Sabine - Do not forget about the 3 trillion plus in minerals they are planning to mine in Afganistan. The fight for control over those mineral rights are a big thing right now.

In an article in the newspaper last week, Karzai and the Talaban are in negotiations over these mineral rights.

This is becoming another Vietnam. All we want is there natural resources. Politicians and big business do not give a damn about the people there.

Rufus

Asshole jury.....

A jury says the city of Philadelphia cannot evict a local Boy Scouts chapter from a city-owned building for refusing to admit gays.

linkyloo

As a veteran IT IS NOT a sham or smoke and mirrors. McChrystal should be court-martialed for insubordination and busted down to Major and forcibly retired at Major pay. His aides who were part of that should be busted down to 1st or 2nd Lieutenant, but can stay in the Army.....good luck getting promoted for them anyway. The lack of leadership shown once again by McChrystal (and now his aides) is appalling and he has no business being on active duty. My understanding is there was alcohol involved in all this.

I would not argue about oil, opium base and rare earth minerals in Afghanistan being what's behind the curtain. Except it's not really behind the curtain........the info has been out there for years and years.....

This was like Vietnam from the get-go. I'm not sure if you think Nam was about natural resouces.........it was not. Nam was about those godless commie bastards coming to get us which was fueled by Senator Joe McCarthy and his unrelenting fear that the commies had infiltrated our government....sound familiar???

I would agree that multinational corporations don't give a shit about anything other than maximizing profits. I do think there are some politicians who do care.........Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) being the first who comes to my mind. Rep Alan Grayson is another. Rep Barbara Lee is another. Rep Sheila Jackson. There are honest and decent politicians.

It MAY be a media distraction but the McChrystal thing is far from a sham. The man subverted the chain of command. Ultimately, every flag officer (generals and admirals) serve at the pleasure of the Defense Secretary. It is a cornerstone of our military that soldiers answer to the civilian leadership not the other way around. Not only did McChrystal subvert the authority of the President with his comments this is not the first time he has done so. He has, at least two other times in the last 18 months, stated that he either disagreed with the policy OR stated policy himself!

Now, here on BFP that may not mean much. In most academic and policy circles that probably means even less. But to a 24 year old soldier, serving his third or fourth overseas tour in 6 years, standing post in some forsaken part of Afghanistan it matters quite a deal that the chain of command is intact. We ask our soldiers to go and do horrible and unthinkable things. Horrible, unthinkable things that 99% of us will never even work up the ovaries to volunteer to do! They are trained to do a job that every sane person hopes they will never have to do. However, when they DO have to do that job--horrible as it might be--they will do so believing that their orders are legitimate and follow a clear chain of command. That chain of command starts at the POTUS and continues down through the SecDef and then through the flag officers and so on.

Now, I will admit I was not a general. I wasn't an officer, I was a lowly sergeant. However, my job was not to make national policy. It wasn't the job of my commanding officer to make national policy. It wasn't the job of HIS commanding officer to do so either and on up the chain. Policy is set by the civilians and soldiers carry out the policy. That is the way it works in every liberal democracy and it is why, whatever else has happened, we have never had any serious danger of falling into a military dictatorship. McChrystal's job is to define doctrine and strategy in pursuit of whatever policy the civilian leadership has defined. If the policy is ill-considered, it is his duty, as a flag officer, to tell the civilian leadership "with all due respect, this is probably a really, really bad idea". It is *not* his job to end-run around the civilian leadership, go to the press and say that he is not onboard the policy as defined.

What's more what he did was galactically stupid. If you or I talk to some reporter from Rolling Stone it's probably not safe to assume that it's off the record. If, however, you are a four-star general, commander of a major operation of the U.S. military, ANY conversation with ANY reporter should be assumed to be on-the-record and your responses should reflect that. This guy got sloppy and started shooting his mouth off.

As far as the hidden interests--being aware of those issues (which I am) is not mutually exclusive to understanding that McChrystal stepped WAY out of line. He would have cashiered his adjunct or any other member of his staff if THEY had, for instance, given an interview to Stars and Stripes where they had done the same because it would subvert his command.

The facts you mention--and I don't dispute any of them--will still obtain whether McChrystal kept his job or Petraeus steps in or someone else. We have no legitimate national interest in Afghanistan at this point and should adjust our policy accordingly.

Cheers
Aj

Thank you, Toughy. It's almost axiomatic that Afghanistan is where empires go to die--it broke the Red Army and eventually the Soviet Union. It gave the British Army a moment of pause and now it is giving the American military that same moment of pause. Yes, there's lots of resources there and that certainly has every mining company from here to Johannesburg salivating at the prospects. My problem is that there is no longer any *strategic* interest in Afghanistan.

