The Negotiator

I spent the past week in sunny Calistoga, touring various local spots of interest, and generally avoiding all but the most peripheral "news" coverage. Funny how walking several miles a day (without looking at a damned phone the entire time) and visiting wineries and local small museums and such will clear your head like nothing else.

And yet, now that I spent some part of the weekend "catching up" as it were, acquainting myself with this week's round of interchangeable nonsense, the thing I keep coming back to is how dreadful our corporate media is. I mean it. They really suck bloated rhino balls. This Iran debacle is just the latest example.

By now, everyone knows the arsonist-firefighter dynamic of Shithead's "negotiating style":  create a problem where there wasn't one, puff up and act like the tough guy you know he really never was, pretend that a crisis has been averted thanks to his steady statesmanship, move on to find something else to fuck up. I mean we just went through this earlier this year with Venezuela, and people seem already to have forgotten.

Then, of course, there's North Korea. Can't wait for the homoerotic mash notes from Maduro, or the Iranian mullahs, for this jabbering dupe to start crowing about, like something was accomplished.

But what's pathetic is how corporate media dipshits like George Stephanopoulos and Chunk Toad persist in their delusional questioning of this fucking monster, as if he has anything legitimate to say or point to, on anything aside from racking up another trillion dollars of debt to give billionaires another tax cut. That's it, that's all he's done. Any temporary economic stimulus we might be experiencing from that will come to an end at some point, sooner rather than later.

This Twitter thread from Rita Konaev --  get this, someone with actual knowledge and expertise in a difficult area, so manifestly unqualified for the claque of simpering toadies and chickenhawks currently "advising" Grampa Walnuts -- captures the Iran situation nicely. As with North Korea and Venezuela and Syria before, we have been counting on Trump's manifest stupidity, impulsive behavior, and sheer incompetence to muddle through these foreign policy crises that he creates and then pretends to resolve. We're depending on this doddering asshole's insecurities, his bone-deep mommy and daddy issues, to keep us out of yet another war.

But that can also backfire. It is entirely possible for Trump to blunder his way into a real shooting war with Iran. His psychotic butt-buddies in Saudi Arabia and Israel would love nothing better. So far it's Russia and China who have been the voice of reason in this, and that alone should be a real cause for concern.

(Speaking of Russia and China, and backtracking to North Korea for a moment, it went practically unnoticed but within the past few weeks, Putin and Xi have each met separately with Kim Jong Un to reaffirm their mutual friendships with North Korea, and they have met with each other to essentially affirm a strategic alliance against us. And why not? We have revealed ourselves twice in less than twenty years to be superficial, short-sighted, and bugfuck stupid and crazy when it comes to selecting chief executives. Even if we manage to shed ourselves of Trump -- and even McConnell and Graham, and take back the Senate and all that -- there is no getting around the fact that forty percent of this country hates the majority, wants the confederacy back, and would round up everyone darker than them in a heartbeat.)

I think the odds are somewhat against us ending up in an actual shooting war with Iran. But if we do, it will be at the behest of the Saudis and Israelis. It should be clear by now that they own his fat ass.

Tea for the Tillerson

Everyone's aflutter about how Secretary of Oil State Tex Drillerson accurately described the emperor as a fucking moron. But as this extensive profile shows, while Drillerson himself isn't a moron, he's not exactly a genius either. Consider this episode from just a few weeks ago, at the JCPOA (Iran nuclear deal) meeting of the signatory nations:

Tillerson took the microphone and began again, his voice unwavering. The real problem, he said, was that Iran had been attacking Americans since 1979, when Iranian students seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held fifty-two diplomats for more than a year. “The modern-day U.S.-Iran relationship is now almost forty years old,” he went on, still looking at Zarif. “It was born out of a revolution, with our Embassy under siege—and we were very badly treated.” He enumerated Iranian-sponsored attacks in Lebanon in the nineteen-eighties and in Iraq more recently, which together killed hundreds of American citizens. “The relationship has been defined by violence—against us,” he said.

Tillerson wondered aloud whether the entire effort to improve relations with Iran wasn’t doomed by history. “We have more pounds, and our hair is gray,” he said. “Maybe we don’t have it in our capacity to change the nature of this relationship, because we are bound by it—maybe we leave it to the next generation to try.” He thought for a moment. “I don’t know. I’m not a diplomat.”

As Lavrov, muttering loudly in Russian, stood and led his assistants out of the room, the meeting broke up, with the officials talking in hushed tones about what had happened. For proponents of the nuclear deal, it was an unacceptably risky bit of brinkmanship. For the [Snowflake] Administration, it was an ideal expression of a bellicose new foreign policy, based on the campaign promise of America First. An aide to Tillerson later told me, “It was one of the finest moments in American diplomacy in the last fifty years.”

[emphasis mine]

Consider that for a second:  the top American diplomat conducts a sensitive negotiation that directly affects the national security strategy by asserting that he is not a diplomat.

Even if you give Drillerson some benefit of the doubt and assume that the comment was his way of framing the supposed intractability of the US-Iran impasse, this is an amazingly stupid and unproductive strategy, assuming your goal is to avoid a completely unnecessary war. Maybe we shouldn't assume that.

The larger strategic implications are even more counterproductive. We've clearly signaled the Iranians that there is no upside to making any concessions to enter into a non-proliferation treaty with us, since we've done everything possible to undermine it. The signal is equally clear to North Koreans that they shouldn't even bother to negotiate with us, since our word is no good.

Perhaps most dangerous of all is the signal being sent to our most important allies and friends (and, you know, Russia). This is yet another instance in which they have to decide whether to go on without us, since we have shown the world that no one else matters, and that we are more than willing to shoot ourselves in the foot if it gives us an excuse to tell everyone else to go fuck themselves.

This is poker of the highest stakes, being played by middling checkers players who don't really care about the outcome. It's a dangerous game, and we're all going to get burned. But hey, Big Daddy Cheeto gets to pretend to be a tough guy again, right? The scariest part is imagining who this toxic dipshit will select to replace Drillerson in the coming days when he decides he's had enough.

Useful Idiots

Fortunately for the world, Princess Snowflake's hypocrisy junket to the Magic Kingdom is nothing but a meeting wrapped around an arms deal. Snowflake reads a good game on combating terrorism, but nobody who knows anything about radical Islamic terrorism and its origins takes this guff seriously, not when the speech is coming from the blackened, beating heart of -- wait for it -- radical Islamic terrorism.

Hey, I'm fine with the aggro "drive 'em out of this earth" rhetoric of the speech. In fact, I don't have any real problem with the content of the speech itself -- except it denies most of the reality of where radicalized Islamic terrorists come from, who bankrolls them, and it seems to take sides in a 1,300-year conflict between Sunni and Shi'a, a fight in which we really have no dog to speak of.

