…I just can’t seem to help myself from posting this. Yeah, loving the trouncing of those who really harsh my mellow…is one of my worst traits. But there it is, and to say that I’m a detractor of Ol’ Sourpuss Hedges would be an understatement. I hope Mr. Haeder won’t mind that I’m (ahem) borrowing so much of his polemic… I’d grabbed the link to the interview he’s referenced, but just hadn’t the heart to either watch or read, so it’s cool he did, so I don’t have to. Now: if only the O, so erudite Noam ‘lote-vote fer The Queen’ Chomsky had been on, too. What a three-bagger that wouldda been! (Note: it’s not all about the guests being interviewed.)
To think that Jill Stein had ‘a conversation’ with him before finally choosing Ajamu Baraka as her running mate gave me the shivers. But seriously, I’m glad Baraka said yes to her offer, as he’s by way of a long, black radical tradition… By the way, don’t bother watching Baraka on TRNN; all the ‘journalists’ really want to ask him was about the Greens as Spoilers for Trump™; Pffffftttt.
So when I’d clicked into Paul Haeder’s ‘Talking About Clinton v. Trump the Day of the First Bomb Dropped; Afterthoughts in a world tied to bats in the belfry as our daily existence to just make it past the 10 pm news’ at dissidentvoice.org, August 6, the other day, I ate it with a spoon and immense satisfaction…(Atta, boy, Paul!) (Note: it’s not all about the guests being interviewed, but a far wider outrage.)
“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.”
~ Franz Kafka, Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922
“I’m listening to Hedges and Reich, on the other millionaire’s venue, Amy Goodman. Let’s make no bones about it – that former labor secretary and now professor at UC-Berkley, and then the former NYT journalist and now best-selling Pulitzer Prize winning author, and the War and Peace Report Democracy Now host and producer, they all have a few cool million in the bank.
(Haeder may know who funds Democracy Now!, or used to, at any rate. No matter, she brings some great stories and interviews. Not (cough) this.)
“Retirements, investments, equity, all of that, and power, a certain powerful First World elite self-agency, the power of getting paid lots for speeches (no, not as much as Albright or Clinton or what Obama will be fetching, but still, not one of us, the 80 percent, has any access to power, to the bully-pulpit). They both write books about us, the floundering, and some of us, not just folks like me with educations, real and on paper, should have been taking up the mantel, should have been put into some system of checks and balances. Some internship, paid, to be the real voice of us, the voiceless. Instead, there is so-so much yammering on and on about our plight, our demographics, our historical place in the Capitalistic mosh pit. You will never see Hedges or Reich give up anything for the real people they profess to care about and write vociferously and vicariously around.”
“Let us write about us, and let us get the platforms that these vaunted few seem to be wresting from the very people they think they are caring about and concerned with.
The revolution will not happen with the literati and intelligentsia running things. Or not this focused few calling the shots. Or the continual analyzing “us” to death. Or without warrior ways? Legal mandates, geeks and nerds? Not so, not so. Or not through the pages of the oh-so irrelevant NY publishing world. The ramparts must be bulldozed and Molotov-cock-tailed into oblivion. Both Reich and Hedges call for some color revolution, some passive, non-violent changing of the guard? The perverted rulers keep kettling us, corralling us in debt, fear, as we have more and more boxes to check off in our precarious lives – bad debt, bad schools, bad credit, bad laws broken, bad zip codes, bad families, bad reputations, bad employment records, bad parents, bad spouses … The game of the controllers is to have these spitting intellects argue among themselves about whether Trump is as really bad as these sheltered labor secretaries say or if Clinton is any more destructive as these sheltered prize seeking article writers profess. We are dying at the hands of the war-makers, the toxin mixers, the pharmacy-edu-IT-surveillance deliverers, the history wipers, the cultural cleansers. We are being shot daily, into extinction, those of us who see nothing in their DNA or line as worthy of their power.
We need more than passive books and an avalanche of people writing about their books to not only foil the felonious few, but to start the pandemic against the very nature of the elite and their riff-raff shilling for their empty consumerism and permanent passivity-prompting sentimental crap on TV, in their music, in their movies, in their daily bread of media mendacity.
Yep, debating the great war of 2016 – madman Trump, vilified in the media, the same rotten to the core media that vilify Chavez, Castro, Stein (Jill), Sanders, Snowden, Assange, Whistle-blowers, Putin, the Marxists, the true leftists, Anyone/thing/cause that just doesn’t fit into the elite’s Pandora Box of Capitalist Tricks, Oh That East Coast Coffin for us all, or in the case of the Washington Post, East Coast digs, Seattle Amazon (dot) com neo-fascist, effete, billionaire, sociopath, owner, Bezos, those East Coast oh-so-erudite(sic) creeps running the media-madison ave-political-defense-financial playground to HELL.
I am hearing the back and forth, the parsing of what should come off as progressive, a new energy, some youth movement away and against this juggernaut of Corporate Control and Fascist Elite Insanity.”
He throws in some fairly good Ol’ Sourpuss quotes, deconstructs ‘progressive’ Bern and his vaunted revolution, then knocks Reich to the ground over his Clinton Love, LOTE comparisons (Clinton is NOT Trump, but ‘it’s a free country™, (ya conscience-voting asshole/s, ringing in the air), and ‘I’ve known her forever! She’ll be grrrrreat!”
“Shit. I am 59, and I have seen one disastrous criminal president after another come to power – head to head, back to back, slimy hands to hands, as bad as humanity gets. Count every rotten one, from my birth in 1957, to now, and this “professor” is lecturing Americans to get in line, once again, for what, Mrs. Clinton? What bullshit country would throw billions at Trump, would be in his stable of CPAs and lawyers and in-his-pocket politicos? Which evil is it that would throw prime time fourth grade shit at him and at the American people? Who are these creeps, these misanthropes, money-loving, money changers, laughing all the way to the bank with their perverted TV-Movies-Marketing Shit that is also another rail of this country’s lobotomizing?
Here I am, listening to the two authors and millionaires go at it, and, I am jumping over puke, shit, dodging little Eichmanns in squad cars, talking to old men at 30 staring at the imagined cockroaches and talking to a hundred voices. Downtown Portland, Oregon, but reader do not be blithe or chauvinistic, because this neoliberal experiment is already on your streets, and coming to a city center near you. Dirt and filth outside, and the thirty-somethings happy as fat cats, living the edgy life, Zip Cars, Smart Cars, Little BMWs, all those Urban Cruiser Bicycles, all that tragically white hipsterism, while the insanity of this country just placates on and on for the billionaires. I am walking over completely insane people living on the streets of Portland, on my way to help people who were almost that insane, broken, scabbed over, twitching, shit coming out of their pants, DTs and voices and like wounded survivors of death camps from 80 years ago.” [snip]
“Listening to Hedges and Reich and Goodman while I step over people bundled up like cadavers on my way to work. Big and small fancy SUV’s, trendy fusion restaurants and those Portlandia food carts, young women jogging in REI-outfits, guys vaping cherry-scented juice while sipping triple grande Starbucks. This is crazy, sick, flagrantly indicative of death, death-spreading, death-flowing CAPITALISM.
