brainiac conspiracy

Not Sure How We Handle The Russians

But I am guessing that threatening war isn't the smartest approach.

Sure, there's a certain amount of feint-and-dodge in these foreign-policy statements---a studied display of indignation is how you play the game, sometimes---but honestly, what the hell can we really do if Putin decides he wants to quash the unruly miscreants in his backyard? We've got as much power over him as the Russians would have over us if we decided to, say, invade the state of Sinaloa to stomp out a drug cartel. Okay, I suppose we could vote some trade sanctions on them, but even then our options are extremely limited because if we overplay our hand, Putin can always retaliate by shutting off the natural-gas spigot, and half of Europe will freeze to death. Maybe some backchannel discussions would be wiser than threats of confrontation.

---Baron V

Another One for the Historians to Explain

Specifically, how it came to pass that a political party that once produced such leaders as Lincoln, Grant, and Roosevelt the Elder would end up being run, essentially, by a Politburo of radio shock jockeys who govern top-down: They provide the daily talking points, and the lower functionaries just regurgitate them. I imagine there are many reasons for this---talk radio, Fox News, no Fairness Doctrine---but I wonder how much could also be due to the rise of the Reality TV Show, which has become as a cultural staple during the years of our derangement. There may be no coincidence, but when you consider reality TV's success in peddling fake story lines using some of the most greedy untalented hustlers who are utterly unequipped for and undeserving of fame---well, with a steady cultural diet of that stuff, you have to wonder if it has had any effect on who we elect to represent us in government. I guess yes.

---Baron V

Light Blogging Morning

Because your humble blogger is a busy man. And because war is always the answer.

---Baron V

Filibusters

Yeah, it actually made for pretty entertaining TV last night---or at least what I saw of it, maybe an hour and a half---though I'll admit to being somewhat conflicted about it: First, because the filibusterer-in-chief is a Randian wack job who wants to repeal most of the 20th century, and later, because comic relief was outsourced to a guy named Ted Cruz, who might be the most heinous human being to be elected to the Senate in the last half-century, and that's saying a lot. On the other hand, I'd have to say that overall, it's better to require the obstructionists to hold the floor if they want to gum up the works rather than submit to the "silent" filibuster, which accomplishes the same ends without requiring the obstructionists to do the actual work of obstruction; and also, frankly, because it forces all of us---or at least, it did last night---to really reflect on some important constitutional issues, and to discuss them at length with our friends, Twitterers, countrymen, etc. And when we do, we're likely to find that they're often thornier and more complex than we had initially thought they were, and that the policy solutions to the problems they pose are often more delicately nuanced. That's a healthy sign for a democracy, seems to me, certainly more so than the usual stage-managed theatrics we typically see coming from the Congress and the White House. We'd probably be better off as a Republic if we didn't have a filibuster at all anymore, but since we're still stuck with it for as long as anyone can foresee, it's not a total waste of time if it helps us achieve a better understanding of our unique form of government and the Constitution that defines it, so two-and-a-half cheers for the Randian wack job. He may be an imperfect messenger, but that doesn't invalidate the message he labored to deliver.

---Baron V

Random Thoughts

Steal millions of houses and pensions from non-corporate persons: Fines and no admission of wrongdoing.

Steal technology from corporate persons: Punitive measures befitting acts of naked aggression.

We have always been at war with Eastasia's catalog server.

---Baron V

Husky Boys

They have displaced Simpson and Bowles as the saviors of the Republic:

[A] feminized setting is a setting in which helpless passivity is the norm. Male aggression can be a good thing, as in protecting the weak---but it has been forced out of the culture of elementary schools and the education schools that train their personnel. Think of what Sandy Hook might have been like if a couple of male teachers who had played high-school football, or even some of the huskier 12-year-old boys, had converged on Lanza.

Idiot Rambo-fetishising aside, you'd think everyone would understand the reason why women seem to predominate in the ranks of elementary schoolteachers is that the teaching of very young children---like a classroom of 6-year-olds, for instance---often requires as much nurturing as it does book-learning, and women have typically been better at, or more attracted to, nurturing smaller children than men. How much of this is cultural, instinctual or experiential---based on the possibility that some of these teachers have raised and nurtured kids of their own---I will leave for the social psychologists to wrangle over, but it has nothing to do with male aggression being "forced out" of anywhere. It's because most men consider elementary schoolteaching to be "women's work" and choose other career paths. If that wasn't the case, more men would be elementary schoolteachers.

