Yes Man

The NY Times' op-ed page is a big bowl of boiled ass these days, but once in a while they cook up an article that breaks out some useful info and details. If half of what's here is true -- and there's no reason not to believe it's 100% accurate -- we are in deep shit.

There's no way to overstate how much the US strategic position in Asia has been abruptly diminished by these fucking morons running the show now. This is much bigger than two fat guys with fucked-up haircuts battling over who has the coolest comb. The world is already headed toward a period of dominance centered around the Indian Ocean. The morons are simply accelerating that trend with alarming quickness.

This is what happens when you start your tenure as [fart] chief executive by gutting your entire foreign service apparatus, through a potent combination of spite, ignorance, mendacity, and negligence. When I've referred to Clownstick as a "barstool drunk," the sort of nasty idiot who thinks he knows everything and provides no evidence at all to back it up, this is Exhibit A. Clownstick has jabbered on and on and fucking on about how much they are shorting us on the security invoice, as if the US military was just a bunch of mall cops hired out to contain the shenanigans in the galleria food court.

It literally does not occur to the dotard that we have logical reasons for carrying more of the burden in NATO and the UN, that the greater outlay buys us far more credibility in calling the shots and providing direction. There are reasons we stay in Germany at greater expense to us, as well as Japan and South Korea. All of those countries would just as soon we packed up and went home, even as they grudgingly recognize that in the end, we do serve as a bulwark against Russian and Chinese hegemony. And the fact is, humanity is just at that point where there is going to be a hegemon regardless, so it might as well be the Americans.

But none of these things have any meaning to someone whose every thought and move and impulse is purely transactional, on a level that a crack-whore kneeling in an alley for her fifteenth blowjob of the day doesn't operate at. All the dotard sees when he looks at a map is how many more venues he can slap that worthless name of his on. He couldn't care less if he steps on the toes of allies he may need for something else in the future, or if he fucks up generations of established international diplomacy norms that have kept billions of people safe, however imperfectly.

These things were already in motion regardless, as we are now nearly four generations removed from the post-WW2 arrangements. Japan in particular has seen a resurgence of right-wing militarism and nationalism; the current generation clearly no longer has any use for the terms of surrender acceded to by their great-grandparents. Germany, like the rest of Western Europe, have already had enough of Mister Man's bullshit, and are trying to figure out a way to deal with the bear without our guns parked in their backyard. They seem to figure that they can trade and finance their way into some sort of arrangement, and given that Russia faces a serious succession crisis whenever the 65-year-old Putin retires or dies, they may be right.

All of it points to the same thing:  the other powers under our longstanding security umbrella have been growing restive, and were in the process of testing the waters anyway. Obama was reflexively conservative (in the old-school sense) about flexing US military power, and his over-reliance on soft power set the stage for the current volatility in the MENA region, and no doubt emboldened China and Japan at the very least to start charting their own courses.

The dotard's approach to North Korea, as detailed in the Times article, will eventually serve as a template of this group's disastrous approach to international diplomacy. It's one thing for him to bluster about ignoring Democrats and liberals on the foreign policy front, but this guy is undermining his own team, and it's a shortchanged team to begin with.

Think about it:  their big diplomatic feint with the Norks was to send his knockoff-handbag-peddling brandbot daughter to the fucking Olympics to stare them down. There is no official presence in the diplomatic corps for this part of the world, no ambassador to South Korea, no Undersecretary of State for the region, a shortage of qualified interpreters and translators in the foreign service.

Considering the various consequences and ramifications, and the singularly inept track record of the moron and his gang of dopes and fools, there's too many ways for them to fuck this up royally -- even if Kim and Clownstick never actually meet -- and only a couple ways to get it right.

Outrage Du Jour

So let's see if we have this straight -- this weekend commenced a massive bombing run in yet another fragmented, despotic Middle Eastern nation that we know nothing about, to kill people we know nothing about, to render consequences we (via the transitive properties of the first two points) cannot foresee. Again.

And yet what's got people's panties in a huge fucking wad is whether a meaningless public gesture was properly made. Friends 'n' neighbors, I'll tell you something -- there are a lot of reasons to be unhappy with Obama. An off-handed, half-assed salute is about #50 on the list.