The crazy people letting moths and bats go from their mouths. Amazingly like some sketch from a Dickens play, something Twain wrote about, this amazing growing population of brain-sliced people, culled by meth-booze-PTSD-violence-the streets-cops-judges-systems!
So what lipstick do these liberals want to paint on the dead pig of democracy? Which form of verbal jujitsu will they deploy to prove that there is one humanity, over there, and another one, under here!
The indestructible is one: it is each individual human being and, at the same time, it is common to all, hence the incomparably indivisible union that exists between human beings.
~ Franz Kafka
The Kafka quote seems to have been his rather abrupt segue into Hiroshima Day, Nagasaki, killing sprees, Los Alamos, the ongoing horror of the Hanford Site, and that none of ‘great leaders or candidates’ spoke to that the insane agony as it seeps into the fabric of USian lies and resultant self-congratulation of what Little Boy and Fat Man ‘accomplished’. Then this astounding horror:
“The Disneyfication of war! Here, from a Catholic website:
In his thought-provoking 1995 work, On Killing, retired Army Ranger Lt. Col. Dave Grossman examines the extent to which physical distance creates emotional distance from the act of taking a human life. He shows with numbers what we know intuitively: A soldier is more likely to resist driving his knife into an enemy soldier’s abdomen than a bomber pilot is to resist dropping a bomb on a civilian neighborhood. He reports that despite all of the historical evidence of soldiers’ unwillingness to kill in hand-to-hand combat or with their rifles from within a line-of-sight range, he did not find a single incident in which a soldier refused to fire a long-range weapon such as an artillery piece or missile launcher—nor did he find a pilot or bombardier unwilling to drop his bombs.
More unsettling, while psychological trauma is not uncommon among infantrymen who have been in close combat, Col. Grossman did not find “a single instance of psychiatric trauma” associated with long-range killing. That includes the pilot and crew of the Enola Gay, the B-29 Super Fortress that dropped “Little Boy” on the people of Hiroshima. Indeed, Enola Gay’s pilot, Col. Paul Tibbets, went to his death claiming that he never felt guilt or lost sleep over having dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Indeed, he flew reenactments of the event at air shows.”
He’s quoted more, but what he probably did not know is that ‘retired Army Ranger Lt. Col. Dave Grossman’ is the creator of the Killology Research Group Warrior Science Group; from his website:
“KILLOLOGY, (n): The scholarly study of the destructive act, just as sexology is the scholarly study of the procreative act. In particular, killology focuses on the reactions of healthy people in killing circumstances (such as police and military in combat) and the factors that enable and restrain killing in these situations. This field of study was pioneered by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, in his Pulitzer-nominated book, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society.
The research group’s consulting practice and speakers bureau is dedicated to protecting our families and our children and to the strong defense of our country.
Warrior Science Group consultants are human behavior studies specialists with credentials in psychology, educational psychology, training, military history, and modern warfare. Each project is unique, and each project is customized to meet the needs of the client. Col. David Grossman, Director, personally contributes to and supervises all projects.”
Watch Grossman’s ‘the Bulletproof Mind’ here. “Now on Sale; $200 off!’
“Most of the people in our society are sheep .They are kind, gentle, productive creatures who can only hurt one another by accident.” I mean nothing negative by calling them sheep. To me it is like the pretty, blue robin’s egg. Inside it is soft and gooey but someday it will grow into something wonderful. But the egg cannot survive without its hard blue shell. Police officers, soldiers, and other warriors are like that shell, and someday the civilization they protect will grow into something wonderful. But they need warriors to protect them from the predators.
“Wolves feed on the sheep without mercy”
Then there are the wolves, and the wolves feed on the sheep without mercy. Do you believe there are wolves out there who will feed on the flock without mercy? You better believe it.There are evil men in this world and they are capable of evil deeds. The moment you forget that or pretend it is not so, you become a sheep. There is no safety in denial.”
Haeder concludes:
“Those bombs are set off daily — in our unjust judicial system, in the global enterprise of cultural, linguistic and geographic thievery. Daily, thousands are destined for the immolation garbage heap that is the end product of CAPITALISM.”
His CV at the end of his essay is worth the time to read.
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
To quote a blogowner that I read, “Whoooooosh!”
When the bullshit detector overloads, sometimes you just go ranting all Allen Ginsburg in one fast-moving long HOWL.
We should have known that with the militarized police as a multi-billion dollar market after 9/11 that some nitwit would coin “Killology” and disgrace himself by trying to claim a parallel with sexology. In the Lloyd Bentsen tradition, Albert Ellis was my parents unintended sex educator through his books (apparently it straightened out their minds). Albert Ellis was a very literate and compassionate writer. And you, Lightweight Colonel are no Albert Ellis. More like the ad copywriter for a patent medicine. Wolves, sheep, and shoot to kill before they do; that’s how you bullet-proof yourself. What sexology exactly is Light Colonel Grossman talking about?
It is not just geographical distance that makes it easier to kill; apparently, it also is social distance. As rickety as Social Security and Medicare are, Pete Petersen’s plan to end entitlements will kill people, but tax increases on the 1% to make Social Security and Medicare more effective (or single-payer healthcare) will kill few, if any. Social distance. And apparently drones mess up one’s sense of geographical and social distance; despite sitting in a bunker as much as 10,000 miles away, drone pilots have more likelihood of PTSD than other pilots. The up close and personal video of the targets eventually crosses the threshold?
Portland, the liberal utopia, apparently isn’t. Or at least the contradictions become more transparent when it is liberal and not conservative bullshit that you have to cut through.
The one thing that folks like Hedges, Reich, and Goodman have is wide reputations for what they do; they’ve monetized those reputations; it’s the American Way &tm;. People really cheer them when they hear their own thoughts reflected back through their punditry. Or discover some minor reference to fact that undergirds their own view of what is going on. It is infuriating that they pull down all that income and much better analysts are searching for a break through shopping stories at various next-to-self-publishing blogs.
It is worth a rant that 71 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki we have become complacent with 4000+ nuclear warheads still in the world. And glibly talk of “turning x into glass”. None of those three — Hedges, Reich, Goodman — go anywhere near the issue that was Bertrand Russell’s to the end of his life, the issue that inspired Lewis Mumford to write a book called In the Name of Sanity. At the time, Kirkus Review sniffed:
There is no record of how balanced that “heated discussion” was. And even Mumford was a decade into the Atomic Age when he called for sanity.
Yes, Haeder’s CV is interesting. I’m still waiting for the sort of worker-writer that held forth in the late 19th century. Just not sure what they would look like in the current economy. Anarchist Mickey D burger flipper; unhinged Uber driver; Worker Party WalMart organizeer and worker,
Enjoy your schadenfreude at Hedges’s, Reich’s, and Goodman’s expense. With their incomes they can afford it.
