Pity the people who are not insane in Texas. They’re trapped in place with the encapsulated delusions of the ruling right and they can’t get out.
The only answer is to run the GOP from political power, as in California. But that’s not an option in Texas.
So this week, many people who wished to not see have been roughly shown that what once was the raving of damaged right wing paranoids is now the way of things.
“You may have issues with the administration … So be it,” said the Special Operations Command public communications officer charged with fruitlessly trying to tell people that Jade Helm 15 was not the start of a big takeover.
The people, wearing T-shirts that said “Come and take it” and “I love Jesus,” were having none of it.
The Baltimore riot, it was said, was just a pretext, a staged diversion to distract what was really going to happen in July: The military imposition of dictatorship and the seizure of all guns in Texas and across the southwest.
My question to the special operations public communications officer would have been:
“Sir, what do you make of what’s happened in your country while you’ve been out fighting endless wars in the Middle East?”
The newspapers in Texas have recoiled. Old run-out-of-power Texas GOPers have railed. Even Mr. Paul Krugman has commented on it, although “derp” doesn’t really describe the problem of intractable mass delusion. (And, boy, aren’t those cute videos of nice young man and nice young girl chamber music bands really beginning to suck?)
Now, in an interesting case study, we’ve seen what happens when you juxtapose Texas’ reverence for troops against the GOP’s instinct to pander to the furthest reaches of its right wing rump.
Yes, the crazies win.
Mere weeks after a state House committee hearing in which speakers railed against the Union in the Civil War, and called anti-slavery Texans traitors, Gov. Greg Abbott indulged in some naked pandering to those that hold modern US Special Forces in the same contempt. As has been widely reported, he has announced that he is sending the Texas State Guard to monitor the exercise. As a learning opportunity? No, because the right-wing fringe, ginned up by Agenda 21 conspiracy theories, black helicopter phobias, and radio demagogue Alex Jones, has decided that this is the beginning of martial law.
The writer closes with a paragraph that likens the crazy Republican Party with the Terminator. It can’t be reasoned with and it won’t stop, ever.
I have another movie character in mind. Rorschach, from The Watchmen.
“None of you seem to understand. I’m not locked in here with you; you’re locked in here with me!”
“The federal government took over Baltimore, but they won’t take over Bastrop,??? Kyle Arrington, a 26-year-old pizza cook said Sunday over a glass of iced tea at Bastrop’s Old Town Bar.
“It would be too big a fight. Texas has more guns than any other state, we can take care of ourselves.???
Arrington said only a small minority of the town’s more than 7,000 residents believe Jade Helm 15 is an attempt by the Obama administration to take over Texas and seize firearms.
“But it wouldn’t be the first time the federal government tried to take over the South,??? he added.
The only thing we haven’t seen yet is someone quoting from The Turner Diaries.
You know, leave out the rabid bigot parts about not-white people and race defilement while focusing on the fighting of government forces.
Maybe Texas news men and the not-crazies could ask Ted Nugent for help? No, cross that one off. Nugent has been a regular on Alex Jones.
Wires…
And Walmart is in on it, with some recently closed stores possibly being used to “house the headquarters of invading troops from China, here to disarm Americans one by one.” And also there are underground tunnels connecting the various Walmarts.
Rant: And screw Jon Stewart and The Daily Show. He’s made a fortune turning lazy video segments on the country’s decline into madness into comedy entertainment. He can’t point to one thing where providing shits and giggles for his upper middle class white bread audience has reversed the trend.
In terms of “art” it’s not much different than YouTube users who post videos of the homeless, crazy, drug-addicted or wounded in backyard mishaps to the net for cheap laughs.
When you get right down to it you don’t even need to employ writers. Daily life, captured on video, unpacks itself and barks at you, no reading of the instructions, assembly or installation of batteries required.
The character of America’s Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse is rock solid kook-ism from the far right. It’s mainstream, an industry as well as a grifter’s paradise. There is good money to be made provisioning it: Advice pamphlets, rotten fiction and non-fiction books, emergency tools, concrete, cinder blocks, fuel, barriers of all types, entrenching shovels that double as bludgeons, dried and canned foods optimized for long-term storage, hundreds of YouTube prepper video channels monetized with Google ads, isolated real estate high in the country away from all those other people, special survival schools, guns, guns, more guns and ammo.