I've said it before and I'll continue to say it to my final day:  a country so chock-full of whinging boobs and ninnies deserves exactly the corrupt, inept, grasping, scheming gubmint it gets, from the Moooslim in Chief on down to goat-fucking reprobates like Louie Gohmert.

Let me be more specific on this subject. Since for some inexplicable reason I like to keep "informed," and don't have enough disposable income to, you know, take a vacation and have a life, I am all too aware of dopey "cultural barometer" non-issues such as this. I prefer to look at current events, and their concomitant media coverage and reactions from the rabble, in terms of nutritional content, on a pound-for-pound basis.

In other words, while I might disagree with someone's opinion on, say, the war in Afghanistan or what to do about Wall Street, at least those issues have some real heft and effect. Even if I radically disagree -- even if I am diametrically opposed, like Chaotic Good to Lawful Evil, yo -- at least the worthy opponents have registered their jabber on an issue that actually means something. At least it's an issue that can be chewed over. There's some steak there, some protein in the mix.

What I have come to think of as "Facebook" issues, such as the (socialist, atheist) pledge of allegiance, this "latte salute" arglebargle, or just how awesome the movie God Isn't DeadGod's Not Dead is, where people will work themselves into a nice frothy lather (much like that in Obammy's coffee cup, oh snap!), it's nothing. It's marshmallow crème. It's a 50 lb. gunny sack of Cheetos. It's a steaming bucket of shit. It's a fucking bowl of Cool Hwhip. It is not only completely devoid of any nutrition whatsoever, it is bad for you.

And I'm sorry, but even children can tell the difference; adults certainly should be able to as well. Cheap symbolism is just that, nothing more. On the one hand, there are and have been symbols that bind peoples, nations, groups of like-minded people. But, uh, guess what? We now communicate instantaneously, we are not constrained by temporal boundaries of distant, unreliable service of mail and news.

The idea that the empty comfort of a crisp salute, from a man who otherwise is preoccupied with starting more wars to slow the decline of his political party, and stroking the pelf-grubbing thieves who own everything, means anything, beyond what gaggles of choice idiots think they need it to mean, is preposterous. If he salutes to their approval -- and you can be sure that, for the most part in six years so far, he has, or the quaking dipshits at Faux News would have hit you upside the head long ago -- those other things are still taking place.

All these staunch defenders of "our troops" and the utterly meaningless rituals that surround their activities. Here's a thought -- if you're so gung-ho about supporting military personnel, howzabout you devote your energy and cheap, empty rage to getting them a decent pay scale?

ISIS Crisis

On the 13th Anniversary of Never Forget Day, we find ourselves ready to head back into Iraq, on a seemingly more justifiable mission than last time, but still a fool's errand with no happy ending. It's not that you can't make a respectable case for military and humanitarian intervention in the region. And if it's remotely true that the group has considerable assets and volunteers from a variety of countries, it is entirely conceivable that a non-Arab cell could sneak, say, a nuclear suitcase into Miami or Baltimore.

What should give pause is what is seemingly not being said, at least as far as I've seen or heard. The fact of the matter is, as Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya and Syria and any number of countries in the region demonstrate, we don't know what we're doing there. We don't know anything about these people, we don't understand why they hate us, we can't figure out the difference between the various groups. We don't know the cultures, the languages, we can't find them on a map.

When you don't know jack shit about a country and people you want to bomb or otherwise commit violence upon, isn't it time you checked your basic premises? Does there have to be a larger casus belli than "I think these guys might be assholes, if these are the guys I'm thinking of."? Weren't some of these ISIS cells rebelling against Bashar al-Assad just a year ago, and weren't we ready to arm them in their fight?

Nowhere in this "spreadin' freedom" effort of the last decade or so, nowhere in the premature triumphalism of the Arab Spring, was the possibility noted that, just because the citizens of these countries had chosen to free themselves from the torturous yokes of (sometimes American-supported) despots and dictators, that they automatically wanted what we had to offer -- an emotionally-retarded culture buttressed by an economy mostly based on rackets and pilferage. Shit, they already have those things.