And the practical reality is that our coddling of the Saudis takes actual sides in the wholesale carnage of SA's barbaric war in Yemen. Snowflake is too dumb to know that putting his comically small thumb on the scale will have unintended consequences. You'd think that since he has interests in a hotel in Baku that's financed in part by the Revolutionary Guard, he'd be more careful about that sort of thing, but maybe someone needs to slap his name on a place in Tehran for him to get the picture.

AmCon's Daniel Larison has written knowledgably and passionately on this subject, and places Snowflake's empty words and promises in their proper context. This is nothing new; every American administration since FDR has been guilty of this nasty open hypocrisy. This is the unfortunate price we have collectively chosen to pay for our shameless oil addiction.

The difference here is that past administrations have not (at least as far as we know) pocketed money for themselves for such deals. As Larison point out, the idea that Saudi Arabia -- where, as Snowflake's christofascist goon followers never tire of pointing out, it is illegal to possess a Christian bible -- belongs to a group of "nations of conscience" is hilarious at best, but mostly just disturbing.

Of course, as with everything else he does, it is all too easy to find any number of tweets from a couple years ago featuring Snowflake's trolling of Obama doing exactly what Snowflake and his entourage are doing right now. It was some sort of high crime that Michelle Obama refused to wear a headscarf, but totally fine for Melanoma and Joanie to do the same thing. Toby Keith playing a concert that only men are allowed to attend (little known fact:  Toby Keith is in Saudi Arabia what David Hasselhoff is in Germany. Go figure.). As the first commenter in the Balloon Juice link notes, it's all worth it to see Steve Bannon surrounded by towelheads, with no booze in sight.

In the end, this is just the first stop on a trip that goes next to Jerusalem, where the Israelis are already pissed at Snowflake burning an intel asset whilst showing off to his Russian masters, and then to the Vatican to visit a pontiff that he, Snowflake, has repeatedly insulted. Good luck, fatboy.

So nothing new to see here, but this is less about the administration in particular than the US' ongoing geopolitical strategy in general. A practical strategy balances potential regional hegemons against each other, if neither one is favorable to the superpower's strategic interests in that region. And in this case, since our operational strategy in terms of money and foreign policy effort expended, is Israel, which both Saudi Arabia and Iran propagandize against routinely.

Beyond the ME prism of Israel's interests, there is of course the strategic interest of preserving our access to oil, and now in containing the burgeoning displacement and refugee crisis, which again has been exacerbated greatly by the meddling of Saudi Arabia and Turkey at least much as by Iran.

The corporate media don't even bother reporting on these issues anymore, since for one, they are owned and operated by conglomerates which have vested interests in these imperial adventures, and for another, most 'murkins couldn't find these countries on a map, much less keep them straight in a discussion of geopolitical strategies of past, present, and future.

Perhaps if someone could spell it out for them how much a gallon of gasoline really costs once all the externalities are factored in, they might pay more attention, but probably not. All they care about is the imagined optics of this thing, but the reality is that Princess Snowflake was every bit as empty and obsequious as Chocolate Hussein Thunder, or any other figurehead who goes to pay tribute to the keepers of the holy spigot. Snowflake's speech might meet the lowered expectations that he seems entitled to on every goddamned thing, but that's about it.

War-ons and Wargasms

So Clownstick spends $90M last night lobbing five dozen Tomahawks into a pre-cleared Syrian airfield with no follow-up plan or policy, literally the lamest and most obvious sort of fo-po theater, and the dipshits at CNN fall for it right away. Someone should tell Chris Cillizza and Fareed Zakaria that the wingers who want to hear empty, mewling genuflections are already watching Fixed Noise for that shit.

No, Clownstick did not "become president" last night, anymore than he did a month ago when he used a KIA Navy SEAL as a prop in a (gasp!) teleprompter speech. He will never become president, not in any meaningful way, because it's never going to be in his skill set. He's going to fuck something up in the next three or four days, because he can't help himself, and this dopey, useless distraction will be forgotten.

When news broke of the sarin attack the other day, two questions immediately popped to mind, neither of which has been adequately answered, near as I can tell:

1. Wasn't the key to Obama supposedly abrogating his "red line" stance on Syria the promise from Putin that Syria's chemical weapons would essentially be taken away from them -- in which case, how did they get them back?
2. What strategic purpose for Assad would be served by using chemical weapons? After all, he's been dropping barrel bombs -- which cause plenty of damage and carnage -- for years, and no one's said shit. He could wipe out a hundred people easy with one or two of those. So what's in it for him to use the chemical weapons that were supposedly taken from him in the first place?

Assad's an amoral monster just like his old man, but he's neither insane nor stupid. The dynamics of the Syrian civil war are beyond the grasp of most Americans because the corporate media sucks balls and is comprised of a bunch of armchair Hemingway types whose dicks get as hard as a full-blown jingo's at the sight of a few lobbed missiles.

But the nutshell version is this:  the Assad family and their regime are mostly Alawites (Shi'a), ruling an overwhelmingly Sunni populace with generations of brutality and coercion. Push comes to shove and the regime topples, Assad and his family might get out, hand over a suitcase of cash to Putin and spend the rest of their days at a dacha outside Sochi. But the sultan's dogs would meet a fate not unlike that of many in neighboring Iraq after we kicked over their applecart, revanchist death squads roaming Baghdad with cordless power drills to run through the faces of their victims.

Of course, the missile strikes don't affect the equation or outcome in the slightest, because there will be no follow-through, because Clownstick is a dipshit and an oaf, and thinks strategically like old people fuck. He has no second move. He seriously thinks that the missile launch serves multiple purposes, and will signal the Chinese and North Koreans (and who knows, probably the Iranians while we're at it) that He Means Business. I'm sure Xi Jinping is trembling in his boots.

Xi is headed to a state dinner at the fucking Maga-Lardo country club, with its iceberg wedges and lobster mac-and-cheese and rich-asshole lemon parties, for one thing only -- a price. Xi will tell Clownstick what his foreign policy expectations are from us, and will make Clownstick an offer, and they'll haggle over the final amount, and Clownstick's little crime family will line their pockets once more (just like they are by holding official events at his business). That's all that is; Xi couldn't care less about the "show of strength" in impotently throwing money into a military runway that's already been repaired and is operational again, less than thirty-six hours later.

Xi is not going to get rolled or bullied on North Korea. Even a retard fake negotiator like Clownstick has to realize that the Chinese are in a position of strength here and we are not. There are no manufacturing jobs being repatriated from China, nor is there going to be a tariff slapped on Chinese imports. Everyone seems to get this but the master negotiator. There is no way to do those things without damaging the American economy, bigly. That's not politics, that's math.

Clownstick is such a joker and a loser that even his closet-case alt-right cargo cult is all butt-hurt on this one, insisting that the "globalists" headed by Clownstick's J-O-O son-in-law and daughter pushed him into this move on (heh-indeedy) humanitarian grounds. Setting aside Clownstick's Being There garden jabber about the "beautiful babies" being killed by the chemical weapons, it again occurs to one that more of those babies will be killed by the next round of barrel bombs, and again no one will say or do jack shit.