Grifter prepper industry junk bag.
Something you need for the end of civilization? They have it. Just click “Add to cart.”
And a couple weeks ago Chicago magazine set one of its reporters to cover a few of the city’s well-off locals willing to be interviewed on their prepping.
The reporter, Rod O’Connor, did leave one thing out in his interviews. Conspicuous by its omission, the politics of his subjects. You see, there are no libtards, gay people, or non-Christians in the bug out bunkers. And scarcely any non-whites.
Because it’s those other people in the cities who will be unprepared when the pulse occurs, American civilization topples and the rule of law comes to an end. It will be necessary to defend the family, possessions and land from them when they boil out of the urban rat-holes in desperation.
By definition: Preppers are a profoundly anti-democratic group, self-absorbed, peculiar and paranoid on fantasies fed to them through right-wing news and end-times self-published literature. The latter, a kind of romance fiction delivered as stories of social trial and purification encompassing world catastrophe, armed struggle and tragedy. But in the end, the good people, the white heterosexual people with values, faith and salt-of-the-earth savvy, still hanging on to the tattered belief in a real America, survive. Evil does not.
Which is why they really don’t like talking to anyone outside their circle, a fact so noted by the magazine’s reporter.
Soon the conversation progressed from blizzards to the quintessential prepper novel One Second After (detailing the aftermath of an electromagnetic pulse attack; Newt Gingrich, America’s favorite conspiracy theorist, wrote the foreword), which she had recently read. Eleni, who has braces and hipster glasses, asked her parents how prepared they were for a serious disaster such as an EMP.
In addition, one is bugged about fiat money.
“All of a sudden, you have hyperinflation, and you’ll need a wagon of cash for a loaf of bread,” one of the preppers says.
Consistent with the beliefs and world view of most of the paranoids in WhiteManistan, every bad thing that happens is turned around to be about what could happen to them.
When, in point of fact, it’s about stuff that has happened to the other people, you know, them, the people without money, or in foreign countries, in poverty.
With every new epidemic or terrorist attack in the headlines, a new batch of preppers is born, says David Scott, whose Northbrook company, LifeSecure, sells everything from crush-resistant earthquake survival kits to fireproof masks designed for fleeing a bombed-out building. “We think of it like sediment,??? he says of the movement that he, of course, has a stake in stoking. “Another headline comes and another layer forms.???
Sediment. Let’s examine the “sediment.”
“Scott started his business in 2005, a few months before Hurricane Katrina, and believes the storm’s aftermath was a wake-up call for thousands of Americans,” the magazine continues.
This “taught” preppers “you could go hungry, thirsty, and even die in the U.S. before the government could save you.”
The people who went hungry and thirsty, or who died or lost everything in New Orleans as a result of Katrina were overwhelmingly African-American and poor, the very opposite of the prepper demographic.
“It was last fall’s Ebola outbreak, in fact, that made [a prepper named Bob Valenti] suddenly feel he was ill-equipped to protect his family if a pandemic disease were to spiral out of control,” reads the feature.
More “sediment.”
Let’s repeat. Who were the people who died in the Ebola outbreak?
Human beings, specifically black people, in the poor West African nations of Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia.
And the first person to die in America, in Texas, of Ebola was?
Let’s leave it to the readers to mull over.
The prepper story points out that Bob Valenti, its first subject, has two homes — one in a wealthy suburb of Chicago, another in the countryside, for escaping to.
“I ask [another prepper named Campbell] if he fears the kind of lawlessness seen in post-Katrina New Orleans or the riots in Ferguson, Missouri,” it continues.
And when you read this, in a story about well-to-do white people possessed by a shared delusion, once again you know you’re in the presence of seriously turned-around bullshit, a world belief totally detached from actual social reality.
“Ammo is a great barter tool … It’s the ultimate commodity item,” the Downers Grove prepper named Bob Valenti tells the reporter.
“God forbid a small nuclear device or an EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) bomb in Los Angeles (goes off), that’s where a lot of us are going to survive — up there,” he said. “You want to get out of the cities. There’s going to be mass looting, rioting — just like in Baltimore — only on a bigger scale because people are going to be hungry after a couple of weeks and the markets are out of food — and there’s no water. Now, we have water up there, we have game up there — we have deer, we have bear.”