Look, even if these ISIS assholes aren't a direct threat to American geopolitical interests -- and they almost certainly are, if not a direct threat to the US mainland itself -- it is also difficult to simply stand by while they decapitate foolhardy journalists out in their desert moonscape, while they seize dams and terrorize cities and civilians, while they attempt to exterminate minority religions in the area. But it must also be taken into account that our track record has been one of going in and leaving a bigger mess than when we got there.

Wars and insurgencies, whether they are wrought by religious terrorists or secular governments, are fought for one reason and one reason only -- to establish and legitimize power. Clausewitz's saying about war being politics by other means is as true as ever. It might be helpful if for once, we knew what we were getting into before getting into it.

Peace Frog

There's having the right to defend yourself, and there's being a dick just for the sake of being a dick. Israel's land-grabbing is not going to help it, not in the long run. They are being outbred by the increasingly pissed-off Palestinians, and the breeding of the settlers and lazy ultra-orthodox will not be enough.

I suppose it's only a matter of time before some sort of attack takes place, gets portrayed as ISIS, and we get involved before finding out the truth of it. It's probably a good time to invest in the companies that make Hellfire missiles and Predator drones.

911 is a Joke

Heads up, Kim Jong Un -- the United Nations is coming hard for your doughy ass. Check this shiznit out, yo:

In one of its stronger resolutions, the United Nations Human Rights Council urged global powers on Friday to back an international criminal investigation of North Korea for crimes against humanity and to consider targeted sanctions against those responsible.

....

“You couldn’t expect a stronger resolution,” Julie de Rivero, Geneva director of Human Rights Watch, said of the measure. “The package as a whole is unprecedented.”

So, like, wow, right? A "strong resolution," which mandates a "special rapporteur," which may even culminate in a -- wait for it -- "field presence." Oh my. These are forceful, fearsome phrases. I'm sure Kim is trembling in his wee elf boots.

Look. I'm not saying that the US or any treaty organization should initiate bombing or invasion of North Korea at the earliest opportunity; in fact, such a move, given the apparent mentality of the NK populace and its leadership cadre, would be catastrophic for South Korea at the least. But the notion that the dickless, finger-wagging, bureaucratic postures of the UN carry any weight with the monsters of the world will, in retrospect, prove to be one of the more dismal ideas of the age we live in.

Shche Ne Vmerla Ukraina

So there is much hand-wringing over ol' Pooty-Poot's (remember back when C-Plus Augustus "looked into his eyes, and....saw his soul"?) crude efforts to undermine and overtake the critical Crimean peninsula, and there should be. But is this something that the US (or, more to the point, Europe, since that's really who Russia is leveraging here -- they're not worried about us in the least) should be interfering overtly in? Depends on which electioneering hack you ask on the Sunday follies.

Don't get me wrong -- Putin is certainly acting aggressively, and his long-term game appears to be to return more or less to Peter the Great imperial days, complete with buffer states, of which Ukraine has historically been one (the root word of the country's name, "kray," literally means "edge" in Russian and Ukrainian). One way to look at the country historically, culturally, and geographically, is that western Ukraine is eastern Poland, and eastern Ukraine is western Russia, in many respects.

This certainly doesn't mean that Ukraine shouldn't have its own sovereignty, just that there are greater contexts here that you can count on many 'murkins to just ignore during the corporate network Two Minutes of Hate. These are just some of the things bound to be going on in Putin's brain -- along with, of course, the fact that Ukraine is one of the world's largest grain exporters, the Crimean peninsula has shipyards and heavy manufacturing resources, and the country itself, with its natural gas pipelines, serves as valuable leverage over the expansionist European Union.

Since George Kennan formulated US post-World War 2 geopolitical principles, our policy has included the doctrine of "containment," characterized by the Cold War moves and countermoves, mostly via proxies and military buildups, that never culminated in head-to-head confrontation, but fomented many "small" wars (see, wars are always "small" when they involve overthrowing someone else's leader, especially if said country is small, brown, and has exploitable resources, such as oil or bananas). It should not be surprising that the largest nation on the planet, one with a much longer history that includes savage periods of conquest, invasion, and mass slaughter at the hands of everyone from the Mongols to the Nazis, as well as buffer zones of compliant vassal states, has its own version of the containment policy.

