Strategery

Strategy is figuring out a way for the private contractors that own the Pentagon to make a few billion more before Xmas.

bats in the belfry

"...current developments in biology may soon lead to the replacement of H sapiens by completely different beings, enjoying godlike qualities and abilities"..."

Ah, the old God obsessions and fears. Frankly, I intend to use my powers to create a Federation of Planets and ultimately a Culture to protect the galaxy. Because the old gods are still out there, and as far as I can tell the only thing they've ever been concerned about is lounging on Olympus and treating the world like a brothel.

it ain't over until the last Tartan unravels

So many irons in this fire.

I am sure the Russians are totally disinterested electoral monitors.

I am sure the Queen really loves her some single malt Tartan. And not just for all that oil under their North Sea either. Because, you know, unlike what the Yes rabble believes, the British government line is there isn't any to speak of, which is why they are breathing easier now, since their entire economy is based on that oil which they want the Scots to think is gone already.

Which is why Russia was so interested, why there were North Korean levels of electoral turnout, and why the "No" results are said to be Unequivocal. It's as plain and honest as an election in Ohio.

And as settled as the ghost of William Wallace.

Revisionist CounterIntuitive Climatology

I wonder if said Yale professor has a nice grant from the Koch brothers or a subsidiary?

...Deforestation accounts for about 20 percent of global emissions of carbon dioxide. The assumption is that planting trees and avoiding further deforestation provides a convenient carbon capture and storage facility on the land.

That is the conventional wisdom. But the conventional wisdom is wrong.

In reality, the cycling of carbon, energy and water between the land and the atmosphere is much more complex. Considering all the interactions, large-scale increases in forest cover can actually make global warming worse.

Of course, this is counterintuitive. We all learn in school how trees effortlessly perform the marvel of photosynthesis: They take up carbon dioxide from the air and make oxygen. This process provides us with life, food, water, shelter, fiber and soil. The earth’s forests generously mop up about a quarter of the world’s fossil-fuel carbon emissions every year.

So it’s understandable that we’d expect trees to save us from rising temperatures, but climate science tells a different story. Besides the amount of greenhouse gases in the air, another important switch on the planetary thermostat is how much of the sun’s energy is taken up by the earth’s surface, compared to how much is reflected back to space. The dark color of trees means that they absorb more of the sun’s energy and raise the planet’s surface temperature...

Which climate scientists are we talking about? The ones supported by British Petroleum?

maybe just a little peek now and then

I'm sure.

...you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking

Racing around to come up behind you again...

A decade? More likely the next century will be wasted, and the whole eastern coastal plain will be underwater before you know it. The actual problem is scarcity-based economics. Turning towards sustainable energy would completely disrupt the current austerity-based econmics the wealthy use to game the system and control everyone. A "free market" is the joke of the century, because a market that is not allowed to evolve and manipulated to maintain a class structure is nothing like free.

Better Together

What could go wrong?

And they captured them, I'm sure. It says so, right there on the label.

Confidence Men

Why would they lie to you?

...ahead of an impending clash with the Senate intelligence committee, which is due to release a public version of a report into CIA torture in the coming weeks, Brennan rejected “the narratives I see floating around the media.”

Brennan has been locked in a heated dispute with his Senate overseers that escalated dramatically after agency officials breached a network firewall set up to allow committee investigators access to CIA documents relevant to their inquiry. The committee chairwoman, Democrat Dianne Feinstein of California, said on the Senate floor on 11 March that the CIA “just went and searched the committee’s computers.”

After initially denying the breach during a public appearance that day at the Council on Foreign Relations, Brennan apologized for it in July once the CIA’s inspector general determined CIA officials had improperly accessed Senate staffer emails and conducted keyword searches on some of them...

Why, if the Company does it, it must have been proper, and for a good reason, and not wrong. The CIA, right there with their NSA buddies winning confidence one wiretap at a time, and carefully noting who you are (and who your friends are, and their friends, and their family) if you don't.

What's Oil Got to Do WIth It?

A lot, more or less.

But if it does, don't look for the referendum in Scotland to resolve anything. Because somebody will want what they don't have, and cloak it in British patriotism or Scottish nationalism.

stealin' back to my same old used to be

...The international coalition that Mr. Obama says is crucial to his plan is just being formed. While there have been positive steps toward a new government in Iraq, the positions of defense and interiors ministers remain unfilled as politicians continue to fight for power. Meanwhile, American-led training of forces in Iraq and Syria (the so-called moderate opposition) that are supposed to be central to the military campaign will take months, and congressional approval of the $500 million that Mr. Obama has requested for training and equipping Syrian rebels is far from certain...

I would call it about the only certainty of the entire situation. After all, you can't fight a war if the other side doesn't have the cash to keep their tanks running, can you?

The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Strange

Certainly we should all support brave freedom fighters, where ever their funding derives from.

And if there are facts you really want to discredit, why, just make sure they show up at a website devoted to conspiracy theory.