Yes, it's right at the crux of two nuclear armed states one of which is seriously unstable--but, quite honestly, I see that as being more India or China's problem than the United States'.

Cheers
Aj

Absolute insubordination! It appears that McCrystal is a very heavy drinker (past military records show this). Now, that is scary to me..... the guy was in charge and most likely an alcoholic?

It will be interesting to see what Obama does at this point. You know, I have to say that he has had so damn much serious stuff to deal with right out of the gate! I, oh, so want him to have better advisors. Who the hell can keep up with all of this!

This is an area where faulty policy has gone for years. Dreadgeek brings up much of the issues in her post.

This might be true if you actually believe that McChrystal is not part of all the lies, coverups, and scandals in our military, government and media. You really think there is some authentic, functioning military strata that isn't corrupt? You don't believe that he is another willing sacrifice @ the altar of deceit? Or, that he was operating in a fish bowl? Sure, one could argue that the comments were in poor judgment, but he was actually being honest about the inept leadership in Washington.

And guess what? The timing of the release of the Rolling Stone article was also a PR stunt. Bear in mind how convenient it is for Rolling Stone that the inflammatory material comes from people who don’t have names. Reporters and writers place words into the mouths of unnamed sources because people who aren’t identified rarely complain of being misquoted.

This business today is worse than a dog chasing its tail. It’s more like a dog chasing its tail after another dog chewed it off; and it’s all just in order to save face and buy some time. That’s when the military becomes a PR machine, and nobody knows who to believe any longer. Remember, all wars are waged for domination and control of resources. I think we've all come to that obvious conclusion. But the bottom line is that McChrystal is waist deep in a propaganda campaign right alongside his boss. I mean, gosh. Just look how the controversy developed in the first place: at Rolling Stone magazine for God’s sakes. Could it get more obvious? Really. We don't see how easily we are being played?

Why does the McChrystal-Tillman connection keep getting ignored?

He COULD be part of the lies, coverup and deceit and ALSO have broken the chain of command and subverted the authority of the CIC. Those two things are not mutually exclusive. And yes, I DO think that there is a functioning military strata because without it people die. I don't know about your military experience although I would be interested in hearing about it, but GOOD officers and GOOD NCOs have, as their primary mission, keeping their people alive. The comments WERE in poor judgement and they DID box the White House in by stating a policy that was in contradiction with the policy as stated by the civilian leadership. Generals do not make policy, they carry it out. Strategy and military doctrine are not policy, they are the instruments by which the policy is made manifest. What McChrystal did wasn't about doctrine or about strategy it was about policy.

Except McChrystal is named and quoted. Isn't it possible that Rolling Stone realized that they had lightning in a bottle and scooped EVERYONE on this? Isn't it possible that Rolling Stone got this article out because they knew it would sell papers? Hasn't Rolling Stone done real journalism in the past?

Firstly, not all wars are waged by both parties for domination and control of resources. Are you going to seriously tell me that the U.S. involvement in World War II would *not* have occurred if not for control or domination? Really? Did Germany and Japan start a war for control and domination, yes. However, Japan attacked US--we didn't attack Japan. What's more, Germany attacked the rest of Western Europe. Britain didn't attack Germany and neither did France they were attacked and they responded (in France's case quite ineffectually). I'm sorry but this idea that war is this simple phenomena carried out for simplistic reasons ignores the reality of warfare AND of geopolitics.

There is such a thing as legitimate national interest and every nation--not just my nation, not just nations allied to my nation but every single nation on the planet is justly entitled to pursue its own national interest. If they do so with a single-minded focus that may or may not be unfortunate but it is still legitimate. If we are going to admit that, for instance, Pakistan has a legitimate national interest in, say, defending themselves if they are attacked and India has a legitimate national interest in defending themselves if attacked, then I am not going to deny the United States the right to pursue its national interest. Now, does the US have a legitimate national interest in the region in play? Perhaps, perhaps not. I don't think we do although I can see ONE argument that would say otherwise.

That argument is this. India and Pakistan have fought three wars in 60 years. Both India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons. Pakistan is currently unstable and it is not beyond the realm of possibility that that nation could fall under the control of the Taliban. Now, if I were India's defense minister and I watched Islamabad fall under Taliban control I would be SORELY tempted to move troops to the border, put my forces on high alert and if the Pakistani's did something that looked at all threatening let loose the fateful lightning. I'm not advocating the use of nuclear weapons here--I want to make that clear. I AM advocating looking at geopolitics from the point of view of people whose day-to-day job it is to make these decisions.