Putin is also, unsurprisingly, flexing nuts and showing us that he will not abide by our dictates, any more than we would listen to him if a restive British Columbia or Baja California attracted our attention. Other than the oligarchs sending their kids to our colleges, and snapping up our real estate, the US has no active or deterrent role in Russia's foreign policy. And our handling of Syria (not that there were any good options) and North Korea probably send a signal of at least some weakness to Putin.

Obama acolytes have been fond of saying that Barry O plays "11th dimensional chess," at least with domestic issues and with handling political opponents. I don't really see whence that notion originates at all; while certainly a thoughtful and intelligent orator, a refreshing break from the wretched syntax and incoherent burbling of the previous guy, it's hard to point out significant instances where (as the chess phrase implies) Obama out-thought an opponent to any great or impressive degree.

Certainly this seems to be the case with Obama's approach to foreign policy, a studied, measured, reasonable doctrine that places great stock in, for example, the UN's recent condemnation of North Korea's long-running record of human rights atrocities, while not backing such pronunciamentos with any real teeth. Quite frankly, all one has to do is look at the UN's record of ineffectiveness and inaction in recent years in the Balkans, Rwanda, and Congo, and be less than convinced that their harrumphing condemnations carry any weight with anyone. So just as China will never go along with cracking down on the Cult of Kim, critical trading partners such as Germany and Italy are not going to kick Russia out of the G8 just because we want them to.

Obviously, foreign policy historically has operated on having carrots and sticks at one's disposal, in order to leverage or pressure for a desired result. In the previous century, that dynamic worked to our advantage, since we had the most of both carrots and sticks to use as we saw fit. This is simply no longer the case, and hasn't been for some time. Economic wealth has become hyperconcentrated, to the detriment of the government's ability to even remain solvent or operate efficiently, and warfare has become much smaller in scope and scale, not to mention that America is leading the way toward a more automated approach to warfare.

In other words, we don't have enough money to bribe Putin (unless the greedy, pelf-grubbing motherfuckers who own half of everything want to chip in) to be nice, and we're not going to send a fleet of flying killbots over Sevastopol. We have nothing he wants or fears, and it turns out that, like any good American preznit, Putin plans to inflate his nation's perceived prestige. It is not a coincidence that the Olympics served as the chronological fulcrum for several important activities in that area, including the release of the Pussy Riot protesters from the gulag. (Incidentally, it should be apparent just how brave and reckless these women are, to the extent that if they don't leave the country or back down their antics, they'll probably be dead within a year or two, without any involvement from Putin. It should be quite clear that Russia is still a pretty culturally conservative country.)

So what do we do? Well, if we're serious about this 11D-chess thing, then we're playing a longer game, and not over-reacting to troop movements in a small, strategically inconsequential place. Economic sanctions, sure, but with the realization that, again, the US is not one of Russia's most valuable trading partners, and that their lock on major commodities give them plenty of options. Plus sanctions won't work if the EU doesn't go along, and chances are they like getting their natural gas.

One thing's practically a given: the "Hitler invading the Sudetenland" comparisons aren't going to help matters.

Syria-sly, Folks

These geopolitical strategies and predictions are interesting enough, until considering all the possible ramifications and permutations give even the most astute observer a ginormous headache. But no matter, we are apparently going to pimp-slap Syria, even though it will definitely jack oil prices up on a precarious world economy, and has enormous chances for flaring into a serious regional conflict.

Everyone should be able to agree that Bashar Assad is a turd of a human being, following closely in the bloody footprints of his old man. The Alawite regime in Syria is overwhelmingly outnumbered by a Sunni population, and like Saddam Hussein, can only hold power by the most ruthless of means, since they don't actually represent any real constituency other than themselves.

But the trick here -- and this is where Obama and the would-be humanitarians need to pay close attention -- there are no good guys here. Americans hear "rebels" and they think of George Washington's ragtag bunch at Valley Forge, or valiant "freedom fighters" striving for Good in the cruel face of ineffable evil. Or they think of Star Wars.