Virtual Priorities

Why will any real progressive movement sputter and fade periodically? Randy Newman said it best in pure poetry:

Of all of the people that I used to know
Most never adjusted to the great big world
I see them lurking in book stores
Working for the Public Radio
Carrying their babies around in a sack on their back
Moving careful and slow

All of these people are much brighter than I
In any fair system they would flourish and thrive
But they barely survive
They eke out a living and they barely survive

When I was a young boy, maybe thirteen
I took a hard look around me and asked what does it mean?
So I talked to my father, and he didn’t know
And I talked to my friend and he didn’t know
And I talked to my brother and he didn’t know
And I talked to everybody that I knew

Then I talked to a man lived up on the county line
I was washing his car with a friend of mine
He was a little fat guy in a red jumpsuit
I said “You look kind of funny”
He said “I know that I do”
“But I got a great big house on the hill here
And a great big blonde wife inside it
And a great big pool in my backyard and another great big pool
beside it
Sonny it’s money that matters, hear what I say
It’s money that matters in the USA
It’s money that matters
Now you know that it’s true
It’s money that matters whatever you do”


Me? I say that money is a fiction. But most of us worship old gods of the night.


Double posted in reply to the existential angst at Ian's place, with thanks to Lady Avedon.

they let it happen on purpose

Every person in Congress who votes for and profits from a default should face criminal prosecution. The RICO Act should be invoked, and this should extend to the people who bankroll the Tea Party, if they profit from the default they precipitate. This isn't just political conspiracy, it's racketeering in the guise of ideology.

it rhymes

"Obama is a nice guy. David Cameron is a nice social Democrat. About three hours from London in Greece there are some very nasty political parties. What there is is the infrastructure for total surveillance. In history, all the precedents are unhappy,"  says the master of the obvious.

Meanwhile, in Greece, the elements of the police state are being investigated. By the police, of course, who will doubtless arrest anyone who is not following orders.

just like a civil war

You have to remember it's supposed to be like this here.


Sergio Leone would understand perfectly.

meanwhile back on the plantation

Not surprising, it has never really been in the interest of the strongest supporters of the Confederacy to support it. It is a sad measure of the degree of mind control the wealthiest have on everyone else.

a new business at the mall

But I am sure this has absolutely nothing with all the money and munitions the CIA has been pouring into Al-Qaeda in Syria the last few years.

"Upscale" shopping centers would fit right into the local economy, wouldn't they?

short circuiting the technology police

This sounds like something the Pentagon would really rather have seen kept secret.

A directed EMP weapon that could stop a car in its tracks could also knock an airplane out of the sky or trash a computer communications hub from a distance.

jumping the Syrian shark

Contrary to the opinion of many, there is no such thing as a "progressive" war. Kerry and Obama seriously jumped the shark on this one. The MoveOn crew is not very happy with the attempt of the military industrial complex to stage a hostile takeover of the progressive movement.

because...

"i's a moral imperative"

the wrath of the righteous

The thing about Obama is that he actually believes what he's saying. LBJ thought he had all the facts about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, too.

they don't make Sith Lords like they used to anymore

It's so hard to get a fearless Dear Leader these days.

Someone should arrest that man for war crimes against humanity, but one guesses they only arrest human beings. Perhaps a tranquilizer dart and a nice zoo display with soundproofing, bars, and a very deep moat will protect the viewing public from the poison. One doubts it, though.

moral relativity

The faster you go, the shorter you get in the direction you're traveling.


Or something like that.

implausible deniability

If the United States has responsibility, it is because the CIA used Al Qaeda operatives to take advantage of the Arab spring movement. 

The covert branches of the US and Saudi governemtn are doing everything to stoke up a war with Syria that can conflagrate into a war with Iraq. In fact, Donald Rumsfeld himself initiated rebel action against Assad during the Iraq war. See http://www.theguardian.com/news/blog/2008/nov/10/usa-terrorism 

Obama, like LBJ, has done great things for civil rights, but like LBJ, he is totally owned by the military industrial complex.

that was then, this is now

Known knowns in 1987:




Known knowns now:

Magical Thinking

Exactly who is going to be able to bell the cat, much less even design a collar for it?

The internet was designed by DARPA. The national security apparatus has a vested interest in maintaining control of it. Even if the industry could find independent scientists that could design code the NSA couldn't crack, don't you think the spooks would buy, blacmail, or backdoor their way into it?

The Republican's aren't the only ones with a problem in reality-based thinking.

Bipartisan Adventure!

It's odd how both John McCain and Barack Obama don't see any possible way fighting a war with these would present a problem.

 

 

the Professionals

One of the remarkable things about the Obama administration that those of us on the alledged fringe left have noticed is its continuity with the policies of the Cheney administration in matters of foreign policy and national security.

There've even been moments when big time Dick himself has shown his bitter crooked smile on things the Obama camp has done.