---Baron V

Time to Reach Across The Aisle

Because we knew they'd be more reasonable once the President was re-elected.

This oldie was spot-on four years ago, and it's still spot-on now:

I really don’t understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties is insane. Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years.

---Baron V

About Last Night

Not sure what else I can add to all the other convention post-mortems today, other than to note that I managed to stay awake until the end of the President's speech (would never have believed four years ago that I'd ever consider Barack Obama to be a boring public speaker, but I guess familiarity breeds etc.) and was once again reminded that Joe Biden is a much cannier politician than most people give him credit for. The one thing that struck me (and I am sure that others have mentioned it today; the Twittersphere was buzzing over it last night) was the sudden transformation of Team Democrat into the Party of National Security and Peace Through Strength and General Militaristic Awesomeness. don't think I've so many patriotic foam-finger shout-outs since Reagan was in charge. Guess it's reasonably smart politics in the swing states, but there was something about watching the spectacle that to me was, well, a little depressing. Anyone else out there feeling the same way?

---Vitelius

Real Americans

There must be something in their DNA, because regardless of geography, nationality, time zone or accent, they're just a whiny bunch of vindictive little shits.

That is all.

---Vitelius

Not Wishing This in The Slightest

But I suspect the odds of an Oklahoma City-style hillbilly terror attack just escalated yesterday by a significant magnitude. Hope I'm wrong, of course, but I am guessing the FBI and Secret Service guys are going to be working obscenely long hours between now and the election.

---Vitelius

Friends in Freedom™ Do The Darnedest Things

Sure glad our tax dollars are helping to subsidize freedom-related program activities:

Gush Etzion has become a hot destination in recent months for tourists seeking an Israeli experience like no other: The opportunity to pretend-shoot a terror operative. Residents of the nearby settlements, who run the site, offer day-trippers a chance to hear stories from the battleground, watch a simulated assassination of terrorists by guards, and fire weapons at the range.

There is something terribly and tragically wrong with these people.

---Vitelius

Bipartisan Consensus

If you've ever tried fighting insomnia by watching those one of those interminably dull, think-tank-sponsored, national-security panel discussions that show up on C-SPAN late at night and wondered, "Who the hell are the people in the audience who sit through this stuff?", here's your answer:

[T]he audience is filled with dark suits and military uniforms — Beltway Bandits (consultants, contractors, and anyone else grabbing for their private piece of the defense pie) and full-time soldiers, Marines, airmen, and sailors. In other words, people whose livelihoods depend on the war machine constantly turning in a forward direction. They aren’t there to determine whether drones are bad or COIN is dead or why veterans are committing suicide.They just want to know where the political winds are blowing, what the talking points are, and how to navigate the budget gauntlet; then they exchange a few business cards in hopes of gaining the access they all crave, all while feeling they are part of “the hive.”

That’s why the biggest stirring of excitement in the crowd didn’t come when World Bank President Robert Zoellick took the stage for a 45 minutes excursion that resembled nothing of the stated topic, “economics and security,” but when CNAS co-founder (and former senior Pentagon official) Michele Flournoy and other insiders were wheeled in to talk defense budget. Now the Beltway Bandits in the crowd suddenly awoke: to cut or not to cut, this was the question, and it affected them greatly [...]

There are only two schools of thought tolerated for debate in the CNAS vacuum---liberal interventionism and neoconservativism. It is not a matter of whether force will be used, but where to use it and under what guise. Even that debate seems largely taken for granted at these events. With the exception of tiny skirmishes between the centrists and neocons on Wednesday, all agreed that despite all the military and diplomatic blunders over the last decade, we should move full speed ahead on “readiness” and confronting China as the next great threat.

But only dirty stinking hippies would denigrate our military by shouting "War is good business!" and other vile obscenities.