But all indications of the Syrian rebels are of loose militias of jihadist animals -- one cell was busted in May in Turkey with a couple kilos of sarin gas. Whether or not Assad actually used sarin, it appears that the rebels would be more than happy to give it a spin as well, should the opportunity present itself.

(And not to play devil's advocate for horrible forms of weaponry, but why precisely is sarin so much worse than, say, cluster bombs? Either one seems like a pretty miserable way to go. The idea that the use of cluster bombs is somehow acceptable or moral because we "deeply regret" the civilians and children who come across unexploded bomblets is pretty monstrous in itself.)

So there are no good guys in this, and we have a consistent recent history of going into places we know nothing about, blundering through and fucking things up. If Obama thinks this might be his Kosovo, a quick in-and-out six weeks of air sorties followed by a peacekeeping camp of Burger Kings and workout gyms, he's almost definitely wrong, to the extent that you could bet serious money on it.

Remember when the Arab Spring was a thing? Good times. How's all that turning out now? The problem is that we know nothing about these countries, or how their people feel about us, or how the best move for us is to stay the hell out of their shit altogether for a while. Yes, Russia and China will step in and reap the rewards -- and the headaches. Let them, they'll learn soon enough.

In fact, this has all the makings of a serious clusterfuck -- Iran will almost definitely do something in response, probably send Hezbollah over the Lebanese or Syrian border to provoke Israel to jump in. Not to mention that Russia and China have registered their vehement disagreement, so a supporting UN resolution will be practically impossible.

Hegemonists will respond -- rightly to some extent -- that it shouldn't matter what asshole governments think if we're trying to do the right thing, the humanitarian thing. And no, we don't let Putin or anyone else dictate our foreign policy for us.

But we also don't (in theory, anyway) go rushing into military action if the risks outweigh the potential benefits. And here, as we finally wind down and limp away from two costly, ill-conceived wars, as the world economy is precipitously positioned, there is almost zero upside and massive potential downside with this.

So of course we'll do it. We can't help ourselves, and more importantly, we haven't yet internalized that the world is no longer unipolar like we'd prefer, but apolar, with no clear single sphere of influence, just large competing interests, all ultimately at the service of transnational merchant princes with no particular loyalties.

Phantom Scandal

So despite getting their asses handed to them last year, the Goopers have decided to gear up for next year and '16 not by figuring out how to reach out beyond their base. Hell, that would mean trying to engage the very same people they're used to trying to disenfranchise. So we have the continued drumbeat for Benghazi.

This is rich, truly -- I mean, when Oliver Fucking North is whinging about a cover-up, you can be sure that irony is either dead and buried or in the witness protection program. Give it up for the colonel here -- he must need the jaws of life to get his pants on in the morning, just to get around his fucking balls.

Matching North testicle for testicle is Congressman Car Alarm, who not only knows there's no there there, but (among others) actually contributed to the problem by voting down money to enhance embassy security.

Like most things Republican, the feigned outrage over Benghazi is aimed primarily at their inbred Duck Dynasty core audience, people who are incensed over an imaginary, contradictory narrative that didn't occur at a place they can neither pronounce nor find on a map. But to them, it's proof that Obama's a terrorist-hugging pussy, just like his imaginary measures to kick down everyone's front door and confiscate their AR-15s. Yes, and noted Chomskyites such as David Petraeus (who, let's recall, was considered a possible GOP presidential candidate through most of 2011) and Robert "Team B" Gates have nothing better to do than perjure themselves for the commiemoooslin, right?

Just for shits and giggles, if you get the itch to respond to your jackass relative who keeps forwarding you bullshit emails or spamming your Facebook page with this ham-fisted nonsense, remind him that there were far more attacks on and deaths of diplomatic personnel under the Bush administration -- and they never said a goddamned word about it. Nor will they, because the facts don't fit with their preconceived narrative.

Look. You're dealing with information and assumptions of a chaotic situation halfway around the world being presented to the White House by two competing organizations under the same umbrella. Occasionally, these two teams may find themselves with orthogonal or parochial interests. So what they give to the White House to communicate ASAP to the public -- because god forbid you the 'murkin news consumer might have to wait 12 hours for people to get facts straight -- might be inaccurate, or conflicting, or even self-serving.