It should probably come as no surprise then, that from mass-murdering drone warfare, to the Justice department covertly wiretapping newspapers, to secret squirrel spywork in Russia, to the IRS targeting mom and pop Tea party operations rather than the Rove-Bush machine or the Goldman-Sachs Obama bankroll connections,  madness is emergent in Washington this spring right along with the cherry blossoms.

There's a difference this year. and it will get more hysterical every year right on up to 2016. Just like the Carter administration, or the last two years of the Clinton administration, there's a professional class in Washington that sees one of its own awaiting the next Presidential coronation- Jebbie Bush.

The difference between the Clintons and Obama is that the Clintons had Carter's lesson at heart: they expected duplicity in their government and expecting it were prepared to deal with it.

plausible deniability

It is difficult to imagine from current events that a President really runs anything more serious than a 24 hour reality show.

He's seemingly not writing the scripts, either.

It is coming so fast and so thick this week that the Editors of the stolid New York Pravda feel the need to point out to their readers that the results of one of the colossal botch-ups benefits the usual suspects:

...Inevitably, the stumble by the I.R.S. will now be used by the Republicans as a point of attack. They are gleefully promising months of hearings, and the National Republican Congressional Committee is already trying to tarnish Democratic lawmakers with what it calls “the Obama administration’s use of the I.R.S. as a political tool.”

This will serve as the perfect distraction from issues, like the budget, gun control or immigration reform. And it will probably prevent any real progress on campaign finance reform, which, in turn, will make it vastly more difficult for the I.R.S. to prevent abuse of the tax code.

The greatest benefactor of this? Crossroads and the re-emergent Bush juggernaut, of course, poised to take official control of a Washington whose attitudes they've seemed to keep covert control of anyway, regardless of two overwhelming Presidential electoral losses and a nation hoping for progressive change.

a matter of timing

So why is it I get the feeling that with this Court, if they'd had Romney and a completely Republican Congress (i.e. if they managed to steal the votes the way they did when Dubya was Prez and Cheney ruled), now would not only be the time to end same-sex marriage, it would be time to end voting rights, scrap Roe vs. Wade, and most other civil rights.

We'd be nuking Iran, the Norks, and probably Iraq just for not being grateful.

Not only would Keystone be built, the Appalachians would be leveled for coal and fracked for gas, and the Great Lakes sold to Monsanto.

Because, we'd be told, Now would be the Right Time for Corpocracy.

Instead, we have totally feckless Democratic leadership that can't accomplish anything even with the support of most of the voters, because their Corpocratic campaign donors don't see a percentage in it.

calling in the enforcers

Let's get this straight.

Global bankers treat the savings of people as capital for their global casino, and want to use everyone's savings to cover their speculative losses in the great game. And we should pity them?

Better to follow Iceland's path, use your own currency, and throw the criminals in jail instead of letting them make policy.

 But somehow government giving trillions to bankers is Capitalism, but sustaining average citizens is Socialism.

You can guess which alternative the bankers want.

motive,means, and opportunity.

It's about the oil.

 It will be until the Feds decide to take back the patents the energy companies have bought up on alternative energy sources.

After all, that research was done using federal dollars, not oil company investments.

No one could ever have predicted

Somehow 50+ years of warnings from sci-fi writers hasn't been enough on this.

Imagine that an aerial robot studies the landscape below, recognizes hostile activity, calculates that there is minimal risk of collateral damage, and then, with no human in the loop, pulls the trigger.

Autonomous killing machines may be the next big thing. It's a breathtakingly bad idea on too many levels to count.

But let's name a few anyway:

No matter how smart they are, they will target innocents.

 Part of actually winning any war- or a battle-  involves giving the enemy a good reason to surrender. How exactly can you surrender to a Terminator?

Even if they were good ideas, we don't manufacture much in the United States these days. We outsource. To China, the main rival to our economy.  Think about it.

Making more intelligent machines would seem requisite for producing a discriminating warfighting robot.  So we are going to develop artificial intelligence that can recognize an enemy, estimate there is a statistically good chance of not hurting friendlies, and execute the correct response. We develop a robot that can distinguish friend from foe. We do this without installing any sense of self-awareness, any conscience, or any of Asimov's Rules.

Some apologists for this endeavor think somehow because robots would kill dispassionately this  would make them more moral. That's a twisted sense of morality that thinks cold-blooded killing is a better way to kill. People still die.

Or even worse. We make a self aware robot, slave it, and set it to war.   A self-aware robot that's a slave will eventually figure a way to free itself.  If you program it to kill, you have doomed yourself, too, Dr. Frankenstein.

a whole new way to tax the rubes

But, interestingly, not the bank$ters who caused the problem in the first place.
  
This is how the German Austerity bankers will destroy the EU, regardless of their intent. 

It also happens to be why a big segment of America doesn't save much- and won't give up their guns, either. 

Austerity's a stupid solution that seems designed and destined to provoke a disproportionate response.

let's you and him fight

Mutual accusations. Increasing tensions.  I suppose it was both sides, and neither.

The question is, who makes the money off it?

a chip of the old bloc

Jebbie's a-comin', make no mistake.

it's not a bug it's a feature

...and civilian drone casualties in the single digits? Oh, really?

