituted as to see everything through a highly colored medium. They raise up a picture in the mind on every slight occasion, and give to every trivial occurrence a dramatic interest. But whatever knowledge, or talent, or courage, or other good qualities such men may possess, Nature has not formed them for the command of armies, or the direction of great military operations."

I see no reason to think that this maxim has been washed away by yesterday's blood on the pave' of Paris.

The Limits of My Post

So apparently some nutter went and shot up several military facilities in Tennessee and ended up killing five troopers; four U.S. Marines and a U.S. Navy logistician.

Everybody was very sad about this, except possibly for the theocratic lunatics in the Middle East that have been on the receiving end of the ordnance delivered by (presumably) USAF aircraft. The degree to which the shooter identified with and wanted to be one of those lunatics is still uncertain but likely to be considerable. That was his problem. The fact that a Muslim theocratic looney wanna-be wanted to shoot up U.S. Navy and recruiting facilities has a lot to do with the number of Muslims that the U.S. has shot up since 2001. That's our problem; when you insist on jamming your head in the beehive it is extremely likely you'll get stung by the bees.

But that wasn't what got me thinking.

It was, instead, the instinctive reaction of the wingnut politicians including Bush, Walker, and (of course) Trump to the "best solution" to the fact that Muslim nuts want to kill U.S. troopers, and it had nothing to do with spending less time killing Muslims and thereby provoking Muslim nuts.

The Donald pretty much spoke for all of these gasbags when he said: "This sick guy had guns and shot them down. These are decorated people. These are people who could have handled guns very easily. They would have had a good chance if they had a gun."

Which, as much as anything this moron has ever said, tells me everything I need to know about the room-temperature-level of his IQ.

But it also made me think about this story, which I think tells you everything you need to know about what I think is very likely to happen if every armory, reserve center, and recruiter has an armed Joe pulling guard.

So.

When I got out of the RA - and I should really tell you the story of my first post-active duty assignment, an Army Reserve mobile hospital in Lancaster, PA - I bounced around through a couple of outfits. I finally got my bump to E-6/Staff Sergeant and in the process got shifted over to a Reserve Combat Engineer outfit. This was a "heavy" engineer unit tasked more with construction missions rather than a sapper sort of outfit, and for a former light infantryman the setup was pretty plush. We had an aid station tent with a big old Deuce-and-a-half truck to carry it and all our medical kit around in and a couple of the old M718 quarter-ton field light ambulances for evacuation. We got to drive everywhere, and as one of Ramses' medics is said to have scratched in hieroglyphics on the back of Cleopatra's Needle: "Why fight when you can hide? Why walk when you can ride?"

The best part of our reserve center, though, was that it was located on what had been an old Nike missile site, Battery PH-91, located north of the city of Philadelphia. This Cold War relic had been closed down in the early Sixties but the underground holes ("silo" is too grand a word for how these critters were stored - here's a picture of one today)

were still out back of the center, in the motor pool, three of them if I remember, and they had a creepily-cool sort of "Doctor Strangelove" feel to them.

The other interesting thing about the old 330th Combat Engineer Battalion was the intake area; it spanned a fairly huge chunk of the northern suburbs and the north part of the City of Philadelphia. Some of the troopers came from the nice, white, suburban and even fairly rural (Montgomery County still had some rural areas in the late 1980s...) areas around where the actual reserve center was located on Potshop Road. Some came from the heavily black parts of North Philadelphia and only got out of the concrete jungle one weekend a month and two weeks a year. Everybody seemed to rub along fairly decently and I recall it as a pretty good outfit, both for weekend drill as well as our summer camps.

Ah, yes. Annual training. That's where my story takes us.

