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Fire...Bad!!..Nrrgh!! Evil Frankenstein Muppet,
John Kerry, patched together from pieces of Vietnam-era antiwar activism and very neo- liberalism. Here he is trying hard to pretend that the US, after ten years, is not in violation of the same
Chemical Weapons Convention he demanded Syria comply with in fewer months
Eternal War
Exit Arab Spring, Enter, Four countries in five years
As the US prepares to create regime change in Syria for the second time (the first was in 1949), it is worthwhile considering the reasons why it has acted so coyly about invading. Obviously there is an advantage to its rare display of patience; if it can make the case that the entire world is begging it to invade, then it suffers less of a PR hit. But there is another reason: if the US loses it, temporarily, as a cheap source of oil, it still retains a torture state. According to a former CIA case officer, "If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear—never to see them again—you send them to Egypt." [1][2] And of course there is the fact that its oil production is #32 in the world and proven oil reserves are #35; to take control of ALL of the world's oil, it does not matter which oil producers to take over, but it does matter for in which ORDER you allocate resources towards taking them over.
First and foremost, the proposed attack is not only immoral and in fact illegal, but useless at achieving anything other than the US' primary objective in world relations, the weakening of other countries. Even if you believe that Syria's Assad responded to the US' "red line" threat of military retaliation by crossing that line, it just proves how ineffective that retaliation would be at deterring him.
Invasions, coups, wars and other sustained military actions against states after 1945 without international mandate for exception are Acts of Aggression and illegal under the spirit of international law according to the precedent set by the Nuremberg trials Nuremberg Principles Principle VI (a) (i) : "War of aggression". The International Criminal Court's Crime of aggression statues apply, as does the precedent set by the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3314
The US attack's opportunism is of course pathetically transparent: unfounded assurances and teams searching for weapons have all happened before, Russian inspectors found the rebels to be the cause,[3][4] UN inspectors initially reported, with evidence, that rebels had used chemical weapons,[5] the US is preparing for the attack before the UN inspectors get back, the UN's later factfinding mission only stayed a token few days, the US uses chemical weapons and has backed every regime that has ever used them, the US has enough WMDs in the form of nukes to blow up the whole world many times over, the US has used military interventions and other means to attempt regime change of countries unfriendly to US Capitalistic interests nearly a hundred times in the past two centuries, the UN inspectors are not given a mandate to determine the source of the chemical weapons, yet the US says it is waiting for the results of the inspection before making attack, therefore the US is currently planning to attack the government of Syria based on no evidence that it used chemical weapons, etc etc.
Secretary of State John Kerry defended a proposed US strike on Syria as "informed" by "first-hand accounts from humanitarian organizations on the ground, like Doctors Without Borders". Doctors Without Borders itself, under its French name Médecins Sans Frontières, said, "MSF is aware that incorrect, manipulated information about MSF and Syria is circulating on the internet and social media. ... MSF does not have the capacity to identify the cause of the neurotoxic symptoms of patients reported by three clinics supplied by MSF in Damascus governorate. ... MSF does not possess the capacity or ability to determine or assign responsibility for the event that caused these reported symptoms to occur. Any statement or story that asserts any of these things is false." Mark Seibel of McClatchy News said, "the secretary of state talks about it as first-hand observation by Doctors Without Borders, and Doctors Without Borders has been very clear that it’s too dangerous for their people to actually go in there. So it is not Doctors Without Borders’ first-hand observation."
Why run the taphouse when you can just control the tap?
Syria is #32 in the list of oil-producing nations (what they take out of the ground), and #35 by oil reserves (what is still left in the ground) but this is only part of the story. There are only six nations left in the top 32 that are not white European nations, or under the thumb of the US, or too large or heavily armed for the US to take over (Russia, number one in production, #8 in reserves; China, #4 in production, #12 in reserves; and India, #19 in reserves, #23 in production. All have nuclear weapons). Of these six, only two can not yet be shown to be in the process of regime change; it can only be assumed.
Azerbaijan, one of these six, is number 21 in both production and reserves. Its story shows an old wrinkle of Empire brought back in a new way: there is no need to control the whole country, when all you want is the oil. In 1998, Azerbaijan suffered an attempt to take over its nationally-owned oil company, and the man that attempted to blow the whistle on it is in jail, while the conspirators are free.[6]
Three of the six are poised for regime change: Iran is number four in both reserves and production. Nigeria is number 13 in production and #11 in reserves. Venezuela is #1 in reserves and #9 in production. They are being processed in the same propaganda+intelligence mill that paved the way for the US to invade, attack, conspire against and otherwise interfere with the governments of dozens of countries, despite a public weary of US interference. The media has been setting them up in the public eye as failed or rogue states.
