Gordon Brown Says "Afghanization" Is The Ticket

...out of Dodge.

Of course, first off you don't know who Gordon Brown is, do you? That's bad enough, but when you read the NY Times op-ed, they'll thoughtfully inform you that he's the current PM of someplace called "Britain"—off the Northwest coast of Mordor.

And then, to properly grasp the stupid patronizing of Brown's bullshit, you need to listen to a brief bit of history, so get a grip.

Once upon a time in a land called Vietnam, the land was divided into two parts. In the North, called North Vietnam, the allegedly evil CommieRats ruled, and were hell-bent on taking over the Southern portion of the land, and imposing communism on everything and everybody. In the South, called South Vietnam, the allegedly good corrupt dictatorship (sarcastically called a "democracy"), managed a pretty profitable whorehouse and casino operation for their American investors. The latter had backed their play by sending, at one point, 1/2 a million American troops to occupy South Vietnam and kill the bad Northerners, and many bad Southerners who were actually in cahoots with the CommieRats.

Now, as is usually the case, most of the poor people in South Vietnam just wanted to farm and be left alone. But that wasn't happening. Nevertheless, if they had to be killed, tortured, raped by marauding bands of thugs, they gradually decided they'd prefer the CommieRat version, who were after all their own people, than the Americans and their corrupt Southern goons.

Eventually, as the war in Vietnam dragged on for years, the Americans got tired of investing billions of dollars and thousands of its own dead soldiers to what seemed increasingly like an unwinable fiasco, and they started looking around for some "honorable" way to get out of the mess.

One day somebody came up with a great plan, a plan where the United States would dump all the responsibility for looking after South Vietnam, and particularly for fighting the Northerners in the endless war, on the corrupt and worthless South Vietnamese government. Then the United States would cut a peace deal with the North, and turn tail and run.

They called the dumping process "Vietnamization".

This morning, Gordon Brown, telling us about "five urgent challenges", mentioned that one of these was the "next stage" in Afghanistan. This stage Brown decided to call "Afghanization", which he defined as a strategy of "building up the Afghan Army, police and civic institutions and handing power to the Afghan people."

That, after eight years of NATO occupation, the Afghan Army, police and civic institutions still need to be built up and handed over is not exactly a sign that things have gone any better for the Americans, and their Mordoran allies, in Afghanistan than they did in Vietnam.

What we are really beginning to see here though is the discursive groundwork laid for the US and NATO to get their ticket out of yet another dumbass Dodge. They will Afghanizize what's left of the anti-Taliban government, likely sign some kind of peace deal with the Taliban, and turn tail and run.

The only question for me, this morning, is whether Gordon Brown knew his term had some troubling and even dire historical roots. Because, after the United States dumped off its responsibilities in South Vietnam, the Northerners, who were always the smarter and much more committed fighters, waited a short while, and then easily crushed the South Vietnamese government. And the successors to the CommieRat victors are still running Vietnam today.

So, did Brown know all this and just figure his audience was too lazy and ignorant to know any better? Or was he trying to make an ironic plea that we not end up that way again?

The Taliban can gauge when they've licked an enemy. They've seen big, lumbering empires turn tail and run out of their country before after all.

(jk)

The Rotten Barrel Of The Terror Wars

Nope, not just a few bad apples.

And it never was.

War-criminal scumbags in the British Army are noted in a new public inquiry to not simply be "a few bad apples", but instead there is something "rotten in the whole barrel", i.e. the entire British military in Iraq. Certainly, that attitude could not be much different than the war-criminal-scumbag behavior the British and their American allies have displayed in Afghanistan either.

Most people are of course busy worrying over their depleting piles of money and possessions, and don't give a crap that the United States is still fighting insane, criminal wars against a long list of poor people all over the world. In Iraq, we are told that some kind of "victory" has been won or anyway an escape plan has been put into effect to finally get US troops out of that hellhole (of their own creation).

But the dying is still going on.

You know how many US troops are still in Iraq today? 130,000.

How many US troops were in Iraq when Obama took office? 145,000.

This despite Robert Gates' hope that the number in January 2009 would be about 100,000. In October, 2006, before the "Surge" (which recall was supposed to enable a faster withdrawal of US troops), the Pentagon had already declared they were going to keep troop levels, at that point about 140,000, stable into 2010.

Afghan Regional Manager of America's WarMart, General Stanley A. McChrystal, recently confessed the obvious in an unsecret report, the United States is losing the war in Afghanistan, and that "the overall situation is deteriorating", this despite years and years of Americans being lied to about the "good war" and its success.