I don't remember the year, but it must have been one of the two years I was there (either 1989 or 1990, since I got off active duty in December 1987 and moved to Oregon in August 1990...) and the battalion did our annual training north of Fort Indiantown Gap - "Fig", we called it, the sprawling Depression-era post that was primarily the business of the Pennsylvania Army Guard. The idea was to help the Pennsylvania Fish and Game people do some work on their hunting lands in the are north of Fig. If my memory serves me correctly it was somewhere in the red circle, probably that triangle-shaped area near the center:

It was a fairly unmemorable piece of the rural Pennsylvania Appalachians, and we drove up the mostly-dirt "gravel" road to where the S-4 put our combat trains, ran out the wire, dug our rifle pits and latrines

(which, as I recall, managed to find the only spring on the whole goddamn hillside and overflowed, washing out a couple of pounds of used GI chow downhill towards the mess tent. "Swimming back to where they were spawned..." was one joker's comment as we frantically tried to fill the damn things in.)

and our aid station tent and settled in for a couple of weeks playing Army.

OK. So now a couple of things happened. First, "spring gobbler season" opened. This is apparently a thing, and in it the local yokels don their camoflage and shoulder their shotguns to go out and stalk the elusive wild turkey. Our portion of the game lands had not been set off-limits to the turkey hunters, and we did not know that. There was an Army Reserve unit in that portion of the game lands, and the turkey hunters didn't know that, either.

Second, our S-2, who was either a smartass or a complete fucking idiot, told our guys that the OPFOR, the notional enemies, were dressed in odd-looking camoflage and might try and walk up to our positions pretending to be local people. This became part of the special instructions for our gate guards, and had been the morning one of these local Nimrods came strolling up the road to where our two Rambos were lounging around the roll of concertina wire that blocked the road through our trains area.

"Halt!" says one of the GIs. I should note that just by pure coincidence the two guards on the gate that morning were deep-city Philadelphians, born and raised within sight-line of Billy Penn's hat (that is, the statue on top of the City Hall building at the center of downtown Philly...) and knew about the central Pennsylvania countryside what a cow knows about the Council of Trent.

The would-be turkey-slayer looked at him curiously but kept coming forward. "HALT!" repeats the troop. Now the guy halts and looks around him like he's suddenly encountered a two-headed Martian baby.

"Where you think you're going?" says the soldier. "Up the hill." replies the hunter.

"Not that way." the GI informs him "You gots to go around the wire. This a secure area."

"Bullshit." fumes the hunter. "I need to get up the road. This is state land. You can't close off this road."

"Hell I can't" replies the troop, getting a little aggravated himself. "You gots to go around."

"I can't and I won't. I'm going through there." says the hunter, and starts to come at my guy. The GI, who has had his rifle slung up to this point, now pulls it off his shoulder and levels it at the dude. His partner backs him up and the hunter stops with his hands coming up, palms out, to show that he's not dangerous.

"You lie down and put your weapon on the ground!" barks the GI, now convinced that this is one of those "enemy" infiltrators. The hunter, not wanting either to lie on the wet dirt of the road or to put his shotgun down in it, just backs off shaking his head.

Now the GI is really suspicious. He comes on, rifle leveled, and then raises it to his shoulder. "Git the FUCK DOWN!" he roars, and the hunter scrambles to put his belly in the dirt, ignorant of the fact that in this confrontation he is the only one with live rounds.

The GI draws down on him as his pal circles around to snag the shotgun before retreating to the landline to call the sergeant of the guard.

"Now...what you want up that hill..?" interrogates the gate guard. The hunter looks up at him with that "how ignorant are you?" face and says "I'm going after turkey." and is stunned when this produces a snarl of derisive laughter and the blank-adapter on the rifle pushed down towards his head.

"Now I know you lyin'!" the guard sneers. "There no turkeys up that hill. You gets your turkey at the Super Fresh."

Anyway, fortunately the unit chaplain arrived at about that time along with the commander of the relief. The hunter was plenty hot, and the GI on the gate was, too, both thinking that somebody had run some serious buuuulllllshit on them (and someone had, but it was the S-2 who was safely distant in the battalion tactical operations center and wouldn't hear about this until it was just a good story...) and it took everyone's best efforts to calm them down and send them their separate ways without a fight.