That’s why scientists who conducted a study of the risks to the nation’s power grid are traveling the country to warn states not to wait on the federal government.
“What differentiates this other blackout type scenarios is the mechanisms can cause long term permanent damage to many assets,??? said John Kappenman, an investigator with the Electromagnetic Pulse Commission.
State Rep. Joann Ginal, the sponsor of a bill aimed at protecting Colorado’s power grid, said, “It’s very import in regards to homeland security, security of our citizens in Colorado, and just day-to-day living.???
There is no Electromagnetic Pulse Commission. It’s been defunct for over a decade.
The bill was a request for the state’s Public Utilities Commission to study electromagnetic pulse, find where vulnerabilities are, and determine how to fund mitigation.
The study would be entirely funded with donations; nevertheless, the bill failed Wednesday afternoon. A dozen other states have passed, or are considering, similar legislation.
Unlike other U.S. military bases around the world, Camp Lemonnier has to use civilian air-traffic controllers hired by the government of Djibouti, the Post said. The base shares its two runways with Djibouti’s only international airport, a French military base and a contingent of Japanese military planes.
As traffic at the base has increased, the controllers’ dangerous habits and dislike for drones have disrupted U.S. military operations and prompted repeated warnings about the risk of a deadly accident, the Post said.
Controllers sometimes punished U.S. flight crews by forcing them to circle overhead until they ran low on fuel, the Post said.
In one case, an observer told an air traffic controller that an unmanned plane he was monitoring was low on fuel. The controller said he did not care because drones “only want to kill Muslims in Yemen and Somalia,” the report said.
They play video games and sleep on the job, too, it says.
Predatory economics. The American gulag, all non-whites and poors given advance ticketing. The biggest military in the world used to destabilize the weakest and most destitute countries in the world. Uncontrollable expansion of the national security infrastructure. Police militarization for the purpose of clampdown on legitimate grievance. Repression of non-violent protest. Exacerbation of rioting through military-style intimidation tactics begetting even more heavy-handed responses. Inability to envision human beings except as soggy meat bags capable of buying useless services and luxury goods. If the soggy meat bag lacks purchasing power, it’s marginalization and/or industrialized prison. Promises of change as propaganda hooked to domestic paralysis and backsliding. Cruel and extraordinary punishments, loss of any ability to make a living and death at the hands of the law as the systemic answer for domestic problems.
I call it “the problems of WhiteManistan,” a beat the New York Times confronts every day.
This week, the United States is at the bottom of the heap in almost all measures of civil life when measured against the other advanced nations of the world.
“On nearly all indicators of mortality, survival and life expectancy, the United States ranks at or near the bottom among high-income countries,??? says a report on the nation’s health by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine.
What’s most shocking about these statistics is not how unhealthy they show Americans to be, compared with citizens of countries that spend much less on health care and have much less sophisticated medical technology. What is most perplexing is how stunningly fast the United States has lost ground …
Three or four decades ago, the United States was the most prosperous country on earth. It had the mightiest military and the most advanced technologies known to humanity. Today, it’s still the richest, strongest and most inventive. But when it comes to the health, well-being and shared prosperity of its people, the United States has fallen far behind.
Pick almost any measure of social health and cohesion over the last four decades or so, and you will find that the United States took a wrong turn along the way …
What [sets] the United States apart — what made the damage inflicted upon American society so intense — was the nature of its response [to global labor markets that destroyed middle class income gains over the few decades]. Government support for Americans in the bottom half turned out to be too meager to hold society together.
The advanced countries of Europe faced the same problems. But they have not destroyed themselves in the manner of the United States.
For the last fifteen years Americans have been told again and again that small bands of piss ant terrorists in the Middle East pose an existential threat to the country. Specifically, white America.
“The bloated incarceration rates and rock-bottom life expectancy, the unraveling families and the stagnant college graduation rates amount to an existential threat to the nation’s future,” reads the Times.
Black Americans, the working poor, have born the brunt of it.
And then there’s Ted Nugent, rock and roll’s kleagle, delivering one classic white person’s response: prison, blows or bullets for all those unwilling and too lazy and or evil, stinky and subhuman to be all they can be.