Snark aside, one wonders what's more troubling here: The fact that our defense and foreign-policy establishments now seem to be fixed in permanent orbit around a global outreach strategy based on warmongering, or the fact that the people in charge of planning and deploying the warmongering outreach strategy are the same people who have been wrong about every fucking thing since the end of the Cold War. And to think some people worry that another 9/11 might happen.

---Vitelius

Not Rocket Science

Know I've mentioned this before, but I guess some people still need to be reminded that as a rule, people don't like it when you invade their country, bomb their villages, and kill their relatives, and some of them will take up arms against you in response. This does not---repeat, not---make them militants, or jihadis, or Taliban, or Al Qaeda, or anything else. It just makes them pissed-off people who are pissed off because you bombed their village and killed their relatives, and who are seeking a little revenge. This is not some aberrant type of behavior exhibited only by unhinged extremists---in most places, in fact, the retaliatory impulse would strike most people as perfectly normal. But I suppose there are certain people in this world who are not allowed to indulge in vengeful thoughts, and they all just happen to be people whose villages were bombed by our leaders. But they hate us for our freedoms!

And I agree with Glenn also, that there is no way for anyone to spin away policies as justifiable under Obama that they would have found morally repugnant under Bush, although I realize, like he does, that some people seem to have difficulty fathoming this:

I know it’s difficult for someone to realize this when they believe that what appears on CNN and MSNBC represents the full range of mainstream political ideas on the planet, but cheering for American violence and affirming its imperial prerogatives to attack anyone it wants isn’t the norm in the world.

---Vitelius

Transparency in Government

It's only truly important when it makes you look good:

Outsourcing the investigation to the Department of Justice instead is a cowardly ducking of responsibility---with tremendously dangerous potential. This is especially the case because under Obama and Holder, the DOJ---presumably to build up good will with the intelligence community---has taken to charging such leaks as violations of the draconian Espionage Act, a 1917 law intended for the prosecution of people who are aiding the enemy. Furthermore, the official DOJ position now seems to be that there is no reporter's privilege at all in such maters, and therefore no need to even consider the nature of the leak, how much if any damage it actually caused, what the intentions of the leaker were, and how much it served the public interest.

Strolling down memory lane, I seem to recall the Independent Counsel law that was passed in the wake of Watergate was intended to avoid the unavoidable conflict of interest that would ensue when an Attorney General was being asked to investigate his boss, particularly is the boss was the same guy who appointed him Attorney General. Now, it's an imperfect law, and it can be abused (see: Starr, Kenneth), but by and large, it's about the only way to maintain some semblance of judicial impartiality in such matters. I'm not so much worried that Eric Holder will go out of his way to cover up for his boss because he's corrupt as much as I fear he'll end up covering up inadvertently for his boss because he's, well, an incompetent who takes the advice of his worst lawyers to formulate administration policy, and who summons his worst lawyers to defend administration policy. But then, I'm just another cranky member of the Professional Left.

---Vitelius

Slaughter We Can Believe In

Jesus Mary & Joseph:

You can be forgiven if you thought this was a story in The Onion when you first saw the headline. Too bad it wasn't.

Does the administration really believe that squeezing as much juice as it can from the "Tough On Terror" meme is going to win him the coveted warmonger vote, considering that most of those people are Republicans, Islamophobes, Greater Israelites, or a combination of the three? Also too, considering that most people in this country are sick to fucking death of these stupid wars and would kindly like them stopped?

Greenwald, as usual, provides context:

This, ladies and gentlemen, is your Democratic Party in the Era of Obama.

It has taken four decades of reverse engineering, but our nation has finally minted a liberal political party that is as militaristic as its conservatives.

---Vitelius

Liberal Democrats

Sure ain't what they used to be:

Sen. John Kerry on Wednesday questioned whether the New York Times should have published explosive stories last week about President Obama ordering cyberattacks against Iran’s nuclear program.

“I personally think there is a serious question whether or not that served our interest and whether the public had to know,” Kerry, the Foreign Relations Committee chairman, told reporters. “To me it was such a nitty-gritty fundamental national security issue. And I don’t see how the public interest is well served by it. I do see how other interests outside the United States are well served by it.”