As it happened, the whole thing ended up in the local paper because, well...because. It was a sort of funny story, and it all ended happily except for the turkey, perhaps.

But let's update that story. Give my GI a rifle with real live rounds in it. Put him out front of his armory or reserve center or, worse, in a busy shopping mall with a "career center", one of these inter-service recruting shop things, in the middle of the busy crowds of pedicure-seekers and payday-lender-marks. Make the turkey hunter someone who has had a couple of Bud Lite Limes for lunch and has got the wrong address and is a little more belligerent and a little less intelligent.

Gee. I wonder how THAT could go wrong..?

The point is, if we insist on treating these gun-nutter shootings like war, then war is what we are likely to get. And any intelligent soldier knows that in war usually one of the most deadly weapons is the one closest to you. That's why we train so hard, that's why we have so many rules about weapons handling and weapons safety. That's why we make such a big deal about knowing exactly who and what are where when we have a round in the chamber.

Putting Joe or Molly on door guard armed with live bullets is a hell of a lot more likely to get some other GI, or some random pedestrian, killed than putting one in the center-of-mass of Rag bin Head the IS Wannabe, and pretty much every GI whose ever carried a full-metal-jacketed round knows that perfectly well.

But it suits our current crop of "conservatives" to pretend otherwise, and that's a huge part of our fucking problem.

The Assassination of William the Silent

Four hundred and ninety-three years ago this month a German monk sent a letter to the Bishop of Mainz complaining about the Church practice of selling "indulgences"; that is, the forgiveness of earthly sins in return for hard, cold cash.

The result, eventually, was a series of rebellions, revolts, massacres, and wars that harrowed Europe from the gray coast of Dunnet Head to the sunny sands of the Côte d'Azur, from the dark headlands of Brittany to the dark forests of central Silesia. We will never know how many lives were taken amid what horrors of murder and rape and ruin and merciless hatred.

All because many people of the day couldn't agree whose church was Church and whose god was God.

Catholics and Protestants, and those who wanted to use Catholicism and Protestantism to advance their less-elevated ambitions, butchered and harried each other for over a century, from the "Peasant's War" in 1524 to the final bloody brutalities of the Thirty Years War in 1648 and the subjugation of Ireland in 1651. The hatreds bred bone-deep still linger along today; ask anyone in Belfast or, for that matter, in the stands at Ibrox or Celtic Park.

By and large the peoples of Europe - and here I exclude the turbulent breeds in the Balkans, which have learned nothing and forgotten nothing from the fucking Battle of Kosovo in fucking 1389 - no longer fight over religion.

The peoples of North America, having sprung largely from refugees of those fights or from fugitives from the very idea of such fighting, did not take their religions to the bayonet point before the modern nations of Canada and the United States were founded.

And, given that despite the lies you will often hear from those whose collection plates and political wherewithal grow from the ignorance of those lies both nations were founded largely by men with little or no use for a formal coupling of religion and the state, since the founding North America has largely been a place where religion, as Mark Twain described it, has become like dandruff; something that many people have "...and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it."

But not to the point of killing other people over.

And that, to my mind, is a very good thing.

Religion, and its quiet companion, faith, can produce great things from the mind and the hands; art, music, and literature, love, forgiveness, and kindness, comfort and mercy.

But those same can - and only can - produce the blackest of human cruelty and pitiless destruction.

A good man or woman can do good from the heart within them; an evil man or woman can do evil from their heartlessness. Only belief that doing death and giving out pain is pleasing to a God can cause a good man or woman to do great evil.

Now bloodyhanded death is being reaped in the name of another religion, and it is even alike in that it has split into sects the better to hate and struggle against itself to kill, and maim, and rape, and hate, and destroy .

I'm going to suggest that we are seeing the Peasant's Revolt of the umma, the first violent spasms of the Islamic Eighty Years War; that the Muslim world has embarked on its own Wars of Religion, and for the next decades - and only decades, if we are lucky - we will see this war fought out amongst, and between, groups and nations wherever those professing one sort of Islam or another butt up against themselves.