Be good. Obey the law, the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule …
Stay in school and, in spite of our embarrassing overpaid anti-education system, discipline yourself to learn how to talk properly, read, write, add, subtract, multiply and divide. There are simply no opportunities for anyone who fails basic human skills and intelligence. Everyone who has these basic skills combined with a good work ethic have [sic] unlimited opportunities…
Stay clean and sober. Drugs, alcohol, tobacco and garbage food will turn you into a stumbling, stinky zombie. Only stumbling, stinky zombie stoners don’t know this.
So don’t fall for all the whining, lying, excuse mongering and BS’ing that is coming out of Baltimore, Ferguson, the president,
the Democrats, your loser friends, much of the media, and every other crybaby scam artist out there.
Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor during the Clinton administration, has been deservedly glum most of this year. And he should be. Reich knows the country he lives is in nothing more than the world’s foremost corporate dictatorship.
Reich can’t call it that. So he writes columns like “Why So Many Americans Feel So Powerless” in which he annotates the comments from people he’s met and adds: “[I’m] struck by how utterly powerless most people feel.”
A large part of the reason is we have fewer choices than we used to have. In almost every area of our lives, it’s now take it or leave it.
Companies are treating workers as disposable cogs because most working people have no choice. They need work and must take what they can get.
Although jobs are coming back from the depths of the Great Recession, the portion of the labor force actually working remains lower than it’s been in over thirty years – before vast numbers of middle-class wives and mothers entered paid work.
Which is why corporations can get away with firing workers without warning, replacing full-time jobs with part-time and contract work, and cutting wages. Most working people have no alternative.
Consumers, meanwhile, are feeling mistreated and taken for granted because they, too, have less choice.
The word rigged is perfect. The giga-company country is rigged for the wealthy. Everyone else be damned. All against all. Root, hog or die.
And despite his great success Reich would have to concede the country doesn’t really work for him, either. While he doesn’t appear powerless, he does have a public voice from the left, he has been. And it started the day he left the Clinton administration because he realized it didn’t care about any of things he did and wasn’t listening to him.
Which brings us again to one of his close friends and someone he still advises, Hillary Clinton.
Hillary Clinton is the best presidential candidate for the corporate dictatorship. Paradoxically, if Reich sincerely believes everything he’s written over the last year or so, and I believe he does, he knows it, too.
Hillary Clinton is not the collection of of white supremacy predators and madmen from America’s tribe of fear. Clinton is someone you’re already thinking you’ll hold your nose and vote for solely to prevent an immediate Biblical catastrophe from taking over the government.
And despite today’s speech centering on the systemic problems of racism, lack of opportunity, policing and the incarceration state, I’m betting Clinton will phone it in as she always does. She’ll get by on the overwhelming power of odious, but not as odious as Republican, things: gargantuan sums of money, the political machine and being super-famous for being super-famous.
There is substantial evidence accumulated that the only thing she and her husband recognize implicitly are galaxy-sized sums of cash.
With Bernie Sanders now in the running, he’ll only make this fact that she is someone who fakes it after consultation with multi-million dollar advisers more glaring.
It’s simple reasoning.
Bernie Sanders is a person who speaks in a blunt and populist way. He’s not cut from the cloth of the corporate dictatorship. Hillary Clinton is. She’s entire warehouses of it.
Clinton was a name nobody among name nobodies as a Secretary of of State. In could not have been otherwise. In our lifetimes, the position has always been nothing more that a rubber stamp for war and America’s foreign policy of the hammer.
She was not as horrid as Colin Powell but, surprisingly, even John Kerry has been better in the role.
“Hillary Clinton has not had one word to say addressing the optics of a secretary of state who [has created an impression of foreign contributions in exchange for policy], if she wasn’t on the take, was more willfully oblivious as to what was going on around her than Sgt. Schultz,” Daniel Ruth. Since she’s very smart, there will be no firm traces in the records, he continues.
For a moment of thoughtfulness, let’s dismiss this one as another instance of the shabby way the Clintons are treated in the media.
Instead, turn to another Clinton analysis by Rolling Stone’s politics and economics writes, Matt Taibbi.