I don't know why you believe that McChrystal being involved in a cover-up is mutually exclusive to his being relieved of command with just cause. Do you really believe that if his second-in-command had gone to Stars and Stripes and had gone off on the kind of rant that McChrystal did that this Colonel would still have that rank by the end of the day? No way! If his adjunct had done the same thing, McChrystal would have busted him back down to butter-bar before anyone could throw a salute--and that's if he was lucky!

Can you explain why it is mutually exclusive? Why is it that either McChrystal has clean hands (in which case it is possible that he was relieved of command for insubordination and subverting of the CIC) or he is knee-deep in a coverup (in which case there was no good cause to relieve him of command)? I don't see these things as mutually exclusive--but I was just enlisted, perhaps you can explain it to me?

Cheers
Aj

In the latest of a long line of things that conservatives do that bug me to no end, I'm deeply frustrated by their dismissive attitude toward serious journalism simply because of the source. "at Rolling Stone magazine for God’s sakes". Seriously? Some of the contributors to Rolling Stone have done some kick ass reporting, actual researched and thorough investigative reporting. Which is more than one can say for a lot of the MSM these days. If you disagree with the facts as presented, then argue the facts. But don't dismiss the whole thing simply because you don't approve of the publication.

Thanks, this entire paragraph gave me a good laugh, which I needed. There's just no end to the entertainment value of right wing paranoid conspiracy. Too bad that some folks take it seriously.

Nam started out as a Commie battle and eneded up a drug trafficing bonanza.
why do you think all those people OD'ed on smack. cause for the time we were in Nam, we were getting the good sh*t and people were taking too much at once thinking it was the usual crappy cut to hell horse.

it isn't talked about much, but a lot of the reason we are in Afganistan has to do with the Heroin. it is ironic that we had the War on Drugs while one hand of our government was dealing drugs for weapons and control.

i think one of the biggest trouble getting any drugs leagalzed is that too many people are making too much money on them. what they fail to realize is that they could make twice as much if it was taxed and regulated.
:canoworms:

It's funny that people are acting like Rolling Stone is some overgrown college newspaper with cache because it's been around for a long time. Just for giggles, I searched to see who--if anyone of note outside of Hunter S. Thompson--has ever written for Rolling Stone. Here are some of the more heavyweight ones:

Joe Klein -- Currently on the Council on Foreign Relations and a Guggenheim Fellow

Timothy Ferris -- Science writer (in fact, I'm currently reading his latest work "The Science of Liberty). Emeritus Professor at UC Berkeley (yay Cal Bears!)

Matt Taibbi -- Writer/Journalist. Most recently he wrote an exhaustive expose of Goldman Sachs

P.J. O'Rourke -- Writer and journalist


Does Rolling Stone have the same gravitas as, say, The Economist or Foreign Affairs? No, it doesn't. But that doesn't mean that RS is a fly-by-night samizdat being desktopped out of a garage by a group of kids who write articles in between bong hits.

Cheers
Aj

Firing flag officers isn't something Obama dreamed up
 

Since I expect that the *next* meme we'll see propagated is that flag officers are *never* relieved and that it has happened, maybe, a few times in our history and since that meme is manifestly untrue, I thought I would just go ahead and cut this myth off before it can get going here.

Thomas Ricks has an excellent article on today's OpEd page of the NY Times talking about the history of firing officers who screw up. Link

Since you have to register to read the page (registration is free) I thought I would paste in a few specific paragraphs which are particularly germane here:

FOR most of our nation’s history, the armed services have had a strong and worthy tradition of firing generals who get out of line. So for most of our presidents there would have been no question about whether to oust Gen. Stanley McChrystal for making public his differences with the White House on policy in Afghanistan. If President Obama had not fired General McChrystal, it would have been like President Truman keeping on Douglas MacArthur after his insubordination during the Korean War.

In the longer term, the Army has to return to its tradition of getting rid of leaders who are failing. The Navy has shown more fortitude; in the first two months of this year alone it fired six commanders of ships and installations.

Back in World War II, the Army had no qualms about letting officers go; at least 16 of the 155 generals who commanded divisions in combat during the war were relieved while in combat. George Marshall, the nation’s top general, felt that a willingness to fire subordinates was a requirement of leadership. He once described Gen. Hap Arnold, chief of the Army Air Forces, as a fine man, but one who “didn’t have the nerve to get rid of men not worth a damn.”

The old system may seem harsh in today’s light, and certainly some men were treated unfairly. But keep in mind that job losses were dwarfed by combat losses: In the summer of 1944, 15 of the 20 battalion and regimental commanders in the 82nd Airborne were either killed or wounded. In World War II, a front-line officer either succeeded, became a casualty or was relieved within a few months — or in some cases, within days.

