Author: Brian

“Iraq and Afghanistan remain the central fronts in the struggle, but we cannot lose sight of the implications of fighting a long-term, episodic, multi-front, and multi-dimensional conflict more complex and diverse than the Cold War confrontation with communism.”

Defense Secretary Robert Gates is thinking about war, more war, and war forever; the long war [wiki].

Retired colonel Andrew Bacevich carefully tells us this is The American Military Crisis.

Valor does not offer the measure of an army’s greatness, nor does fortitude, nor durability, nor technological sophistication. A great army is one that accomplishes its assigned mission. Since George W. Bush inaugurated his global war on terror, the armed forces of the United States have failed to meet that standard.

William J. Astore, who has taught at the Air Force Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School, is warning us our militarists have led us toward “a warrior-state that went berserk in a febrile quest for ‘full spectrum dominance’.”

It seems that too many unappetizing “peacekeeping” tasks, once handled by other departments of the government, are now in the military’s lap, which turns out not to be quite as capacious as once imagined.

The Bush/Cheney administration has taken us to primitive battle. These poor, poor men. They have enabled private armies, invigorated war as an industry and made mercenaries of us all.

And so, McCain. There’s yet to be a solid, point-by-point effort to expose John McCain…

Senator John McCain arrived late at his Senate office on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, just after the first plane hit the World Trade Center. “This is war,” he murmured to his aides. The sound of scrambling fighter planes rattled the windows, sending a tremor of panic through the room.

Within hours, Mr. McCain, the Vietnam War hero and famed straight talker of the 2000 Republican primary, had taken on a new role: the leading advocate of taking the American retaliation against Al Qaeda far beyond Afghanistan. In a marathon of television and radio appearances, Mr. McCain recited a short list of other countries said to support terrorism, invariably including Iraq, Iran and Syria.

“There is a system out there or network, and that network is going to have to be attacked,” Mr. McCain said the next morning on ABC News. “It isn’t just Afghanistan,” he added, on MSNBC. “I don’t think if you got bin Laden tomorrow that the threat has disappeared,” he said on CBS, pointing toward other countries in the Middle East.

Within a month he made clear his priority. “Very obviously Iraq is the first country,” he declared on CNN. By Jan. 2, Mr. McCain was on the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in the Arabian Sea, yelling to a crowd of sailors and airmen: “Next up, Baghdad!”

There is a system out there… making mercenaries of us all.

What a kick!
It’s three paragraphs. The diplomat’s tire went flat, and brass and swords rattle.

“Trouble had been brewing in the disputed South Ossetian region for weeks as Moscow-backed militias skirmished with Georgian troops, yet Russian-brokered negotiations between the Georgian government and the separatists had continued.

“But the first substantial face-to-face talks on August 7 fell through after a farcical chain of events in which the top Russian diplomat claimed he was unable to attend the meeting in South Ossetia because his car tyre had run flat.

“Refusing to take his excuse at face value, the Georgian delegation then assumed they were being lured into a trap, and began the shelling that invited the Russian invasion.”

General Sir Mike Jackson, former head of the British armed forces, wrote in The Sunday Telegraph:

Georgia is a sovereign democratic state that, like many others, gained its independence in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse.

Strongly supported by the West, it aspires to Nato and EU membership. It also has to contend with two regions – Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both with Russian minorities – that did not, and do not, wish to be part of Georgia.

South Ossetia, in particular, has an independence movement not averse to the use of illegal violence; it is worth bearing in mind that by agreement with Georgia, Russia had deployed so-called peace-keeping forces in south Ossetia long before the current crisis.

Did Russia encourage the South Ossetian rebels to provoke the recent Georgian military action, thereby providing Russia with a casus belli? Did Georgian forces use excessive force in South Ossetia? Did Georgia wrongly calculate that in the face of Western support for Georgia, Russia would not react?

I do not know the answers, but I am clear that the problems arising from minority enclaves in such circumstances are fundamentally political, rather than purely military.

I write not to excuse the Russian actions and behaviour, but rather to explain them. For the West, the challenge is to find the right answer to Lenin’s question: “What is to be done?”

Putin is determined to rebuild Russia’s stature, and he is being much helped in this by the surge in energy prices. There is also evidence that after a decade and more of decline, the Russian armed forces are starting to rebuild and modernise.

For me, the right course for the West – without compromising its own position and values – is to show a greater understanding of why Russia behaves as it does, to accept more willingly Russia’s concerns for its Near Abroad.

