Great quotes, from our old white guys in charge at the Pentagon:
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey, who also testified Wednesday, said he would not support shifting the strategy from sending U.S. military advisers to sending U.S combat troops [to Iraq]. “I would not recommend that we put U.S. forces in harm’s way simply to stiffen the spine of local forces. If their spine is not stiffened by the threat of ISIL on their way of life, nothing we do is going to stiffen their spine.???
The situation is apparently worse in Syria … [The Pentagon] has begun training just under 100 men at a camp inside Jordan. No Syrian forces have yet to graduate from any training program.
In the Middle East, having created failed states in Iraq, Libya and Yemen, our bolt is shot. Pin-prick raids, assassinations by drone, data collection and random tactical bombings mean nothing when the locals have virtually zero interest in fighting for your side or taking training.
Hey, want to be another lopped-off head for ISIS? What? No volunteers?! What’s the matter with you people!
“It’s an effort to show the public that we are different, and that we’re trying to change the public perception of what militia groups and survival groups and prepper groups are,??? Luntz said.
Some of the people at the Talkeetna gathering make no secret of their negative feelings about the current administration on social media. Facebook posts include anti-taxation and Benghazi links, along with a photo of ranks of Chinese United Nations forces, captioned “Bring it.???
“We could wake up one day and have an electromagnetic pulse detonation over our state and lose all power and communications and the next thing we know is we got aircraft overhead,??? he said. “That’s a stretch. But it is a possibility.???
“One [session] scheduled for Sunday provided tips on defending against armored personnel carriers,” it reads.
While there aren’t many in this particular group, 20 – 25 by the newspaper reading, many, it says, are ex-military men.
There are the usual nice pictures of white guys in full combat gear, running across a field, weapons raised, while staging a commando assault or, perhaps, a counter-attack against invaders.
Continual warfare in the Middle East, a nuclear Iran, electromagnetic-pulse weapons, emerging pathogens, and terrorism involving weapons of mass destruction variously threaten the United States, some with catastrophe on a scale we have not experienced since the Civil War. Nevertheless, these are phenomena that bloom and fade, and that, with redirection and augmentation of resources we possess, we are equipped to face, given the wit and will to do so.
But then the unthinkable happens and a terrorist detonates a smart bomb. You awake to no lights, coffee, computer or refrigeration. Your car will not start and your phone will not call.
This would go on for months.
Today, everything has computer chips and digital makeup that can be destroyed with “smart??? bombs or non-nuclear electromagnetic pulses (NNEMP).
A NNEMP is a device that causes an electronic pulse that can wipe out all digital-based smart technology when activated near a critical digital or electrical device. It can fit in a suitcase or be deployed by a remotely operated drone.
So unthinkable it’s written or talked about in major media a few times each week.
An even more deadly scenario would be an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP. An EMP instantly wipes out all electronics. This means that cars won’t start because of the electronic ignition system; radios, television sets, computers, phones and other communications equipment would be dead; and the rest of the nation’s electrical grid would be down. Imagine that. America would be sent back to the Dark Age, quite literally. All it would take is three to four nuclear detonations in the atmosphere over America.
If you thought the zombie apocalypse was bad, then you should think again. A TV show called “Jericho??? chronicled a devastating nuclear attack on the U.S. and an EMP. This is a possibility if we allow Iran to develop nuclear capabilities.
So why then is our government allowing such a deal to be made?
America needs to wake up before our way of life is gone. An Iran with nuclear capabilities is a threat to the United States and needs to be dealt with before everything we love is destroyed.
If Obama seriously thinks climate change is a more urgent threat to national security than the Islamic State, al Qaida, al Nusra, the Taliban, Hezbollah, Boko Haram, al Shabaab, the Houtis, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Putin in Ukraine or the escalating China-Japan confrontation in the South China Sea, his judgment is so profoundly haywire that Congress should consider invoking the 25th Amendment (that’s the one dealing with presidential disability) and replace him with Joe Biden.