Venezuela is, to the Wars on Oil, the most important of the potential regime change targets; its oil production is operating on the same principle as the USSR's economy (that had a GDP to national debt ratio fifty times higher than the US at the time of its "collapse"); be economical with your assets. Their production is #9, but their proven reserves are the largest in the world. They have already suffered an attempt at regime change, and Nigeria shows signs of being prepared for it, with the same mass incarceration of dissidents being covered as anti-terrorism.[7]
US regime change operations of propaganda and threats and bribing officials and paying demonstrators and all their other techniques may yet yield, or be yielding, or have already yielded, similar weaknesses in Kazakhstan, #10 in reserves and #17 in production, and Ecuador, #20 in reserves and #30 in production.
Recently brought under US control: Iraq, #5 in reserves and #7 in production; Egypt (brought back under control), #27 in reserves and #28 in production, and Libya, which like Venezuela used up its reserves (#9) at a lower rate than other countries (production #29). Coming soon, Syria, #32 in production and #35 in reserves. So much for the Arab Spring. Instead, it has only been part of Four countries in five years. Admittedly, this is three short of what was said to be planned, and one country that was not said to be planned. But after our suspicions about the Arab Spring have been borne out, it seems clear that what most of the world hoped was Freedom was in fact only Free Market. In the one tiny state that is still more free than it had been before the revolution, Tunisia, the embezzling rulers still got away with the cash. Tunisia is #51 in oil reserves, and #55 in production, and will eventually fall, as Egypt has. It may not be that long now; someone assassinated the opposition leader on 28 Aug 2013, and the party that took over after the revolution was unwise enough to dissolve itself and make new elections,[8] US puppets will eventually win the country with falsified elections or by whatever other means.
Afghanistan is the obvious exception to the oil rule, but this fact, rather than disproving US interests, in fact points to another interest, and the major reason why the US fought the USSR there. It was, of course, taken over to make secure the oil pipelines to the Caucasus (US army bases are situated directly on this line), but also for CIA drug trafficking, easy access to the opium poppies that the CIA has been turning into heroin since the 1940s. So do not be taken in by the characterization of this as a War for Oil. It is only a Battle for Oil, a minor if penultimate part of the War for Capitalism. Together with Afghanistan's and the Golden Triangle's Wars for Drugs, and the War On Communism, it has been going on since the Russian Revolution, and its prerequisite, the US Empire, goes back much further. The US has been declared to have been at times isolationist, by historians, but they are mistaken. The US has never paused in its grabbing of land and their resources; but it never once failed to fail to aid when aid was needed. In Rwanda, in Sudan, in Spain in 1936, in Europe against Hitler, in the Balkans until it realized there were mineral resources to be gained...none of the tragic massacres of the 20th Century were as much as avenged by the US. But what of the closing of the Nazi death camps, you ask? The US never fought against Fascism; Franco's Fascist Spain was allowed to not only take over, but rule Spain indefinitely; it only failed when Franco died in 1977. Not a single one of the soldiers deployed in WWII was ever told they were fighting genocide, and Jews fleeing the Nazis were forbidden sanctuary. Nazi scientists were recruited by the US, and Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon.
Wondered why there was so little coverage of the Arab Spring in these pages? Well, sure, we're lazy. But mostly it was because we saw Egypt coming, and we did not believe PBS (Proving We're Not Liberal Since 1989), when they (Gwen Ifil) called the anti-Libyan mercenaries armed with rocket launchers and with anti-aircraft guns mounted to the back of their pickup trucks, "demonstrators". Egypt has gained absolutely nothing from its revolution-the Wikileaks leak for Egypt included a memo from Mubarak asking the US to install the army in a coup, roughly for the principle that they were sons of bitches but they would be THEIR sons of bitches. Always think in terms of this, and you will only be wrong a small percentage of the time: the US is trying to take over the world, but they will not merely settle for, but in fact prefer, puppet states-why bother with all the administrative tasks when you can merely syphon the cash out of the country? They are also patient and utterly ruthless; making enemy nations weak now, even if it means making allies fight a war of attrition, means it will be easier to take them over later. Three good examples of America using up other countries and discarding them after they are no longer useful: Iraq, which the US backed in a war against Iran, Syria, which the US used as a torture state for extrajudicial rendition, and Panama, whose invasion by the US was only the secondary objective; the primary one being removing from power Manuel Noriega. Noriega was held without trial for over a decade until the publicity about his capture had died down enough to avoid not only embarrassing facts about his connection to the US, but actually legally threatening facts about his part in the CIA's Cocaine drug trade. Two less good examples: Cambodia; good because the US backed the Khmer Rouge, less good because coming back and betraying the KR afterwards could be mistaken for doing the right thing, and Afghanistan, where it created and then attempted to destroy the Taliban, a less good example of betrayal for similar and obvious reasons.