Observers are overthinking this whole thing. The alt-right cuck-tards are postulating a neolibcon takeover of their movement, pushing out Foster Brooks Steve Bannon in the purge. Even more stupidly, the putatively librul corporate mediots are proposing an even more ridonkulous theory -- that the missile strike is the opening gambit of some sort of grand strategy or (for fuck's sake) doctrine.

You wanna know what the fucking Clownstick Doctrine is? Here it is -- and listen close, 'cause it's a wild one:  make money bigly. I mean, there's some of the usual narcissistic self-aggrandizement baked into everything he does or attempts to do, because that sort of shit is to him what breathing and taking a dump is to us mere mortals. When he talks about being the smartest and bestest at every damned thing, remember that he's talking to himself, not to us.

But it shouldn't even need to be said that there's nothing at all beyond that, certainly not a strategy. Good grief, when it comes to strategery, compared to Clownstick, even Fredo W. Arbusto is fucking Garry Kasparov. Clownstick doesn't do strategy; he'd probably lose two out of three to a tic-tac-toe-playing chicken at the county fair. It's all id and impulse, there's no other gear with this guy. There is no strategic interest for the United States in Syria right now, other than containing ISIS and al Qaeda and the rest of that lot. But the continuation of those groups has as much to do with the Gulf states paying them protection money, and Turkey controlling all the water for the region, as it does with the atrocities of the Assad regime.

On the other hand, I tend to believe Clownstick also had sincere motives in lobbing the missiles for those beautiful babies. That is clearly how his mind works -- he's an addled, sundowning old man who gets every drop of his "information" and "knowledge" from the teevee. So he saw that shit on the teevee and had to Do Something. Coupled with his idée fixe that nothing says "diplomacy" like a big swinging dick (even when all can see that it's just a shriveled orange worm), he timed it against the Chinese state visit for maximum effect. But there's no doubt he seriously thinks that his show of force got ol' Assad all a-skeert and what-not. Sure. Problem solved. No more bombed babies.

Imagine your foreign policy and geopolitical strategy run by Mark Burnett. That's what you've got here, with less polish and suspense. He's gonna fuck this up just like he's fucked up everything else he's touched in his too-long life. It is the universe's weird, ironic sense of humor that his skeevy avarice and utter incompetence at the simplest of things will end up being the main things that keep us out of a nuclear war or an even greater depression than Shrub got us into a decade ago. Maybe.

Ideological Consistency

Oh, so you're saying that a woman-hating, boy-raping death cult has different rules for different people, that when one of their "leaders" takes a break from molesting farm animals to butt-fuck a teenager, they kill the teenager? I, for one, am shocked. I guess we should expect more intellectual honesty from barbarian fanatics.

More seriously, you really want to defeat ISIS, like for reals? Are you sure? Because here's the thing -- while our so-called foreign policy geniuses want to focus on "enemy" (translation: states that don't want to be compliant clients) nations like Iran and Syria, they're not really the problem. The countries that are exacerbating the situation in various ways are our closest "allies" in the region:  Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Turkey.

One thing Obama's critics have right is that his foreign policy is a sheer clusterfuck, especially in the Middle East. It is at best ineffective in some areas of the region (the air-bombing campaign in ISIS territory), and is actually worsening the problem in other areas of the region (Yemen).

World On Fire

The Republicans are basically the proverbial car-chasing dog who, once he's caught his quarry, has no idea what to do with it. If they really want to stick with their formula of Johnny Walnuts having a permanent seat at the Sunday morning follies, the usual think-tank monkeys agitating for war with whoever looks good, and Ted Cruz making an ass of himself at every turn, hey, go with what you know, guys.

It's become a well-worn truism that football (yes, American football, dammit) has become more dangerous in recent years not in spite of better technology, training, and protective gear, but because of those things. Instead of average-sized men holding off-season jobs to make ends meet so they can play football for a couple months in the fall, you now have superbly conditioned, freakishly proportioned men colliding with one another in suits of technologically sophisticated armor, at much higher rates of force and impact than in the era of Chuck Bednarik.

Similarly, the rapid advancement of drone technology has emboldened the hawks to instantly assume that airstrikes and drone-bombings are the "safe" option. And they are safe -- for us. Drones give policy-makers, armchair generals, and average joes alike the ability to just not think about there being any consequences to military actions. Not that they think about those things unless they or one of theirs is in the line of fire.

It's bad enough that we have been bombing -- maybe not indiscriminately, but not all that carefully either -- civilians in remote areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. But airstriking Iranian nuclear facilities means hitting cities. Tehran and its suburbs have somewhere around 20 million people. The nuclear labs have been quite deliberately placed in populated areas, albeit mostly underground. They make it sound so simple, we'll just "take out" their facilities, knock out their program, end their attempt at regional hegemony. Done and done.

Did we not just finally extricate ourselves from a decade-long clusterfuck that was sold as a slam-dunk, one that we'll be paying the financial, ethical, and medical costs for the next generation? Is the region not worse off in every way since we barged in and gave them their sweet, sweet freedom? Is there really a preponderance of 'murkins that thinks it's a simple and good plan to "surgically strike" the Iranians pre-emptively, that moral considerations aside, it would even just accomplish what its advocates say it will accomplish, nothing more, nothing less?

I don't think anyone has any illusions about what Iran is up to here. They really are moving, quickly and with purpose, to expand their influence in the Middle East. They are Bashar Assad's lifeline; they do flex nuts in Beirut, Damascus, and Baghdad -- and now in Sana'a, Yemen. They are surrounding the Saudis, waiting for the off chance that they flinch and provoke the Iranians, or more likely, waiting for ISIS to continue streaming into Saudi from the north, radicalizing an already radical citizenry, overthrowing the petrocrats, sending that country and probably the world economy into (to put it lightly) a turbulent situation.

So no one's saying that they're the good guys, the mullahs. But when the very same people who got us into Iraq are insisting that we simply must start it up with Iran, that it'll be quick and precise and work better than any other option, well, that's the time when you look at the people and politicians in this country, the United States, and see if they're ready to fall for that one again, so soon after the last one.

Some of them will; some of them are always ready to fall for whatever affirms their assumptions about how the world works. Some of them have trouble remembering that while we are friends to Israel (and they have the checks to prove it), our foreign policy is supposed to protect our interests first. But if it's a majority that's in favor of that mess, then you have a real problem.

Cotton Pickin'

Tom Cotton fits in perfectly with the current iteration of the Republican party, in that the more you get to know him, his stances on various issues, and the idjits he rolls with, the less you like about him. Like good ol' Fredo Arbusto, Cotton seems to be determined to undermine whatever credibility remains in a Hahvahd pedigree.

I mean, when you consider the standard media propaganda model, it makes a twisted sort of sense that Bill Kristol gets so much air time. Like the political class he clucks about, Kristol is a pedigreed, sinecured schmuck with the track record of a county fair chicken crapping on a bingo sheet. He's perfect for helping his insect corporate overlords sell pharmaceuticals, outsized trucks, and hemorrhoid crèmes. (And perpetual war for perpetual peace. With other people's kids, of course.)