There is a very compelling national security argument for the deployment of solar and wind energy systems and for a much more decentralized electricity production and distribution system without ever uttering the words “climate change.???
Big, centralized power plants and regional scale grids are sitting ducks for enemy attack by terrorism, conventional sabotage, cyber sabotage and attacks with electromagnetic pulse weapons. The last affect whole regions of the country and frog march tens of millions of Americans back into the good old days.
“Climate change is the worst problem facing the world today. We have no more important issue in the world than this issue, period,??? Nevada senior Sen. Harry Reid once said on the floor of the Senate.
At one of Reid’s clean energy confabs, Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton opined on climate change, “This is the most consequential, urgent, sweeping collection of challenges we face as a nation and a world.
[But what] if the power grid melted down? The water would stop flowing. Fuel pumps at the corner gas station would not work. Banks would close. Communications would be interrupted. No refrigeration.
If the power remained off for months, it is estimated as much as 90 percent of the population of the U.S. might die from starvation, disease and social tumult.
There are a number of things that could actually cause such a scenario — terrorism, solar flare or an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) caused by the detonation of a relatively small nuclear bomb in the atmosphere.
There’s more. But I think these constitute enough inspirational thinking from the heartlands of freedom for today, no?
Part of the fog of lies and military aggrandizement that are the regular dispensations on the forever war is that “troves” of information have been seized. It’s insisted that troves are often everything to the war effort.
It’s the concoction of a fable, one in a series of interlocking fables on American military actions in the failed states of the Middle East. Of course, the failed state of Iraq is so because we made it that way. And so an elaborate narrative of total crap must be created in the mainstream media, something to sell the idea that the military action is actually winning in some way, rather than just spreading ruin and death, making an already tortured place worse.
And the troves of information are a necessary part, feeding a fancy that with more and more and more data, war can be massaged, manipulated and managed to your advantage just like the digital world
The most famous of troves, of course, were the materials allegedly seized in the bin Laden raid.
When Seymour Hersh’s story broke that the raid was an arranged killing and that very little material of value was gained during it, the intelligence services moved quickly to offer the bin Laden trove online.
There was little value in it other than as clickbait for net gawkers. To be honest, I saw nothing worthwhile in it. Boring otiose letters, software manuals, American books of no great interest, public domain US documents and papers culled from the web.
One document, and “document” is a little too fancy a word for it, on the “Terror Franchise,” linked to last week, was merely a collection of wishful thoughts, desires and various rubbishes on killing and projects to make poisons and biological weapons. From 2009.
In reading these alleged scrapings, that part of Hersh’s story, that little information had been gained, was off-handedly confirmed.
Over the weekend, the New York Times published another trove story, this time from materials allegedly seized during a Delta Force raid in Syria.
The raid, aimed at bagging one of ISIS/Daesh’s bureaucrats, Abu Sayyaf, killed him. So, in his place, the wife was kidnapped.
New insights yielded by the seized trove — four to seven terabytes of data, according to one official — include how the organization’s shadowy leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, operates and tries to avoid being tracked by coalition forces …
Wives of the top Islamic State leaders, including Mr. Baghdadi’s, play a more important role than previously known, passing information to one another, and then to their spouses, in an effort to avoid electronic intercepts.
“I’ll just say from that raid we’re learning quite a bit that we did not know before,??? a senior State Department official told reporters in a telephone briefing last week. “Every single day the picture becomes clearer of what this organization is, how sophisticated it is, how global it is and how networked it is.???
Abu Sayyaf’s wife, Umm Sayyaf, who was captured in the operation, has also provided information to investigators, one senior American official said.
Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said last month that the killing of Abu Sayyaf dealt a “significant blow??? to the group.
The wives are important claim is central because it lends justification to kidnapping women when everything else has gone to pot.