Nor is democracy more than gravy to this process. The denunciation of results of the Palestinian elections in 2006[9] and the slaughter of the elected and their entire party in Egypt in 2013 are only the two most recent proofs of US disregard for democracy, if its use of the word as a synonym for regime change were not enough. There is also the Iranian coup d'état of 1953 and the dozen US violations of the Geneva Conference of 1954, including most importantly its backing of the leader who refused to hold elections in Viet Nam. Of course, there has never been any such thing as a democracy of the people, but even in institutions which are touted as democratic, the US prefers control to freedom. The US held its breath and stomped its little feet at the League of Nations, which had a democratic vote, and established the United Nations in its stead, which is arguably the most undemocratic government institution in the world not vilified as a dictatorship. The US alone is guaranteed a vote in its Security Council, and there is always some nation the size of a large city, somewhere in the Pacific, like Nauru or Palau, who always casts the deciding vote in the US' favor...
The rule of thumb for regime change, then, is not that the US acts to spread its way of life throughout the world, or even that it focuses its military on regime change that is in its own interest. It is, quite simply, always and forever bent on controlling the entire planet, and everything that happens in the world should first be checked for this possibility.
And what of this Leviathan of lies, theft, and mugging on a global scale, when Cuba has "instituted economic reforms", or when the last drop has been drawn from Iraq's wells? We have been promised a "peace dividend" before, back when politicians cared enough about what the people thought to offer them promises they did not intend to keep, instead of just lying first and then lying some more. All we got was the opposite, escalation: a similar number of nuclear warheads, in a smaller number of more modern missiles. Nuclear weapons in the hands of Russia and China may be enough to keep them out of the US' grasp, but India's can not reach the US, and thus cannot be more of a threat against invasion than they are to India itself. And the US national interest, which was openly defied in the 60s and disdained in the 70s, is now taken for granted by the media and whoever believes them. All that is required is for the national interest to be redefined. It has been redefined already; bastions of progressivism like Democracy Now! warn of the dangers of China taking over US jobs-they do not sound very much different to the racists, and all because the political argument has been reframed as Globalism. "Think Globally, Act Locally" paved the way for Americans with tens or more as much income as the world average to imagine themselves saving the planet by buying things, and to a lesser extent, Europeans and activists from other countries as wel. The admitted success of boycotts against South Africa saw activists taking a good hard look at the moral dilemma of political action vs the needs of starving people and coming up on the side of activism. The arguments for ALL of America and the developed world as being inimical to the needs of the developing world and the moral interests of the entire world get weaker and more equivocal, but they go on and on, with the myriad of things that the American Way of Life simply must have, and the years in which nothing is done stretch onward.
Perhaps at the heart of obstacle to change is the perception that no struggle can be allowed to be violent, and that radical change can only be achieved through violence, so compromise must be achieved. What follows is wishful thinking-we will make the politicians want to change. But they do not want to. It is really as simple as that. They hold sufficient power, as a continuum, to ensure they will never have to make any but the most minor changes, which they can later reverse when the heat is off, and the outrage dies down again. But there is another, third way. The Achilles heel of capitalism, is...capitalism. It not only allows but mandates theft. Capitalism can never advocate the removal of private property rights, and a nation indoctrinated into personal financial interest can never be told that they should not acquire things. So if we get together and tell the world to steal back the world, then the obvious superiority of cooperation to competition, especially once it grows sufficiently large to gain the greatest benefits of a computerized economy, will inexorably move the balance of ownership in favor of the people. There may not be much left of the world when the oil runs out, but at least the people will live in a 19th Century agrarian horse-powered world with cellphones. Call it science fiction if you must, but first think hard about either alternative. Does not the inevitability of an un-egalitarian world, the wreckage of capitalism, translate into this? Walled-off decaying cities with their slave factories to support an elite of what we would now call middle class means, surrounded by the farms that support them. And perhaps, but not certainly enough to count on or fruitful enough to hope for (yes, some of us were survivalists, once), a few hardcore survivors in the wastelands of countries too meager for the army to cleanse.
Playing, both sides (Puppet Power)
Steven Colbert says that Elmo's arabic-language program for kids was the US' most successful deployment of a puppet in the Afghanistan region since Hamid Karzai[10]
A Few Men Good at Baiting, A Few Men Good at being Bait
- See Drop weapon
"We don't want you on the wall, we get that you don't care much for the parties you don't get invited to, you don't really know much about us, let alone anything 'secret', and those in the right need not "admit" to anything"
Artificial Stupidity?
The US healthcare site's ills are in part due to procurement system, like the lobbying system, being a political-industrial complex. As Clay Johnson said on Democracy Now!, "the people who are building this stuff are the people with the best lawyers, not the people with the best programmers".[11] But surely the people with the best hackers, the NSA, have an interest in the downfall of a more socialistic system...