But the idea of someone who actually affects policy and decisions taking Kristol's advice, not just with a block of salt but at all, such a person has instantly disqualified themselves from serious consideration. I have a ton of misgivings about Obama's foreign policy acumen; he seems to think it's chess when it's really poker. But Kristol isn't even playing Stratego, more like fifty-two pickup.

Mutiny on the Clownty; Or, None Dare Call It Reason

Because we now live in an era where a thumb-dicked, draft-dodging cousin-fucker like Rudy Giuliani can still get his corrupt ass on the teevee as a serious common-tater, political discourse has taken a more-tacky-than-usual swerve toward proving Who Loves Them Some 'murka More, I Mean Like With Tongues And Throbbing Cock And Shit.

So, since the new crop of conservatard dickheads naturally takes their cue from 'murka's Mayor (PBUH), leave it to freshman cracker Tom, I say Tom, Cotton (R-Cletusippi) to spearhead yet another misguided opportunity to make Black Satan look bad. Like he don't love him enough 'murka. Not like us, baby; he cain't loves ya likes I loves ya.

This is less about who might be borderline traitorous in their sentiments and activities, and more about a party -- an entire political party here, not just one or two key players moseying off the reservation -- to risk buggering a critical piece of foreign policy, just to make Obama look bad. That's the key here, that everyone other than they're own constituencies seem to understand -- these guys are more than happy to fuck the country sideways, if it makes Obama's job just a little bit more difficult.

(And it's no coincidence that Cotton got the nod for this nonsense, since he's brand-new and not running for higher office -- yet. If it blows up in their faces, the party elders can point to the kid having a rookie mistake; if it works out, it's a feather in his cap down the road.)

Whether that means tweaking the administration by hosting Netanyahu's campaign speech, or writing the mullahs a letter that does nothing but empower Iranian hard-liners, they have shown that they are plenty willing to go the extra mile to mess with The Man. It is central to the evangelical core ethos that most of these knuckle-draggers spout that Israel gets into an all-out Armageddon with the Arabs (never mind that Persians aren't Arabs, they're still Mooooooooslim). That is where their actions trump mere partisan hackery -- it is the future narrative of their belief system.

Jeffrey Goldberg has written some fine pieces for The Atlantic on this subject, trying to finesse the balance between dealing with Iranian leaders who do say vile, aggressive things about Israel, and understanding that the way to bring them around to a compromise is not to engage in useless brinksmanship. That sort of nuanced thinking does not come easily (or, perhaps, at all) to people who attained power precisely by eschewing all appearances of nuance.

The mullahs' statements are for internal consumption, of course, but that doesn't mean that Israel and the US should laugh them off. Many things are simultaneously true, and two of the most important ones in that region are:  one, that Israel needs to attend to its miserable treatment of its Palestinian population, sooner rather than later; and two, that Israel really is surrounded by unstable, despotic regimes who stay in power by stoking the grievances of their seething, resentful populations.

However, it is also important to note that Iran is bordered by countries who possess nuclear weapons, namely Russia, India, and Pakistan. Not to mention Israel itself, not to mention that Saudi Arabia and Egypt are no doubt doing everything they can to acquire the technology as well. American lawmakers, just like American citizens, seem completely ignorant of the idea that other countries might have interests of their own, and that those interests might run contrary to our expectations of them, or of the countries in our "sphere of influence," as the saying goes.

But this particular episode goes beyond the usual bumpkin parochialism, this is simply interference for its own sake, a petulant child throwing a tantrum in the supermarket for no better reason than to embarrass his mommy in front of all the other shoppers. Cue the canned Sunday follies with Johnny Walnuts and Huckleberry Closetcase tag-teaming the hapless hosts over whatever bullshit they decide to spread this week.

Cities of Salt

By now no doubt most people who are interested in geopolitical goings-on, beyond the usual "the Middle East is burning while Obammy fiddles" Chicken Little plaints, have read this exhaustive analysis of the ISIS movement. It's a valuable take on a subject that is simply too complex for a teevee -- or even most print outlets -- summary of the situation.

It takes some doing to go to London and Melbourne and sit down and listen to these cold-blooded psychopaths, who are using their religion as an excuse to fuel their apocalyptic fantasies, and address grievances that are legitimate, but are really the grievances of their parents and grandparents.

That said, I think the freshest thinking and writing on the subject is from John Robb at Global Guerrillas. Graeme Wood postulates in his Atlantic article that a theological movement whose doctrinal weight must eventually place it in a situation where it can no longer operate in the way it intends. Robb, on the other hand, sees these "open jihad" things as stigmergic, constantly iterative, with a clear short-term goal of taking down the Saudis, at which point they obviously are in a real position to write their own rules.

(Not that the Saudis have been great friends or anything.)

It should be clear by now that where the US has failed in its war on terror is in more or less the same mode as the Soviets failed in Afghanistan:  the approach has been rooted in ideology, rather than in a practical application of systems theory, as Robb approaches it. The Islamic State actors embrace both things almost equally well, which is another clear indication that a good part of their success is attributable to the Iraqi Army regulars who have defected to that cause, since we managed to fuck the dog so thoroughly in putting a corrupt Shiite gubmint in charge of what had been a mostly Sunni command infrastructure.

In other words, our obsession with de-Ba'athification post-Saddam worked in perfect congruence with the destabilization of Syria in the wake of a record drought (and please don't ask about who controls all the water that flows into Syria and Iraq). When people ask whence ISIS sprung and gathered momentum, those are the two big conditions that fed the beast.

In hindsight, it would have been wise to temper our expectations about the "Arab Spring" of a few years ago, so it would be wise now to carefully consider our viable options now that that false promise has faded into a haze of chaos, violence, recrimination. The usual right-wing armchair tough guys want to blame Obama for all that, and they're right insofar as geopolitics doesn't seem to be Obama's strong suit.

But, uh, it wasn't Fredo's strong suit either. I don't think anyone has the right answer, because the foreign policy of the hegemon is mostly all or nothing, especially since you can't use checkbook diplomacy with these Islamic State creeps. At the same time, you can't just let them overrun the Saudis either (and yes, all the precious oil). Iran and Saudi are mortal enemies, of course, which makes the dynamics of all this so much more compelling -- and dangerous.

The US has obviously had no talent for knowing which corrupt petro-douche to throw its support behind, and how (or how much). Strangely, it may turn out in retrospect that the biggest missed opportunity was to not have gotten the Russians involved to help strike a balance of great powers to assist in stabilizing the region (which again has not worked out too great so far, but look what's happened with no presence at all).