The tradition of swift relief provided two benefits that we have lost in today’s Army: It punished failure and it gave an opportunity to younger, more energetic officers who were better equipped to adapt to the quickening pace of the war. When George Marshall heard of a major who really was doing a general’s work, he stepped in to make the man a brigadier general overnight. Under this audacious system, a generation of brilliant young commanders emerged, men like James Gavin, an innovator in airborne warfare who became the Army’s youngest three-star general.

The meme that is going to emerge in the next week is that Obama's firing of McChrystal is this once-in-a-lifetime event with not the least bit of historical precedent---don't believe it because it simply is not true.

Cheers
Aj

Vietnam wasn't about resources?

Herbert Hoover, later to become President of the United States did a study that showed that one of the world's largest oil fields ran along the coast of the South China Sea right off French Indo-China, now known as Vietnam.

We were in Vietnam to protect Standard Oil's assets— McCarthy's notions did a very good job of distracting folks from that reality.

so...........
 

is it safe to assume that all wars are fought over money, money from drugs, money from oil, money from money???????????:pirate-steer:

War, always about money, greed and power.

Wars are fought for one of two reasons, and quite often a combination of both: A) resources (money, land, food, water, minerals, etc.), or B) religion. Even though Shrub seems to have done it because Sadam picked on his daddy and it was a good way to funnel lots of taxpayer dollars to his buddies at Haliburton, etc., that still falls under "resources". Governments don't decide to spend their money and kill their citizens for the fuck of it, they do it because they want something.

I think that Rachel had a snippet on her show yesterday that listed 5 military higher-ups axed by Shrub. Sorry, I was baking and only half paying attention.

I don't think that's a safe assumption. I really, really don't. I think it oversimplifies a VERY complicated human behavior and in so doing gets in the way of understanding.

I'm curious are we talking about ALL wars--no matter who fights them--or are we talking only about wars Americans fight or are we talking only wars that Europeans and Americans fight? Is it just modern wars or is it all wars? Are wars fought in defense of a nation also in that category? I ask because the answers to those questions kind of set the dimensions of the discussion.

If it's all wars then it brings up the problem of wars where there was not a clear-cut financial or material gain to be had.

If it's just wars that Americans fight (leaving others to have other reasons to fight wars) then it fails to explain either WW II or Korea.

If it's just wars that Europeans and Americans fight then it fails to explain WW I or WW II.


So if your nation is attacked--for whatever reason someone might do so--are you saying that your nation should NOT defend itself?

This seems more along the lines of treating war as the complicated phenomena it is. I would, however, add the following: C) national honor and D) largely by accident. I think that most wars we might care to study fall into a combination of those four with each one having different weights.

For example---

WW I--mostly D and C with, perhaps, a sprinkling of A in the peripheries (read what was left of the Ottoman Empire). WW I, at the time it broke out, wasn't what any nation was *trying* to make happen--it just kind of happened because the various national leaderships allowed the situation to get out of hand.

WW II--mostly A and C with a sprinkling of B and D in the case of the European theatre. Hitler invaded Eastern Europe for land (lebensraum) and to rebuild the honor of the German people after the humiliation of WW I. I say D because there are things that England and France probably *could* have done that might have prevented the war but they didn't. For Japan it was A, C, D and B in that order. Japan had legitimate strategic interests in the Western Pacific--being an island nation with very few natural resources not having control of the Straits of Malacca would cause the Japanese high command no end of sleepless nights. They wanted land and control of the waters in their immediate neighborhood. In attacking the United States, they stumbled into a war that was far larger than they had anticipated.

Korea--D, A, C in that order. After WW II, with Japan defeated the Korean peninsula was partitioned on the 38th parallel. One thing led to another and the North Koreans invaded the South. The South was backed by the U.S. and the UN and the North by China and the USSR.

Vietnam--A and D in that order.

Gulf War I -- D and A with a sprinkling of C. Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait was a HUGE miscalculation. He expected the U.S. to sit it out which, of course, we weren't about to do. He stumbled into a larger war in an attempt to grab more oil resources and regain of some Iraq's national honor after the war of attrition that nation had fought with Iran. For the United States, it was a way of redeeming the American military after Vietnam and to begin asserting a stronger presence for the US military in the region in pursuit of goals related to reason A.

Gulf War II -- A and C in that order with a sprinkling of B. The US leadership wants to establish *permanent* hegemony (beyond what we already have) in the region and Iraq is perfect for that purpose. C has to do both with the feeling of the neo-cons that Bush the Elder, Powell and Schwarzkopf didn't finish the job by getting rid of Saddam Hussein AND Bush the Younger wanted to avenge the attempt on his father's life. Oddly enough this is the only war a Western nation has been involved in that had a clear religious dimension to it.