Woot! on your ‘whoooosh’! he rawked, didn’t he? (davidly’s good critique notwithstanding). now i looked up your parent’s sex guru, and divine you might have meant your folks had read his ‘sex without guilt’, perhaps? wish my parents had. oof, mumsy was the most horrific ‘explainer’ of human sexuality, quite a mechanized picture she drew us. (shiver)
thanks for the mumford clip; i’d never heard his name that i can recall. guess those were the cold war ‘russia will start it’ days. oh: they’re still here!
but oof, as i’d remembered it, when i wrote a satire of Urban Shield in oakland in sept. 2104, i’d included twitter images of dave grossman’s t-shirts featuring wolves, sheep, and sheepdogs. i found it, but as it turns out i hadn’t, but my, oh, my, the urban shield hashtag is still alive and well. (i do remember that the militant oaktown police state protestors had at least accomplished having driven the big killer fair out of the city, into the county in 2015.)
nuclear madness, nuclear sanity. and how many trillion has our peace prize prez guaranteed over the next X years to ‘upgrade’ the nuclear arsenal? even the concept of ‘surviving a limited tactical nukes’ war scenario is simply insane.
yes on the celebrity ‘lefty and librul’ brands as mirrors. and yeah, i reckon you’re right: with their money that can hande my devilish schadenfreude juuuuust fine.
Wikipedia on Lewis Mumford:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Mumford
He was a protege of Scottish evolutionary biologist Patrick Geddes. Geddes sought through and “urban observatory” to analyze ciities as evolutionary environments (Geddes, Cities in Evolution was published in 1915 and kicked off a city planning movement that, among other things, emphasized green space.
His first book, written when he was 27, is The Story of Utopias (1922) , He turned to look at architecture before arguing that American culture’s Golden Age was the era or Emerson, Thoreau and the Purtian/Universalist/Unitarian transcendentalists. From that he looked at Melville and the post-Civil War art and literature (The Brown Decades). His Depression-era books examine civilization and technology, then cities, then the human condition, winding up what he labeled “Renewal of Life” series with The Conduct of Life, type of reflection that is rarely produced anymore.
The two-volume The Myth of the Machine looks at the narrative by which the bureaucratic human machine that originated with the so-called “hydraulic” civilizations — Egypt, Mohenjo-Daro, China — became the model for the industrial infrastructure and mechanical equipment of the industrial revolution, which coincidentally perpetuated the bureaucratic machine as an organizing principle of capitalism. It is now recognized that management practice for organizing large groups of people were first worked out in the modern era on the Barbadoes sugar plantations and then fed back to organization of textile mills in Great Britain, where Marx and Engels (the scion of a textile mill owner sent to Manchester to learn the business wound up documenting the conditions of the workers) observed them in practce. Needless to say, the Barbadoes sugar plantations used African slaves for labor. That realization of the origins of capitalism did not really hit home with academic historians until this century.
The Pentagon of Power (Volume 2) extends the argument to the arms race and militaries, which continue to be modeled after the most recent developments in organization of machinery as well as become places for the extension of the latest technological innovations.
Lewis Mumford died a quarter century ago, leaving a fascinating body of work with high praise from reviewers but not really yet incorporated into mainstream thinking.
thank you for all of that, amigo. amazing that he saw so far as ;the pentagon of power’ that long ago (my math skills being questionable). but doggone it; before a brief rest in the dark, i looked up ‘hydraulic civilizations’, and while there is varying opinion which ones qualify, the gist was that forced labor built the systems, agriculture, of course, led to ‘stored, excess capital’, yes, the basis of capitalism and in china, despotism, as differentiated from ‘the west (amurikan historian Karl A. Wittfogel).
fascinating on barbados, slavery, marx and engels.
but the middle link has photos to boggle the mind, but the author brings in the additional theory of ‘lightning water’. i didn’t get it, but my eyes are crappier than usual today due something i got into causing my face to swell up red and fiery, making it look like an appalachian dried apple doll. scare the horses, this week, i do. ;-)
http://www.flowofhistory.com/units/pre/1/FC6
http://eden-saga.com/en/ancient-hydraulic-civilizations.html
http://www.riseofthewest.net/thinkers/wittfogel05.htm
i did have to bingle to discover just where barbados sits: not far from…grenada.
i like mumfort’s opinion that the walden era was the best, and while i dunno the ‘brown decades’, i sure do love the melville passages that jason remember so well and brings us.
heh; industrial revolution: the con has long been that machines will do the work so we can engage in other lofty pursuits. now it’s: smart tech hoo-hah.
green spaces as the commons now even the commons can be owned, according to our security state. “no, no! the free speech zone is over yonder a mile or so!”
Short of further context through the Hedges, I could easily say Reich got his hat handed to him. Even on a surface emotional level, it was clear that it was obvious to Reich himself that the bankruptcy of his rhetoric was plainly exposed by Hedges in spite of the balance of time and quantity of coordinated cut-off having gone in the secretary’s favor.
In this regard, one would have wondered if “Democracy, just NOT NOW!” might be more emblematic of Goodman’s endowment. But, alas, we’re not playing prima facie here. Hedges let Reich off the hook by not calling him on just how it is that Clinton will be “a great president”. Seriously.
Still, I somehow find myself wondering whether Haeder deserves your deference. I mean, cv c-schmee, I say (though his Army Pedagoging is ear pricking). His trouncing, as it were, of Reich had already been done for him in the debate itself and I can’t discern from his piece the same such of Hedges except by way of categorizing him with the others in the manner of “we got less money than they do” and allusions that someone should be willing give up more of something, only vaguely defined, than they are – perhaps a rhetorical flourish that includes a Molotov? By the end, the rest of his words about Reich only reiterate the argument that Hedges was making, otherwise effectively.
Whenever I hear or read someone claim — or imply through the use of colorful prose (it’s always the author having to trudge through the awful carnage, not a simple statement of its obvious existence to would-be “we-ers”) — that they are one of me, I am automatically suspicious. If someone is one of me, I don’t need to be told so. I can read the argument they are making and judge it on its merits. Reiches gonna Reich; Hedges gonna Hedge; and Haeders gonna Haed. If I wanna see where Hedge goes awry, I’ll read you instead. This one doesn’t do it.
thank you for your far deeper analysis and critique, davidly. i still haven’t watched or read the interview, so i have no idea if haeder had picked the right quote or there would have been better evidence of his failures. but he was gob-smacked that on Hiroshima Day, none of them spoke of that evil done by the USA…that keeps on giving…and giving, even to the DU used in iraq and elsewhere, causing more generations to suffer the horror of that (deformed babbies galore, cancer in the living, and such).