For the Times, other anonymous officials acknowledged that maybe the intelligence wasn’t really that valuable. ISIS, after all, has not been losing. Quite the contrary.
And the placement of a graphic within the story on the organization’s gains in Libya undercut the entire argument.
Nevertheless, this is what we get from our national security experts.
It’s the equivalent of a designed and purposeful mental illness, in this case, the insistence, in the face of years of evidence to the contrary, that one can find one’s way to some kind of victory against a region spanning foe through pin-prick raids, assassinations of random thugs dressed up as very important and irreplaceable leaders, and the seizure of whatever digital detritus is on hand.
Here’s a perfect example of the pathology at work:
“In the recent raid on Abu Sayyaf, we collected substantial information on Daesh financial operations,??? John R. Allen, the retired general who now serves as the diplomatic envoy coordinating the coalition against the Islamic State, told a conference in Qatar on Wednesday. “And we’re gaining a much clearer understanding of Daesh’s organization and business enterprise.???
This is a stupid-ass belief, something only an American could come up with, that “analyzing the financial operations” of ISIS (it used to be al Qaeda) gets you anything at all. Although it flies with reporters and meaningless conferences at a posh resort in Qatar well away from the battlefield.
“Lt. Gen. John Hesterman III, the top allied air commander, told reporters by phone from his headquarters in Qatar that ‘there is a whole bunch of targeting that is opening up here, as we gain and learn more about this enemy,’ ” it continues.
All this, particularly the NY Times story, it was said, might begin to “sow fear in their ranks that the United States and its allies were beginning to crack their shield of secrecy.”
Keep in mind there is no evidence that ISIS is becoming afraid of anything as it takes more cities in Libya, Syria, and Iraq. And that the thing called the Iraqi Army, trained by Americans, has broken and run twice in combat, requiring complete reconstruction plus ever more infusions of “advisers.”
What you don’t see in the stories as admissions from anonymous sources is the reason American-trained Iraqi formations run. Logically, they probably don’t want to fight or be seen as a US flunky force. But that they will take a training paycheck up until they have to engage in real action.
Why would this be surprising?
Do American military leaders and intelligence men believe analyzing the alleged finances of ISIS, combined with commando raids, are something winning?
If they do, they’re fools. I don’t believe American generals are fools but I do think that since they have nothing to lose by executing the process, they’ll conduct it. It’s a living, apparently.
ISIS gets its money from its conquered areas, in the form of taxes, levies, theft and the sale of anything valuable, whether it be antiquities, small amounts of fuel or other commodities.
And it is now apparent it has learned that American tactical bombing isn’t effective in close-in fighting. This is the same thing the army of North Vietnam and the Viet Cong worked out. The conclusion is that if you close in and fight the enemy belt to belt, the advantage of American air supremacy and bombs are negated.
Here American technology isn’t the last answer, the final thing that trumps all else. Networked communications, information dominance, the super-machines of US war-power have not worked and won’t.
“ ‘We’ve gotten very good at document exploitation,’ said Matthew Levitt, a former Treasury Department official who is director of the Stein Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at the [some institute in the nation’s capitol],” reads the Times.
Yes, right. It’s to laugh out loud that someone actually passes it off as wisdom. Document exploitation. Examine the financing. Don’t forget about kidnapping the wife, too.
“Islamic State militants staged attacks near Baghdad and the Libyan city of Surt on Tuesday, underscoring the group’s persistent strength on both fronts despite a months long American-led air campaign against it in Syria and Iraq,” reads another story.
Thought question: Who came up with the theory that point tactical bombing and running what are essentially nothing more than highly trained and supported death squads wins wars or does anything more than make conditions worse in failed states?
If you’re part of the civilian population in such areas, what do Americans think is the current enthusiasm among them for US forces that, whenever they come, assassinate someone, maybe a bad person, while also always destroying a random assortment of the really unlucky in the doing.
For the past few years he’s been a force unto himself, writing books on the most poverty stricken places in America, how the economy has made them so, and the utter moral failure of capitalism.
