‘Opportunity’ — Why the Afghan War is Doomed
Filed Under Bullshit, Just Plain War | Leave a Comment
The US and its nit-witted NATO allies should pack up and leave Afghanistan right now — right here and now.
And this terrible incident might be a major culprit (among a shitload of others).
From the Washington Post on Monday:
An Afghan border police officer opened fire on U.S. troops during a training mission in eastern Afghanistan on Monday, killing six of them in one of the worst such attacks in the past year, according to Afghan and NATO officials.
..
A senior police official said the shooter had been recruited into the border police two years ago.
“I think the Taliban has worked on him,” the official said.
The Taliban issued a statement praising the police officer, whom the group identified as Izzatullah, for the killings.
The group said the man “joined the police force of stooge regime in pursuit of an opportunity to eliminate any number of U.S.-NATO invaders until he got one today.”
This was at least the fifth time in 13 months that supposedly trustworthy Afghan soldiers or police officers have turned their weapons on their NATO partners, and earlier this month, two US GIs were killed in a extreme-similar situation.
Last August, two troops from Spain and their interpreter were killed by another Afghan police trainee, that one a so-called ‘Taliban agent.’
Next to the incident with US troops on Monday, the worse case was in November 2009 when five British soldiers were killed by a rogue soldier as they relaxed on a roof at an Afghan-British checkpoint.
No winning for losing — Pull the plug!
Wiki-Wiki — Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’
Filed Under Just Plain War, Media, Politics, Technology | Leave a Comment
The most-modern gadfly in the ointment of nefarious US governmental operations, WikiLeaks, dropped another load of classified documents into the vast media mainstream on Sunday, labeling this batch, “CableGate,” as the doco-dump is more than 250,000 US embassy cables — confidential communications between 274 embassies in countries throughout the world and the State Department in Washington DC.
And as in previous drops, WikiLeaks, offered the material to giant media outlets in advance, the usual suspects in journalism — the New York Times, Germany’s Der Spiegel, the UK’s the Guardian, Spain’s El Pais, and, not to be denied, France’s Le Monde.
Across the globe, all the ugly, arrogant and holier-than-thou bullshit from the US State Department has been apparently laid bare, and according to the various media, the result ain’t pretty.
Der Spiegel noted it best:
Never before in history has a superpower lost control of such vast amounts of such sensitive information — data that can help paint a picture of the foundation upon which US foreign policy is built.
Never before has the trust America’s partners have in the country been as badly shaken.
Now, their own personal views and policy recommendations have been made public — as have America’s true views of them.
One can peruse the various files, but right now the most-immediate view is from those media outlets and in the next few days, I’m sure, all kinds of gossip-like information will surface from this mirror of how an empire thinks about the rest of the world’s rabble.
And how US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, among others, have been conducting “damage control” the last few weeks — reportedly WikiLeaks allowed the US government a running start on what the doco-dump entailed.
From the standpoint of a campaign promise, President Obama has truly gotten his “transparency” in government, though, through a forced end-run around the closed-lipped bullshit still apparent in the way the US government conducts foreign affairs.
And oh, the gossip — again De Spiegel and Russian muck-a-mucks:
One cable from the Moscow Embassy on Russian first lady Svetlana Medvedev, for example, states that she is “generating tensions between the camps and remains the subject of avid gossip.”
It then goes on to report that President Medvedev’s wife had already drawn up a list of officials who should be made to “suffer” in their careers because they had been disloyal to Medvedev.
Another reports that the wife of Azerbaijan leader Ilham Aliyev has had so much plastic surgery that it is possible to confuse her for one of her daughters from a distance, but that she can barely still move her face.
Nasty shit.
From the Guardian, and how US diplomats were told — under Hillary’s name — to “spy” on UN officials in a “a secret intelligence campaign,” including UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, to obtain whatever information on just about everybody: Washington also wanted credit card numbers, email addresses, phone, fax and pager numbers and even frequent-flyer account numbers for UN figures and “biographic and biometric information on UN Security Council permanent representatives”. The secret “national human intelligence collection directive” was sent to US missions at the UN in New York, Vienna and Rome; 33 embassies and consulates, including those in London, Paris and Moscow.
Despite all this being illegal under UN bylaws.
All kinds of shit is being exposed, but because of death and dying in Afghanistan still ongoing, the cables view of terror in terms of popularity is noted.