Taibbi has contempt for Hillary Clinton but it’s detailed in its flavor.
Hillary Clinton ran onto the playing field this week, Rock and Roll Part 2 blaring in the background, and started lying within minutes of announcing her entry into the presidential election campaign.
“There’s something wrong,” she told a crowd of Iowans, “when hedge fund managers pay lower taxes than nurses or the truckers I saw on I-80 when I was driving here over the last two days.”
Oh, right, that. The infamous carried interest tax break, the one that allows private equity vampires like Mitt Romney and Stephen Schwartzman to pay a top tax rate of 15 percent while all of the rest of us (including the truckers Hillary “saw” – note she didn’t say “hung out with Bill and me over chilled shrimp at the Water Club”) pay income taxes …
Raise your hand if you really think that Hillary Clinton is going to repeal the carried interest tax break.
At launch she talked a streak of anti-elitist rhetoric that was taken seriously for a few days, until the punditry took the temperature of her populism and declared to it be the right kind: the fake kind, the purely strategic kind.
The [cognoscenti] even seemed to applaud Clinton for sounding enough like Elizabeth Warren to preclude the necessity of the actual Elizabeth Warren running for president, Warren being the wrong kind of populist, the real kind.
I didn’t include the finer parts of his reasoning. Go read it, they’re sound.
As for Hillary Clinton’s recognition that something ought to be done about the profound inequities of mass incarceration in America?
Jerry Brown and the people of California have been way ahead of
her. We passed law that downgraded drug possession for personal use to misdemeanor crime. It’s already released a lot of people from jail, reduced sentences and stopped mass police arrests, disproportionately on the poor and non-white, for the smoking of methamphetamine and crack cocaine.
Nationally, though, who was responsible for the national shift to getting tough on crimes, escalating the war on drugs, building prisons and locking more people up forever? The Clinton administration.
Many will have already noticed that Hillary Clinton, regardless of her speech recognizing the national stain as a significant problem, made no concrete suggestions on how to stop the war on drugs and mass incarceration of poor non-white people nationwide.
Sounds like the same formula used in talk of repealing the carried interest tax break for the rich.
“Pundits say her idealist porridge is not too hot, not too cold, but just fake enough,” reads the subhed at Rolling Stone.
“On song after song, Dick Destiny and drummer Mark Smollin
discover the joy in creating a racket, in the high hat, in song, in raising your voices,” said RockNYC about our first record – Loud Folk Live.
You and your friends are welcome to attend the Dick Destiny Band Spring Party at Artscape Gallery in Pasadena, Saturday, 16 May 2015 @ 7:30 – BYOB … Light refreshments will be provided. Special door-prize goes to the most progressive fan. Maybe their will be a bottle of Thunderbird with it. Or maybe not.
He praised the intelligence professionals for their work even as he reflected on the costs. “This self-reflection, this willingness to examine ourselves, to make corrections, to do better, that’s part of what makes us Americans,??? Mr. Obama told them. “It’s part of what sets us apart from other nations. It’s part of what keeps us not only safe but also strong and free.???
Leon E. Panetta, who served Mr. Obama as C.I.A. director and then as defense secretary, said the president was especially engaged in counterterrorism operations and wanted regular briefings, always asking about civilian casualties. “You hit some of these targets, and you get a lot of people in a shot, and what you wind up doing is asking yourself, ‘Is every one of those guys you get a bad guy?’ ??? Mr. Panetta said.
I bet. Bad guys. Always with the good guys and bad guys thing.
“We came, we saw, he died,” Hillary Clinton joked about Mo Ghaddafi after B-2 bomber strikes took out the rivets holding his military together.
Now Libya is a failed state with a local chapter of ISIS. But we bombed the paupers and got the bad guy.
“Mistakes happen, says William Banks, a professor at Syracuse University’s Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism” on the drone strike that killed two humanitarian aid workers, one American and one Italian, in Pakistan.
That’s a quote from the BBC, courtesy of one of many scholars flacks for the forever wars devoted to dropping bombs on the poor people of the world. “Even if you’re up close and personal, it can be difficult,” Banks adds. It’s difficult to tell the “bad guys from the good guys.”