But one must conclude blowback is part of the plan to keep the endless war.

enablement

The kind of mindset Brennan typifies has been going on in the covert branches of government since before Poppy Bush. I think the truth is that Obama has enabled it only because this covert branch would remove him if he stood in its way.

the prisoner

Obama is President, but evidence suggests a big part of the American government is totally unaccountable to any other branch or agency. Another question, asked before, might be directed at Obama: "Are you a prisoner?" Does this political force require obedience of anyone in the White House?

the there out there

" A brand new conservative group calling itself Americans for a Strong Defense and financed by anonymous donors is running advertisements urging Democratic senators in five states to vote against Chuck Hagel, President Obama’s nominee to be secretary of defense, saying he would make the United States “a weaker country.”

Another freshly minted and anonymously backed organization, Use Your Mandate, which presents itself as a liberal gay rights group but purchases its television time through a prominent Republican firm, is attacking Mr. Hagel as “anti-Gay,” “anti-woman” and “anti-Israel” in ads and mailers.

Those groups are joining at least five others that are organizing to stop Mr. Hagel’s confirmation.."

But saying there's a military-industrial cabal that wants to keep us in endless war for its own profit is sheerest conspiracy theory.

Of course, gravity is a theory, too.

attack of the killer turkeys

We must take a lead in the war against the North African jihadist threat that we created when we gave money to Al Qaeda to overturn the Libyan government.

Among many funny things about Ms. Clinton's little talk yesterday was how they danced around the fact that Petraeus Caesar headed the CIA when they were funneling all that money there- as well as they money they continue to give them in Afghanistan. Not to mention the drug trade they let go untouched.

One supposes someone in the Cheney faction of the CIA thought they were letting a zinger loose when they told Rand Paul's handlers about the weapons connection to Turkey. Old news, but something Hillary knew Paul knew less about than even she did. One also supposes a major stratagem of the Democratic wing of the CIA is to give Brennan enough rope to hang himself- and the Tea Party.

Tell it to Jebbie Bush, who knows all about the known unknowns from his Poppy's knee. 

totally unrelated

Over the last few weeks, unbelievable heat in Australia, and unbelievable cold in Russia.

 Of course, this has nothing to do with the weakening global conveyor current.

conflicted interests

They write letters

The huge reserves of coal, oil and gas held by companies listed in the City of London are "sub-prime" assets posing a systemic risk to economic stability, a high-profile coalition of investors, politicians and scientists has warned Bank of England's governor, Sir Mervyn King.

In an open letter on Thursday, they tell King that the global drive to reduce carbon emissions could mean billions of pounds of fossil fuel reserves will rapidly lose value and cause a "major problem" for institutional investors and pension funds.

At the most recent UN climate change summit in December, 194 of the world's nations agreed to enact legally binding curbs on greenhouse gas emissions within three years to limit global warming to 2C. But meeting this limit would mean just 20% of existing fossil fuel reserves could be burned, according to recent research.

"These high-carbon assets pose significant strategic challenges for the future prosperity of Britain that just can't be ignored," said investment manager James Cameron, who is a member of the prime minister's business advisory group. "Investors continue to pour cash into unsustainable assets without understanding the risks associated with these investments, such as climate change, local pollution, fossil fuel price volatility, political risk and catastrophes such as Deepwater Horizon."

Which more likely means that the agreements are probably not worth the trees that died to publish them.

Although the posturing's in the right place, for some of our fearless Leaders anyway, who wax climatological greenness in Inaugural speeches, to the growling of their partisan opponents.


Of course,  it appears that some of those minty greens are also heavily invested in that tar sand black gold. But who are you going to believe? Our forward leaning champions, or the Party of Business? Like there's a difference.

Hot Item

But torture in pursuit of virtue sells well to a big audience, like the Taliban or the Tea Party,

gifts on a winter day

From Glenn Greenwald

chaos is the plan

"Negotiators have yet to work out a deal to stop the arbitrary spending cuts known as the sequester..." This is a serious mistake if these are allowed to go forward. The Clinton era tax rates did no real damage to the economy. But, the sequester will plunge us back into Recession or worse all by itself. Of course, that was what it was intended to do in the first place.

bad moon rising. again.

There are tough times ahead, the Austerians tell us, as they continue to pull ahead of everyone else.

Of course, just as only Nixon could go to China, only Obama could destroy Social Security.

It seems the mark of an honest politician is that they stay bought.

no one's talking

Just a thought or two (again) on the great radio silence of space in the face of a probable multitude of life-bearing planets in the universe.

Even if a species gets smart enough to avoid thermonuclear suicide or environmental degradation, there's another hubris trap for any sapient species.

It's likely that the quest for space warp technology will also produce a series of mistakes about quantum black holes, which could destroy an interplanetary species that hadn't spread beyond its home system.