Aj, very good points about C and D. Thank you!!!!

In fact, as things stand right now the modern conservative movement is *counting* on historical amnesia. The examples are legion but I'll list just a couple of ones that really have my gall up:

1) Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican. In fact, there appears to be NO evidence that this was the case other than the word of his niece Alveda King. However, his son says his father was not a Republican, he voted for LBJ in '64 (who, if memory serves, was a Democrat) and in his autobiography he is quoted as saying that the '64 GOP convention was a "frenzied wedding ... of the KKK and the radical right". What's more he would NOT have supported the GOP of today. Which, actually, leads to the next issue.

2) It was the Democrats that were the party of segregation and Republicans that was the party of civil rights. This is *partly* true but it does not tell the whole story. The South was solidly Democratic until the mid-1960s. As such, there were a lot of segregationists and it WAS the party of segregation--at least the Southern flank of it was. However--and this is critical to understanding what happened--after Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, the South started to swing toward the GOP. At this point, most of the people who had been pro-segregation Democrats (Dixiecrats) became Republicans. So it was Conservative Southern Democrats who were transformed into Republicans--they didn't shed their racism when they moved from the D column to the R column. The Republican party would like people to forget that Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond and Trent Lott and Haley Barbour were ALL--to a man--pro-segregation Democrats who became embittered pro-segregation Republicans. One unintended consequence was the shift of the two parties---the Democratic party moved Left and the Republican party moved Right. Although, to be honest, the Republican party moved more to the Right than the Democratic party moved to the Left.

3) Washington, Jefferson, Paine, Adams, Franklin and Madison were all what we would now consider to be evangelical Christians. They were not. Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin and Madison were all deists. Paine was an atheist. Not a SINGLE one of those men would pass muster as a Christian the way that is defined within the Religious Right, the Tea Party or the Republican party.

The list could go on and on but those are three particularly pernicious myths that the Republican party is trying to perpetuate and are hoping that Americans overall cultural amnesia will allow them to get away with the bait and switch.

Cheers
Aj

War! Huh! Good God y'all!
 

I am not a military historian. I'm not even going to pretend that I can play a military historian on the Internet. The discussion of the firing of McChrystal and the larger issue of the Afghanistan war has me thinking, however, about how to deal with the question of warfare as a tool of geopolitics. I am not pro-war however I am what I hope is a geopolitical realist. Right now and for any foreseeable future, the way geopolitics is done one of the pieces that nations have on the board is a standing military. While I understand the reflex to condemn all war and to try to distill it down to its simplest *possible* essence, I don't know how useful it is in understanding why we get into wars, how we can avoid them in the future and how we get out of wars. For me, I think the idea that 'war is always about money or resources' actually clouds the issue and doesn't allow one to think about the subject on its own terms.

I get it that war is unpleasant. Although I was lucky enough not to see combat in my time in the military, I am the daughter and mother of combat veterans. I served under men who had fought in combat. I am not trying to argue for the glorification of war, nor am I trying to argue in favor of either action the US military is embroiled in currently. Rather, I'm trying to deal with the issue of warfare beyond either the reflexive Liberal position (always bad, we're always up to no good when we're involved in a war) and the Conservative position (kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out--as long as I don't have to do the fighting).

To do this, I think it is useful to try to deal with geopolitics using the most hard eyed, coldly realistic realpolitik we can muster. By doing so, I think it allows us to actually dig deeper into the issue.

For instance, I think we spend too much on our military and I think our current strategic posture makes no sense. Do we have legitimate national interests? Yes. Do we have legitimate transnational interests? Yes. So, I see no reason why we maintain our Cold War defense posture in Europe. It is vanishingly improbable that any two given European nations are going to war with one another and there's just no way that Russia is going to invade Western Europe anytime soon. No European nation has anything to gain by invading another and Russia has absolutely nothing to gain by invasion that they couldn't get some other way. We *never* had any legitimate strategic interest in Iraq and any strategic interest we had in Afghanistan in 2001 no longer exists. We could, I think, pull out of Afghanistan and Iraq entirely and withdraw from Europe without any significant harm being done to our national interest. On the other hand, there is a *legitimate* national and transnational interest in maintaining a naval presence in the Persian Gulf. Why? Because huge amounts of the oil used by EVERY country flows through that area and everyone--from you and I to every person who could lay their hands on a boat and some explosives--knows it. In order to keep oil prices somewhere in a region that could be called stable world markets have to have a reasonable surety that the oil will get from A to B without being blown up. To do that, you need a deep water navy. We have the best blue water navy on the planet--in fact, we have the only navy that is probably capable of making certain that the oil tankers get from point A to B. It is in the global interest for oil prices to be stable and it is in the US national interest for this to be so as well.