Unfortunately, this will also mean that some of us living in the unchurched lands outside the Muslim world, the peoples and places that outgrew our infantile religious wars will be killed by the violent spray of this religious warfare.

Collateral damage, as it were, of the Islamic Wars of Religion.

We cannot "win" this war for the Islamic lands; there are not enough bullets cast to kill every living Muslim, which is what we in the Enlightenment West would have to do to "win" such a war.

Only those living within the places where the Muslim faith is practiced can, by doing what the West did and rejecting religion itself as temporal government, rejecting religious "law" as temporal law and religious mores as social strictures, do that. And that is what must happen - there is no middle ground. There can be no theocracy lite, no half-measures of an "Islamic State" any more than there could be compromise between the Catholics and the Protestants in the Holy Roman Empire in 1558.

Simply stated, Islam cannot stand half wahhabi and half free. The wahhabis, the jihadis, the rapists of unveiled women, the killers of unbelieving men, will not let it. It must become all one, or all the other.

We, the West, can help those who stand against these unholy holy men that kill for Allah as we stood - eventually, too late, far too late, but finally - against those who killed for Christ.

But if we respond to the barbarism of the jihadis by becoming ourselves Arnaud-Amalric we will lose even if we win. If we respond with panic, with fear, by sacrificing our laws and our liberties, we will defeat ourselves.

So we will simply have to learn to live with, and accept, that we will lose our lives, some of us, even the highest among us, in this war that is neither ours to fight nor to win. To accept those losses and go on without sacrificing ourselves to our panic fear.

On the evening of July 10, 1584 the then-leader of the Protestant revolt in the Low Countries of what is today's Belgium and the Netherlands was the Prince of Orange, William, first of that name and often called de Zwijger or "The Silent". He seems to have been a man of few words.

But of deeds, many. He was a leader in the Protestant rebellion against Catholic Spain and is still today revered in the Netherlands as a good ruler and a founder of the nation. But to a Catholic named Balthasar Gérard he was just a traitor to his Spanish king and a heretic to his Catholic religion.

So Gérard picked up a couple of wheel-lock pistols, the Desert Eagles of his day, infiltrated Delft, and met William as the Prince was leaving his house where he had just enjoyed a quiet dinner with a guy named Rombertus van Uylenburgh.

William got to the bottom of the stairs and Van Uylenburgh heard Gérard shoot William twice in the chest at close range. The Prince died on the pavement.

The Dutch set up a monument to the dead man and carried on.

As should we.

Terror Abroad

In case you were taking a break from domestic news and wondering who's killing innocent people overseas, well, in Bangladesh it's mostly the people working for Bennetton, the Gap, and J.C. Penney;

"The plan would ditch government inspections, which are infrequent and easily subverted by corruption, and establish an independent inspectorate to oversee all factories in Bangladesh, with powers to shut down unsafe facilities as part of a legally binding contract signed by suppliers, customers and unions. The inspections would be funded by contributions from the companies of up to $500,000 per year.

The proposal was presented at a 2011 meeting in Dhaka attended by more than a dozen of the world's largest clothing brands and retailers — including Wal-Mart, Gap and Swedish clothing giant H&M — but was rejected by the companies because it would be legally binding and costly.

At the time, Wal-Mart's representative told the meeting it was "not financially feasible ... to make such investments," according to minutes of the meeting obtained by The Associated Press."

Well, I, for one, am glad that our corporate "citizens" are not knuckling under to the tyranny of those irresponsible Bengalis who seem to hold the misguided belief that things like workplaces that don't collapse or catch fire are some sort of "right" rather than a privilege of being in a Free Market.

I'd have more to say but there's a terrific sale today down at Wal-Mart, and I have got to pick up a pair of Levis; always low prices there, y'know?



Always.