yes, i can see why his ‘i-yam-you-and-you-are-me-and-we, tra la la… causes you to be suspicious; dunno where to take that, really, except that reading his history of working with everyday people, especially the trouble ones, caused me to believe that he really is a comrade. my guess (panglossian?) is that he put his military pedagogy experience in as not braggadocio, but fact, and caused me to wonder if in his linked autobiographical series, might have shown that it had informed his rage against the empire, and fat brand (gate-keeping?) journalists. the DN link was to interviews of the many who berners who will now lote-vote for the Queen of ‘he died’ Cackle. well, did I spy a photo of Trumka? He’s long been on board, as have most big unions, so maybe i got it wrong.
now to the ‘molotov cocktail’ allusion, i reckon that he’s pinging hedges’ fucked-up ‘the cancer in occupy’ rubbish. yanno, a few broken windows, a molotov cocktail thrown, and who even knows if those thing were done by agent provocateurs? some photos of a certain ubiquitous vibram-soled boot made us think so. imo, it was sick that hedges and some occupies chose His Nibs as the Occupy Spokes-Intelligentsia, though the potty-mouthed ranter lee camp as ‘official humorist’ was gagging to me, as well.
but w/ the ‘caner in Occupy’, it was as though he were chanting bill bratton’s ‘broken windows’ policing, and the whole movement stopped to argue ‘diversity of tactics’ at GAs. and his take aside, i confess that for a time i’d thought that media coverage relentlessly focusing on those windows, was not healthy for bringing families out to the street in solidarity. what i’ve seen by now is that the alleged ‘riots’ in baltimore, say, were actually helpful to the black and other rabble lives movement. but that’s a much longer narrative that could be challenged, given the increasing militarization of dissent.
i jut saw a news blurb that in stockton, mebbe, that police shot and killed an unarmed and innocent of crime black man…with a gun turret on a tank. well done, po-po. and of course, some of the cops on the ground were black, proving one again that the Uniform of the State gets zipped on quite easily in the mornings. willing compradors galore. always make me wonder about glen ford, et al.’s ‘black police for black communities’, really.
anyway, thank you for making me think more analytically; obviously, it doesn’t always come easily to me. ;-)
Oh, yeah, I’d forgot about the Occupy hedge (btw: I go on the assumption first that they’re agent provocateurs), but still think there’s something else about him I cannot recall – and that you’d’ve (or Tarzie’d’ve) done a better job analysing the same debate.
I guess mine was more of a personal gripe that Haeder’s critique didn’t land on CH the way I would have liked, especially since in the debate in question, he made a near perfect argument against Clinton. And though Reich almost did that on his own, this just happened to be one of those times for Goodman where she put it together right. And my comment about Haeder’s military teaching was more of a swipe than well-founded suspicion.
sorry to be absent for such long periods; RL is chock fulla communications that need tending, often distressing as hell and time-sensitive these days.
but i will say that i’m losing more of my memory every day, meaning: there are likely more gripes i have w/ old sourpuss (the one to jaango vexed me), but i haven’t made any mental or word doc file. it does always bug me that when he conducts an interview, his MO is to ask questions that show how brilliant and so-veddy-erudite he is, almost never allowing his guest to get a word in edgewise, but that’s true for lots of interviewers, isn’t it?
and i may have added to some hedges detractor discussion, but i can’t remember what. you have me almost wishing i could read the interview transcript, but haeder’s rant had made it so i dinnae have to. yanno how one’s visage gets shaped by one’s ‘beingness’ (i can’t recall the term) by a certain age? i do believe that his face and manner actually offend me. so now we can add to my bad traits list. ;-)
well, i might be totally back-assward on his contract military writing instruction job, but i can’t imagine reading the series. but peeking at his recent work at dissident voice: well, one admirer had called him a charles bukowski-esque writer. but i dunno bukowski, so…
but i’m glad to hear that amy did it right; that’s a good thing. and she often has, save for having some singularly anti-putin guests on just after having had stephen cohen on. beats me!
Here in my neck of the woods, or with some geographical precision, my Wonderful Sonoran Desert, I don’t and can’t take Reich, Hedges, Chomp-pomposity, et.al, seriously for their misspent espousals. In short, we don’t “listen.”
Take, for example, we–Chicanos and Native Americans. well-recognize these always loud voices of Nonsense, have never addressed our political concerns. However, their “populist” push to move the conversation into the ever present arena of “centrism” defies their non-creative label for being a “progressive.” And from across the political aisle, the Trumpistas are utilizing their “populist” chops and done in order to move into the continued extremist stealth mode, and where the armed militias that are ‘surveying’ Arizona-Mexico border, is not part of this extremism. Consequently, this Trumpista populism is being espoused and practiced in a manner meant to “protect” the wealth of the elite that employs the card sharks in our national politics.
As to our particulars concerns, or international relations, none of these elected and appointed officials have never for these past 40 years, configured the solution to the boundary between Israel and Palestine. Of course, I could go on and on and on issue after issue but it’s safe to say, some 25 years into the future, today’s wrongheaded voices will have died of old age and thusly, become eligible for being name-placed on our national monument and titled, America’s Monument To Criminal Stupidity.
Jaango
how about: ‘America’s Monument To Criminal Stupidity and Moral Turpitude’?
ha; i just saw that there’s a big rumble online cuz google erased palestine from its maps. and bibi and friends are waging war against any activists who promote BDS. yes, i hear you on trump; it’s not even dog-whistle garbage, but full-throated, although one wonders if he’d be given the levers of power, yes? but the red queen has already been crowned by the neo-cons and security state.
how many million visitors from the south had O deported? figures are hard to come by, but many millions, iirc. and this is just the most recent fight by the t’onoh o’odham nation on the border, under the comprador in chief’s ICE.
but no! you’ve got hedges all wrong/s! he’s been dubbed the King of Revolution, as per trnn. of course, not too long ago he wrote a scathing diatribe against the movemental soci-politics of the ’60s generation. O we were so jejune and embarrassing! fighting nuclear madness, war (okay, a lot of that was due to the draft), rejecting puritanical sexual morés and authoritarianism, humanity as one, the birth of feminism, a magnificent resurgence of art, poetry, and prose…and he wasn’t even in amurika at the time, but working as a war correspondent, iirc! ay yi yi.
well, good luck to us all, jaango. we got some work to do, and i sincerely hope the youth are about to lead us.
America’s Monument to Criminal Stupidity would be more like a Hall of Fame or Hollywood Walk than like Mount Rushmore. Andrew Jackson and James Polk certainly have earned places besides George Armstrong Custer. And that even before the current crop of stupid.
Yes, indeed, Jaango. But today’s wrongheaded voices recruit and nourish their acolytes and the tradition of stupidity perpetuates itself even when it is out of power. Because if nothing else, stupid is persistent.
Wendy….”of Moral Turpitude” is wonderful.
TarheelDem…”stupid is persistent” is, indeed, another adage for excellence in Observation. And I might add, a complementary rationale for another pending Surveillance System, given that the NSA and the more belligerent National Recon Office is facing some unintended consequences of a political nature. And perhaps, a third systemic for surveillance with another add-on to that warehouse facility in Utah.
