Overcast and still warm this way-early Tuesday morning on California’s north coast, and if the recent past is any indication, this day will either be foggy, sunny or a mixture of both — who’s to really say?
Weather up here is almost the same year ’round, not like just about everywhere else.

Beyond the noodle that’s Washington, DC, and the fruit-flies holding court there, the bottomless pit of the endless war on a faceless enemy (though, most seem to resemble peoples from the Middle East and are Islamic in nature) is most-incredibly dangerous and stupid.
And has accomplished worse-than-nothing.

(Illustration found here).

And the war ain’t even near finished — in the horror days since Sept. 11, 2001: The US Congressional Research Service, in its March 2011 report, states that the Overseas Contingency Operation has cost the US taxpayer $1.3 trillion – $130 billion per annum since 9/11. At present, US military operations worldwide cost $386 million per day, or $4,000 dollars per second. According to US Congressional estimates, the final bill will total $1.8 trillion.
The attacks on the WTC killed nearly 3,000 people. George Jr. launched the war formerly known as the Global War on Terror, which has led to an estimated 600,000 Iraqi lives being lost — some figures indication more than a million — and another 10,000 or so in Afghanistan.
And that maybe don’t include all them drone deaths.  And in ‘maybe,’ because John Brennan, now head of the CIA, blubbered nearly two years ago there hadn’t been “a single collateral death” in covert U.S. drone strikes because of the “exceptional proficiency [and] precision” of U.S. targeted killings — a ridiculous statement on its face and a bald-faced lie.
President Obama was suppose to be transparent — he’s hiding shit like no other. War is war and will also be war as profited by national security.
And the Afghan conflict is falling apart.
Jason Ditz at at antiwar.com: The dirty war behind the Afghan occupation has always been smoldering just under the surface, but is becoming more and more obvious and ugly, with US commanders openly refusing to ever hand over detainees held without charges unless the Karzai government promises never to give them trials. Officials maintain the detainees are “dangerous,” but concede they don’t have the evidence to ensure them being convicted in an actual court of law.

And Iraq has become Syria-like. Drive-by shootings, bombs (suicide or otherwise) and home invasions, killed 30 people at one location, many others all over that sliding-into-chaos country, nearly 200 wounded.
When George Jr. sold the show on Iraq, he said it’d be a cakewalk, costing just $50-$60 billion — which of course in reality is/was $823.2bn and counting. And it sure ain’t been no cakewalk.
A more-solid look at Iraq came this week from one of the more-sane and intelligent guys, Andrew J. Bacevich, a professor of history, and a retired Army officer, in the Washington Post.
Money quote:

A challenge facing historians of the Iraq war, which began 10 years ago this month, will be to gauge what senior members of George W. Bush’s inner circle were actually trying to accomplish.
The justifications offered for the invasion were all over the place, including supposed weapons of mass destruction, claims that Saddam Hussein had collaborated with al-Qaeda and visions of democracy throughout the Arab world.
Eventually, only this last — Bush’s Freedom Agenda — remained.
Yet, as the war dragged on, expectations of transforming the Middle East gave way to more modest definitions of success.
When it came to advancing the cause of liberty, the Bush administration set out to build a cathedral.
In the end, the Obama administration declared itself content with a shaky two-car garage.
Considered from this perspective, Sen. John McCain’s recent assertion that “history has already made a judgment about the surge” of troops in Iraq in 2007 — a statement meant to disqualify Chuck Hagel as defense secretary for having the gall to question the strategy at the time — qualifies as a nifty sound bite but is suspect on at least two counts.
It is almost certainly premature.
And more important, it is profoundly misleading.

Yet the killing continues. We’re out of Iraq, but Afghanistan is still way deadly, and totally f*cked-up.
Seven US soliders died in Afghanistan yesterday  — five in a helicopter crash, and two others killed hours earlier in an insider attack by an Afghan policeman.
Into that quagmire, cesspool last week strode newly appointed DOD chief Chuck Hagel, who has way-more than Stars-of-David whip-lashing his brains. He had suicide bombers and Hamid Karzai to contend with, and there’s no easy way out of the shitstorm. He also blubbered up a way-understatement: “…to better understand where we are in Afghanistan.”

Up to our eyeballs.