To say he’s a glum fellow in an understatement. Hedges finds the United States a bleak and unrelenting place. Like me, he considers it a corporate dictatorship, although he uses a more intricate term, inverted totalitarianism.
As mentioned, his talk is long. But the first five minutes frame our life in the corporate dictatorship of America. And skipping ahead to 55 minutes, right before the close, he runs through the well-known history of non-violent revolt in eastern Europe.
Hedges’ message is that it’s impossible to know when it will happen. But when it does, everything falls apart at once and non-violent change sets in.
Revolt was a moral imperative then, he says, as he says it is in America now.
“We have Hillary Clinton, wandering around like Queen Elizabeth …”
Now, about once a week, there’s a story on Clinton stating some populist position at odds with her past. In all cases, so far, they’ve been easy hits, things she doesn’t have to back up with any substantive detail.
Yes, there are too many Americans in prison, particularly African Americans, then [blank]. (Her husband accelerated the building of Prison USA, Inc.)
Yes, I believe we must do something about the scourge of drugs in American communities, then [blank]. (When her husband was in charge, the result of doing something was horrendous, and still is.)
Yes, I think the GOP should stop trying to take away the vote from American citizens it doesn’t like, then ….
And until the time that you must vote for this noxious candidate (not precisely my words) over one of the immediately dangerous authoritarians, it’s still accurate to view her as an example of someone who believes she should be President because she is Hillary Clinton, of our royalty.
But Chris Hedges is right if you listen to the details. The Clinton administration turned the Democratic Party into centrist money-mad, war-loving Republicans. It had no use for populism.
At the Times, describing corporate America’s hiring practices. If you’ve half a mind left you’ve instinctively understood this for the last few decades.
In another manner of speaking, corporate America is largely composed of bootlickers and the like-minded, chosen by through a mental crutch called “cultural fit.”
But cultural fit has morphed into a far more nebulous and potentially dangerous concept. It has shifted from systematic analysis of who will thrive in a given workplace to snap judgments by managers about who they’d rather hang out with. In the process, fit has become a catchall used to justify hiring people who are similar to decision makers and rejecting people who are not …
Crucially, though, for these gatekeepers, fit was not about a match with organizational values. It was about personal fit. In these time- and team-intensive jobs, professionals at all levels of seniority reported wanting to hire people with whom they enjoyed hanging out and could foresee developing close relationships with. Fit was different from the ability to get along with clients. Fundamentally, it was about interviewers’ personal enjoyment and fun. Many, like one manager at a consulting firm, believed that “when it’s done right, work is play.???
Discovering shared experiences was one of the most powerful sources of chemistry, but interviewers were primarily interested in new hires whose hobbies, hometowns and biographies matched their own. Bonding over rowing college crew, getting certified in scuba, sipping single-malt Scotches in the Highlands or dining at Michelin-starred restaurants was evidence of fit …
And, no, people who are all alike do not statistically outperform groups which are not.
“[Cultural] fit has become a new form of discrimination that keeps demographic and cultural diversity down, all in the name of employee enjoyment and fun,” it finishes.
“Employee enjoyment and fun.” Try defining what those terms mean in corporate America. You’ll turn yourself inside out.
I found that men — the vast majority of gun owners are men — may also carry weapons as a reaction to a broader socioeconomic decline.
Frankie, a retired Detroiter, told me that in the 70s he got “a job at General Motors, and they were hiring people off the street with zero education, and they could work for 20 years, and they could make a living. You can’t do that now.”
As men doubt their ability to provide, their desire to protect becomes all the more important. They see carrying a gun as a masculine duty and the gun itself as a vehicle for a hardened kind of care-work — catering for others by shielding them from danger, with the threat of lethal force.
The gun rights platform is not just about guns. It’s also about a crisis of confidence in the American dream. And this is why gun control efforts ignite such intense backlashes. Restrictions are received as a personal affront to men who find in guns a sense of duty, relevance and even dignity.