This is what passes for pithy comment, scholarship and critical thinking from the American academy on our many wars in 2015. That’s because the American system virtually wiped out everyone who wasn’t attached to the payroll of the Department of Defense or the national security infrastructure after 9/11. Experts on the matter, you see, are only necessary as fonts of simple-minded justifications, suitable for public consumption, for whatever it is the war machine is doing around the world.
What does Syracuse know about national security and terrorism? Nothing. Its “institute” didn’t exist until 2003.
A visit to its homepage (laugh at it’s unintentionally hilarious acronym) shows it to be almost all middle-aged and older white guys. Like most of these things, funded and fertilized by national security money, it’s a dumping ground for lawyers, military men from the wars still wearing their uniforms for their bio pictures, and lower and middle tier officials from the Pentagon. Plus, they can’t even hire someone to keep their web links working correctly.
“At times mistakes occur because of poor judgment,” continues the BBC. (No link, I won’t do it.)
Then the Beeb White House reporter digs up still another lawyer from the University of Houston to furnish yet one more upper class servant-of-the-military to white-mansplain how it is the war on terror is fought. For the one times ten to the sixth power time.
“There was ‘faulty intelligence,’ says Jordan Paust, an international law professor at University of Houston.” But the target site appeared to be “lawful … despite the unintended deaths,” he tells the Beeb.
“Someone’s got to make a choice …. That’s not necessarily a war crime.”
Faulty intelligence. Hard time telling the “bad guys from the good guys.” Even if you’re up close and personal it’s difficult.
A sack of potatoes could have thought this stuff up.
Do the war flacks passed off as scholars know how bad they sound? Certainly some of them do. But that’s why they’re paid. We need people to convincingly pretend they’re serious and thoughtful so that the news doesn’t veer dangerously into discussions of systematic callousness, inequities, blood and long-term consequences.
And there’s nothing that can be done about it. Except write something supercilious on a blog, something no one will like or share because … why, exactly?
Well, what to like? There’s no appropriate social media reaction widget.
The Obama administration has helped the Saudis with intelligence and tactical advice and by deploying warships off the Yemeni coast. Now it is wisely urging them to end the bombing. The White House seems to have realized that the Saudis appear to have no credible strategy for achieving their political goals, or even managing their intervention.
Seems baldly disingenuous, does it not? There are smart people at the New York Times. When they say “the Saudis appear to have no credible strategy” they certainly know it’s a strategy cooked up and targeted by the US Africa Command after it was surprised by the eruption of revolution. (Google US Africa Command and “stability operations” for a bleak laugh.)
“The deployment of the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier and other warships to the Arabian Sea this week was intended [to help the war effort], writes the Times. “American officials said they were prepared to intercept a nine-ship Iranian convoy headed for Yemen and believed to be carrying weapons for the rebels. Fortunately, the Iranian vessels turned around, avoiding a possible confrontation.”
Yes, an entire nuclear carrier surface action group is needed off one of the poorest countries in the world, just in case.
Perhaps the President or the Times ought to concede that letting Special Operations Command and the East Africa Air Pirates drone crew give Yemen the business for a few years hasn’t done the world any humanitarian favors.
Yemen has almost always teetered close to being a failed state. In 2013, the country’s electrical production was 850 megawatts, down by almost half of what it was the year before.
By contrast, the cities of Burbank, Glendale and Pasadena consumed 962 gigawatt hours of electricity in 2012 for residential use alone. Pasadena, by itself, it’s probably safe to say, has indescribably more electrical production capacity at its disposal than the entire country of Yemen.
Yemen, then, is patently one of the worst off places in the world, it’s deteriorating electrical production capacity only one measure of its very weak and fragile structure.
The US government, or its military, surely cannot say with any straight face (although they may try), that unleashing a vigorous anti-terror campaign upon the country did not significantly contribute to its current terrible condition.
“Core Al Qaeda is a rump of its former self,??? said an American counterterrorism official, in an assessment echoed by several European and Pakistani officials.
The Pakistanis estimate that Al Qaeda has lost 40 loyalists, of all ranks, to American drone strikes in the past six months – a higher toll than other sources have tracked but indicative of a broader trend. Now, they say, Qaeda commanders are moving back to the relative safety, and isolation, of locations they once fled, like the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, and Sudan.