In any case, the alleged benefit to US troops and their mission of the Surge, never materialized. And while troops have been reduced a bit in Iraq, in the new phase of the endless Afghanistan war, few if any US troops will be coming home. Indeed, the 15,000-troop reduction in Iraq was erased by the 20,000-troop Surge (part I) in Afghanistan.

Unlike in the Iraq Surge, which was largely based upon bribing the Iraqi insurgents and ethnically cleansing and partitioning vast portions of Iraq to keep people from killing each other, the Afghan Surge (part I) has met with unexpectedly stiff resistance from the Taliban, who are not much interested in being bribed it seems, but are interested in killing as many NATO invaders as they can.

And of course the American generals, as Bob Woodward has recently informed us, want many more troops than they presently have, and are warning that without them, the US will be defeated in Afghanistan. What we will likely see, if the Afghan-Pakistan component of the Terror War should continue, is the bulk of the Iraq-based US force being moved east to fight the Taliban and Qaeda—and those dastardly Afghan babies US troops keep blowing up.

War is now a permanent export of the USA. So are the attendant war crimes.

And anyone who thinks US security interests are being improved by those ghastly facts on the ground is a damned fool.

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Update: US orders wholesale retreat back to Afghan cities. The Afghan government is protesting this move, since it amounts to a military defeat of NATO by the Taliban, and thus "will make the weak Afghan government appear even more powerless in the eyes of its people."

The US government doesn't look so powerful or competent either.

(jk)

Fuck Civility

Civility: "formal politeness and courtesy in behavior or speech"

So, "formal"—some kind of ritual or dance.

And what's that word?—"courtesy"! What the fuck does that mean?

Courtesy: "the showing of politeness in one's attitude and behavior toward others"

Or more to the point: "polite, respectful, or considerate in manner."

And really more to the point: "having manners fit for a royal court".

See? It really means acting like a courtier, a person fit to be hanging with the king, instead of hanging the king, which is what a good republican (not the party, dumbass, the idea) should be doing.

Now, I have to say, with respect to full disclosure, I'm not a democrat or a republican (party or idea)—both sound pretty lame-brained to me—the majority of people are a dumb mob, who are not qualified to choose anything, including the elected representatives who will sell out their interests. Not only is democracy a questionable idea but, as we see continually, it doesn't work, at least not as piously advertised. The interests of poor people, for example, are left on drowning housetops in Katrina, while the interests of the rich and powerful (the smart people who own this system) get protected so they can keep collecting their billions.

After a week of televised, emphasized incivility, in other words a few celebrity moments of egotistical idiocy culled from the giant morass of rudeness which is modern American life, there are screaming meatheads questioning whether we need a "civility czar", to "enforce good mannered public behavior".

Of course I think that guy was trying to be funny, but as he points out, czaring problems is a favored White House approach, no matter what party is in charge of meting out social enforcements.

Well, let's look, individually, at the recent alleged offenders of civility and see if they really merit all this attention—especially in a country fighting wars all over the world—do you really think that's all that courteous an activity?

Joe Wilson—a couple of weeks ago this clown was a deservedly obscure member of the South Carolina US Congressional delegation, a fellow who loves his Confederate flags, the "honor" of the slave-owning Confederate States of America, and who probably wishes he could fire on Fort Sumpter again and get Act II of the Civil War rolling. Actually, in a way, that's just what he did. Most Republicans, many of whom absolutely despise the idea that a mulatto is President of the United States, generally accept the notion that the office of the Presidency rates some kind of formal (i.e., superficial) respect. Thus, during Obama's speech to a joint session of Congress about health care, they cheered or booed, but nobody shouted out the many awful things they think about Barack Obama. Nobody until Joe Wilson did it anyway. Right after Obama had gotten through explaining to Congress and the nation that Republican fear-mongering, like their stupid death-panel nonsense, was a pack of lies, Representative Wilson decided he needed to counterattack, and at Obama's next claim, that illegal aliens weren't going to benefit from his health care reform bill, Joe yelled out "You LIE!". As some people have pointed out, the word "boy" seemed to hang at the end of that charge, though I don't think anybody actually heard it. But given his Confederate sympathies, certainly Joe Wilson wouldn't have minded using the formal ending to address a person Wilson no doubt considers an embodiment of the folly of latter-day Reconstruction.