Jaango
Dmitry Orlov of top-line voting in this year’s election. Vote randomly.
https://cluborlov.blogspot.ca/2016/08/furious-sheep.html
That would really screw up Nate Silver’s model if done widely. It could also have unpredictable results in low-population states if done widely.
I doubt that it will be done widely.
I see that b of MofA underestimates the craziness of the extremes of the Second Amendment movement. To the extent that they intersect the prolife movement, we know how far they will go. They will bomb buildings and assassinate doctors. I don’t take Trump’s dogwhistle lightly at all. There is a historical tradtion in the South that likely is not quite dead. And there is a rampant issue with the po-po’s who very likely are not Clinton voters (or Johnson or Stein voters either).
It seems that Clinton has cornered most (but not all) of the deep state; Mike Rogers backs Trump and will likely be part of a transition team if Trump is elected (IOW, Trump’s ambassador to the deep state, like Brennan was for Obama).
Given the current dissatisfaction with the choices in the 2016 election, I wouldn’t be surprised if some other nations are doing some ratfucking of their own to repay constant US meddling. Lobbying firms and social media would be two likely channels. The way that anonymity of contributions works would permit that (as Stephen Colbert taught us when he had his own SuperPAC). And some anonymous faces reporting in blogs might also be the sort of channels for others that the US regularly creates in other countries (even those of allies).
it’d take a hella lot of people standing in line w/ a hella lot of pennies, wouldn’t it? ;-)
until i read davidly’s diary on the subject, i hadn’t been clear what second amendment fix statement he’d actually offered. i wasn’t tempted to click the headlines, mainly because his ha ha ha jest for wikileaks to publish moar dnc emails…seemed to have been believed as evidence that he and vlad are in cahoots. dayum, all this stuff is sick, isn’t it?
and here i’d been doing so well as per orlov’s one choice (i loved the sheep with laser beam eyes) about ignoring it all until…until…some-buddy moved into the slave-built WH. oh, my yes; elections are soooo expensive, and create a hella lot of revenue besides. this tweet did make me laugh, though.
on edit: holy hell on your link! and ian welsh reported that john negroponte just endorse Her Highness.
BTW, Trump knew his history and his audience in Wilmington NC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_1898
Second Amendment remedies — Southern style
Class politics by proxy
Bomb buildings and assassinate doctors, eh? The Clinton camp would never do such a thing… at home. Would they? Could they?
Dangerous to the neo-natives or not, I am dead serious in my belief that the Don’s a shill. It only gets more obvious to me with each new proclamation. And history cannot be ignored when viewing this strange new reality.
Forgive the self promotion, Wendy, when I state here that I at least believe to have made a pretty good rhetorical case for the shillery of it all. And as such, it is the same establishment playing with fire here, not some rogue egomaniac. And with all of this “what would happen”ism – can we please not pretend the neighbor’s house is not on fire while we fear the flaming of our own?
http://davidly66.blogspot.de/2016/08/trump-wrecklessly-employs-clintonian.html
well per the propaganda rag known as NPR, Trump has claimed twice in the last 24 hrs that Obama & HRC “founded” ISIS. hmmm….
your prose runs down like water, davidly, and your banner quotes are remarkable! a polyglot you are, to boot. the white on black is hard for me to read, but i did take a bit of a spin for an hour or so this a.m., anyway. the color scheme: i’d meant to ask you about the origin of your avatar, and what meaning it has. and yes, i’d said that it did look like ‘transitioning’ before, and still does, as though hovering between the metaphorical heavens and this world. jupiter?
oddly, i did recall the queen of cackle’s remark once you’d repeated it, and i see now that trump’s notched it up, albeit in his signature bellicose protruding lipped way. now as to being her ‘shill’, do you mean that it was his and bubba clinton’s plan all along a he’d suggested he run?
Much thanks, Wendy. I appreciate the compliment. I went in and corrected and fleshed this one out more than I usually do. Much of the rest of the content is dark, so I opted for that scheme early on — went to black on gray intermittently, due to similarly expressed concerns. Guess maybe I oughta go back?
The avatar is from a headshot when I was making a go at theater in Chicago. I’ve tooled with my might being from Jupiter. There’s something about Jupiter. Maybe I’m from the moon Europa. I wrote about that once in there somewhere, when I was more diversely creative.
Like I said, I’m sure he’s shillerying. The Bubba and him bit is just a tiny piece of it. I didn’t know about that when it occurred to me, quite at the beginning of his run. It was how cozy they’d always been, the nice things they had to say about one another (as recently as last year), and the continued coziness twixt two of their offspring.
Brings to mind how the family of the recently (or soon to be) released Hinckley were big Bush supporters. How, in very bin Laden-like fashion, son Scott was with Neil the day (or night) before Ron got it in the chest. I wrote about that, too, in there somewhere.
Then, of course, there’s the Perot precedent, albeit via third party. It seems to me, given the ostensible lack of interest on Poppy’s part (I mean, how does one forget having awarded Bubba a “Nation’s Best Governor Award” when fixing to lambaste his state for being lame on education?). He was so disconnected from that campaign. It was as if he was passing the torch so he could ride off into the sinecure of the Carlyle Group and such, knowing full well that Mena Bill could handle the daily business required for the office. Choosing Gore should have been a tip that the torch was being handed right back to the family, as it were.
Speaking of which: Not that I have high hopes for accuracy, but the Mena film with Tom Cruise has gone through a name change and delay. Probably too close for cartel comfort.
If only a German reader would praise my bilingualism! BTW – click on the dash under the aphorism and it loads a new one!
i’m on a short break, and there’s to much to answer and ask on this comment for now. first, i noticed that you’ve paid a lot of attention to this quadrennial stuff, and couldn’t agree more on the bern.
your quote about ‘conspiracies being no longer necessary’ (or close) is fine, as of course democracy has proven to be a sham since kennedy’s assassination and gore’s er…not being elected. and as thd would point out: the immense power of the deep state, including all those ‘fantastic! NGOs. was the french close to: ‘i am a magnificent room…with no key’?
i started one of your essays that posited the truth that cognition is really about memory, and to that i say: yep, a huge part of it. for me, since my brain damage, i tend to think in pictures. thinking actual thoughts requires remembering several things at one in order to weave them together into some sort of whole.
and both thd’s link and your rhetorical question about the clinton camp ‘Bomb buildings and assassinate doctors, eh?’ made me see an aerial bombing of a tony black community back in the day. i’d it added either a tweet with a link or the link to a black lives/police state here not long ago. i couldn’t find it here, but i finally found this w/ difficulty, not remembering where it had happened:
“The date was June 1, 1921, when “Black Wall Street,” the name fittingly given to one of the most affluent all-Black communities in America, was bombed from the air and burned to the ground by mobs of envious whites. In a period spanning fewer than 12 hours, a once thriving 36-Black business district in northern Tulsa lay smoldering–a model community destroyed, and a major African-American economic movement resoundingly defused.