While there are actions that we cannot condone, Russian perceptions exist and will take time to change.

This is the challenge for politicians and diplomats: strategic military hostility and confrontation must remain a thing of the past.

This is the challenge for politicians and diplomats, and citizens: strategic military hostility and confrontation must remain a thing of the past.

I give no support to Putin nor Russia for brutish policies, but our press is pounding drums, selling papers, competing for revenue, taking sides… street-corner stuff as far as I’m concerned.

The purpose of this post is to examine what others are saying. As above, a top military chief.

In another paper, the Times of Johannesburg published a scathing view of us. Sadly I read, “It has been said that at times wars provide clarity.”

And an Israeli paper said:

It has been years since we have had a war in which it is so clear to spectators in the West who constitute the Children of Light and who constitute the Children of Darkness.

It is a matter of propaganda. The U.S. president’s remarks on Friday that the world would not accept bullying and intimidation could only raise a bitter smile.

George W. Bush talking about bullying? The U.S. president talking about intimidation? Who set off to two bullying wars this decade? Who tried to solve problems and replace regimes through intimidation if not our friend in the White House? Which power spilled more blood this decade? Russia or “the leader of the free world”?

“There’s no room for debate on this matter,” said Mr Bush.

And puffed in vain glory, John McCain sells us a bumper sticker, “We are all Georgians now”. Nonsense. And about Russia he says,

“I think it’s very clear that Russian ambitions are to restore the old Russian Empire, not the Soviet Union, but the Russian Empire.”

McCain’s nonsense is inappropriate, shot from the hip, as if to say we’ll soon be in McCain’s 100 Years War with Putin the Czar of Russia. McCain is making headlines too easy to achieve. Aggrandizing for votes by feeding slogans to a profiteering media is 100 years of confrontation we should learn to stop.

I believe too many revel in war.

I’ve been looking for an article such as this for a very long time.

I encourage you to read Dr. Albert Bartlett: Arithmetic, Population and Energy

Dr. Bartlett first gave this presentation on “Arithmetic, Population and Energy” in September 1969 and since then has given it an average of once every 8.5 days.

These days are good days to brush up on small percents.

redferret and many, many folks say this is “The Most IMPORTANT Video You’ll Ever See“. And most folks say it’s boring too. But the man offers critical knowledge. No life should be without these tidbits of awareness.

In the comments at the LATimes’ article about Bill Maher’s new movie, Religulous:

My great hope is that he interviews Arthur Blessit, the wild man preacher who was the one who converted “W” into a born again. In the 1960s, of all the crazies on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, and there were plenty, Blessit was considered by most to be the craziest.

In his traveling revival show in 1984 that was in Midland, TX, one of his followers, a car dealer, brought the then Vice President’s son to be converted and he was in a private ceremony.

The Bush family has had the record revised, as it has on other recorded occasions, and claims it was Billy Graham.

I would love to see Bill Maher interview Arthur Blessit about the Shrub’s conversion.

Craig Unger, author of “The Fall of the House of Bush” and “House of Bush, House of Saud” suggests that Mr. Bush did not become a born-again Christian after talking with the Rev. Billy Graham at the Bush compound in the summer of 1985, as the president recounted in his autobiography, but that he’d already been born again, more than a year earlier in Texas, thanks to an evangelical preacher named Arthur Blessit.

Blessit once ran a “Jesus coffeehouse” on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, where he preached to “bikers, druggies, hippies, and two Mafia hit men.” [NYTimes]

3-D wireless network coverage
in this case, Salt Lake City,
via Paul Kedrosky

Akkam’s Razor:

Why did the interventions of the New Deal (and our victory in World War II) largely work while the attempts of Johnson’s Great Society fail? What was different?

…
Fast-forwarding to today, particularly through the lens of the environmental crisis, particularly peak oil, the specter of outstripping, the water problem, and global warming, one can easily see how the conditions that pulled the country out of the Great Depression, contributed to the greatness of the country and her people through the New Deal, and Ultimately won World War II and the immediate post-war period appear to be re-manifesting themselves.

We will all be affected by the scarcity of those resources and the effects they will have on our lives.

Our collective cooperation, whether through innovation, conservation, or re-configuration will change us as a people. Once the American people begin to view their lives in terms of kilowatt hours, gallons-per-day, and dollars-per-mile, and begin doing what they have to do to get those costs and consumptions in line, we will have primed the pump for the next great period in American history.

This is what the Republicans fear – a Democratically unified country around these principles undoes how the GOP has done business for all of the 20th century.