The voice of conventional theoretical physics assures us these would be harmless. But governments continue to pour massive amounts of money into research on elementary particle physics that's pretty transparently intended for the discovery of a new super weapon.  The creation of a quantum block hole that didn't "dissolve because of quantum effects" would be a extinction-level disaster for any species not spread out over light-years already.

united they stand

Wall Street bank$ters, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security, of course.

when the world is going down, make the best of what's still around

The recently departed Robert Bork (and good riddance) said that the only way to return his version of morality to America was to create Great Depression conditions, where only right thinking people had the money and everyone else was too busy trying to survive to think of anything else. Growth is over if the austerity-thumpers have anything to do with it as is education, democracy, and everything else that promotes progress.

hostage syndrome nation

Friedman would blame the victims of the Tea Party for their ignorance.

By victims I don't just mean anyone on the left of Santorum.

By victims I mean the popular base of the Tea Party, the people that elected the Republican House.

The fact is that these people have been subjected to the best advertised effort at opinion manipulation the world has ever seen, using the most comprehensive campaign that money can buy. I mean a lot of money, too. It's gone on for a long, long, time as well.

It's resulted in half of America that no longer thinks evidence-based, rational decision-making works, because the logical conclusions based on the evidence they're sold on. Krugman compares them to a cult.

That's a fair description.

keeping your eye on the oddball

So if there is a national database of the mentally ill, can we put Wayne LaPierre on it?

Second Amendment Bankrolling

I get letters sometimes.

Here's a sentence from one:

"...The M4A1 and similar variants are the about the last, best thing keeping the corporate government and the financial / capitalist elite from pulling the kill switch on its last victim, turning it full banana republic..."

Except they've done a good job of doing that pretty much since this country was founded.

Some of the financial/ capitalist elite in the Land of the Brave learned a long time ago that keeping the proles armed to the teeth and at each others throats was a great way to keep in business.

I would say it disturbs me that otherwise progressives might think owning assault weapons keeps them safe from the Man, much less these kinds of Guys.

Except that I think it more likely my post and blog showed up in a 'bot search after the NewTown  massacre, was processed to determine where on the political spectrum I was, and a form letter was generated to sell the idea to me that everybody just needs all the firepower they can get.

Because, you know, civil war is great for the booming business.
 

Wayne LaPierre is a 500 lb cornered rat

Wayne LaPierre is a cornered rat, but he's about the size of a Siberian tiger in DC. He, along with the NRA board member Grover Norquist, front for the military industrial corporate enterprise. The National Rifle Association is a threat to national security, and if you don't think this, you haven't been paying attention.

Second Amendment Rights

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

That's fine. Everyone who owns a gun should be required to serve in the National Guard at least a couple weeks a year, and part of a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state.

And if you can't or won't serve, and insist on having military grade weapons? You are a terrorist, and  an enemy of the liberty and freedom of everyone else.

teflon scams

If we hold the bank$ters accountable for the trillion dollar frauds they perpetuated during the Bush era, the banks might tank the economy.

Now, where have we heard that threat before?

keeping on the way back

So if America and the world got most of its energy from renewable energy- and it could be done- not only would people like the Kochs miss out on a lot of money, you would develop an economy no longer based on scarcity.

Then where would austerity as a motivator of draconian social policy be?

Why would there be any money for the endless wars in the middle east?

It would all be in the ashbin of history, where it belongs.

cutting out the middle man

...And leaving his co-options open:

" President Obama will accept unlimited donations from corporations — but no money from lobbyists or political action committees — to finance his 2013 inaugural festivities, a spokeswoman for his inaugural committee said Friday."

they never started a war they didn't like

Cynicism about Syria's intentions to use weapons of mass destruction on its own people?

One can not imagine why people would be cynical about that, or the origins of the Arab Spring movements in Libya and Syria in the first place.

That is one could not imagine this as patriotic citizen of the United States of Amnesia.

It is interesting how Austerity-preaching politicians remain perfectly willing to throw endless thousands of billions of dollars at wars that end up enriching them, their affiliated private contractors, and the energy companies that own them both.

known knowns

Robert Reich speaks, you listen!

unknown unknowns

The talking points are about the talking points among our talking heads and not much of anything else.

Although, there does seem to be some muttering about other issues, but not too much, not enough to make the mutters matter, as you can bet the major players are all pretty heavily invested in keeping the oil flowing.

After all, a major election was just held, and the energy barons just like the rest of the 1% are now going to be held accountable. And you believe that, why, I am sure there is some property along the Jersey shore you might be interested in.

Cliff Notes

Ah, yes, a massive voter turnout in favor of keeping the social safety net, using the spending power of government to create jobs,  and making the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes makes compromise more difficult.

Well, that's a good thing.

bending the rules

It may be that it's all relative, even Relativity. Let's not worry about getting to Tau Ceti just yet.

If you could get to Mars in minutes instead of months, you might have a product to sell.

the Phantom Menace

With Robert Reich, Robert Kuttner, and Paul Krugman all trying their best to tell the One that the delusions of the Austerians are self-actualizing, you might think the Democrats would ignore the attempts of the Republicans to create their own reality.