Again the Guardian: IT IS OUR IMPRESSION THAT THE USG IS NOT DOING AS WELL AS IT MIGHT PROJECTING PUBLIC DIPLOMACY ON USAMA BIN LADIN (UBL). WE WOULD LIKE TO SUGGEST THAT WASHINGTON CONSIDER A REVIEW OF THIS PUBLIC DIPLOMACY EFFORT. END SUMMARY.
In other words, Osama and his boys are much-more popular than the US and pro-al-Qaeda items sell better than US “Wanted” posters — what a crock of bullshit, the war on terror.
Along with the stories on the actual cables and what they say and mean, the spotlight has again been placed on Bradley Manning, the 23-year-old soldier who was arrested seven months ago and is facing a court martial next year for leaking the troves of information into the public domain.
From the Guardian:
It was childishly easy, according to the published chatlog of a conversation Manning had with a fellow-hacker.
“I would come in with music on a CD-RW labelled with something like ‘Lady Gaga’ … erase the music … then write a compressed split file.
No one suspected a thing … [I] listened and lip-synched to Lady Gaga’s Telephone while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history.”
He said that he “had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months”.
Manning told his correspondent Adrian Lamo, who subsequently denounced him to the authorities: “Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public … Everywhere there’s a US post, there’s a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed. Worldwide anarchy in CSV format … It’s beautiful, and horrifying.”
He added: “Information should be free. It belongs in the public domain.”
Manning has repoprtedly been on suicide watch since his arrest.
All this has caused US blowhard Republicans to scream bloody murder: Rep. Peter King of New York wants Wikileaks to be classified “a foreign terrorist organization” and be eventually prosecuted.
Hey, what about Hillary and the spying and all the other “illegal” bullshit — Wiki,Wiki.
Hello, hello baby you called?
I can’t hear a thing
I have got no service
In the club, you see, see
Wha-Wha-What did you say,
Oh, you’re breaking up on me
Sorry, I cannot hear you
I’m kinda busy.
– Lady Gaga, Telephone
Huh? Too busy?
Cancún Canard
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Environment, Politics, Weather | Leave a Comment
Hope is a dim bulb for “CopenCun” — so nicknamed the UN climate summit which begins Monday in Cancún, Mexico — in that maybe some of the agreements wished-for during last year’s Copenhagen confluence disaster would be finalized, or even discussed again.
Don’t bet the farm.
(Illustration found here).
As the chief UN official on climate change in Copenhagen stated recently that to expect any kind of accord out of Cancún would be “a bridge too far.”
What we’re seeking/looking for is any kind of bridge.
And from what I’ve read about the upcoming summit, not much will be done, other than to hold onto the flimsy agreements reached in Denmark without any new kind of approach to the most-greatest threat now facing the planet — the probable result in Mexico will allow the climate-change can to be kicked further down the pot-holed road to the meeting in South Africa next year.
One hundred ninety countries to be represented in Cancún.
In face of the above-mentioned ‘most-greatest threat,’ mankind’s entire attempt to secure a handle on this living-environmental nightmare is complete gobbly-gook, laced high with toxic, near-about-incomprehensible bullshit.
Check this intro nonsense from UNFCCC:
The United Nations Climate Change Conference to be held in Cancun, Mexico, from 29 November to 10 December 2010, encompasses the sixteenth Conference of the Parties (COP) and the sixth Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP), as well as the thirty-third sessions of both the Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI) and the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA), and the fifteenth session of the AWG-KP and thirteenth session of the AWG-LCA.
WTF!
Yes, one can follow the whole spiel if one knows the proper alphabet sequence.
And this from The Ecologist — a quick “five-minute” guide to the 14 days of Cancún babble — and the Copenhagen more-than-disaster event:
Last year’s meeting saw the largest-ever collection of people come together for a climate change meeting, with 4,000 reporters and more than 120 heads of state in attendance, including US president Barack Obama and UK prime minister Gordon Brown.
The BBC sent 20 reporters to cover the event, but is reported to be sending just one to Cancun.
No heads of state are expected to attend, with energy secretary Chris Huhne and climate change minister Greg Barker due to represent the UK.
No actual agreement was reached, but instead a two-page accord was produced.