Ignorance is Strength
Theoretically
"Those who ignore those who make history are doomed that they repeat it"
Propose a new theory: Manifest SNAFU! The opposite of Manifest Destiny, which has made a wholly undeserved return to an undead halflife as a misinterpretation by the Wrong of a version of Exceptionalism (Howard Zinn on the myth of Exceptionalism). With no more chance than Manifest Destiny of being right, Manifest SNAFU! nonetheless COULD be more right, and is thought-provoking. It postulates that there must be some reason that things are, as is apparent, Situation Normal-All Fucked Up. As is equally apparent, this because the losers were always right, and the winners always mistaken. Or to put it another way, the reason why there are winners is that they are mistaken.
NRA Escapes Reality
NRA's Wayne LaPierre is having trouble distinguishing between real life and video games, while the players do not. Wayyne threw video gamers, among whom are surely a few staunch gun owners, to the wolves in the face of the reaction to Sandy Hook, along with at least nine other scapegoats.[12] Gamers have always included in their numbers those who are philosophical about game violence, pointing out that pixels are not people, so animated, computed violence is not comparable to real violence. Games, and any other activity that critics want an edge against, have been labelled an 'escape from reality' for quite some time,[13] but LaPierre was clearly on the run. What is amazing is how far everyone - left and right alike - was prepared to follow him. Arming school security guards became normality, and arming school children was discussed. They have to defend themselves against the children with videogames, after all.
Even adult Americans fall prey to illogical arguments that have immoral consequences, such as the notion that the interests of one nation can supersede another's, so there is little doubt that moral guidance is useful. But a moral center exists in some games themselves. Compare the US Army's 'America's Army', which bet of millions on the idea that teens and pre-teens will be more amenable to what they stand for if it is in game form, with story-driven roleplaying games, which often show war as an evil. The Final Fantasy series provides its own moral context, commonly placing soldiers as tools of the villains. Similarly, becoming innured to violence and injury is not a moral detriment to surgeons and nurses. Or games can take the other route, which is to avoid violence altogether.[14]
- See Wikipedia:"Polish death camp" controversy. Sometimes the politics of the Wrong seems to misunderstand things deliberately. Previous 'misunderstandings': National Socialism, Islamofascism Gunboat Diplomacy (WP)
Divined from the entrails[15] of an imaginary scapegoat:
- 2009 : Obama chooses the Republicans' health care plan, hoping everyone will finally agree with it. Reps create the name "Obamacare" (WP) and declare war on it
- 2029: The Dems disband and join the Reps, hoping everyone will finally agree. Reps create the Fatherland Party, leave the Republican Party and declare war on it
Capitalist Cloud Cuckoo Land
You probably know the Law of Supply and Demand as saying that the price of something goes up when the supply decreases, but knowledge of the Law itself has fed back into the loop, causing speculators to sell when the price goes up, and therefore the supply increases.
- If it is Opposite Tuesday, then this not a Law, it is Fizzbin
Neurotics build castles in the sky. Psychotics live in them. Capitalists float a futures market on the expected returns of rent from them
This is either, a
Fahrvergnügen Driving Excitement Moment (aka
Traffic Jam), or lunch break at the
Feed and Seed, depending on whether the guy is waiting for a line of cars in front of him or waiting for his burger and fries to digest. You decide. Kind of makes a mess of the argument that public transportation is lame because you have to wait for buses
Computerized economy
As there were factories and workers and raw materials and consumers who wanted products and services both before and after 2008, why were all of these things suddenly diminished? The answer is, the money men. They make it run, they just stopped. And whether one describes it as, they stopped because they wanted to, or they stopped because they had to, they are still the weak link. And they can be replaced by computers. Not only are they paid more than everyone else, and not only do they do their job poorly (allowing everything to collapse every couple of decades), but they are entirely expendable. Every transaction that takes place in our economy can be performed by the merest electronic blink of a computer program. All the salesman. All the financiers. All redundant. And what would these people do for a living, you ask? Why, what everyone else does. It is really that simple. Imagine it.
Lemmings
- "...Packed like lemmings into shiny - metal - boxes / contestants in a suicidal race..." - The Police, Synchronicity II
Fully occupied buses get between 50%[16] and 125%[17] more miles per gallon per passenger than fully occupied cars. This model, of course, is not ideal;[18] car occupancy is an average of 1.5 passengers rather than four, and bus occupancy goes from nearly full occupancy at rush hour to almost empty at other times.[19]
Minibus and microbus routes have been used to great effect in Oxford England and other cities, often in developing nations, and achieve high levels of occupancy. With greater efficiency and smaller buses, the time between buses can also be reduced. But the key is public participation. The more people turn from private to public transportation, the lower the wait time, and the more expansion of bus routes.
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