Congressional Budget Office has shown, as even Sen. McCain’s advisers have acknowledged, his health-care plan would impose a $3.6 trillion tax increase over 10 years on workers.

Sen. McCain’s plan will count the health care you get from your employer as if it were taxable cash income.

Even after accounting for Sen. McCain’s proposed health-care tax credits, this plan would eventually leave tens of millions of middle-class families paying higher taxes.

In addition, as the Congressional Budget Office has shown, this kind of plan would push people into higher tax brackets and increase the taxes people pay as their compensation rises, raising marginal tax rates by even more than if we let the entire Bush tax-cut plan expire tomorrow.

Who is the great power now?

Not only have we done a Versailles on Russia but we have also found ourselves in the same weak position as the Great Powers found themselves in the early 1930’s.

We have no will or means of standing up to a resurgent Russia. We have not the treasure – we have blown that in the Middle East and the Credit Crisis. We have not the arms – we spent this in the Middle East. We have no moral authority – we spent that too.

Worse. Putin has Europe by the balls. He is the key energy supplier for Europe.

Worse, the west has made a whole series of promises of security to the new states that we cannot keep.

“The Congress is no longer able to articulate the common good.”

Andrew Bacevich:

“The Congress, especially with regard to matters related to national security policy, has thrust power and authority to the executive branch. We have created an imperial presidency. The Congress no longer is able to articulate a vision of what is the common good. The Congress exists primarily to ensure the reelection of members of Congress… As the Congress has moved to the margins, as the President has moved to the center of our politics, the presidency itself has come to be less effective…

Because of this preoccupation, this fascination with the presidency, the President has become what we have instead of genuine politics, instead of genuine democracy… We look to the next President to fix things and, of course, that lifts all responsibility from me to fix things. So one of the real problems with the imperial presidency is that it has hollowed out our politics and, in many respects, has made our democracy a false one. We’re going through the motions of a democratic political system, but the fabric of democracy really has worn very thin.”

“No one in Washington knows what they are doing.”

No one in Washington knows what they are doing.

McCurfew Tactics… Kneecap America

ABC News’ David Wright reports:

<img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 85px;" src="https://brianhayes.com/images/citizen-suspects.jpg" border="0" alt="
McCain called them tactics” />Answering a question at the Urban League about his approach to combating crime, John McCain suggested that military strategies currently employed by US troops in Iraq could be applied to high crime neighborhoods here in the US.

McCain called them tactics “somewhat like we use in the military”.

“You go into neighborhoods, you clamp down, you provide a secure environment for the people that live there, and you make sure that the known criminals are kept under control.”

“The best thing for being sad is to learn something.

“That is the only thing that never fails.

“You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewer of baser minds.

“There is only one thing for it then — to learn.

“Learn why the world wags and what wags it.” – T.H. White

Carmel Point, Robinson Jeffers

The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of surburban houses-
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads-
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.-As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

Interesting shot of Michael Phelps managing his breathing.

Where is the rich magnificence
That tender children know and sense;
That drifts our atmospheric thought
Beyond the tightened social knot?

Where is gifted deep intelligence
That leaps our cobbled sense;
Where piercing probes of quickest wit
Can lance the gripping past, be done of it?

Where is the blanket of community
That o’er the womb of opportunity
Our loitered deeds do sprout and climb
To strengthen hearts that brave through time?

Where are these coasts of civil rhyme,
That soothe these dusts that fall in time
That pound remembrance to the heart
To build our peace, our poise in every part?

---

“There lies before us if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal, as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity and forget the rest.” Bertrand Russel

Robert Reich trying to explain trickle up, er, why ‘trickle down’ trickles:

The heart of the matter isn’t the collapse in housing prices or even the frenetic rise in oil and food prices. These are contributing to the mess but they are not creating it directly. The basic reality is this: For most Americans, earnings have not kept up with the cost of living. This is not a new phenomenon but it has finally caught up with the pocketbooks of average people. If you look at the earnings of non-government workers, especially the hourly workers who comprise 80 percent of the workforce, you’ll find they are barely higher than they were in the mid-1970s, adjusted for inflation. The income of a man in his 30s is now 12 percent below that of a man his age three decades ago.

…
So Americans turned to a second way of spending beyond their hourly wages. They worked more hours. The typical American now works more each year than he or she did three decades ago. Americans became veritable workaholics, putting in 350 more hours a year than the average European, more even than the notoriously industrious Japanese.