This called on industrialised countries to list their emissions targets, for all countries to monitor their emissions with complete transparency, to promote low-carbon technology and stated an ambition to keep global temperature rises below 2C.
An agreement is needed to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which was the last major international agreement for industrialised countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
This protocol expires in 2012.
No countries signed the so-called Copenhagen Accord, so it is not legally binding, though they did agree to ‘take note of it’.
‘TAKE NOTE OF IT’ — question mark.
Not only is the fight against quick-evolving climate change itself, but humanity’s complete survival scheme is also greatly hampered by another man-made burden, Climate Zombies.
People who actually deny climate change are either so-damn ignorant they should be institutionalized, or they’re greedy, dumb-ass lovers of big oil, big money and big-lipped arrogance.
And what makes these deniers so infuriating to me is the glaring factoid that they’re obvious liars as all one has to do nowadays is look out one’s window, or on occasion go outside, to actual witness climate change — it’s the freakin’ weather you assholes!
And for the first time it seems, science and actual weather events coincide.
From Newsweek and Science Nails the Blame Game.
Finally, climate scientists see a way to stop being so wishy-washy and start assigning blame, through a technique called “fractional risk attribution.”
This technique uses mathematical models of how the atmosphere would work if we had not goosed carbon dioxide to 389 ppm (from 278 before the Industrial Revolution), plus data about ancient (“paleo”) climates and historical (more recent) weather.
The idea is to calculate how many times an extreme event should have occurred absent human interference, explains climate scientist Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and the probability of the same extreme event in today’s greenhouse-forced atmosphere.
Result: putting numbers on extreme weather.
In their biggest success, climate scientists led by Peter Stott of the British Met Office analyzed the 2003 European heat wave, when the mercury rose higher than at any time since the introduction of weather instruments (1851), and probably since at least 1500.
After plugging in historical and paleo data, and working out climate patterns in a hypothetical world without a human-caused greenhouse effect, they conclude that our meddling was 75 percent to blame for the heat wave.
Put another way, we more than doubled the chance that it would happen, and it’s twice as likely to be human-caused than natural.
That’s one beat shy of “Yes, we did it,” but better than “There’s no way to tell.”
In that scenario, ditto the amazing Russian heat wave this past summer and the seemingly-endless flooding in Pakistan — climate change and major weather events.
And for you climate zombies/deniers/liars there’s even “crazy, extreme weather” right now right in the good-ole-USA.
And in the vernacular maxim of the age, the ‘new normal,’ will be the horror of these continually-expanding weather acting-badly events.
In Saturday’s New York Times, an opinion piece by Minnesota farmer, Jack Hedin, which depressingly describes arrival of the future, and it ain’t pretty.
A couple of bits (h/t Climate Progress):
The news from this Midwestern farm is not good.
The past four years of heavy rains and flash flooding here in southern Minnesota have left me worried about the future of agriculture in America’s grain belt.
For some time computer models of climate change have been predicting just these kinds of weather patterns, but seeing them unfold on our farm has been harrowing nonetheless.
…
In August 2007, a series of storms produced a breathtaking 23 inches of rain in 36 hours.
The flooding that followed essentially erased our farm from the map.
Fields were swamped under churning waters, which in places left a foot or more of debris and silt in their wake.
Cornstalks were wrapped around bridge railings 10 feet above normal stream levels.
We found butternut squashes from our farm two miles downstream, stranded in sapling branches five feet above the ground.
A hillside of mature trees collapsed and slid hundreds of feet into a field below.
…
The 2010 growing season has again been extraordinarily wet.
The more than 20 inches of rain that I measured in my rain gauge in June and July disrupted nearly every operation on our farm.
We managed to do a bare minimum of field preparation, planting and cultivating through midsummer, thanks only to the well-drained soils beneath our new home.
But in two weeks in July, moisture-fueled disease swept through a three-acre onion field, reducing tens of thousands of pounds of healthy onions to mush.
With rain falling several times a week and our tractors sitting idle, weeds took over a seven-acre field of carrots, requiring many times the normal amount of hand labor to control.
Crop losses topped $100,000 by mid-August.
…
Climate change, I believe, may eventually pose an existential threat to my way of life.
A family farm like ours may simply not be able to adjust quickly enough to such unendingly volatile weather. We can’t charge enough for our crops in good years to cover losses in the ever-more-frequent bad ones.
We can’t continue to move to better, drier ground.