Now, we could wish that our civilization was not dependent upon fossil fuels and I think we should not be dependent upon them. We might wish that it didn't take a deep water navy to secure the shipping lanes. But wishing doesn't make it so. The job has to be done, the US Navy can control any large body of water and the air space above it for a few hundred miles at the time and place of their choosing. Therefore the US Navy is best positioned for the job. (As an aside, this is a legacy of both WW II where sea power was decisive and the US/NATO war plan for WW III which would be fought in Europe against the Soviets. The war plan called for the army in Europe to fight the world's greatest holding action while the navy owned the Atlantic ocean and then a huge resupply mission would be undertaken. The Russians could resupply by train, the Americans had to resupply by ship.)

It's a different way of thinking about the same subject. The reflexive Liberal response to the above is "why do we have to be in the Persian Gulf at all". The reflexive Conservative response is "withdraw from Iraq, Afghanistan and Europe! Are you mad?! 9/11 and Hitler!". Neither response actually deals with the realpolitik that the SecDef and SecState as well as the POTUS and the Joint Chiefs actually have to face. It requires, on the Liberal side ,getting over the knee-jerk "if the American military did it, then it must be evil and done for some horrible purpose". Have we done things in the name of national interest we should not have done? Yes. Absolutely. But that is no reason to assume, at the outset, that any and all military actions involving the American military were undertaken for horrible, backhanded reasons or that national interest is just another word for "policy makers waking up and deciding to send a bunch of poor kids to kill a bunch of brown people because it's Thursday".

As MsD pointed out, national leaders--not ours, not anyone's--spends blood and treasure to fight a war because they are in the mood. They do it because they *want* something.

I need to correct this. Senator Sanders is not a member of the Democratic Party, nor is he a Republican. He is an independent....meaning he has no party affiliation.

However, he does caucus with the Democratic Party and is considered a Democrat when it comes to committee assignments.

We're sitting on that oil there and we're not going anywhere. Why? Because of the power of fear at what could happen if we did'nt have it. A shortage of fuel eventually stopped the Germans and Japanese. Everyone needs oil to defend their countries, until Science can develop new innovative technologies we need. If oil were gone, our American spirit of pride in innovation leadership would be gone and we would need to devolve into relying upon more primitive techniques once again to get what we want. Until then ,we need our brains are so battered in by war and world devastation that every country in the world will fall upon an aggressor.

:seeingstars:

The truth is that both sides equally have folks bent over. That ain't no conservative conspiracy, folks. How about we all make a deal. Let’s just call it as we see it. It’s a goddamned disaster – politics, that is. It’s one miserable failure after another, and yet the same old clowns have the unmitigated gall to get up before mankind and profess their really honest desire to do something about the raping and pillaging of America this time. Oh yes, just trust them this time and you’ll see. This time it’ll be better. The vote coming up in November isn’t about Republicans or Democrats. It’s about throwing all these criminals out on their ass for good. Every one of them. Lying, stealing, thieving bastards that they are.

So, go ahead. Enjoy your summer. Let the media continue to tell you what all this discomfort is about. Let them jerk you around as before, telling you bullsh*t about how this one over here is going to do this for you and that one over there is going to do that for you. And blah, blah, blah. Frankly, I am not going to watch this crap on TV any more until right before this election in November in order to confirm my suspicions that people fall for this nonsense over and over and over. You have to keep in mind, these people in the media are able to basically package turds and sell it to y'all. It happens all the damn time. Just read the endlessly pedantic posts.

If you want to take Rolling Stone seriously, rock on. They fly Matt Taibbi around to attend political conferences and make snide remarks and that passes for cutting edge. That rag hasn't been relevant or taken a real chance since I was taking bong hits in high school. Hmmm, is it their opinion-filled lack of journalism, their grade school writing or their biased music critiques? Maybe it's The Jonas Brothers cover? :blink: It's amazing that something supposedly so cool and supposedly subversive could be so undeniably insignificant.

:cigar2:

A couple of questions. Firstly, if all politics is a disaster what do you replace politics *with*? America is a nation of 300 million people who do not have identical interests. There are close to 7 billion people on the planet who also have interests that are far from identical with any other given person. If there is a *better* way to manage the conflicting interests of that many people beyond some kind of political process, I'm all ears. Secondly, let's say we throw them all out--every last politician currently holding office and up for election is gone. Now what? Most of the people running for office have held some other elected office so that makes them a politician which, in what we will for the moment call your analysis, means that they are lying, stealing thieving bastards. So we can't vote for the incumbent because that person is a lying bastard and we can't vote for the challenger (unless they are a neophyte) because THEY are also lying bastards. So who, precisely, is left to vote for? Write in candidates?