I took the first part of this week to re-read Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. In his books and short stories, Dick often described the US as irredeemably fascist. In the novel, it’s a full description serving as backdrop and driver for the heart of the story: a few friends, part of demoralized civilian populace, paranoid and under surveillance 24 hours a day, left to drug addiction as the only relief in a bleak day-to-day existence.
Substance D, or Death, is the most addicting, the most sought after. It slowly turns people into empty shells, good only for rehab, janitorial tasks or agriculture, out in the southern California countryside. Growing the plant from which Substance D is isolated.
It is a big business, one of drug rehab clinics as a supply faucet for slave labor, totalitarian policing that keeps everyone in a state of fear, and, of course, the use of people who have no other way to earn a living but selling and doing drugs.
Prisons aren’t mentioned. Why would they be? After being turned into a zombie by Dick’s imaginary neuro-degenerative compound, there’s not a need. There’s only the cycle — leftover ambulatory bodies requiring only feeding, warehousing and training in menial mindless jobs.
I’ve left out the character studies, all centered around anti-narcotics agent and undercover cop, Bob Arctor, and his Death abusing house-mates.
It’s wonderfully written but profoundly depressing.
Passages eerily describe the United States.
Arctor has his own place put under 24 hour surveillance. Another place down the street is an undercover police operation where the tv monitors operate. Seized from another “doper” family. Arctor is informed his own place probably won’t be taken after all the arrests and black bag jobs are carried out. It’s too run down.
Assets forfeiture. The government can’t get much for the shitty things.
There’s even a bit on “straights” in their gated communities, loaded with guns fearing all the so-called “dopers” just ready to come over the walls to rob them. In Dick’s novel, “the dopers” are the most non-violent, trying to maintain a living in a rundown exurban house as their minds deteriorate.
Early in the book, Arctor is before the Anaheim Lions Club in his scramble suit, a computerized electronic disguise he wears as a bag, originally to give a talk on what he does on the drug squad.
But Arctor can’t give the talk, something concocted from the mentality of the war on drugs, punishment and the need to strike fear in those who would corrupt society. The “Commies!” shouts one person in the crowd.
Arctor’s mind seizes, partly the result of Substance D addiction, which he has to take to get in with the drug abusers. He can think only of a couple blunt, supercilious sentences, stunning the crowd, people in their “fat suits” and “fat shoes” into silence. But someone from anti-drug police central is always on a two-way inside the suit and starts telling him the script, sentence by sentence, so he can repeat it:
“I’ll read it to you. Repeat it after me, but try to get it to sound casual …
“Each day the profits flow … where they go we — that’s about where you stopped.”
“I’ve got a block against this stuff,” Arctor said.
“–will soon determine,” his official prompter said, unheeding, “and then terrible retribution will swiftly follow. And at that moment, I would not for the life of me be in their shoes.”
“Do you know why I’ve got a block against this stuff?” Arctor said. “Because this is what gets people on dope. He thought, this is why you lurch off and become a doper, this sort of stuff. This is why you give up and leave. In disgust.
Further:
Life in Anaheim, California, was a commercial for itself, endlessly replayed. Nothing changed; it just spread out farther and farther in a form of neon ooze. What there was always more of had been congealed into permanence, as if the automatic factory that cranked out these objects had been jammed in the on position … Someday, he thought, it’ll be mandatory that we all sell the McDonald’s hamburger as well as buy it; we’ll sell it back and forth to each other from our living rooms. That way we won’t even have to go outside.”
The UK poison cell allegedly linked to al Qaeda in Iraq was part of the Bush administration’s call for war. (Of course, it was not the only factor. It was an issue, however, that I had first hand knowledge of.)
This alleged London poison cell, infamously said by Colin Powell and the Bush administration to be linked to al Qaeda in Iraq was not an honest mistake. It was a fraud. Period.