No new field drainage scheme will help us as atmospheric carbon concentrations edge up to 400 parts per million; hardware and technology alone can’t solve problems of this magnitude.
Read the entire piece — a literary, articulate farmer.
During weekdays on cigarette breaks out behind the liquor store where I work, there’s always tractor-trailer trucks moving around, backing up, pulling forward, or just sitting at idle, making deliveries at a back loading dock of the 24/7/364 (closed on Christmas Day) Safeway super market next door.
Emblazed across a few of them is the phrase: Safeway — Ingredients For Life.
And what an ironic truth to that — do people, especially US peoples, fully understand and grasp the situational fact of where actual foodstuffs actually comes from, and what an arduous process it is to get those ingredients for life to Safeway shelves?
According to UC Davis: Anticipating a world population of 9 billion people by 2050, global agriculture faces the daunting challenge of increasing food production by 70 to 100 percent in the next four decades, without significantly increasing prices.
How to feed all the freakin’ peoples when the globe adds the equivalent of “two Pakistans or three Mexicos every four years” – along with disastrous regional climate bursts like those recounted above by Minnesota farmer, Jack Hedin.
Despite being late in the game, new research will begin shortly to analyze food production and climate change.
A $200 million, 10-year research project, known as the Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) and operate via the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and the Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP) — more alphabet-soup — will seek ways to adapt agricultural needs as the global climate changes.
According to Bruce Campbell, director of CCAFS: “Climate change threatens to alter growing conditions so rapidly and dramatically as to require an intensive effort that draws on the combined talents of all of our centers and partners. We want to bring a sense of urgency to finding and implementing solutions and attracting more support for this effort.”
A decade’s worth of study when the earth needs action yesterday.
In a pre-Cancún conference warning-rally call, the UN’s planning chief, Robert Orr, admonished the planet in saying the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on global warming will be much worse than the last one.
And the last one, the 2007 IPCC, was the first to flash on human’s as the main culprit in a climate change that was “unequivocal” — that report really changed how the vast majority of people viewed climate change and opened the floodgate of deniers/liars.
Orr told reporters last week:
…that negotiators heading for the Cancun conference “need to remind themselves, the longer we delay, the more we will pay both in terms of lives and in terms of money.”
He said UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon would make it clear to world leaders in Cancun “that we should not take any comfort in the climate deniers’ siren call.”
“The evidence shows us quite the opposite — that we can’t rest easy at all” as scientists agree that climate change “is happening in an accelerated way.”
“As preparations are underway for the next IPCC report, just about everything that you will see in the next report will be more dramatic than the last report, because that is where all the data is pointing.”
…
If governments “understand the peril that their populations are in, it is much easier to get over the political hurdles to do what you have to do,” he said.
…
Orr said no one should expect “the final deal” in Cancun.
But he said: “The time has come for some decisions on issues and therefore we do want some concrete results.”
Unless it’s too late, of course.
And if the government is broken and unable to create an understanding of ‘the peril’ to its frightened, ignorant populace, than the planet itself is doomed — the US will not be able to move properly against climate change for at least the next two years, even if then.
The old ‘victory gardens’ during WWII will become ‘survival gardens’ in the extreme-near future.
Vapor Day
Filed Under Media, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
“Step out the front door like a ghost
into the fog where no one notices
the contrast of white on white.”
– Round Here, Counting Crows
(Illustration found here).
This morning for damn sure it’s the stupid economy, you complete dumb-ass.
While way-more than a shitload of US peoples will have their hearts, minds and souls invested in finding and buying all kinds of useless crap — maybe even crushing a few in numerous early-AM stampedes — the world continues to collapse right before their bargain-gorged eyes.
Indeed in many, many ways this is Black Friday — monsters are on the loose.
And now is time to remember the time — nine years, 50 days.
On Friday, the U.S.-led coalition will have been fighting in this South Asian country for as long as the Soviets did in their humbling attempt to build up a socialist state.
The two invasions had different goals — and dramatically different body counts — but whether they have significantly different outcomes remains to be seen.
And despite all those 130,000 NATO troops and the billions of dollars, there’s still some “eye-watering” violence to come, and even without any type of conclusions reached, or an end to a conflict that has racked the foundations of many an empire.