The night’s carnage left some 3,000 African Americans dead, and over 600 successful businesses lost. Among these were 21 churches, 21 restaurants, 30 grocery stores and two movie theaters, plus a hospital, a bank, a post office, libraries, schools, law offices, a half dozen private airplanes and even a bus system. As could have been expected the impetus behind it all was the infamous Ku Klux Klan, working in consort with ranking city officials, and many other sympathizers.”
once i’d found it, i looked for a page easier to read. Ebony’s account…never mentioned the aerial bombing, just the ‘burning’. odd bodkins, no?
er…and i’d had to look to find who in the world ‘hinkley’ is/was. yeah, y’all are gonna chase me offa the internet soon…
i’d thought with french, also: polyglot, and what german or frenchman/woman would deign to compliment one on their excellent languages?/s
odd on scott and neil together, though. you’ll not believe where mr. wd and i were. we’d driven from CO to florida to visit relatives, and stopped at disney world. what strange disconnect to come back to our motel, and the teevee blaring that news. sorry to say..we chuckled. was hinkley a hireling, ya think?
but see, you and jupiter (it rules the sign of sagittarius astrologically, fwiw); in a way i sort got it right in ‘hovering between the worlds’. : -) apropos of nothing, i dreamed of the milky way last night, and woke to a rare chorus of six (i assume) great-horned owls and perhaps fledglings, havin’ a gay old songfest.
dunno nuffin’ about a tom cruise mena film; that short for Middle east/north africa?
but i’d sure like to offer you authorship here at the café. my sole hesitation is that you can write so much better than i can now. (sorta kidding, lol) but you can pretty much have electoral politics for all me. thd and jason have said no thanks, juliania has quit her internet provider to do more meaningful things, big al is just posting at caucus99%, the rest are sorta in the wind. anyhoo, let me know.
Mena is in Arkansas. As part of the web that Gary Webb reported on in the San Jose Mercury News re. the matter of Central Intelligence’s flooding of LA with crack, there was pilot Barry Seal’s flying coke into a field in Mena. I’m sure the governor at the time didn’t know anything about it.
And, yeah, I think Hinckley was any number of things, steered to greater purpose. The following two links and the relevant links therein point to pairs of pairs of coincidences that would at least point to the Bush family’s being frequent beneficiaries of blowback by way of family friends and business associates. As I mentioned, the sons’ bin Laden and Hinckley are the relevant. There’s a GHWB-JFK-GWB-JFK jr. thing I’d rather not get into, as it appears too kooky on the surface for even me to attempt to address.
http://davidly66.blogspot.de/2010/02/new-coke-nostalgia.html
http://davidly66.blogspot.de/2013/02/we-all-eat-in-yellow-cake-canteen.html
My being a magnificent room without a key was mere whimsy. I can do little more than order a falafel in French. Though, that would seem to be an indication of the former sentence’s implication that I am not one to realize his potential. Whatever that might be.
Sorry if I’ve failed to answer something here. The threads get long, not least of which in this case because of my having derailed it. Which brings me to the authorship question: What would I write? How would I deal with suddenly having a comment at my feet?
woot! you’re not only a skeptic of the ‘offishull’ narratives, but able to see the underbelly connections, and have some rollickin’ fun w/ metaphorical associations. i admit i got lost a few times cuz i really don’t know some of those stories, the manson murders, for one. and i only knew of gary webb through tarzie’s incredible reporting (and i wish i could remember more of what i read).
well, i loved the magnificent room/no key; i could jest about that re: myownself, as well. ;-) shoot, i so often think after i send a comment that i missed this or that…i’m lucky that i can edit in things after the fact, eh?
i expect we could talk about what you’d write, but your more stream-of-consciousness plays might be just what the café needs. comments? didn’t you have commenters at your site? now, how you’d deal with it is own to you, amigo. it does take some getting used to, i admit, but my guess is that you just might like it. ;-) i’ll send an invite, we’ll flesh out the details when we both have more time.
Hannah Arendt was clear that the banality of evil was such that such acts, clothed in bureaucratic process, were possible for anyone plopped into that bureaucratic context. It is much easier to think that one’s bravery of conscience would object from well outside of the dysfunctional pit.
What Clinton does is constrained by how well the institutional checks and balances designed into US government actually work. Given the expectations of the downticket ballot and the current state of the judiciary, that answer is either gridlock or a slick slide to disaster. And the Wall Street media is so far in the tank for the 1%, that there will be little real discussion of issues or checks on bad impulse there.
Clinton voters are betting that extend and pretend can offer the space to do something different. I am very pessimistic on that score as I am about this entire election. What is a certainty is that the US has a large enough militarized police contingent and large enough military to suppress rebellion up to the point at which the ideology of the rebellion infects those institutions. And we have seen in what ideological direction the po-po’s are disposed already.
In short, my inclination is to hope that the envelope is not yet pushed to chaos. I’m old enough and had enough experiences to be devoid of that sort of romanticism that broken eggs can make a great omelette in the street.
All of the choices from a policy perspective and a strategic perspective are bad, even boycotting. Lesser-of-two-evils is not an applicable calculus because there really in practical terms no lest evil option. Powerless conscience really does not constitute protest any more. And without some results that affect institutions of government conscience-voting remains powerless. And voting that will affect something will affect in ways that drive us faster down the path of real social crises toward repressive government, more economic inequality, cultural war, and international chaos. Not to mention all of those aggravated by anthropogenic climate change. Whether Trump of Clinton drives this faster is left as a problem for their voters to solve. Contrary to some analysis, Trump did not end the duopoly. And who co-opted who is still open for debate.
What is clear is that the modern conservative movement has run its course and has no new ideas. Neo-liberalism in economics is the failure it was predicted to be in the 1970s. The neo-conservative movement that arose out of panic over Soviet power has resulted neither in greater world peace nor greater prosperity globally. Most importantly, it has not increased the power of the US as the sole superpower, but squandered that power in unwinnable wars. It failed at its primary motivation.
Finally, “we’ll figure all that out after the chaos tears down the current relationships” is not an attractive value proposition in the conventional way that political persuasion is viewed; the “marketplace” of ideas.
So the outcome of the election, whether (1) a Clinton win and Democratic control of Congress, (2) a Clinton win and Republican control of at least one house of Congress, (3) a Clinton win and Republican control of both houses of Congress, (4) a Trump win and Republican control of both houses of Congress, (5) a Trump win and Democratic control of at least one house of Congress, (6) a Trump win and Democratic control of both houses of Congress, (7) a Johnson win and Republican control of both houses of Congress, (8) a Johnson win and Democratic control of at least one house of Congress, (9) a Johnson win and Democratic control of both houses of Congress, (10) a Stein win and Democratic control of both houses of Congress, (11) a Stein win and Republican control of at least one house of Congress, (12) a Stein win and Republican control of both houses of Congress, (13) a win by any other third party candidate and the same permutations of Congressional control — none of those outcomes show promise of changing the policy options from (1) gridlock; (2) more rapid policy changes in exactly dysfunctional directions. The process of primary through election to inauguration is the high holy religious ceremony of “democratic” governments’ national religion for conferring legitimacy on the leaders of the regime. When money replaces popular power (when has it not in the US?) at core that religion is a sham democracy. Until someone actually unites the all of the working class and not just the white working class, chaos will lead to race war instead of revolution. And revolution is not guaranteed to lead to a more just social order, merely a different one.