Now, Wilson apologized, it is true, in fact several times, and it is understandable he rapidly tired of having to do so, especially since he instantly created a new base of Obama-haters who absolutely love the fact he openly called the President a liar, especially in political church where he was supposed to keep his yap shut. I suspect they wish Wilson had thrown his shoes at Obama, or maybe worse, given all the guns these cretins are packing to Obama speeches. But Wilson now desperately needs these people, and their money, given the incredible amount of enmity he has created on the other side of things by opening his big mouth.

The questions we wish to look at are simple ones. Was Wilson being uncivil to the President, and if so, so what? As many people have rightly pointed out, the President isn't a king, so why does he automatically rate any unearned respect at all, especially if you think he's lying about something? On the other hand, the President is also head of state of the United States, which is supposed to carry with it an expectation of formal deference to the supposed dignity of the office, even if the person occupying the position is a horse's ass.

Unfortunately, we have had such a succession of horse's asses in the job for such a long time, people from both parties who have done an awful job (especially at being dignified), that most people can't understand why the office rates a drop of automatic respect from anybody. As we have heard repeatedly in defense of all kinds of rancid antics in the White House, the President is not a pope, and of course he isn't a king, and he shouldn't be (though Bush tried to be) a defender or pusher of any particular religion.

In fact, after Clinton and Bush, a good colloquial term for the President might be "First Dude". And Dudes might rate attention, depending on what craziness they're inflicting on the rest of us, but they certainly don't rate any automatic or unquestioning respect. These creeps we're installing (or tolerating) in the White House are not Washingtons or Lincolns or Roosevelts—they're people just like you—which is absolutely the source of the problem, as I'm sure you'll agree.

So, was it an act of incivility for Joe Wilson to yell "LIAR" at President Obama? I don't see how it could be, since the Congress is not the king's court, but a meetinghouse providing an opportunity for people to resolve conflicting views. Obama said the Republicans were liars. One of the alleged liars then called Obama a liar. Isn't that what you expect from your elected, paid-off, public representatives? Honesty and resolve and equal opportunity?

Next we have the psycho-bitchery of one, Serena Williams, she the bigger, badder side of the Williams Sisters act in professional tennis. When Serena was getting her big, bad ass thoroughly kicked by new mom Kim Clijsters (who had earlier beaten Serena's sister, Venus) in a semifinal of the US Open, Williams foot-faulted on a point, which in tennis is a bad thing. The foot-fault cost Williams a point, another bad thing, and Williams was having lots of bad things happen to her and, given that she had already been penalized for "abusing" her racket, she decided to go abuse the line judge who called the foot fault.

Now, the key point is that Williams later didn't dispute the call, in other words she admitted she had probably broken the rules and deserved the penalty. But that didn't matter. She was being made to look bad, mainly through her own ineptitude and of course through the good play of her opponent. But, why should Serena blame herself? Hey, that's bad for her self esteem, and everybody knows that celebrity self-esteem is protected under some amendment or something. So Williams told the judge, a diminutive woman, that she could stuff the ball down the judge's throat, among other colorful acts of violent retribution she allegedly threatened.

The judge got frightened, scampered over to the bigger judge, who called in other officials, and they once again penalized Serena a point, this time for being an uncivil jerk, and that point happened to be Match Point, meaning her opponent won on a penalty point, because Serena, like Joe Wilson, couldn't keep her fat stupid mouth shut.

Clijsters, who had really accomplished something, getting to the finals of the US Open, after entering the competition unranked, and coming back from a several-year retirement to be a mommy, was robbed of her moment of acknowledgement, because all people wanted to talk about was crazy Serena.

But again, was Serena Williams uncivil? And if so, so what?

Well, tennis without splutter and bloodshed is truly one of the most boring and stupid sports ever invented. Add a ranting asshole, like John McEnroe, or a psycho-bitch like Serena Williams, and you at least have a spark of humanity vitalizing a land of rich, robotic Borgians.

And, after all, it's a sport, you know entertainmentnot a joint session of Congress!

Speaking of entertainment, if there was ever an event which strives to elevate vulgarity and garishness over any consideration of civility, it's the MTV Video Music Awards Show. Now, true, it ain't what it used to be, a place where Eminem could hold hands with Elton John, and Madonna could share gum with Britney. Those fine moments in television aside, the MTV Awards Show is just another allegedly edgy event that glorifies the exploits of rich, often grotesquely arrogant and stupid, clowns. Who the hell, in any right mind they might allege to possess, would expect a pack of clowns on crack to care a whit about civility?