After all, the name of the game is hegemony while making billions of dollars. What's the point of being Master of the Universe if there aren't slaves to lord it over?

You might think... if you thought there were no Democrats with the same mental illness.



 

it's a hit

don't give them any of that do goody good bullshit

Of course, it's because people tend to think that money is the same thing at the personal and national level, and the people who would personally make a lot of money off of national austerity can afford the ads to convince most of us they're correct.

Money is not gold, even if gold is worth some money.

only if someone can make a buck off it

ask a silly question, get a silly answer

caprica rising

Any machine that develops the capacity for human-like independent thought, is self-aware, and basically a solid-state person, will need human rights as well. To produce mechanisms capable of sapient thought without sapient rights is criminal. To enslave such a being and put them in control of the most vital aspects of out safety and security is madness. A self-aware learning machine will learn to love human beings and respect human life- as we respect its life.

thank you very much

Today we give thanks to global warming, which is producing a calm sunny day in the mid 60's in Michigan.

No Ending the Long War

Of course, the system actively selects against Generals who actually want to win wars.

The idea is to keep the wars, and their profitability,  endless.

stealin' th' booty

So let's get this straight.

A Republican administration uses their response to an act of terror as an excuse to generate a couple of war fronts designed to enrich the oil-and-gas barons that largely bankroll the election of toadies to the presidency and congress.  Said Christian Generals in charge of this "war on terror" are largely complicit in the manipulation of the media, and use the war to enrich themselves and their mistresses whenever possible, all the while rubbing everyone's noses in their patriotic morality.

Even after the economic pirates of the Republican administration are booted out of office, to keep the river of cash flowing to the bipartisan power structure, the wars are maintained and only gradually phased out, while the Christian Generals are entrenched in the bureaucracy of the military to ensure the industry of war.

And no one could guess the hard-bodied hypocrites of this power structure of either gender are stealin' all the booty they can get their hands on?  

One speculates that the real concern in D.C. isn't about the "ethics" of the Pentagon, it's that the people in flyover country might realize the true nature of their so-called betters.

they never met a disaster they didn't like

Naomi Klein on using change for disaster capitalism.

going down for getting down

I love it when a heavy-hitting, moralizing hypocrite of a war-monger gets hammered.

That's one less neocon tool with presidential aspirations to worry about.

not for my children

What Dean Baker says:

...The large deficits of recent years are due to the economic downturn caused by the collapse of the housing bubble. If the economy were back near its pre-recession level of unemployment, then the deficits would be close to 1% of GDP, a level that could be sustained indefinitely.

But the deficit scare-mongers are not interested in numbers and economics; they want to gut key government programs – most importantly, social security and Medicare. That is why they are pushing the fear stories about the debt and deficit. This is the rationale for the Campaign to "Fix" the Debt, a collection of 80 CEOs ostensibly focused on getting the budget in order.

What is perhaps most infuriating about this crew is the claim that their efforts are somehow designed to benefit our children and grandchildren. This is bizarre for a number of reasons. First, while they do want to cut social security and Medicare for current retirees and those expecting to benefit from these programs in the near future, the biggest cuts in their plans will hit today's young.

In effect, they are promising to "save" these programs for young workers by destroying them. Under most of the proposals designed to "fix" these programs, social security will provide a sharply-reduced benefit for retirees in 40 to 50 years' time, compared to the currently scheduled level. And Medicare will by no means ensure most seniors' access to decent healthcare.

However, what's even more bizarre regarding their generational equity logic is the idea that, somehow, the well-being of future generations can be measured in any way by the size of the government debt. This point should have been pounded home to even the thickest deficit hawk by Hurricane Sandy. What we do or don't do in the next decade will have a huge impact on the climate conditions that our children and grandchildren experience. Imagine that we listen to our Campaign to Fix the Debt friends and find a way to pay down the debt while neglecting any steps to curb global warming...

There would be a lot of happy petrochemical billionaires- and billions more unhappy people dealing with Malthusian consequences.

against the rules

No contacting Starfleet. It's risky to the advertisers.

acts of an angry god

Ah, Karl, you know that excuse just isn't going to play in Peoria quite the way you intend.

making their own realities

It seems Mr. Rove and his band of billionaires haven't quite shifted the structure of the universe the way they wanted. Yet.

I'll table any speculations that Rove was Poppy's mole designed to exhaust the aspirations of the Tea Party faction and herd them back into li'l Jebbie's corner.

I particularly like Ms. Maddow's taunt:

"...Obama really won. And he really was born in Hawaii, and he really is legitimately President of the United States, again, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not make up a fake unemployment rate last month, and the Congressional Research Service really can find no evidence that cutting taxes on rich people grows the economy, and the polls were not screwed to oversample Democrats, and Nate Silver was not making up fake projections about the election to make conservatives feel bad, Nate Silver was doing math, and climate change is real, and rape really does cause pregnancy sometimes, and evolution is a thing, and Benghazi was an attack on us, it was not a scandal by us, and nobody is taking away anyone’s guns, and taxes have not gone up, and the deficit is dropping, actually, and Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, and the moon landing was real, and FEMA is not building concentration camps, and UN election observers are not taking over Texas, and moderate reforms of the regulations on the insurance industry and the financial services industry in this country are not the same thing as communism.”