And while shoppers drool, the US continues it slog through a status of ‘permanent war:’
John Cioffi, a political science professor at University of California, Riverside, says the nation’s “increasingly unhinged ideological politics” makes it difficult for the country to extract itself from battles in Afghanistan, Iraq and Central Asia.
“The U.S. is not on the path to permanent war; it is in the midst of a permanent war,” Cioffi says.
Permanent war is made possible by massive defense spending that has been viewed as untouchable.
But that may change with the recent financial crisis and the decline of the nation’s industry, Cioffi says.
More ordinary Americans might conclude that they can’t have a vibrant domestic economy and unquestioned military spending, Cioffi says.
“All this points to a time in the future when the government will no longer have the resources or popular support to maintain what amounts to an imperial military presence around the world,” he says.
All this treasure and blood: 90 percent of US peoples aged 18 to 24 couldn’t find Afghanistan on a map of Asia even if they used both hands — from National Geographic: “Young Americans just don’t seem to have much interest in the world outside of the U.S.,” said David Rutherford, a specialist in geography education at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C.
Oddly ironic, that failed interest must perk up sometime soon as these same young people will be the ones doing all the fighting in those ugly, wasted years to come.
Is anyone paying attention?
And again horribly ironic, this same age group will have the happy pleasure of living through the the worse of what climate change is bringing as most science groups warn 2010 will most-likely be considered the hottest year since records have been kept since 1850.
And in another nasty irony, while US shoppers cruise the bargain bins after gobbling up gravy-fied (such a word?) foodstuffs yesterday, poverty wordwide is outta sight: The number of very poor countries has doubled in the last 30 to 40 years, while the number of people living in extreme poverty has also grown two-fold, a UN think-tank warned Thursday.
Despite all the models and whatnot: “What happened is that in the past 30-40 years, the number of LDCs have doubled so it has actually deteriorated, the number of people living under the poverty line has doubled from the 1980s.”
ATTENTION SHOPPERS: Clean up in all aisles.
Celebrate Slaughter Day
Filed Under Bullshit, Double Standard/Religious | Leave a Comment
Another day set aside for perpetual lying.
(Illustration found here).
As always, Mark Twain notedly recorded the festivities:
“Thanksgiving Day, a function which originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people recognized that they really had something to be thankful for — annually, not oftener — if they had succeeded in exterminating their neighbors, the Indians, during the previous twelve months instead of getting exterminated by their neighbors, the Indians.
Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that in the course of time, as the years drifted on, it was perceived that the exterminating had ceased to be mutual and was all on the white man’s side, consequently on the Lord’s side; hence it was proper to thank the Lord for it and extend the usual annual compliments.”
As some US peoples sit down to tables stacked with fatness, to gorge themselves, watch TV for several mind-bungling hours, and supposedly give thanks for the fat-ass and arrogant bounty which came via blood and horror.
US history is a shitload of lies wrapped in fuzzy feelings easily embraced by a population underwhelmed by what the last few hundred years has really wrought and live in a vapor of desire to understand, or maybe even care.
Not all US peoples are so swell: 17.4 million households won’t have such a holiday dinner and nearly 15 percent have had problems sometime during the year with “food insecurity” and food stamp use is at a record 40.8 million folks.
Food stuffs is in the eye of the beholder.
Arthur Silber, who can utilize words that cut like a buttered knife through a bird carcass, has a good recent post titled “A Cause For Genuine Thanksgiving” in response to a new upcoming Wikileaks release reportedly coming this week.
Silber’s money bit:
It must be noted that the U.S. government has yet to offer the smallest particle of evidence that any Wikileaks release has damaged “national security” or jeopardized even a single life.
In starkly unforgiving and murderous contrast, the U.S. government and its military have unleashed an immense amount of suffering, brutality and widespread death in country after country over endless, blood-drenched decades.
The constant, but for most people almost entirely muted, soundtrack of our existence is a howling scream of pain as countless lives are mutilated, deformed and ended.
The overwhelming majority of Americans fail even to notice it.
This is simply the way we live — and die.
When unbearable pain is the never-ending theme, we learn to diminish it or ignore it altogether. For most people, the only “solution” is to deaden their souls more every day — or to slowly go mad.
Most Americans choose to murder themselves in slow motion. In this manner, the world — your world — becomes more brutal with every hour that passes.
Black Friday is tomorrow — a recipe for greed.
Gobble-gobble.