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Ignorance is Strength

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]

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, the US is preparing for the attack before the UN inspectors get back, the UN's factfinding mission only stayed a token day or two, 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, etc etc.

Syria is #32 in the list of oil-producing nations, but this is only part of the story. There are only nine nations left in the top 31 that are not white European nations, or under the thumb of the US, and they are all either too large for the US to take over (China, Russia and for the moment, Iran), or are poised for regime change with the same propaganda mill setting them up in the public eye as failed or rogue states or some such: Iran again, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Nigeria, Venezuela and Ecuador.

In the top 30 and recently brought under US control: Iraq, Egypt and Libya. Coming soon, Syria. 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. And Tunisia will fall, as Egypt has; 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,^[2] which US puppets will win, in falsified elections, or by whatever other means necessary. Afghanistan was, of course, taken over to make secure the oil pipelines to the Caucasus. But 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, and it has been going on since at least the 19th century.

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) Gwen Ifil, when she 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 the US trying to take over the world, and you will only be wrong a small percentage of the time.

Theoretically
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.

Divined from the entrails^[3] 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

Commundiput
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%^[4] and 125%^[5] more miles per gallon per passenger than fully occupied cars. This model, of course, is not ideal;^[6] 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.^[7]

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.

Eternal War
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^[8]

Dearth from above
Neocon warhawks are soft and fuzzy airheads; they just grit their teeth as they speak empty euphemisms, so one thinks they must mean something by it:

Case in point: Michael Ledeen, who has advocated "the kind of warfare that not only destroys the enemy's military forces, but also brings the enemy society to an extremely personal point of decision..."

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"

Daily Kos Comics

Anarchopedia:Message archive

1. ↑ Lila Rajiva, "The CIA's Rendition Flights to Secret Prisons: The Torture-Go-Round", CounterPunch, 5 December 2005
2. ↑ Update: Tunisia to Dissolve Government After Assassination, Day of Mass Protests
3. ↑ Aruspicina: study of entrails to see the future Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan (1651). "Lastly, to the Prognostics [who] have added innumerable other superstitious ways of Divination[:]...Sometimes in the Entrails of a sacrificed beast; which was Aruspicina..."
4. ↑ Manufacturing Climate Solutions – Carbon-Reducing Technologies and U.S. Jobs Center on Globalization, Governance & Competitiveness (CGGC), an affiliate of the Social Science Research Institute at Duke University
5. ↑ Demonstration of Caterpillar C-10 Duel-Fuel Engines in MCI 102DL3 Commuter Buses
6. ↑ Thomas Rubin, in the "free minds and free markets" outlet Reason Foundation, criticized the report as being "far removed from actual “real world” experience." because the average occupancy of buses is so low. But it is Rubin who is not accurately portraying the real world, by using an average value, see main text
7. ↑ Passenger Transport (Fuel Consumption). Hansard. UK House of Commons. URL accessed on 2008-03-25.
8. ↑ http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-collections/415044/puppet-power/