Putin did us a solid in helping dial down Bashar Assad's chemical assaults on his own people (not that that's stopped the Syrians from just dropping barrel bombs on "rebel" entities, who of course are hiding among civilians). And while the Russians' actions in Ukraine over the last year have been contentious, to say the least, there's been zero effort on our part to work any of it out, no acknowledgment of the fact that Russia considers a NATO state on its borders as unacceptable as we would consider Mexico becoming a Chinese or Russian satellite.

So what do you do about this region, and how? Our previous bungling empowered and cleared the way for these psychopaths, we have some moral obligation to at least think about options to help the captive populace. Forget the idiots from western countries who are going over there for jihad; no one will miss them if they get droned.

But more practically, maybe it's time to get serious about renewable energy sources, to dump Marshall Plan money into a Great Project -- akin to landing on the moon or Mars -- to make those sources viable and scalable. What powers the Middle East is oil revenues, and the second those are gone, the wealthy Saudis and Kuwaitis will get out one step ahead of the surging mobs, escape to their Greek island hideaways, and those places will sort themselves out. There will be voices calling for us to jump in, and again perhaps we have a moral obligation to do that in some respect. But it has to be done with the knowledge that innocent people will die, regardless of our good intentions, no matter how careful we try to be.

And it has to be done with a systems outlook that is responsive and agile, that adjusts as quickly as they do. It could all end up in another decade of chasing shadows in a miserable moonscape regardless, but that approach is the only way you stand a chance against a faceless, implacable foe.

And Jingo Was His Name. Ohhh.

The idea of "freedom of speech" is one of those things that resonates across the political spectrum, even if different people have radically different ideas about what exactly it means. What I think it means ultimately is that everyone has a right to be wrong, and even to be an obnoxious asshole about it. (See:  Party, Tea.) As long it doesn't pick anyone's pocket or break their arm, it can't -- and shouldn't -- be squelched.

So Bradley Cooper bought the film rights to deceased SEAL sniper (and serial fabulist) Chris Kyle's life, and got The Chair Haranguer to direct it. Oscars for everyone! And a perfect opportunity for Joe Average to refuse to flex his brain muscle one more blessed time. Who knew that people only want to see war movies where your side is clearly the good guys?

That's not to say that Michael Moore didn't know what he was instigating with his tweet about snipers being cowards. Moore has certainly made some wonderful movies and excellent points in the past, but he fails to understand what pretty much every liberal save Bill Clinton (who is a "liberal" only in the most technical sense, and only in comparison with the full-blood psychopaths on the other side) fails to understand -- the average 'murkin does not want the facts or discussion. He wants affirmation. He does not want to be challenged in his thoughts about The Troops, although he has yet to write his duly elected representatives to, you know, pay them better.

Even though the US military is obviously the largest in terms of firepower, one of the largest in terms of manpower, and by far the largest in area of deployment, there is actually only a very small percentage of Americans who serve or have served in the military, or even have a family member or friend in the military. Consequently, they are treated with a weird mix of misplaced reverence and outright ignorance. I'm not sure what you do, or why you do it, but I worship you for it, but not enough to keep you off food stamps, or to only send you to die for worthwhile causes. That's what all the ceremonial mumbo-jumbo boils down to, when the rubber meets the proverbial road.

Ceremony ends up mattering more than the people themselves; we would rather fold giant flags in football stadiums and participate in the obligatory 7th-inning stretch ritual than, I dunno, make the VA functional, get them jobs and counseling when they need it after returning. It's much easier to endlessly deal the more-patriotic-than-thou card off the bottom of the deck, than to think or do or say anything remotely useful to anyone besides themselves. Wrap it in a flag with plenty of empty benedictions, and you got yourself any random battle of twits virtually anywhere in this here fine country. It's not that difficult.

Here's what I suspect Joe 'murka's real take on snipers is:  their snipers are cowards, ours are heroes. That's all it ever is.

Tout Le Monde N'est Pas Charlie

If you run a blog, one geared primarily toward current events, it makes sense that when events occur, you jump on it with a quickness and register some sort of observational analysis, one that pinpoints your approval or disdain, ultimately. Counter-intuitively, I find myself more and more inclined to wait, to bide time, to consider as many elements, if not all "sides" of the event or argument. This is less a matter of some high-minded mission to craft the ineffable pronunciamento, and more of a recognition that, no matter how obvious something might appear at first, there is almost always more than initially meets the eye.

The initial base reaction to the mass murder of the Parisian satirists at Charlie Hebdo magazine is (and should be) revulsion. Brave stand, I know. Seems like an easy thing to condemn, like human trafficking, or animal cruelty. Setting aside the official iniquities of Balfour and Sykes-Picot and their policy heirs, ordinarily people have the right to be angry and disgusted not just at this massacre, but at other such horrors perpetrated, if by isolated cells of radicals, still radicals of a generally like-minded bent -- to kill, to destroy, to hurt and maim, not necessarily against "westerners," but against any and all people who are inconvenient to their murderous ends.

This Must Be the Transparency They Spoke Of

No administration ever turns out to be as responsive and transparent as they promise to be. It's practically impossible, especially for a commander-in-chief with zero military knowledge or experience. It makes sense that Obama will always defer to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on these matters.

There is almost no chance that the ISAF (and jeebus knows my dick gets granite-hard at the limitless ocean of sometimes recursive acronyms that the modern military is truly all about) will be more than minimally "successful," by whatever no-doubt-shifting criteria they choose to measure that. There's probably a variety of reasons, some of them measurable within the overall expenditure in question.

Maybe some of the Afghan Forces trainees are Taliban saboteurs. Maybe some of the money gets siphoned off here and there to grease the palms of local warlords, or Karzai and his family. Maybe all of the above. One thing Afghanistan -- like any other collection of human beings, but two generations of war has amplified it there -- has no shortage of is pelf and power and venomous shitheads who would fuck their own country over for a fistful of dollars.

So let's say that you, Tonstant Weader, are the preznit of these here Yewnighted States, and have a fine degree from Harvard Law but zero military experience. And Stan McChrystal or Peaches Petraeus tells you that the most efficient way to kill American enemies without endangering American soldiers is to deploy a fleet of killbots high above the Hindu Kush, controlled by some guy with a joystick in a trailer in Tampa.

Sure, there's always the chance that the hellfire you rain will kill some people who already want to kill you. But you won't have to send in more troops. That's the choice being presented to you, the president, by people who have a lifetime of experience with this shit. You can't tell them no without a better plan, one that you can take to the press and try to convince millions of people who hate you on a deeply personal level.

Or they tell you that these special military programs operating halfway around the world in an extraordinarily problematic part of the world, likely run by their handpicked protégés, need to remain classified because too much information would undo all the good work they've done, and intend to do. Knowledge is power, and in this case would empower the bad guys.

So what are you gonna do, smart guy? Tick-tock, you have to make a call, and soon, because as the song says, choosing not to decide still counts as a choice.

I'm not in any respect sticking up for Obama or his chickenshit acquiescence to many of these policies, which have only increased in scale and degree, and will only continue to do so. We'll know we're at the saturation point when drones are used to attack (don't worry, it'll be spun in the media as "defending" against thuggery) the next Ferguson riot. But in the meantime, it's not that difficult to see how these wrong-headed decisions get made.