Yet militancy experts caution that it is too early to sound the death knell for Al Qaeda’s leaders, for whom patience and adaptability are hallmarks, and who, despite the adversity, remain the principal jihadist militants focused on attacking the West.
“People always want to know when the job will be finished,??? said Michael Semple, a militancy expert at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland. “I don’t think we can talk about that. They’re on the back foot, rather than being eliminated.???
The job will not be finished. That would mean the need for so many facile “militancy experts” might come into question.
Militancy experts. Say it again. Sounds delicate, like something for which you have to have brains.
Is there a metric, a “militancy quotient,” used to measure countries we’re working over because terrorists? What’s the quotient of Yemen? Pakistan? Iraq-Syria-Libya?
The newspaper does sort of glumly concede al Qaeda men are has-beens next to ISIS, though.
“A Nobel Peace Prize laureate’s [Barack Obama’s] embrace of drones, partly on humanitarian grounds, is sure to increase their legitimacy as instruments of war in the future,” reads the New Yorker. “But how can Obama’s choice be squared with the accumulating record of mistakes?”
In 2014, Camp Lemmonair in Djibouti (or US Africa Command’s home) was the launching pad for 16 drone sorties a day, most of them into Yemen.
You will appreciate the perverse twisting of language employed in the US military’s proxy war in one of the most desperate places on the planet. Naming a bombing campaign Operation Renewal and Hope is something that could only spring from the secretive US Africa Command, running America’s many special operations and Predator assassination strikes against Yemen out of a base in Djibouti. Only freedom-haters and the patently insane could find fault with the claim that bombs, made in America, generate renewal and hope wherever they are dropped on poor people in the world.
From the New York Times, yesterday, a story on how international condemnation had caused a halt to the Saudi bombing campaign against the Houthis in Yemen.
For years, Yemen has been the prime target of US Special Forces operations and drone bombings run out of Camp Lemmonier in Djibouti. Eventually, giving the country the treatment in the hunt for terrorists set off a civil war.
So the US’s toady in Yemen was overthrown when a tribe called the Houthi took over the capital. The Houthis continued their assault and now control most of this very poor country.
Subsequently, we have used the Saudis and a couple other little slimy US-equipped militaries from the southern side of the Persian Gulf to crank up bombing campaigns.
“Why, would one say, are we obviously behind it?” is the question.
Because the Saudi air force, trained by Americans, flies American-made planes, drops American-made bombs and is aimed using American targeting.
The NYT reports:
Saudi Arabia said Tuesday that it was halting a nearly month-old bombing campaign against a rebel group in neighboring Yemen that has touched off a devastating humanitarian crisis and threatened to ignite a broader regional conflict.
The announcement followed what American officials said was pressure applied by the Obama administration for the Saudis and other Sunni Arab nations to end the airstrikes. The bombing campaign, which has received logistical and intelligence support from the United States, has drawn intense criticism for causing civilian deaths …
When asked why the bombing campaign had been momentarily stopped an anonymous American official told the newspaper: “Too much collateral damage.”
Civilians, as it were.
The operation is called “Decisive Storm,” informed the newspaper.
It sure sounds familiar, something an American military command would come up with. I bet they almost broke their arms patting themselves on the back over the coinage.
Yemen’s “health services had collapsed,” added the newspaper helpfully.
The bombing halt seemed to have lasted not even 24 hours.
Warplanes from a Saudi-led coalition conducted airstrikes Wednesday in the southwestern Yemeni city of Taiz, hours after Saudi officials had announced they were ending a nearly monthlong military operation against the Houthi rebel group in order to focus on a “political process.???
It was unclear whether the new strikes represented a resumption of the original operation under a different name — the Saudis are now calling it “Renewal of Hope??? — but there was little evidence of change in the nature of the combat on Wednesday.
Personally, which do you prefer? Operation Decisive Storm? Or “Renewal of Hope” for a bombing campaign built, trained, engineered and guided by the US Africa Command.
Who knew 2000-lb. bombs, made in America, were filled with so much compassion?
A made-in-America guided bomb of renewal and hope smashed this building in Sana plus some of the neighborhood, probably crushing people under the rubble.
Another rhetorical question that arises: How do the New York Times reporters cover these stories without becoming physically sick?