Short version; We iz screwed no matter what we do in the short term. All the print trying to influence voters in this election is the quadrennial exercise of vanity.
If your model of elite politics is a duopoly, of course Trump is the sheepherder diverting the sheep into elite support and not necessarily the Clinton form of elite support, but elites of the duopoly do collude. What else are those conferences and golf games for? Trump is failing because he has failed to attract more than the white racist petit bourgeoisie and a few xenophobic workers. That makes him safe enough for Tea Party, Freedom Party, and mainstream Republican endorsement. And makes the possibility that Republicans will create a real labor party a media fantasy. You only have to look at his Republican-dictated economic program to grasp who will benefit from a Trump presidency. The same old crowd.
The problem Trump has is having offended the self-righteous sensitivities of the bourgeoisie and not just the liberal college-educated bourgeoisie. And scared the shit out of people who think that mutually-assured destruction (MAD) as a global policy makes nuclear war unthinkable. Trump tries to doubletalk around the mandates that he is asking for, but his foreign policy inclinations got communicated through his operating style. The distrust of Clinton is from her more polished doubletalk and style of evasion. The usual personality contest. Trump had the delusion of having wide popular appeal outside of the narrow constituency he built in the primaries. The current trends, which still could be turned around, show that he doesn’t.
Meanwhile, significant parts of the neoconservative deep state are signalling something relative to Trump. Worst cases: Clinton wins; Trumps points to rigging; Second Amendment folks start a new civil war. Trump wins; deep state seizes power in a coup. Trump wins; cuts a deal with deep state; implements fascist governing structure with enough Trump power to color the regime; unpredictable consequences.
Rogue egomaniacs indeed don’t win primaries. This is the establishment either colluding with itself or against itself along some economically predictable lines of fracture and conflict of economic interest.
Just a flippant sidenote, the argument against too many third parties is that they do split the protest vote to ineffectiveness and too loose state regulations allow too many parties of the State X for Candidate kind (if if not as blatantly named as Connecticut for Lieberman was) that have few political ideas and policy directions other than “Trust me”. Yes, that personal “Trust me” is what the two major parties also have come down to–the qualifications by temperament of the candidate. The claim that you can depend on the candidate to do the right thing. The other rap is voters having a ballot so long with parties, offices, and referendum issues that the length of time it takes in the voting booth in itself discourages turnout.
And yes to clear ballot boxes, many eyes judging the chain of custody of ballots, many eyes watching the counting, and independent audits of the posting of the votes. But even then, there are openings to shenanigans. Frank Kent’s 1920’s book The Great Game of Politics is a great overview into how pre-reform urban machines did it.
Oh, one other way to mess with inevitability. Don’t participate in opinion polls. Don’t let your friends participate in opinion polls.
i hear you on the hannah arendt, but to both you and dmitri orlov, for me, vote your conscience will work for me this time. what tipped me was stein adding ajamu baraka to the ticket (even though she gaggingly asked Old Sourpuss first). now he knows that it will be seen as an appeal to people of color, doesn’t seem to care, and i reckon he may have been asked to tone down his invective and polemics. if so, that will prove to be a major mistake in my book. she just ain’t got the fire, but srsly, what white gurl does?
and if a hella lot of those hate-clinton voters weren’t so almost goofily buying to the #neverTrump stuff and voted green, it at least could prove to be the start of an actual social movement for democracy. whether there’s time for that now is barely debatable.
your analysis is estimable over-all, but my guess is that the Heir Apparent really doesn’t need a D congress and likely has all of the deep state help she needs already, esp. in the upcoming foreign misadventures the Imperium is eyeing. i know you’ve seen some major coups possible ahead, i have to say that either my lack of historical knowledge, general naiveté, or ennui about nra ‘solutions’ is to blame, i either don’t care much or am not seeing it…yet, a any rate.
miz cackle is the choice of the 1%, and the status quo trajectory into the future. and oh, i forgot: she might need some dems in congress in order to toss some bones to the rabble, as in her new vow to create ‘comprehensive immigration reform’, ha ha ha. another dream act? but the brown voters will be lovin’ that, yes?
Very well, put, TD. I do agree with Wendy, however, that a vote for Stein does no harm. I see Orlov’s piece as sort of satirical in the sense that it shows how it would be about as likely to get significant action on his recommendation as it would be to achieve a plurality of votes for a third party candidate. And while I agree about not answering polls, I have never in my relatively long life been polled by anyone other than a lady in the mall who wanted me to eat some Spaghetti-O knock-off and tell her how great I thought it was. If any of my friends have been polled, I never heard about it.
The fact that a vote for Stein does no harm is exactly why the other parties and the media feel free to ignore her presence in the race. Only now after some pressure are polling organizations even including her with Johnson. Part of that is the geographical distribution of Green Party supporters. Not strong enough clusters of them in in small states where they could have impact. (That’s a general issue with third parties in general.) Johnson pulls from some small rural states so his voters could affect the electoral vote if they got enough turnout for Johnson. And “doing no harm” means effectively affecting no policy at all. The Greens are missing out by not trying to organize small red states, where dissatisfaction with Republicans is growing. Forty years of trying to siphon off Democratic votes has not been a successful strategy; they actually have to become the governing party in some locality in order to grow a party in a first-past-the-post system. That’s the doing the math and geography of it — for example, organizing 175,000 to 200,000 people in a 1-Congressional District state does it. Taking power in a network of 10,000 population towns could also do it if that network implemented actual new policy directions. That would mean organizing one to two thousand people and winning an election in a non-presidential year. (A lot of local elections are in non-presidential years.) Those then provide a regular voting base for state and national elections. Going for the gold ring and failing to get it for 40 years is why Greens do not get substantial crossover vote except for those who want to signal symbolically and those who are in states where Greens are close to the % of support needed to be considered by default on the ballot. It is in fact the waste of time and energy trying to get on the ballot that hampers third parties in the US.
Downlevel voting helps as much as top-line voting for third parties, and in some locations it helps even more.
Yes, Orlov’s piece is satirical and is much like the advocacy of voting against all incumbents every two years until they figure out that they have actual voters who are voting.
Well done argument for Trump as a Clinton stalking horse. What it misses is that the primary-caucus-convention system is pretty poor at vetting candidates. Especially in a year that Republicans self-immolate by having 13 other candidates and two tiers of debates. Winner take all states play to candidates who can get enough of a plurality in a crowded field to name all of the delegates. And who can build the story of momentum in the media. And frame his argument as a protest against business as usual. Plus, Trump started out having a record as the one who kept alive longest the slur that Obama was a treasonous Kenyan muslim socialist whose birth certificate was illegitimate. It is damn easy, if you are spinning an alliance, to see birtherism as payback for Obama’s beating Clinton in the primaries and the legitimacy issue playing an internal political role in forcing Obama to align with the deep state for protection. Around that time the media was yammering about “team of rivals” and “keep your friends close and your enemies closer”.