Damage Control

Could the half-baked excuses offered by the seventh-century death cultists for shooting schoolgirls possibly be a sign that they're losing traction? Who knows. What's really something is the sheer balls this guy displays in his pretzel logic:

"If you were shot [by] Americans in a drone attack, would [the] world have ever heard updates on your medical status? … Would you were called to UN? Would a Malala day be announced?"

It goes without saying (or should) that incidents of indiscriminate drone bombing are horrific and despicable, and deserve the censure of decent human beings around the world, since their governments give far less than a shit what anyone thinks. But the attempt to morally equivocate that with the deliberate, systematic abuse and terrorizing of women and children is about as craven as it gets.

We definitely need to get the hint already that drone-bombing, among other tactics, creates as many or more terrorists as it removes. That does not absolve these bastards, if we left tomorrow, would still routinely be violently subjugating the weak, and perpetuating their regressive, dead-end creed.

Another Day, Another Lie

So here's yet another in a long line of "the Moooslim Brotherhood in the White House" sacks of crap circulating the agnotosphere, even though the "event" actually occurred nearly a full year ago:

A course for U.S. military officers has been teaching that America's enemy is Islam in general, not just terrorists, and suggesting that the country might ultimately have to obliterate the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina without regard for civilian deaths, following World War II precedents of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima or the allied firebombing of Dresden.

The Pentagon suspended the course in late April when a student objected to the material. The FBI also changed some agent training last year after discovering that it, too, was critical of Islam.

The teaching in the military course was counter to repeated assertions by U.S. officials over the last decade that the U.S. is at war against Islamic extremists — not the religion.

"They hate everything you stand for and will never coexist with you, unless you submit," the instructor, Army. Lt. Col. Matthew Dooley, said in a presentation last July for the course at Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Va. The college, for professional military members, teaches midlevel officers and government civilians on subjects related to planning and executing war.

Dooley also presumed, for the purposes of his theoretical war plan, that the Geneva Conventions that set standards of armed conflict, are "no longer relevant."

Since then, Lt. Col. Dooley has been fired, in no small part thanks to letters of protest from dozens of organizations representing various cultural and ethnic organizations, who all have Islam in common. So naturally, the folks who see an exploding turban under every bed and/or the creeping threat of sharia law being mandated in the heartland have taken all this to mean complaisance or outright complicity on the part of Obama and his eeeevil minions, whose poorly-hidden mission it is to convert, whether by legalistic trickery, the sword, or some sort of jabbery hocus-pocus. Booga-booga!

Folks, there's no denying that political Islamism is no friend of western democratic principles. It is openly and overtly hostile, not only to the past century of Anglo-American meddling in the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia, but even to relatively benign cultural mores, such as women being allowed to drive, vote, and not be forced by threat of violence to wear sweltering tents whenever in public. Extreme Islamists flip out over the mildest of slights, from cartoons to books. You could not write, produce, and perform a Book of Islam musical, without riots and murders. There's no getting around it, they're dicks and goons. They need to go.

But to insist that a religion with over a billion adherents in dozens of countries is (to indulge in legalistic jargon) jointly and severally responsible for the vile actions of a statistical sliver, is just nuts. And if the excerpts that have been shared from Lt. Col. Dooley's seminar are accurate, then in fact he is striking a needlessly provocative, antagonistic stance, one that will only serve to further polarize the massive impasse between the two cultures.

TMI

One thing the Boston terrorist attack has really driven home this week is the prevalence of "too much information" -- in both senses of the phrase. Maybe some people still watch the corporate evening news, when they're not fixing typewriters and fax machines. But I wager most of us, in this interactive world, get our information from news aggregators.

More often than not, that means subjecting ourselves to a toxic barrage of nonsense, a dynamic in which we're encouraged to commit and contribute our two cents, even if the actual opinion offered isn't worth that amount. Notions of intellectual honesty, or logical consistency and integrity, are completely disregarded, not even acknowledged.

This doesn't just apply to the usual retarded political sentiments, by the way -- the profusion of social media inanities is something that just a generation ago would not have been just technologically impossible, but conceptually impossible. The technologies, and the social mores that have cropped around them, have literally changed the way we think and perceive these interactions, in a way that, to someone born before, say, the mid-1980s, would have been truly inconceivable. The advancements in technology were foreseeable enough, it's the regression to the mean of basic interaction that would have been more difficult to prognosticate.

Or not. That other great '90s cultural phenomenon, The Jerry Springer Show and its innumerable bark-show brethren, presaged the now commonplace norm of televised human cockfighting. Anyone who might have not gotten the memo about some people being truly mean bastards, should have a clearer understanding now.

Projection

Remember when one of the primary -- and most hilarious -- rationales given for invading Iraq was the idea that Saddam might have a squadron of nucular-tipped drones that would only take 45 minutes to get London or Washington? Somewhat ironic, considering how much we've depended on drones in the Afghan campaign (and the amount of diplomatic grief some of their more "erroneous" misfires have caused.

The commentary over Iran's pursuit for nuclear capability has been uniformly paranoid. Not that the mullahs are nice guys, and they very well could cause some trouble with the capacity for nuclear weapons, most notably by dissemination through surrogate independent terrorist cells.

But the simpler and more prevalent explanation is that Iran simply needs to keep up with its neighbors at this point. If you live in a really dangerous neighborhood to begin with, and all your neighbors have AR-15 assault rifles, and all you've got is a 12" Buck knife, are you gonna want a gun or what, just in case?

Anyway, this whole snafu plays right into China's hands, at least as much as Iran's. Between the Osama copter and now this, their reverse-engineering crews have just gotten a huge upsurge in projects to work on. And the tech monkeys can downplay this all they want, talk about how the Sentinel's tech is already been surpassed, but the fact is the plane has only been declassified for four years, and therefore is almost certainly less than ten. For a country that's still playing catchup on 70-year-old nuke tech, they'd settle for being just ten years (or less) behind on surveillance drone tech, since that is a huge future branch of warfare.

It might be useful if, just once in a while, our insect overlords considered their projected anxieties about certain weapons and tech, and see if that helps them empathize a bit more with other countries that are nervous over our capabilities with those weapons. Rational-actor theory aside, a scary weapon is still just that.

Tardocalypse Now

Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ, this country desperately needs an enema. Take your pick at what's more morally repugnant -- the shameless racism, the mind-boggling illiteracy, or the complete inability to compose anything remotely resembling a coherent fucking thought. Truly, the best part of every single one of these halfwits ran down the cracks of their mommas' asses and ended up as a brown stain on a dirt road.

Some days you just figure that maybe Darwin was wrong after all.

[Via Gin and Tacos.]