The Massachusetts Democrat’s comments were prompted by a question from CNN’s Ted Barrett, who asked whether the Times should have held back the story “for national security reasons.”

After answering the question and walking away, Kerry chased down Barrett down the hallway to clarify his remarks: “With the Pentagon Papers, the country was being lied to, you can understand the need to know. On this, I don’t think a need-to-know standard gets met.”

No, I suppose we don't really "need to know" that our government is spending billions of dollars to destabilize the government of a country that has never threatened us (besides calling us all sorts of nasty names) for the benefit of someone else's national security, or that the United States has become the kind of aggressor nation in the conduct of its foreign policy, and the kind of human-rights abuser of dissidents, that we used to decry regularly when the Soviet Union evidenced the same behaviors. But we are certainly entitled to know about this because (1) we are paying for it, and (2) whether our leaders realize it or not, this kind of crap threatens our own national security by needlessly interjecting America's presence into a regional pissing match between the Israelis and Iran. Will this country ever learn to mind its own business?

---Vitelius

Yellow Perils We Can Believe In

The Cold War ended 20 years ago. Someone forgot to tell our leaders about it:

The DDG-1000 and other stealth destroyers of the Zumwalt class feature a wave-piercing hull that leaves almost no wake, electric drive propulsion and advanced sonar and missiles. They are longer and heavier than existing destroyers — but will have half the crew because of automated systems and appear to be little more than a small fishing boat on enemy radar.

Down the road, the ship is to be equipped with an electromagnetic railgun, which uses a magnetic field and electric current to fire a projectile at several times the speed of sound.

But cost overruns and technical delays have left many defense experts wondering if the whole endeavor was too focused on futuristic technologies for its own good [...]

The U.S. Defense Department is concerned that China is modernizing its navy with a near-term goal of stopping or delaying U.S. intervention in conflicts over disputed territory in the South China Sea or involving Taiwan, which China considers a renegade province.

China is now working on building up a credible aircraft carrier capability and developing missiles and submarines that could deny American ships access to crucial sea lanes.

The U.S. has a big advantage on the high seas, but improvements in China's navy could make it harder for U.S. ships to fight in shallower waters, called littorals. The stealth destroyers are designed to do both. In the meantime, the Navy will begin deploying smaller Littoral Combat Ships to Singapore later this year.

One word: Why?

Are we really going to fight the Chinese over Taiwan? It's their turf. If they want it badly enough, they'll just take it. England didn't go to war with them over Hong Kong---hell, they gave it back to them voluntarily---and the world didn't come to an end. And why in hell would we need to get involved in a shooting war with China? Shipping lanes? Why would they want to block them? Seems to me they'd want to keep every possible avenue of transportation on the planet as wide open as possible so they can keep shipping their cheap, shitty products all over North America. I mean, none of this "meeting the Chinese threat" crap makes any damn sense at all. Then again, maybe that's our leaders think it's such a great idea. Just look at how they're handling the global economy.

---Vitelius

First as Tragedy

Thinking back on the days of my youth, I can remember watching the "body counts" from Vietnam being posted on the TV every Thursday night. There were typically four columns: one for Americans, one for ARVN (South Vietnam) troops, one for the NLF (North Vietnam) and one for "Vietcong", which was basically anyone we killed over there who wasn't wearing a uniform. The last column was always wildly inflated over the first three, and the implication either way was that, besides the fact that we were perpetually winning the war, that no innocent civilians were being killed in all this. Of course, eventually news leaked out over American atrocities such as My Lai, where dozens of innocent civilians were being killed, and the public's mood soured on the war, and rather quickly. So what's different now? We've had ample evidence of atrocities for many years in our current wars, and outside a few lefty/libertarian bloggers and scolds, no one seems to give a shit anymore. Why is this? Is this kind of outrage a discontent of affluence that people can't afford to vent in hard times, or has our collective conscience grown coarse to these things? Or have we simply bought into our own bullshit that American is the Greatest Nation Ever that can Do No Wrong because entertaining the alternative would pose the kind of moral challenge our leaders would rather avoid? Don't know the answer here, but it sure seems like people don't seem to be terribly bothered anymore that our leaders are killing people all over the world with only the foggiest idea of who they're killing, and why, other than insisting that they're all "militants." Seems to me if our prevailing national ethos was prevalent back in the '70s, we'd still be fighting in Vietnam today.