Funny thing is, one can be informed by taking in a variety of media sources and then filtering it through some kind of rational thought.

I don't know about you but I don't expect anyone to 'do things for me', I expect elected officials to solve problems that are too large for any one person to solve themselves. For example, I have neither the means nor the skills to build a road but my local government does. I don't have the means or skills to negotiate international treaties, but my national government does. That's not 'doing things for me', that's doing things for the country that no one individual can take on by themselves.

So, in other words, you have already concluded what will happen and any evidence you see will be taken as evidence ONLY of your foregone conclusion.

There are media people here? Who? Who here works in the media because I wasn't aware of anyone here doing so. Or are you folding BFP into the larger category of 'the media'?

You know, the easiest thing in the world is to take a flamethrower and just indiscriminately wave it around, shouting like some biblical prophet of old that it's all corrupt, all is lost and all are fools--except those who, of course, agree with you. It is quite a bit more difficult to actually come up with a cogent argument that actually deals with complexity on its own terms while, at the same time, breaking it down into digestible pieces. Your statements may or may not be accurate--there's really no way to evaluate them because they are largely content-less. By this I mean, for example "it's a goddamned disaster--politics, that is". Okay, so what? Maybe that's true but since the statement just sits there with not even the least suggestion as to how it could be made better or what politics could be replaced with, it comes off as nothing so much as a tantrum instead of an attempt to inform or get people to think about a subject deeply.

For my money, I will trust a news organization like the BBC or NPR or even The Economist (although I don't agree with about half of what I read there) over the likes of Alex Jones or any other conspiracy theorist who is "just telling the truth". The BBC, NPR and The Economist actually have something to lose because if they get it completely wrong too many times without correction eventually they lose all credibility. Alex Jones or any other conspiracy theorist you care to mention doesn't have to worry about credibility. If PrisonPlanet announced that a giant rock will hit the Earth tomorrow at 7:00 am Pacific time and at 9:00 am there still isn't a rock the people who buy into the conspiracy theories peddled there will simply pretend that the prediction wasn't made--OR that 'the government' moved the rock out of its path with lasers as part of a secret plot to hasten the coming of the One World Government--OR that when it was said Saturday 26 June 2010 at 7:00 am Pacific it meant a DIFFERENT Saturday on a *different* 26 June 2010. What they won't admit is "they got it wrong".

Imagine that oil could not get out of the Persian Gulf starting today. What would be the consequences? The first is that the non-gulf oil producers would be on their way to becoming fantastically rich because the price of oil would shoot up like the space shuttle. The second thing that would happen is that the price of food would rocket up in a desperate attempt to catch up to the price of oil. The third thing that would happen is that agriculture would grind to a halt. We use oil to make fertilizer (I won't get into the process here because it's not germane) so suddenly we would be doing agriculture as it was done in the early part of the 19th century before we could make nitrogen fertilizers. The fourth thing that would happen is that industry would grind to a halt as other fuel couldn’t' get from A to B, materials couldn't get from A to B, and some things couldn't be manufactured at all.

So now we have six billion people many of them hungry and living in gigantic monkey-hives called cities which are going to go dark as soon as the sun sets. Hellish nightmare straight out of Dante doesn't even *begin* to touch how horrible this gets. I'm not talking about what would happen just to the U.S. but this would be global.

It is simply a fact that we cannot feed 6 billion people on pre-20th century agricultural techniques. Not possible. It is simply a fact that modern medicine relies heavily on plastics which are made from, you guessed it, oil. It is simply a fact that it takes oil to get coal or wood or anything else you might use for fuel from here to there. World civilization would collapse. That's not trading in fear, that's trading in cold-eyed reality.

Yes, a shortage of fuel sort-of stopped the Germans (although I would argue that Germany was just battered into submission). The Japanese probably could have kept fighting--had two atomic bombs not been dropped on their cities. Recognizing that the Americans had a weapon they could not counter and which would visit unspeakable horror upon their people if they kept on, they surrendered. But your point demonstrates just how important oil is to modern society. I don't know about you but I am profoundly grateful I wasn't born in the dark ages and I would like very much for human civilization to avoid a repeat performance of them.

Of course, the MSM wants you to believe that there is a power struggle going on in the military over Afghanistan (=distraction), and the new big whopping financial industry regulations that those poor bastards worked on all night long for us small people (=another distraction), and the big hamburger outing with Medvedev after his visit to ‘Twitters’ (=distraction), and on and on and on it goes seemingly without end…

:dance2:

I really should copy this quote and paste it every time someone posts one of those nonsensical 'everyone's corrupt', 'throw the bastards out', 'there's no difference', or, then new one, 'everything's a distraction'. It's become clear to me that one of the biggest problems facing this country isn't our government, it's our citizenry, where a fair number of people don't bother to pay attention, to get facts, to sort out the crap, and to make informed decisions.