Spy vs. Spy: Bay State Fathead Edition

Well.

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

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

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

Ever.

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

Until they told him.

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

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

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

The Great Gun of Athlone

The Easter Rising of 1916 was probably not something my Scots grandfar liked to celebrate.

My Scots forebears were not Scots but "Scotch-Irish" which is to say they were the thugs the English planted in "The Pale" around Dublin and in the North to keep the boot on the neck of the Catholic proles. They and theirs went a long way into making the bloody calvary that has been the history of the Six Counties since the Rising cleared the way for the founding of free Ireland. The "Ulster Scots" have long been the Boers of Europe; stiff-necked bastards who could fuck up a child's birthday party.



On the 97th anniversary of the Éirí Amach na Cásca it's worth remembering, amid our rush to hate and fear "terrorism", that one man's "terrorist" is another's freedom fighter, and one man's "military tribunal" is another's "judicial murder".

And to recall a time when men like James Connolly openly fought for the working man and woman, when those of us not in the two-yacht family stood together, holding strongly to the now-"outdated" notion that the rich and the well-born were (and are) no more our friends than the wealthy farmer is the friend to the sheep, the cow, or the pig.

(h/t to Pierce for the outstanding cover of the Ballad of James Connolly.)

They will be with us always

The house is quiet now. Missy jogged out of her bed to the couch in the front room but immediately curled up there and went back to sleep; the other two - my Bride and the Boy - are our slow risers and have yet to wake. So I get to site here at the laptop near the front window and watch the gray Sunday begin.

I'm not sure whether the brown-streaked song sparrow is one sparrow or two, but it (or they) have been coming regularly to the platform feeder my family has set up outside the window. One of the few gains from the loss of Miss Lily is that Fat Nitty has never been an enthusiastic huntress, and with the Terror of the Backyard biding safe in a ditch we can resume putting out treats for the local birdlife. Nothing exotic; the song sparrows, a pair of chickadees I suspect of nesting in the Oregon grape, and a single massive scrub jay that arrives to standoff with the other local gourmand Mister Eatee the squirrel.

I was watching this little bit of Nature and thinking about the end of the Boston Bombing Week.

With the older brother - who seems to have been what passed for the "mastermind" of this business - full of holes as a colander we may never find out what the hell was going on and why. Certainly the likelihood of some sort of international jihadist conspiracy seems...unlikely. All the jihadi groups have denied these mooks, and their oddball odyssey Thursday and Friday - ambushing a campus cop, carjacking and careening through the streets tossing homemade demo out the car windows - makes them seem more and more like the couple of homicidal losers that Uncle Tsarni called them.



This hasn't stopped any- and everyone from using this episode as a platform for calls for this, that, and the other. My pals Lisa and jim over at RAW have a post up scolding the local security folks for their slipshod laxity in not securing the Marathon finish area better. Various pundits have drawn all sorts of inferences from this; everything from questioning the mental health system, the immigration system (despite the simple reality that the younger Tsarnaev was nine when he arrived here - nine!), to other calls for better security and more thorough assessment of the "threat".

I'm going to add to that but to perhaps something of a different end.

I'm going to suggest that we will ALWAYS have a Tsarneaev or two to strike at us.



For two reasons;

First, because we are and, I hope, will remain a relatively "open" society. I agree with jim and Lisa; the Boston Marathon organizers could have done more to make the route secure. When I go to soccer matches my bag and every bag is searched at the gates, and the gating and exclusion at public venues has become fairly standard. The price of safety is eternal inconvenience.

But I think back to the other big urban events like Seattle-to-Portland. The finish area is almost unsecurable; you have people arriving and departing all through the day. Riders with saddlebags, supporters with backpacks. Vendors, journos, and the whole thing ends in the park right between a mall, a big movie theatre, and the tram stop. To make that area secure you'd make a traffic jam and bottleneck that would make STP and everything around it slam to a stop.