And even if everyone involved did everything as efficiently and honestly as they humanly could, again, it was a huge riot that sprung up hours after another huge riot in a neighboring country that happens to be the most populous in the region. Shit was flying pretty deep, yo. The first casualty of war is truth, but that does not automatically translate into some calculated bout of misinformation, strategically timed for our quadrennial electoral pageant.

At this point, they're barely even trying to fake sincerity. This is so transparently just another lame exercise in gumming up the works, of hamstringing a second-term president, throwing anything and everything again the wall until something sticks or slides, that it should be obvious to all but the dumbest and most casual, most fact-free political observers.

Which is why Fixed Noise has done so well  in perpetuating this nonsense.

Dumb and Dumberer

Maybe we can all chip in and buy a nice atlas for the Twittard cowboys who can't tell the difference (and couldn't care less regardless) between Chechnya and the Czech Republic. Small distinction there, dipshits. Not to mention the slight possibility that, since so far it looks as if the bombings were committed by two individuals born in Chechnya, and not agents of the actual Chechen government, that a retributive act of war might be, um, como se dice, overreacting?

I promise you, if this had been some suburban asshole doped up on psychotropic meds, tuning up his daddy's AR15, and not a couple of idiots armed with pressure cookers and ball bearings, these same internet tough guys would be singing a different tune about the whole thing. You can use a gun to pile up a couple dozen bodies in a classroom or mall, and the most these guys will have to spew is the usual jabber about liberty, or how it would have been better if all the kids/mallrats had been armed. But a couple of swarthy malcontents cook up some incompetence in their basement kitchen, and we gotsta invade the wrong country, any country, like stat.

What happened in Boston is unbelievably awful, no two ways about it. But what's striking is that the folks who bray the loudest about "freedom" in the wake of gun massacres are the first to want to nuke something, anything, when any other weapon is used. And they're always the first to surrender every other freedom. The gubmint can read their emails and up-arm the local gendarmes, put cameras everywhere and confiscate nail clippers and shampoo in order to fly, so long as they don't get any bright ideas about doing background checks on felons and lunatics. Awesome. That makes sense.

And then you have the Twittard tough guys, as mentioned above, who can't even be bothered to consult a map before running their mouths. I thought war was supposed to be god's way of teaching 'murkins geography. Guess not. These are the sort of bozos who think Volvos are made in Switzerland.

Honestly, I'm amazed that some of these halfwits can remember to breathe. I'm assuming that they own no footwear that require tying laces. Shudder to think that any of them might have positions of any responsibility, or worse yet, children.

Oceania Has Always Been At War With Eastasia

Looking for more reasons to love the successes of the American educational system?

Reason #1:

A war on the Korean Peninsula is unlikely after an American strike, but it is not inconceivable. The North Koreans might continue to escalate, and Mr. Kim might feel obligated to start a war to save face. Under these unfortunate circumstances, the United States and its allies would still be better off fighting a war with North Korea today, when the conflict could still be confined largely to the Korean Peninsula. As North Korea’s actions over the last two months have shown, Mr. Kim’s government is willing to escalate its threats much more rapidly than his father’s regime did. An unending crisis would merely postpone war to a later date, when the damage caused by North Korea would be even greater.

China’s role in a potential war on the Korean Peninsula is hard to predict. Beijing will continue to worry about the United States extending its influence up to the Chinese border. If armed hostilities erupt, President Obama should be prepared for direct and close consultations with Chinese leaders to negotiate a postwar settlement, in a larger multinational framework, that respects Beijing’s legitimate security interests in North Korea. The United States has no interest in occupying North Korea. The Chinese are unlikely to pursue an occupation of their own.

Reason #2:

 

 

 



 I know, right? It's a bit of a challenge to determine objectively who the bigger dumbass is here -- the tenured professor at the state university, or the Herpes Shore candidate who probably flunked out of eighth grade.

Either way, as always, America wins, because we simply refuse to learn. We'll show the world that, despite pouring a decade's worth of blood and treasure into two epic failures, we're not afraid to start up two more, just because we can. I don't think we actually will, but the fact that people still want to indicates that Kim Jong Un and the mullahs aren't the only goofballs in this equation.