My new rule: If you make blanket statements about government, politicians, or policy along the line of 'it's all bad', I'm going assume that you don't pay attention and you have no idea what the hell you're talking about.

Um, there IS disagreement over Afghanistan. There IS financial overhaul - though it's much less powerful and effective than it should be thanks to the Republicans (once again, if one can't tell the difference between the parties, one is not paying attention). And they DID eat a hamburger and discuss twitter. None of this is made up by the MSM, it really is happening!! There's really also an oil spill, and global warming, and all kinds of stuff. The MSM doesn't fabricate disasters and wars to generate advertising revenue.

Right? The distraction argument reminds me of the groups that say the holocaust never happened. Meaning the distraction argument is a distraction in and of itself.

I have to say that I want to copy that out and paste it in every time someone starts complaining about how all the politicians are corrupt. We may not have the government we want but increasingly I am coming to the conclusion that we have the government we deserve. We deserve it because we no longer think that there's any difference between information and rumour, fact or fiction. If you believe that a solar flare is going to turn the Earth upside down like in some summer blockbuster movie, it isn't really going to matter what any scientist says about it being physically impossible. It's not going to matter how much information they bring to bear on debunking the idea. The Earth is going to be turned upside down by a solar flare, killing off all but the very rich (for no good reason), and 'the government' is keeping it all from us. Full-stop, end of story.

That might sound funny but that's precisely where we find ourselves in this country today. A high ranking officer is insubordinate and gets cashiered (much to the delight of the troops under his command) and it's a distraction? No, not really. If firing McChrystal means that someone who is less likely to get my son killed will take command in the Afghani theatre then I'm all for it and I don't consider it a distraction at all. It IS news that McChrystal was fired. It's easy to say "it's a distraction" but I couldn't help but notice that it was never detailed *what* we were being distracted *from*. If I'm doing a "hey, look over there!" feint then I'm not doing it because it's Thursday and I can has cheeseburger, it's because I want your attention elsewhere while I do something. Well, what's that thing that we're being distracted from? Or is the MSM just distracting us because it's Friday and they can has cheeseburger?

You're spot on that so many citizens don't pay attention and don't filter things through a fine mesh of "is it reasonable to presume that the world works this way". That fine mesh alone makes it safe to get news from a variety of sources. (And for the record, TV news--including Rachel Maddow's program--is not real valuable to me as anything but entertainment with two exceptions--BBC America's news broadcast and PBS Newshour. I get my news mostly by reading because I'm antiquarian like that.)

Lastly, I can't help but notice that the prophets are long on declarations of how FUBARd things are and how anyone who doesn't see that in the exact same terms they do is nothing more than a foolish dupe of the powers-that-be and their media lapdogs. When it comes to solutions, however, nine times out of ten they are nowhere to be found because solutions aren't interesting, they aren't as emotionally satisfying and they have the added disadvantage of actually forcing one to deal with the complexities of a given problem. I used to think that the world was a pretty simple place but the more I tried to understand why the world didn't work the way a simple world should, the more I realized that part of what was wrong wasn't with the world but with my expectations of it. I was expecting a very complicated world to behave as a very simple system. The more I delve into a given subject, the more I have come to realize that the problems facing us are fiendishly difficult.

Just to take one--our dependency on fossil fuels. We need to get off oil and coal as soon as possible. Yet, getting off oil--particularly--isn't going to be easy. Sure, we could all trade in our ICE cars for hybrids or, better yet, electric cars. But I don't think that an electric 18-wheeler is practical and an electric jumbo jet is out of the question. The easy answer is "no more oil!". Nice, simple, fits on a bumper sticker and is emotionally satisfying. But spending time with the issue, trying to figure out how we still manage to have an economy while not using fossil fuels anymore than is absolutely necessary will make your head hurt. It doesn't fit on a bumper sticker. "No more oil! (Except for long haul transport, military applications and jet aircraft)" doesn't really fit on a bumper sticker very well.

I don't pretend to have answers for what ails us. I do hope that I think about these issues and give them the gravity and respect of depth that the problems deserve and require. I hope that when I get didactic here I am stimulating people to think about matters in a way that, perhaps, they didn't think about them before. This is our mess--not 'the government's mess' it's OUR mess. Like I said earlier, we may not have the government we want but we probably have the government we deserve.

Cheers
Aj