---Vitelius

You Mean Liberals Don't Do it Too?

The tradition of respect for civil authority is so firmly embedded in the collective American consciousness, it rarely ever dawns on anyone to ponder the possibility of a military coup---mostly because, obviously, we've never had to endure one. However:

We are fighting a subset of a subset, Dominionist Christianity. It grew mostly at the end of the Vietnam War; it grew and grew and exploded in 1994 with the so-called Gingrich revolution, when we really saw the politics of polarization rear its ugly head. That Congress said that to be the right kind of American, you need to have these attributes, and if you don't, then you didn't deserve to be an American. And then after 9/11, it went on steroids. It went crazy [...]

What we are fighting at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation is nothing less than fundamentalist Christian para-church military corporate proselytizing complex.

It's a fanatical religiosity, in this case fundamentalist or Dominionist Christianity, mixed with actual weapons of mass destruction, mixed with a tortuous version of faux patriotism and unfettered access to weapon systems and further mixed with a dearth of restraint, oversight and supervision.

It leads to a national security threat that is metastasizing within our military. It's so huge, it's almost impossible to believe this could be happening.

I think this is a risk we've taken, but failed to acknowledge as a Republic, that relying on an all-voluntary fighting force to fight the nation's battles can have some dire and serious consequences. In universal conscription, after all, most draftees go off to do their duty but generally are counting down the days until they can return to civilian life. People who enlist because they actively want to fight may not have the same civic priorities. Throw in a dominant culture that fetishizes gun ownership and preaches a violent End of Days, and you've got the potential for . . . well, I think you can guess where I'm going here.

Put another way: I've heard more than one commentator in recent days---from both sides of the ideological divide---wondering out loud if the citizenry can ever reclaim genuine ownership of its government absent some form of armed rebellion. Don't know if that's true or not, but if it is, do you want the people who have the most guns in this country to be the ones leading the rebellion? It's scary shit, if you really think about it.

---Vitelius

Preemptive War We Can Believe In

Regardless how it's waged, it's still a violation of the UN charter and the Geneva Conventions:

The United States government only recently acknowledged developing cyberweapons, and it has never admitted using them. There have been reports of one-time attacks against personal computers used by members of Al Qaeda, and of contemplated attacks against the computers that run air defense systems, including during the NATO-led air attack on Libya last year. But Olympic Games was of an entirely different type and sophistication.

It appears to be the first time the United States has repeatedly used cyberweapons to cripple another country’s infrastructure, achieving, with computer code, what until then could be accomplished only by bombing a country or sending in agents to plant explosives.

Amazing, isn't it? Just imagine the reaction that would be elicited from our leaders if some other country engineered a similar attack on our infrastructure. At the very least there would be threats of retaliation, calls for sanctions, and shoe-pounding speeches in front of the Security Council. There might even be a drone strike or two thrown in for good measure. And to think we're not even doing this for our own national security, but for the sake of another country, which continues to show its gratitude in the oddest ways:

“We think there was a modification done by the Israelis,” one of the briefers told the president, “and we don’t know if we were part of that activity.”

Mr. Obama, according to officials in the room, asked a series of questions, fearful that the code could do damage outside the plant. The answers came back in hedged terms. Mr. Biden fumed. “It’s got to be the Israelis,” he said. “They went too far.”

Heaven forbid that anyone in our government should ever have informed the government of Israel that a preemptive military strike on Iran would automatically trigger a suspension of foreign aid and a call for UN sanctions. This would have cost zero taxpayer dollars, and as a special added bonus, it would be have been in accord with international law. But I guess those legal formalities only apply to the little countries, not to a global hegemon and its problem child in the Middle East.

On the other hand, it's good to know the Republic is otherwise in good health, with a thriving economy and ample jobs for all who want them. Otherwise, how could our leaders justify devoting precious resources to such a tangential endeavor? Oh, wait.

---Vitelius