Comments:
But, see, the rich pay taxes already? 40% of government tax revenue is provided by the top 1% of income earners. We can’t tax higher. It isn’t fair to tax wealth. They’ll move to… and there’ll be no money left in America whatsoever… not even trickles.

Congressional Budget Office:
The top 1% received 57.5% of all capital.

Internal Revenue Service:
The top 1% earned 21.2% of all income.

Government Accountability Office:
72 percent of all foreign corporations and about 57 percent of U.S. companies doing business in the United States paid no federal income taxes for at least one year between 1998 and 2005.

Balancing class is a critical task, not a taboo to be ideologically scorned. The top 1% own more than 40% of our wealth!

Story:
The non-partisan group Campaign Money Watch has come up with another startling figure for those who follow the presidential money chase.

According to an analysis performed by the group, McCain’s top fundraisers and aides have collected nearly $1 billion in fees from U.S. companies in the past decade — specifically, $930,949,819.

“The McCain campaign relies on big money lobbyists, and they’ll rely on him.”

John McCain once said “too often the special interest lobbyists with the fattest wallets and best access carry the day when issues of public policy are being decided.”

Comments:
“The problem arises when companies pay operatives to pressure politicians to act in a way contrary to their commitment to their constituents. What eventually happens is influence on politicians becomes a commodity to be bartered and sold to the highest bidder.”

“Because they buy political influence generally at the expense of the electorate.”

“Because in a democracy, policy should be decided by the public good, not by the interests of the tiny majority that can write the biggest checks. (And which then gets even richer on public money, and therefore can write even bigger checks, and so on.)”

“John knows Washington is broken. He broke it.”

Truth is like breathing, Polly.

She said,

“Children always know deceit.”

Thanks. Really. I bounce off stars with human-human like this.

Steven Wright scoured off copyBlogger:

You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?

Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.

Everyone has a photographic memory. Some just don’t have film.

Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it.

The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard.

“To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.”

Oops.

Stop!
The biggest overhaul of the Endangered Species Act since 1986.

Bush now is stopping federal agencies from “assessing the emissions that contribute to global warming and its effect on species and habitats”.

The changes apply to any project a federal agency would fund, build or authorize that might harm endangered wildlife and their habitat.

Roving for graft? We can be certain there’s a payoff for cronies.

SAD = Stop Assessing Damage

Citizens. Count ’em. Enjoy America.

You’ve been invited to a fancy ball but the only thing you have to wear is an orange wooly jumper. What shoes do you wear?

Huh? Forget that question. Here’s a better question: What is important to you? Relationships. Relationships with real people, people who share themselves, their true selves, with no desire to paint themselves other than they are. Imperfect, but real. I hate fake.

She says,

“The love for our fellow man has to burn like the flame in the Olympic torch, and be carried from place to place until it burns in every heart.”

Dying to protect a pipeline
The definitive piece of evidence about the real goals in Afghanistan arrived a few weeks ago with the announcement that Afghanistan had signed a major deal to build the pipeline the U.S. has wanted all along. If the reports are accurate, the $8 billion pipeline will go through the southern part of the country — and right through Kandahar.

Combine this with a constitution that put enormous powers in the hands of the president and you have a political structure designed to ensure American dominance.

A coin is each side. And on top of that, all of our progress is freedom and free heart. We are this argument of liberty, so grateful for it, to every step and sad ounce of blood, so glad to be here, doing this: America is unfurled, yes she is, attending to these matters.

We herald good and grand and great things, don’t you think?

This precious land, maybe not as writ, maybe crude destiny, maybe not so prized as merely praised, but in every contest we America stand with justice, prove effort, thrill children.

These may not be bleak times.

After his talk at their Las Vegas convention, just one of 14 Disabled American Veterans said they would continue to back McCain.

Major media tries so hard to paint a ‘fair election’, advert revenue from both sides, but what else needs to be carefully reported?

Listen up!!
Christopher Locke says The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule by Thomas Frank is

an important book, and right on the money,

fascists by any other name would still smell

“Personally, I found the book engaging, hugely informative, and fascinating — the way a 40-car pile up or train derailment is fascinating. Frank makes a valiant attempt to end the book on an upbeat note, but on the whole, the picture he presents is like a case study in political despair.

“The really depressing part is that he seems to have correctly diagnosed the cancer.”

From the book’s description:
It is no coincidence, Frank argues, that the same politicians who guffaw at the idea of effective government have installed a regime in which incompetence is the rule.