And I was the first to write that. I was a consultant to the defense in the London ricin trial for GlobalSecurity.Org
One of the last claims in Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003 blew away like dust in the wind late last week in the Old Bailey, London’s central criminal court.
The trial of the infamous “UK poison cell,” a group portrayed by Secretary of State Powell as al Qaida-associated operatives plotting to launch ricin attacks in the United Kingdom and in league with Muhamad al Zarqawi in Iraq, found nothing of the sort. The jury did find “the UK poison cell,” known as Kamel Bourgass and others (Sidali Faddag, Samir Asli, Mouloud Bouhrama, Mustapha Taleb, Mouloud Sihali, Aissa Kalef), not guilty of conspiracy to murder by plotting ricin attacks and, generally speaking, not guilty of conspiracy to do anything. Kamel Bourgass had been previously convicted of murder of a British policeman in an unpublicized trial.
In addition, the jury found Bourgass (and only him) guilty of conspiring to be a public nuisance with poisons.
A planned subsequent trial of other Muslim men who had been rounded up in the operation which eventually netted Bourgass was then canceled.
There was no UK poison cell. The alleged tip that led to it was obtained by torture, by an informant in the UK who had been tortured in an Algerian prison, and another man who had been tortured in one of the American gulags. (The UK informant later recanted and his information could not be used in the trial precisely because he had been tortured.)
“The ‘detained al Qaida operative’ in the above slide was Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi,” I wrote in 2008. “It is now well-accepted the al-Libi was tortured into a number of admissions, statements made to placate his captors.”
A Senate report from the Select Committee on Intelligence on the subject of Iraq and weapons of mass destruction read:
The other was an Al Qaeda detainee, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who had reportedly been sent to Eqypt by the CIA and tortured and who later recanted the information he had provided. Libi told the CIA in January 2004 that he had ‘decided he would fabricate any information interrogators wanted in order to gain better treatment and avoid being handed over to [a foreign government].'”
“There’s a fable going around now that the intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was all cooked by political pressure, that there was a big political conspiracy to lie us into war,” wrote David Brooks yesterday.
The New York Times got rid of Judith Miller. It should lose David Brooks. Stubbornly, it won’t.
C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
In 2005 the US press definitely did not want to hear the London ricin ring was a fraud. And Judith Miller was still working for the Times. (She saw my pieces at GlobalSecurity.)
The US newsmedia declined to cover the results of the trial of the so-called London ricin ring. The verdict came at a time when much of the newsmedia was still toeing the line on the Bush administration’s reasons for war with Iraq …
At Newsweek, Mark Hosenball also got his details from [my] GlobalSecurity posting.
Newsweek’s subsequent article was a disgrace, attempting to spin the verdict as evidence that if accused terrorists were allowed to go to trial in England, a jury would bring in the wrong verdict. Hosenball shoved my name in at the bottom of his article [I was his primary source] in an attempt to bury where the news actually came from. No one wanted to hear or print the real story about a big terror plot that had turned out to be tiny or that innocent men had been found not guilty during a lengthy and fair process.
“A much-touted ricin-plot terrorism case in the United Kingdom ended in a muddled verdict today, raising new questions among U.S. officials about the ability of British authorities to secure convictions against major terrorist suspects,” Hosenball wrote.
The jury had left off guilty men, Newsweek implied. It was a setback in the war on terror.
“The mixed outcome dismayed U.S. counterterror specialists who were convinced that Bourgass and his four codefendants were in fact acting as part of a broader international terror plot,” continued the Newsweek journalist.
Hosenball then roped in a source, Evan Kohlmann, who had nothing to do with the ricin trial.
“This is very disturbing,” Kohlmann, billed as a U.S. government consultant on international terror cases, told the reporter. “These are dangerous people … ”
Muddled verdict. There was nothing muddled about it.