A Small Victory

A crackling portrait, the fondling of trophies
The null of losing, can you afford that luxury?
A sore winner, but I'll just keep my mouth shut
It shouldn't bother me....but it does
-- Faith No More

Heading into this past weekend, after two solid months of Charlie Sheen/Donald Trump/royal wedding guff from the rancid husk that passes for our corporate media, I had plotted out the usual pained jeremiad lamenting that which has at this point already been long lost. Sometimes it feels good to sing a familiar song, vent spleen into pixillated void, edit it into something passable.

Process, as they say, is important.

Needless to say, the events of the past 48 hours have cast my would-be picayune musings into rather sharp relief. Ever undeterred and still endlessly annoyed by the (seemingly paradoxical) abdication of a vacant institution, I have to lob at least a couple of scuds on the aforementioned inanities. The continued boosting of said inanities only feeds into the lame meme of the lamestream media, yet damned if it is not becoming more and more true.

Useta be that the meringue stories fell into a certain time of year when folks' attentions were presumed to be only incidentally tuned to the teevee. Moving summer-of-the-shark type crap into heavy rotation during March and April only makes one wonder what fresh hell awaits the unsuspecting person who might actually expect something, anything, newsworthy to float through their electronic transom during the summer.

Instead we get a vapid, overblown nobody with a crappy show traveling the country and making a complete jackass of himself; an inbred Hanoverian dynasty desperately trying to sling the tinsel of relevance on its archaic, completely useless offices and ceremonies -- and of course, Charlie Sheen.

Sheen's case is reprehensible for its simplicity, for starters -- a man is self-destructing, seemingly at a mile a minute, in front of America, and fucking with his bosses the entire time, while keeping up a level of whoring and drug intake that would have brought down most people. Everybody loves a train wreck, but not when it's drawn out so far past its shelf like, and not when it culminates in the likes of Matt Lauer pumping some weedy teevee therapist about What Charlie Should Do. Well, Matt, maybe Charlie should do his next bump off yer wife's ass, champ. How ya like them apples? It's just cheap, tawdry voyeurism at its worst.

Trump and the Windsors were just exhausting in the Jesus-Christ-who-in-their-right-mind-fucking-cares sense. The idea that anyone, besides shut-ins and morbidly obese people with broken remote controls, would watch royal wedding crap for three blessed weeks straight is utterly perplexing. It quite literally makes zero sense, except as the most abject, desperate attempt at marketing -- I dunno, tourism, wedding dresses, something along that line.

Considering that family of theirs, the princes seem like more or less normal decent people, who just happen to be able to get pretty much anyone and anything they want. One of 'em got married. Seriously, I mean, big fucking deal, are they going to follow the new couple to Mustique and film them having sex? It's difficult to escape the impression that this is not really a demand-driven market, but rather something that is pimped and pumped until certain segments just give in.

That's also the only sensible explanation for why anyone would watch more than five seconds of Trump's estimable contribution to the body cultural. Yes, F-list has-beens and never-weres threatening each other and pulling out each others' weaves. Why not just beat your own skull in with a large rock and have done with it?

Trump's bizarre attempts at political jabber make his weekly NBC abortion look like fine craft. Perhaps this is all performance art, just another distraction aimed at the already overly-distracted. Nevertheless, the fuck-China, take-their-fuckin-oil, whaddaya-gonna-do-bout-it-fuckface attitude capture perfectly a deeply ingrained, reflexively ignorant posture in the 'murkin body politic. He's the perfect preznit for people who confuse endlessly promoted scenes of Meat Loaf and Gary Busey screaming at each other with reality, much less with entertainment.

---

For a few years in the late '90s, I had a pirate rig on my satellite teevee system, basically an ancient PC with (iirc) a 386 processor, whose sole function was to simulate code for the satellite card reader. Periodically DirecTV would catch on, disable the code, and you'd wait a couple hours for a new code to pop up online and load (via floppy disk, mind you) over to the system. It was pretty sweet, since we got everything -- all the sports packages, all the movies, all the porn, yada yada.

There were also all the local network packages for something like two dozen markets around the country, New York, LA, Chicago, Jacksonville, what have you. It was cool to check out other local news teams, get some local weather, see what the weather bunny looked like, the usual. You could watch Live at Five at 2:00 Pacific time, Letterman at 8:30.

One thing that became a guilty pleasure -- perhaps because of its total spontaneity, perhaps simply because I'm originally from Los Angeles -- was when the 5:00 LA news would air a police chase, completely live, no delay, nothin'. Sometimes I'd recognize neighborhoods I had lived in or near, sometimes these things would go on for much longer than you thought they could. Some of these would-be getaway drivers (and they always get caught, of course) are pretty inventive, dumb as they are for thinking that they actually have a shot at getting away from the LAPD.

So one fine afternoon an epic chase comes on, goes on for at least fifteen minutes, not in the heart of the city, but the sprawling, interchangeable communities bordering it, your Norwalk, your Bellflower, your Cerritos, etc. Through alleys, around corners, backtracking around blocks, knocking garbage cans, sideswiping and cutting people short, narrow misses every few seconds. Crazy shit. This putz was endangering people, but you almost had to have a grudging respect for his sheer animal will, his utter belief that he would not be caught. The helicopter, the all-seeing eye, captures every move, every dodge, every squealing, frantic turn.

Finally he comes up on an overpass, hemmed in because, well, it's LA and it's fucking rush hour, and you ain't getting near any freeway in a hurry. Sits there parked on the overpass for a minute. Helicopter starts zooming in its focus, so's you could see the profile of the guy through the driver-side window, actually see his face fairly well. Naturally, there is periodic commentary throughout from the meat puppets at the anchor desk, peppered with the usual bons mots from the one in the copter, and by now, they're in the "well, what's he gonna do now?" mode.

Welp, here's what he does, friends 'n' neighbors -- while the copter has its nice tight shot on this gentleman sitting in his ancient, now-beaten Monte Carlo, no doubt pondering the sequences and patterns of decision-making and impulse control, both throughout his life and on that particular day, which led him to this particular fork in the proverbial road, he blows his fucking brains out. If anyone had any doubts about whether these chases were completely live, no delays, they were certainly dispelled that tragic instant. Suddenly it's no longer fun and games. Needless to say, the station was shocked at such an outcome, and made some changes.

There's yer reality teevee, folks. All these circle jerk shows, with their barely-vicarious nonsense, manipulative scripting and editing, and intensely manufactured and programmatic setups, taking weeks to "tell" a "story" that should really take a couple hours (and isn't interesting to begin with), featuring idiots that you wouldn't let clean your gutters, are nothing, just filler between endless ads for overpriced vodka and completely unnecessary pharmaceuticals.

Used to be that if you didn't like a show, you could avoid it by changing the channel. But with endless cross-promotion cluttering up blocks of time formerly devoted at least to somewhat newsworthy subjects, that is less and less the case. This has been amplified by the onslaught of Trump, posturing dickhead bloviating to anything and everything that looks like a microphone, blustery nonsense guaranteed to aggravate our creditors and give credence to the notion around the rest of the world that Americans will fall for damned near any ricockulous notion.