On the other hand, they do care a lot about and worship foolishness. Oh yeah. And let's face it, Kanye West is a god-damned fool. And that didn't just start the other night, when he grabbed the mike from Taylor Swift as she was accepting the Best Female Video award. West pointed out that an injustice had been committed, since clearly Beyoncé, who looked like she really had to agree with Kanye, had done one of the best videos ever, he claimed. The crowd started booing, just like they were supposed to, just they always do when the bad-guy character ambushes the good-guy character at a professional (i.e. fake) wrestling match.

And that's all American life is any longer—one unbelievably stupid narrative arc of a wrestling opera, complete with brutish bullying orcs, blustering about themselves, and oh also themselves, while kicking sand into some 98-pound weakling's face, like Taylor Swift's or the little line judge or even Barack Obama—the little, nuclear-armed, pansy-ass (who did however call West a "jackass").

After, the people look on, helplessly of course, until their public defenders, the noble meatheads of cable, ride forth to call our most saintly entertainers a pack of uncivil barbarians, and woe is us, what is the nation coming to? Blah...blah...blah. And everybody experiences another round of the two-minute indignation and then sucks their SOMA and goes back to work—if they're lucky enough to have a job.

Well distracted.

Meanwhile, a bomb in Afghanistan that you paid for tears a score of children to pieces.

Brits Finally Say "Sorry" To Alan Turing

Some nominally English minister (or "Scottish", whatever) of some sort issued the following apology today in accord with changing tastes, and some stupid petition:

"Oh yes, Alan, thanks so very much for breaking the Nazi codes and saving England from a fate worse than Thatcher (most likely). And of course everyone is terribly sorry that it turned out you were a little faggot who had to be chemically castrated—by frying your balls with fem-mones. Of course you did have a choice, didn't you? You could have chosen not to be a homosexual. What's that? Oh, I'm told you all claim you have no choice in that matter and some scientists are backing that absurdity. Well, then you had an option to not to do anything about it that bothered the rest of us. And, after your errors in judgment were found out, and you were punished, you could have chosen prison where your natural inclinations would have been a boon to that population, instead of an eternal shame upon pretty much everyone. But you chose chems all the way, including, what was it, guzzling cyanide or something? Well, anyway, now, after fifty-five years of being perfectly fine with how it turned out—especially for all the straight people—we did want to say we're very sorry those chaps in the past were so strict about morality, one might even call them inhumane, if one wished to be unduly harsh to good intentions and proper values. No doubt you'll rest better now. Well, must be off...straight things to accomplish...another Afghan adventure you know. Peace down there. Say hello to Satan."

Wall Street's Next Brilliant Idea—Death Bonds!

Afraid your government-run death panel will pull the plug on grandma?

Well, you'll be a lot more positive about it if her life insurance policy is included in one of Wall Street's new "securitized" death-bond investments.

Designed to fill in the gap for the now discredited subprime mortgage investments, the new approach gambles on the notion that, unlike crappy mortgages which, surprise-surprise, really could all go bad at the same time, nobody expects everybody in a death-bond package to croak at once.

Nor do they expect the Spanish Inquisition.

What's a death-bond?

Well, first you need a bunch of really sick and elderly people, who have, as they say, one foot in the grave and not quite on the banana peel, but you know they're almost through eating the banana. Anyway, these are people who have cashed in their life insurance policies early, to get some cash out of them so they can pay for medicine or a last-gasp get-away or whatever. The investment bankers get a bunch of these policies, turn them into bonds, so the risk to the bond-seller is spread out, and they sell them to idiots like you, who they (most likely rightly) figure are so stupid you haven't learned any lessons from the subprime-mortgage-investment fiasco.

Anyway, they also figure the unfortunate aspect of the subprime mortgage investment scheme—that the mortgages actually could all go bad together, thus sinking the banks or insurers (like AIG) backing them, will not happen with death bonds, because how could everybody in a bunch of death bonds all die at once? Death is kind of reliable in that way, right, in a way that mortgages just aren't.

Of course, next time we have a Black Plague or something show up, you might want to dump all your death bonds—because the backers of them will never be able to pay out on them.

Now, thinking about that, here's one of the great features of the death bond from an investor's point of view:

"The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return"

Of course on the downside:

"...though if people live longer than expected, investors could get poor returns or even lose money."

So, what death bonds are really about, from an investment point of view, is hoping all the people (because there are actual suffering human beings creating the profit potential) in your bonds die like really soon, but not too soon, because then the backers won't be able to pay off on them.