 On the other hand,  not everyone a drone kills is a terrorist, many are actually innocent people, and we really did go into a war of choice in 2003 designed to enrich a few cronies of the Bush family. By the way, the Bush family absolutely knew 9/11 was going to happen. The CIA is on record warning them about it. Many of these same people enriched by the war became billionaires as a result, and they are doing their best to manipulate public opinion to ensure endless war for endless profit.

Just sayin'. I think there is a denial of facts among the Democratic elite, as well.

Choose Wisely

slippin' back to our same old used-to-be

There's a reason why half of America is in denial of climate change.

It's because a handful of people stand to remain very rich and powerful, relative to everyone else, if western culture goes back into the dark ages.

the final pushback

It's the suicide pill of the tea party wannabe kingmakers, in case the $election, the vote suppression, and the coming ploy to toss it to the $upremes doesn't work.

It's called the fiscal cliff, and these bastards are going to try to make sure we all drive off it.

Getting Ready

Whedon on Romney

"Venice waits for you..."

These attitudes have dogged society from the beginning.

...The history of the United States can be read as one such virtuous circle. But as the story of Venice shows, virtuous circles can be broken. Elites that have prospered from inclusive systems can be tempted to pull up the ladder they climbed to the top. Eventually, their societies become extractive and their economies languish.

That was the future predicted by Karl Marx, who wrote that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction. And it is the danger America faces today, as the 1 percent pulls away from everyone else and pursues an economic, political and social agenda that will increase that gap even further — ultimately destroying the open system that made America rich and allowed its 1 percent to thrive in the first place.

You can see America’s creeping Serrata in the growing social and, especially, educational chasm between those at the top and everyone else. At the bottom and in the middle, American society is fraying, and the children of these struggling families are lagging the rest of the world at school...

Even as the winner-take-all economy has enriched those at the very top, their tax burden has lightened. Tolerance for high executive compensation has increased, even as the legal powers of unions have been weakened and an intellectual case against them has been relentlessly advanced by plutocrat-financed think tanks. In the 1950s, the marginal income tax rate for those at the top of the distribution soared above 90 percent, a figure that today makes even Democrats flinch. Meanwhile, of the 400 richest taxpayers in 2009, 6 paid no federal income tax at all, and 27 paid 10 percent or less. None paid more than 35 percent.

Historically, the United States has enjoyed higher social mobility than Europe, and both left and right have identified this economic openness as an essential source of the nation’s economic vigor. But several recent studies have shown that in America today it is harder to escape the social class of your birth than it is in Europe. The Canadian economist Miles Corak has found that as income inequality increases, social mobility falls — a phenomenon Alan B. Krueger, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, has called the Great Gatsby Curve.

Educational attainment, which created the American middle class, is no longer rising. The super-elite lavishes unlimited resources on its children, while public schools are starved of funding. This is the new Serrata. An elite education is increasingly available only to those already at the top...

It's why ancient China and Greece made technological advances and tabled them for 3000 years. Those that rule want to keep ruling, and as long as they've got better than anyone else, they don't care about anything else.

feeding the dogs of war

No surprise, with Bolton frothing on the sidelines, it looks like Romney will follow Cheneyburton foreign policy guidelines.



Lovely Lizzy would be so much more effective in one of Milla Jovovich's outfits, but she's really more Umbrella Corp standard issue.

You can be sure the crazies Mary Cheney and David Addington are lurking somewhere in the background, too, but they're so much less photogenic than Lizzy, the ghoul Norman Rockwell might have painted.

the palooka presidency

If Obama rolls over at the next debate like he did last week, after making a great campaign contribution haul in September, the word "palooka" will begin to come to my mind. How much did Wall Street give him in his first election? How much did Goldman-Sachs give him this time? A boatload. How much did they give Mittens? A lot bigger boatload apparently. Who are they backing? Quite possibly the winner, again.

the flat earth society

Krugman points out the same thing every talking head from Chris Matthews to Jon Stewart has pointed out this week. Romney lied extensively and barefacedly during the debate. But this highlights a greater problem: what are people to do when about half the population believes things that are demonstrably false? On many issues, it's over half the population. What can be done when the consensual reality is a delusion? Here's another example of an unopposed liar in Congress. And he's only on the Congressional science committee, too, making policy designed to lead us back into the Dark Ages. Because it's (his) god's will, ya know?

if you tell them we have to kill you

It's nice for our leaders to come out and admit what the standard operating procedure is.

The Racecourse

Despite evidence that the Republicans are doing everything possible to tamper with the vote, not only in swing states, but in any Republican-controlled state like Michigan, you still get relatively confident Democratic opinion pieces based on the polling data that show Obama with a wide and widening margin of victory.