The jury was clear and so was the case. Nobody bought the idea that a mere 20 castor seeds in a jewelry tin on a dresser constituted something in a real plot organized by al Qaeda through Iraq to cause mass death in the United Kingdom.
“The Iraq invasion was always an insane exercise in brainless jingoism that could only be intellectually justified after accepting a series of ludicrous suppositions,” wrote Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone this week.
“The bulk of [our reporters hid behind the morons in our business, people like Tom Friedman and David Brooks and Jeffrey ‘I trusted the Germans’ Goldberg, frontline pundits who were pushed forward to do the dirty work, the hardcore pom-pom stuff,” he continued.
“Many others, particularly the editors, quietly sat by and let lie after lie spill onto their papers’ pages …”
And who’s doing the pom-pom work today?
Why, it’s Mark Hosenball at Reuters, writing about the alleged trove of information seized at bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad,” coincidentally just declassified a week, one whole week [!], after Seymour Hersh’s story that the hit was arranged, bin Laden had been in the custody of Pakistan’s intelligence service, and not much information, if any, was retrieved at all.
If you follow the Reuters link to “bin Laden’s bookshelf” at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence you’ll see it’s another big bag of mostly unimportant nothing: Lots of US-origin public domain materials downloaded from the Internet, some American political books (including one by Bob Woodward), and 100 or so boring and relatively meaningless memos from bin Laden to an small assortment of al Qaeda lackeys.
The constant libertarian assault on the radio, in newspapers, on the television, this drumbeat of anti-government discourse is an old story – but still very important for understanding the anarcho-liberal sensibility. Just tune in to AM radio late on a weekday evening and listen to the anti-government vitriol. It’s sort of wild.
Someone could do an interesting study, Ph.D., in unpacking the cultural history of all this. It is tempting to speculate that deindustrialization, having disempowered and made anxious many huge sections of the working class, opens the way for fantasies of empowerment. The anti-statist, rugged individualist common sense is also always simultaneously a fantasy of empowerment. White men are particularly vulnerable to these fantasies. The classic guy who calls into the batshit crazy, late night, right-wing talk radio show is a middle-aged White man. Listen closely to the rage and you hear fantasies of independence. In this rhetoric, guns and gun rights become an obviously phallic symbol of individual empowerment, agency, self worth, responsibility etc.
We need to drastically restructure the state. We need it mobilized and able to transform the economy.
But most importantly, we have to think about how all of this anti-state ideology is being stirred up with investments from elites.
Delete phrases like “anarcho-liberal sensibility” and it’s a decent encapsulation.
Or, in other words, the tribe and party of Ted Nugent.
Last Thursday, Nugent went on one of his standard pro-gun rants, presenting an illogical comparison as something built on common sense: Swimming pools kill more children than gun accidents. (If you don’t understand why it’s illogical, you’ve no business reading this blog. We haven’t the slightest thing in common.)
As a very young man I ran my town’s swimming pool for two summers and was second-in-command for two more. Ted Nugent is a despicable insult to the good people I worked with.
Without going into details, we occasionally acted quickly and with skill, as lifeguards, to ensure the summer afternoons of young children were safe and never unpleasant, no questions asked. Kids will be kids, you watch over them. And sometimes you fished them out of the water and put them on their towels until they were calmed. You told mom just to keep him or her out of the water for a while.
You lent them an arm so they could pull themselves in and continue playing. Or you stood there on the concrete edge, looking at them, giving them the confidence that just because they’ve suffered a snoot full, you’ve seen it and they’re not in trouble. Because you were there.
And the Pine Grove swimming pool was not a small pond. Half a million gallons with a two-story pump house, exceptional for a town of its size.
What does it have to do with guns?
To see the summer swimming experience fashioned into something worse than gun violence by some very public ninny is beyond hateful. Guns have one function. Killing, putting holes in things. Swimming and water recreation are something for everyone, a pleasure of the human as well as the animal condition.