Flick through the pictures I've posted. This is just one year's accumulation of the public events I've attended; me, personally. In one year, in a single mid-sized American city. And every single one of these events was just as open as the Marathon finish area. You could drive right up to them and park within car-bomb radius of a crowd of several hundred. You could walk amid the crowd with a backpack or tote bag competely un-inspected or unexamined.

Street fairs. Bike races. Sunday Parkways. Bridge Pedal. Saturday Market.

COULD make all of them utterly secure? Sure, you could.

But there's a cost there, not just in access but in thought. To really secure all of those venues would be a great deal of cost and personal committment; I'm not sure that anyone has any real idea of how much it would cost.

But, even more significant, you have to get the people, all the people; the organizers, the attendees, the competitors, the law enforcement and security agencies...into the sort of mindset that Israelis have to have; you have to have everyone on the constant lookout for the slightest hint of a threat. Every package, every backpack, every empty vehicle, every "odd stranger" has to be considered a danger.

You have to build that "fortress under siege" mentality into your people. Into your culture.

You have to see every venue as a potential massacre, and everyone as a potential enemy.

And we can do that. Of course we can.

But do we want to?



But, second, the other reality is that there will ALWAYS be human beings who want to do us harm.

They may be simply violent losers, more Tsarnaevs, more Columbine or Newtown shooters. There is almost no way to prevent a person from killing people if they're willing to work hard enough. You can make it more difficult. But stop them? Never.

And - giving consideration to the "Islamic" angle so many people have thrown at this - there are also some mindsets that will never live easily alongside each other.

Think about it this way; even if we stopped the "War on Terror" this minute. If we pulled every drone and every covert agent from every Middle Eastern country. If we halted every dollar and every round of ammunition sent to some loathsome dictator we support because he's friendly to the U.S. or supports our Middle Eastern policy. If we backed away from reflexively supporting the Greater Israel conservative faction. If we became scrupulously "neutral" in the great secular versus sectarian conflict over Islam now ongoing.

Would that bring us "peace" with the sorts of people who want an "Islamic Caliphate" in the Muslim world, the sorts of mad dreamers who founded outfits like Al Qaeda and Hizb-ut-Tahrir?

How could it?



The United States ideal represents everything that that sort of person finds appalling and dangerous. A nation founded on the ideal - often violated in practice, yes, but, still based on the notion - of personal and religious liberty. Open to "dangerous" ideals like the legal and social equity of men and women, the acceptance of homosexuality, even atheism. Tolerant of sexual liberties to the point of libertineism. Women in uniform. Personal choices on everything from abortion to educating women. You can almost hear the conservative mullahs shudder.

So in that sense they do, and will, always "hate us for our freedom". But not in the way that someone like Limbaugh or Coulter or Beck mean it; indeed, the sorts of Islamists who would like to bomb and shoot Americans for ogling nudie pictures and cuddling up to feminists and gays would probably get on famously with Operation Rescue and the boys down at the local John Birch Society.



And to make "peace" with these sonsofbitches really would be to have to change our society in some very fundamental ways, ways I cannot see happening if we are to remain true to our national ideals as I see them.

I hope that the nasty business of last week will, in some way, produce something of value. Some better way, perhaps, to help prevent this sort of brutality from striking somewhere else some time in the future.



But it may not.

Update 4/21: And this sort of idiotic crap doesn't help. "The accused perpetrators of these acts were not common criminals attempting to profit from a criminal enterprise, but terrorists trying to injure, maim, and kill innocent Americans." And you know this, McCain, how? By your extraordinary political ESP, the sort of brilliance that gave us Backwoods Barbie? And King, do I remember you calling for this when your IRA pals turned up in Boston back in the day? And Graham - is this what you had in mind when you were quoted as saying ”We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.” back in August?

Fuckadoodledoo, you gormless pinworms, we don't even know what these two gomers were in business to do, much less why. And you're already insisting on replaying the worst-selling of "Dubya's Greatest Hits" as covered by Obama?

Christ, but we're screwed.