Too bad there are no emails for that.
Valid points. I also see the Kenyan Muslim thing as part of the greater strategy to limit his appeal in the long-term and render off-limits to serious discussion any little nugget of truth that slips past his lips.
In this regard he functions much like Alex Jones by tainting certain realities off limits to serious discussion through wild hyperbole and chimerical speculations. Meanwhile, it’s not like the dots to connect are so far apart in the mainstream press: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/08/11/the-u-s-will-rearm-saudi-arabia-to-the-tune-of-1-5b-as-airstrikes-resume-in-yemen/?tid=sm_tw
true. trump was not stating ISIS is an Operation: Cyclone redux. rather, Obama/HRC abandoned overt militarism, leaving a vacuum due to troop withdrawals and blah blah blah. “proxy war” b/n Rus & US in Syria was in a headline in the NYT a day or so ago. yeah on the wapo link. some revelatory stuff there for an MSM piece. who knew so many Yemenis (& Syrians) face starvation?
I’ve also seen a couple of “we can no longer avert our eyes” pieces recently re. Syria. One of them was in the German AriannaOnLine Huff’n’Po, which stated that, “again”, Assad had gassed his own people. And I’d thought that that had been debunked. Or was it the story that debunked it, that the gas was American made and used by the rebels the Americans back that was debunked?
At any rate, it looks like Syria would be first on Clinton’s list, as it is unfinished business. But I don’t like to get into prediction games, nor downplay by implication what the US role in the destruction already is.
i’d asked thd recently if the ‘assad gassed his own people’ story had been discredited, as well. i’ve been collecting links for a new ‘café war and *** report’, and had seen this link at new eastern outlook, written by jean perier ‘alleged and actual usage of chemical weapons (dunno him or her), but i haven’t read it, may not get to it. you might, dunno.
about receiving or answering comments though: most here are polite in their disagreements. i’d asked wayoutwest not to come back a few months ago, more of a heat than light commenter/thread derailer, but in a way i regret it now. i’d given comrade x a lot of er…warnings to do better, because he was able to…before i finally pulled the plug on his continual mockery of other guests, as well as me. but ya just can’t be expected to answer everything, even if you could figure out what comments to you or others.
i keep trying to remember to stick someone’s name in, but i forget plenty of times. and by the way, i’m pretty much just ‘wd’ here; easier designation.
nice summation of Alex Jones. and your two pieces above. Hinckleys & Bushies, huh? court intrigues for everybody! and mental health issues just cover a whopping world of sins, don’t they? “he was a 9/11 truther with obvious, but mundane, family & personal problems & a low credit rating. sounds mentally suspect, don’t he?”
i’ll be back as soon as i can, but it’s 4-loaves-of-bread day, and i’m late getting started already, plus a neighbor just stopped by and inadvertently gave me some more chores, albeit pleasant ones.
may i add a bit more to the wd schadenfreude devilry? the hits just keep on comin’!
will it end like it did w/ loretta lynch and bubba on the airport tarmac? ;-)
Here is my logic for debunking chemical weapons stories from Syria.
The primary purpose of chemical weapons stories from Syria was to motivate retaliation from outside forces who considered chemical weapons to be an outrage. Those would primarily be NATO members. In the first story, given Obama’s “bright red line” statement on chemical weapons, the motivation was US intervention (or increased rebel support) to bring down Assad. Russia assisted Assad in diplomatically removing that story and getting disposal of obsolete chemical weapons subsidized, adding Syria to the list of “good guys” complying with the chemical weapons treaty.
The fact is that banned chemical weapons are not very useful in a civil war and publicly horrifying in strategic bombing. That is, like other classes of banned weapons of mass destruction, not very usable at all. That is why nations find it easy to ban them and not to cheat. That leaves their usefulness as a one-off act of terror or a false flag intended to draw in more powerful nations.
Second, the most used chemical weapons in the world are tear gas and pepper spray, supposedly “non-lethal”. They are routinely used for crowd control but can cause serious health consequences. In the fog of war, civilians cannot know what is being lobbed at them. So “chemical weapons” might not mean “banned chemical weapons”. And you can see (1) how propaganda operations could run with that one, and (2) how even widely used chemical weapons could wind up killing people in grotesque ways.
Third, Russian and Assad at this point having rid Syria of Assad’s chemical weapons stockpile in a verifiable process are not likely to try to cheat when there are other means of attack and killing that are much more effective, even much more terrifying.
The recent report of chemical weapons was an attempt to interrupt Syrian regime momentum in Aleppo. But the Battle of Aleppo continues, and looks to be a mini-Stalingrad in its destruction.
US playing Russia interest much like WWII (western front Russia/Syria – eastern front Kurds/Iraq/US/NATO) with letting Russia//Syria doing most of the work to secure Syria with US/NATO assisting the final blows against Daesh/ISIS/ISIL has resulted in a seemingly befuddled Secretary Kerry. The wild card still is Turkey. And based on John Helmer’s latest report the Russian-expected detente did not happen but restoration of contact did. (Helmer’s article is very clarifying about the issues around the Black Sea/Mediterranean and Russia foreign policy position. Eurasian responds to Oceanian containment with seeking access to Oceania for naval forces. And forward deploying their own bases. The US/NATO foreign policy is to force international relations into Halford Mackinders’s century-old imperial division of the world.
Returning to chemical weapons, (and nuclear and biological weapons as well), the only block to total abolition at this point is the US Congress and its insistence on a US exception to not destroy US stockpiles of those weapons because the US needs to understand how to counter them defensively if any country cheats. No doubt that Congressional sentiment is stronger and more unified after the Amerithrax attack on Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle and three network news anchors. Pity about the collateral damage of that political stunt (or deep state move) /snark.
Increasingly we are going to have to be careful about when our authentic concern for human rights is being played to politically by other actors than the US government.
thank you for that. and for your cheat sheet on both Daesh and syria earlier; i’m still lost as i read differing accounts. i may have even put your cliffs notes on a word doc, but i have so many going at one time…i haven’t found it again yet. no matter, i may just not be educable on the subject i started from so far behind.
this might be the john helmer you mentioned; looks worthy of reading more closely. sad about the kurds if putin agrees to it…
there are so many human rights orgs that play right into the hegemon’s hands, plus a few that seem to be one dude or dudette in an undisclosed location reporting ‘the facts’ (syrian human rights center?)
ooopsie; you may have meant helmer on trnn.
This one from John Helmer:
http://johnhelmer.net/?p=16253
wot? i ain’t crazy enuff already ya gotta gaslight me, thd? ;-) (yeah, my first helmer link was that one…)
Ohhh, that’s where I linked from to read it. Senior moments are fun, aren’t they?
i have many; you have few. ;-)