In Nugent world, might as well write a piece about choking to death on food. Or all the people who die of flu because they aren’t immunized.
All allegedly much worse than accidental death from loose gun handling in the home.
The Big Lie about guns is that innocent kids are being gunned down or are accidentally shooting each other. Compared to drowning, gun-related deaths don’t even register.
The Big Lie is just that – a lie.
Indeed, some kids do die in gun-related deaths, mostly in the president’s old stomping grounds of Chicago. However, very few kids under the age of 10 die or are injured as a result of gun-related accidents.
The vast majority of teenagers who die as a result of guns are involved in gangs. They are punks, thugs and street rats …
Nugent is one of the popular voices of the batshit crazy white guy, now mainstreamed and in control of one political party.
Media Matters immediately pointed out that, as usual, Nugent has no grasp of what he’s ranting about:
According to a project of Everytown for Gun Safety, there have been at least 88 incidents just this year “in which a child 17 or under fired a gun unintentionally and someone was harmed as a result.” In 2013, the group documented at least 100 accidental shooting deaths of children aged 14 or younger. A Mother Jones report that examined the same time period found 84 fatal gun accidents involving children aged 12 and under, 64 of which involved a child pulling the trigger, killing themselves or someone else, which debunks Nugent’s claim that children are not “accidentally shooting each other.”
Indeed, one such shooting captured national headlines when a 5-year-old boy accidentally killed his 2-year-old sister in rural Kentucky with a rifle designed for children.
Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, recently looked at data from 2009 and found that 662 children aged 14 or under were hospitalized after being accidentally shot that year.
There is never a shred of humanity in anything written by Ted Nugent.
If it’s not enough to drag drowning in the summer into an article in defense of gun accidents, the language of Nazi Germany is also employed.
Hitler first wrote about “the big lie” in Mein Kampf. The Nazi leader accused Jews of telling “the big lie” to corrupt “the broad masses,” who he claimed “more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie.” The phrase is also associated with tactics used by chief Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.
It’s hard to argue that accidental gun deaths involving children are not worth calling attention to, let alone that covering such tragedies is comparable to Nazi-style propaganda.
Yeah, it’s hard to argue. Still, it doesn’t matter. We live in a country where half of the political spectrum embraces senseless, patently offensive positions with no basis in reality.
On the other side of the coin, many in the not entirely batshit crazy parts of the country really do detest Ted Nugent. This is minor progress.
Liberals, Obama- and Hillary-lovers, Democrats, gun-controlniks, vegans and, one supposes, Jade Helm 15 operatives, beware: Rock musician/bow hunter/gun advocate/tea party favorite Ted Nugent takes the stage May 25 at the Waco Hippodrome in a solo show …
Funny, funny, funny.
The tickets aren’t selling: “About 180 tickets are left for the May 25 concert, including 12 VIP tickets, with about 140 tickets already sold.”
What do you think is the better deal, even in Waco?
A standard two six packs of cheap beer and a steak or Nugent playing the Star-Spangled Banner and telling people how he got to be a “political animal” for the sake of freedom and liberty?
One of the songs of the corporate dictatorship, specifically the toxic vision of Jesus held by the alleged Christians of the GOP and old Dixie.
Jesus fed the poor with loaves and fishes; he liked the lepers, too.
Then he found the land of liberty; America told him what to do!
Wealthiness, just like Godliness, that’s what Jesus taught.
To tide you over, here’s Chris Hedges on the radio from Boston, talking about the moral imperative for revolt, also the title of his new book.
In the name of balance, the station’s host brings in one of the Clinton corporation’s multi-millionaire money flunkies to insist the system still works.
It’s the best part of the interview because it gives Hedges the opening to vigorously rebut the smug and condescending fellow with a raft of unpleasant facts from the first Clinton administration.
Summed up, the Clinton administration and its obsession with triangulation moved the Democratic Party to the center. This resulted in the GOP moving farther and farther to the right, until it became the insane tribe it is today.