A careful balance of death is thus required, and taking the long-term view, especially given problems of population and the like, perhaps a managed death program (like a government-run death panel!) could see to the stable liquidation of the underlying assets.

One investment banker put it: "We’re hoping to get a herd stampeding after the first offering."

A herd stampeding to bet on timely, profitable, death.

And what was that you said about capitalism still being a good idea?

Maybe that was true before the monsters took over.

(jk)

Robert Gates Confesses Appalling Lack Of Imagination

Robert Gates, continuing the fine American tradition of monstrous idiots in charge of the Defense Department, recently criticized the Associated Press for publishing a photograph of a dying US Marine.

Gates is reported to have written to AP the following:

"Your lack of compassion and common sense in choosing to put this image of their maimed and stricken child on the front page of multiple American newspapers is appalling. The issue here is not law, policy or constitutional right—but judgment and common decency."

The photograph in question was part of a series taken by an embedded AP photographer, and depicts the fallen Marine, both legs burned and mangled by an explosion from a rocket-propelled grenade, being helped by two other Marines. While his condition stabilized enough to allow him to be evacuated, he later died of his wounds.

While it is certainly the case that the parents of this soldier are likely to experience additional pain knowing their son's life and death are now part of the very public, and strident, debate over the war, Gates' remark about a "maimed and stricken child" make it sound like the Taliban just ran over a three-year-old, instead of the truth—Lance Corporal Joshua Bernard died because Robert Gates, and Barack Obama, acting in the name of the American people, ordered him into harm's way. They put the uniform on his back. They gave him the guns and ammunition he carried to kill the Afghan people. And the American people have a right and a responsibility to see what it looks like when somebody they order into battle gets his legs blown off by people who don't want Americans occupying their country.

So important is this right and responsibility that the United States Constitution protects the press in its job and duty of supplying Americans with the hard facts, of peace and of war. And for the most part, the US media have done an awful job of reporting the facts of the the US Terror Wars. Instead, they have repeatedly acted as propaganda arms of the US government.

For once, a media outlet did its job, properly, and showed Americans what the cost of the war actually looks like.

And what they got in return was a harsh rebuke from the Secretary of Defense, who is supposed to be protecting and defending the Constitution.

Instead, Gates made this remarkable confession:

"I cannot imagine the pain and suffering Lance Corporal Bernard’s death has caused his family."

Yeah, why would he? His family is not at risk for losing a loved one in these idiotic wars. The vast majority of Americans are at no risk for losing anybody they care about in these idiotic wars. Meanwhile, thousands upon thousands of innocent people all over the world, but particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, have been murdered by American troops.

That also gets no notice, no coverage, and is habitually dismissed by US military officials as misreporting of justified killings of the "enemy", even when the victims are children and babies. After investigations show in fact Americans did unjustly kill innocents, the US government tosses a little money at any survivors, says "sorry...whatever", and keeps on committing war crimes.

So long as the meatheads in charge of the wars can honestly say they cannot imagine the pain and suffering of the people upon whom they inflict their war crimes, these crimes will continue to seem to them just abstract policy issues, instead of the death-&-destruction horrors they are perpetrating.

Oh, and just so we're clear, it isn't just Americans committing these crimes. NATO countries are helping and are just as responsible. Recently, as you may have read, Germany made its contribution to the ongoing murdering of Afghan citizens by NATO troops.

Here's the German excuse (imagine the accent):

"According to the information available to us there have been no civilian casualties...had civilians been present, the air strikes could not have been called in.”

Yeah...right. Well, at least the Germans have learned well the lessons of their American masters. Always blame the victims for transmuting into "enemies" the moment the NATO terror bombs start falling.

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UPDATE: "The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan said Saturday he was convinced that civilians, in addition to militants, were among those killed in a NATO airstrike that killed at least 90 people in northern Afghanistan."

Note that the above is the original wording of the article, which was then changed to read "among those wounded", no doubt after CNN buckled to US military propagandists.

---

The question is, why do the German people, the British people, the Italians, the French, the Canadians, the Icelanders??...continue to tolerate their countries' support for this American catastrophe? Good friends should know when to say "You should stop...this is a mistake."

All these wars are accomplishing is making the hatred of the United States and the West a more virtuous and vital option for the poor people of the world, people whose economic despair, combined with religious fanaticism fuels their response to the US's and the West's own terroristic crimes.

The world writhes in its madness now.

Are these not death throes?

(jk)