Even, as it turns out, the fuckwitted idea that a casino owner -- you know, the business model where people come in, drop off money, and leave -- who has managed to go bankrupt four times, might be a good or even competent businessman. But again, this seems much more media-driven than truly demand-driven (not to mention, for NBC, a pretty cheap and obvious conflict of interest, for which they really deserve a nice boycott). But it is also an inescapably ugly instance of the innate, lame voyeurism that pervades the popular culture at large. People feel compelled to gawk, even when there's nothing at all to see.

Maybe is the true palpable cultural residue of "reality" teevee -- people no longer have the urge -- perhaps not even the capacity -- to discern what has value and utility, and ignore or reject the toxic emissions of this ocean of dross. At some point, one would think, people might get sick of Trump's obnoxious preening and increasingly dismal choices for contestants. But then, the Survivor thing still seems to be on, weirdly, inexplicably. I still think dropping a crate of weapons on the next site would liven things up.

---

So. Bin Laden, eh? Good riddance and all that, but it's strange, this woofing, chest-thumping dynamic. The surprise Moe Greene-ing of bin Laden seems to have awakened our inner Homer Simpson, never too far below the surface in the first place.

9/11, you'll recall, itself brought out some baser, more opprtunistic impulses -- suddenly every inbred dipshit who had always trashed NYC as a multiculti librul enclave knew how best to avenge the city's honor, even though the majority of New Yorkers themselves, once the initial shock was over and cleanup had commenced, seemed determined to get up, brush off, and move on. The people with the least direct investment seemed the most bloodthirsty, especially in their eagerness to turn everything ending in -stan into a parking lot. The bloodlust was completely undiffused by important questions, such as who and how, and what the most rational course with the best outcome might be. People just wanted to go fuck up the first guy that looked cross-eyed at them. So we did.

This time, the bloodlust is undiffused by any rational thought about the results of killing bin Laden. It is not going to bring one (1) soldier home from a war zone a day earlier; it is not going to save a dollar or a dime from the military budget. It is still going to be standard procedure to molest travelers and confiscate toothpaste at airports; we will still detain people without charge or recourse, without defense or representation.

But one expects woofing from five-digit crowds at sporting events; that is, after all, the original, time-tested purpose of mobs gathered in stadia, drunk on $8 trash beer, deep-fried organ meats, and an unstoppable sense of self-regard. More offputting was an exchange I happened across yesterday on the public Nice Polite Republicans station, home of the soothing, dulcet-toned panderers of reasonable discourse. One of these indistinguishable gits was counseling a caller who had lost a loved one in the Towers, was still grieving of course, and had possibly achieved closure with this latest news. Good for him; after unspeakable tragedy, everyone needs to find whatever works for them to screw up the courage to soldier on and make the most of it.

But it struck me during the counseling session, not how routine these genuflections to public grief have become, but how invisible the grief of innocents who had our rage inflicted on them has always been. I recall stories of mothers literally digging through gardens of limbs, walled slaughterhouses of parts, looking for some sign of a lost child. I recall Fallujah getting white phosphorus, cheerfully referred to as "Willy Pete", which melts your skin off, being indiscriminately spewed into large cities under siege, to subdue them, force capitulation. I recall Abu Ghraib, prisoners humiliated and raped for the amusement of their pervert captors, and beaten and killed at times. There is never, and will never be, so much as a thought or a care for any of these lost souls, all of them preventable, none of them necessary, a great many of them genuinely innocent of any misdeed whatsoever, aside from being in the way.

Don't get me wrong -- the world is better off without the likes of bin Laden, and "moral equivalence" attempts to square the grief of 9/11 with the grief of the Iraq war will always ring false, as moral equivalence tends to. The SEAL team that went in and accomplished this mission did amazing precision work, truly a surgical strike. There will be foreign-policy implications, but there always are, no matter what we do, right or wrong. There is something here to celebrate and be proud of.

It's the public grief-plumbing that puts me off. It's just the stark, grotesque disparity of it all, one endlessly fetishized and the other long dropped down the memory hole. Most unbecoming of such a Christian nation, since perhaps the most durable tenet of that particular religion may be the principle of empathy.

Although I constantly claim to be "perplexed" by the manifest oddities of the world around us, and its cantankerous, misbegotten denizens, the reality is that the capacity for genuine surprise seems long gone.

My Booky Wook

One certainly hopes "Pastor" Terry Jones is proud of himself. After all, it's not every day you can get innocent people killed with your idiot shenanigans; normally you have to be in a decision-making capacity in the federal government to accomplish that feat.

But Jones is no ordinary idiot -- in fact, perhaps inspired by his Yosemite Sam choice in facial hair, Jones has found a fairly innovative way to extend his sheer ridonkulosity:

Two weeks ago, with no advance notice, the burning was on again. The Quran was torched after a mock trial in which the book was found guilty of various transgressions.

Terry Jones howlds trile fer th' Caurt o' Jaybus.

Yes, a mock trial for a religious text. No word on whom "represented" the "defense", nor what, if any, transcript exists. This asshole's theatricality -- a clergyman who packs heat! -- knows no bounds. Straight outta the 12th century, y'all.

Of course, Jones figgers that the barbaric response simply proves his point. And he's not entirely wrong about the differences in response to fairly mundane events -- as corrupt and messed-up as Teh West and/or "Christendom" might be, there is simply no analog in the western world to the deadly riots that occur across Islamistan when someone draws a cartoon or burns some books.

But if we are results-oriented, this is not entirely relevant. The fact is that Jones is a cheap, sleazy provocateur, willing to put people's lives at risk for a stupid stunt. His intent was to antagonize, not to prove some epistemological point.

More interesting is that it hasn't seemed to occur to anyone that perhaps at least part of the reason behind the riots is the desire to let unwanted guests know that it is time to leave. In many ways Afghanistan is a debauched, sick culture, where a bunch of overcompensating child-rapists keep their society square in the dark ages by the systematic, violent repression of women.

Yes, America treats its women like second-class citizens, but Afghanistan treats them like hundredth-class citizens as a way of life. But the complicity of American companies in organized pedophilia -- not to mention American soldiers thrill-killing teenagers and old people, mutilating and desecrating corpses, acting like they're doing the world a goddamned favor by venting their frustrations on the weak and powerless -- brings us to that level. Whatever it is we think we're doing, it's not helping.

Now those are sensible reasons to riot -- except here, of course, where even the open gutting of the world's economy merely elicits more tweets on the comings and goings of assholes like Charlie Sheen or Donald Trump, rather than the immediate defenestration or guillotining of the perpetrators. But it's easier to oversimplify it as another instance of the wogs going batshit over a dumb book.

The decline of the empire continues apace, not only because of our institutional inability to know when to fold 'em, but our collective refusal to acknowledge plain facts right in front of us.

Duh, Winning

Onward to the Maghreb! As Hitchens once poetically put it, some people never learn, but then some people never intend to.