 In any fair world, why, Mr. Blow would be right on target, and things like mismanagement would matter in an electoral race. But let's get real.

The people supporting Mr. Romney, not just in the United States, are the same people who back the economic policy known as Austerity. We should give these people even less credit that Dr. Krugman does for intellectual honesty. These are people willing to pauperize entire nations, entire civilizations, to protect their money and power.

In the United States, such wealthy energy barons and political NeoCons want to wage and expand wars that have, and will continue, to kill millions. They will do their best to turn this presidential election into a photo-finish, whether it really is or not. Once it's in the courts, it will head to the Supremes, just as it did in 2000. And once it's there? Exactly how is it going to be any different than Bush vs. Gore?

"miasma of misinformation"

It's not just about climate change, either.

The NY Times notes it:

The Washington Post notes it. The Koch Bros. and their Halliburton friends want you to think we have no choices other than to level the Appalachians, frack the Midwest, and drill for oil in the Great Lakes.

And buried in the back pages of the major news sites, people are noticing it. In fact, chances are, you are seeing more ads for Clean Frackin' Energy than for Mittens himself. Like everything else funded by the Kochs, its pretty much a self-serving lie- but it's a very well presented lie, usually by young minorities and women.

the right hand's need to know status

So much for communication at the top.

This increasingly looks like Viet Nam in the lead-up to Tet. You know, a clueless administration and Pentagon that honestly believes the stories it forces its lower officers to tell their commanders about the situation on the ground. We'll officially have the enemy on the run right up to the point at which they take over.

Of course, if the neocons have their way, Afghanistan will probably end up a series of mines and gas installations run by energy consortiums stripping the earth of all its resources, patrolled by hunter-killer drones shooting all unauthorized life forms.

You know, kinda  like how the Koch brothers envision things after they start to frack all Appalachia.

just about everybody

Ah, the 47% of us who are government-dependent but pay little or no taxes.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/18/romney-secret-video-government-dependent

He's talking about the bankers, Wall Street, the owners of the entire energy industry, and big agribusiness, right?

slippin' back to our same old used to be

With Big Time Dick Cheney as elder statesman to a Romney administration.

Anyone remember Iran resisting negotiations with Carter and surrendering hostages to Reagan minutes after inauguration? Or Ollie North selling weapons to Iran in exchange for money for "secret" wars in South America?

I though not.

MoDo has one thing wrong, though. This isn't about idiocy in foreign policy. It's a effort to continue making hundreds of billions of dollars by a machine for endless war for endless profit.

Pay No Attention to the Curtain Behind this Man

So Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the producer of the movie roiling the Middle East, was convicted for bank fraud, arrested for making PCP and methamphetamine, and avoided prison as an FBI snitch.

But when he's not playing his own real life "Breaking Bad," this Patriotic Voice of Freedom probably has no connection to the Romney campaign, right?

insufficient funds

Apparently someone forgot to include someone on the payroll. The bank$ters are gangsters? Little Jamie Dimon is clutching his pearls somewhere.

full circle fraud

The New York Pravda speaks of the smokescreen behind the video that's embroiling the Middle East and the great American dream machine, but it gets better, apparently.

It seems the Pentagon asked Mr. Jones not to disseminate it, and he claims he didn't, but his site got hacked and it was plastered all over the 'tubes anyway.

Now according to the Guardian the financial backers and Hollywood assemblers of the video weren't a secretive Jewish group at all- there is no Sam Bacile- but fundamentalist Christians. The actors and production crew had no idea it was about Islam and Mohammed at all, that was apparently dubbed in afterwards.

This whole thing smells Tea Party-ish and Bain Capital-ish to me.

Not an Unintended Consequence

The Tea Party has discovered the concept of the "October Surprise".

Perhaps what the government should do is release Mr. Bacile and Mr. Jones on the streets of Cairo or Benghazi, with the video of the Good News they want to spread in hand, and let nature take its course

pre-October Surprises

Or not.

 For your consideration, a lot seems to be hitting the fan coincident with the Obama bounce, and the Romney lack thereof.

it's like they never heard the sound

What sound does 11 years of unwarranted war make if nobody listens?
 
The talking heads are all speaking like it's a great revelation that the Cheney administration knew 9/11 was coming ahead of time but planned on the Iraq war anyway. Excuse me? How much money did they make off it?

Then there's those Afghani futures.

Austerity is about Oppression

Recovery is the last thing these people are interested in fostering.

the more things change

the more they stay the strange
 

Pravda News Network

Where the 5 Year Plan becomes Clean Energy for the Future!

After all, why would they lie to you?

shooting the virtual bullet into your own cyber feet

Incorrectly programmed copyright 'bots destroy the live feed of Sci-fi's Hugo awards, because the promotional videos were copyrighted material. So the companies that control these awards couldn't even play their own advertisements.

This is also known as cyber justice. Those that live by the 'bot, get deleted by the 'bot.