Low-Hanging Fruit

Obama's Libya campaign/non-war has reeked of Kosovo since day one, cynical and half-assed to its very core, and newer info only reinforces the similarities:

Two diplomatic sources at the United Nations independently confirmed that Washington, via Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, gave the go-ahead for Saudi Arabia to invade Bahrain and crush the pro-democracy movement in their neighbor in exchange for a "yes" vote by the Arab League for a no-fly zone over Libya - the main rationale that led to United Nations Security Council resolution 1973.

The revelation came from two different diplomats, a European and a member of the BRIC group, and was made separately to a US scholar and Asia Times Online.

Well, of course, it figures as much. The Saudis will do damn near literally anything to prevent anything resembling a true democratic uprising, including invading its neighbors. And not entirely without reason, from just about every standpoint -- the Saudi populace teems with young, unemployed, ultraconservative men, not exactly a cure for high gas prices.

And what of all that, anyway? Where in Obama's recent homilies to energy independence has the notion of conservation, of reducing not only consumption but waste, been seriously mentioned? The White House's own energy page pays scant lip service to the idea in its extensive back-patting laundry list, with a brief nod to "increase fuel efficiency and decrease greenhouse gas pollution from medium- and heavy-duty trucks for Model Years 2014-2018". Oh, okay. Well, now that we've got the when (several years down the road, per usual, so whatever claque of gutless poseurs has the reins then can simply eviscerate the measures, however modest), from what to what? Doesn't say, just a brief mention about how "trucks consume more than two million barrels of oil every day, and average 6.1 miles per gallon."

So the path to "energy independence" includes finding new and better ways of deepwater offshore drilling (which has worked out spectacularly in the Gulf of Mexico), and investing heavily in such low-EROEI techniques as shale oil (basically melting chunks of a mountain, and dealing with the hazardous waste) and buying tar-sands oil (basically steaming the oil out of enormous volumes of sand and soil, and dealing with the hazardous waste) from Canada.

None of this takes into account that these are not long-term methods for retrieval, that even beyond the environmental issues, there is the matter of physics and math. The oil is getting more and more difficult to get to, while demand just keeps increasing. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that the best way to stretch whatever supplies remain is to conserve. This used to not be a bad word, before marketers figured out that far too many 'murkins cannot help themselves when it comes to self-actualizing through their choice of vehicle.

I say this not as a hater of the internal combustion engine -- I have worked in the manufacturing and motorcycle industries in the past, and appreciate many makes of car for the works of functional art they truly are. There is a freedom and a vigor to the simple act of driving that is difficult to replicate in the workaday drudgery that comprises the majority of existence for the lower 90% of the Globalized Corporate Merchant Principalities of the Yew Ess Ayy.

But we are running out, and that pace will only continue to accelerate as supplies dwindle further and demand ramps up, and maybe someone in the decision-making class oughta stand up and murmur in the affirmative that it may not be the most intelligent idea to drive everywhere in a jacked-up Suburban like some strutting ofay asshole.

This doesn't automatically mean that the bombing of Libya is all about oil, unless of course it is. But even if it is not, one finds more often than not that blowback from foreign policy decisions (or lack of) frequently correlates with blowback from energy policies (or lack of). This is from a lack of coherence, of principle, of even a modicum of foresight and a minimum of discipline.

Shaw was, of course, devastatingly correct in opining that youth is wasted on the young,and that frivolous mentality is certainly writ large in this instance. It is not that living for today is necessarily bad, or that people should live quiet lives of deprivation any more than they already do. But when people live only for today, and collectively pretend that tomorrow will never come, and are shocked when it does show up and there are consequences to pay, it's kinda hard to feel sorry for them when they wonder why gas is going to be five bucks a gallon by Labor Day.


Update: Ahahaha. Of course, it figures. Even as we lob missiles at Qadafi, at $1M per, we're also bailing out his bank. I know I spent a great deal of the Cheney regime kvetching about their consistent incompetence, but sweet jeebus, these chumps give them a run for their stolen money at nearly every turn.

Duh, Winning

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