Spectacle and theater have come to dominate the political arena today, even more so than ever before. Politicians are now celebrity oligarchs, who use tax revenues to promote their pet projects, and to enhance their personal investment portfolios, while pretending in scrupulously orchestrated performances to care about the populace from whom all of the money they squander is siphoned. Congresspersons who issue dire warnings about global warming jet across the world for photo ops with President Zelensky in Ukraine. The provision by the federal government of Peloton bicycle memberships to...
War on Terror
Adam Kinzinger Executes Neocon Vision for Ukraine
As the war in Ukraine approaches its tenth week, the steady flow of ominous headlines has grown to a floodwater deluge. Dissenting observers are made to watch, seemingly helpless, as the broader levy of sanity threatens to break, unleashing a torrent of death and destruction across Eastern Europe, and likely, the globe. Leading the bad news cycle, on Sunday, May 1, Congressman Adam Kinzinger proposed a new Authorization of Use of Military Force (AUMF) in the U.S. House of Representatives. The legislation, if passed, would allow President Joe Biden to deploy American forces to restore “the...
Smart War Disinformation and the U.S. Military State
Drone killing has long been billed by the military as a cleaner, smarter way to conduct war. The standard marketing line has been that with drones it is possible to neutralize even elusive enemies such as factional terrorists while sparing the lives of innocent persons, and without sacrificing any soldiers at all. The most effective propagandist throughout the period when drone assassination was redefined as “targeted killing” and normalized as a standard operating procedure was John Brennan, who served as Barack Obama’s drone killing czar before being promoted to the position of CIA...
Elon Musk, Twitter, and the ‘Ministry of Truth’
Just last week, I finally got around with starting to read Crime and Punishment, Fyodr Dostoevsky’s famous novel about a Saint-Peterburg student’s murder of an old lady pawnbroker. The murderer and book’s main character, Rodion Raskolnikov, got the idea from a fellow student whom he overheard saying at a local eating establishment: “On the one hand, you have a nasty, stupid, worthless, meaningless, sick old woman who’s no use to anyone. […] On the other hand, you have young fresh energies that are going to waste for want of backing. […] If one were to kill her and take her money, in order...
Neoconservatives are the Flat-Earthers of Foreign Policy
Douglas Murray, the author of Neoconservatism: Why We Need It, claims: Neoconservatism is not a cabal or a party, but rather a sense, an instinct, a way of looking at the world. That way of looking at the world is, in my definition, a blend of idealism and realism. We look at the world as it is, but act in the world to make it as we would like it to be. This makes our instincts different from traditional conservatives who often distrust social engineering projects or any form of alteration of a status quo they perpetually see as being an irreversible if often quietly enjoyable decline....
America’s Exceptional Amnesia (About Those War Criminals…)
The top-ranking U.S. diplomat, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, recently denounced Russian president Vladimir Putin as a war criminal, which has resulted in a marked uptick in the usage of that term throughout the media. Putin decided to invade Ukraine in February 2022 and has killed people in the process. That’s what happens when leaders decide to address conflict through the application of military force: people die. The U.S. government has needless to say killed many people in its military interventions abroad, most recently in the Middle East and Africa. Yet Americans are often...
The Necro-Neologism of Lethal Legal Experts
The power of language is magical to behold. Through the mere pronouncement of words, people can be persuaded to do what they would never have thought to do, left to their own devices. The playbook with the most success in this regard is that of war. When people are “informed” that they and their families are in mortal danger, they can and often will acquiesce to any and all policies which government authorities claim to be necessary in order to protect them. Young people can be coaxed into killing complete strangers who never did anything personally to them. Citizens can be brainwashed to...
Don’t Apologize, the Antiwar Movement Was Right
The antiwar movement, the anti-imperialist movement of America, has nothing to apologize for and obediently doing so now is tantamount to facilitating our own systematic demonization, silencing, and persecution. There were notable analysts in the independent media, antiwar orbit who called this correctly, predicting a Russian attack, leaving the door wide open to an invasion as a major possibility. Those who apparently assumed American policymakers would choose diplomacy and not ultimately risk the deaths and displacement of millions of Ukrainians and Russians, a possible global economic...
Inflated
Inflation. Today’s inflammatory word of the day. Apparently, I’m permitted to share critical thought in this regard since I majored in Finance and Econ in college, correct? I haven’t written anything on today’s other hot topic, Ukraine. With 13 years of military intelligence experience apparently, I might be permitted to posses and share a thought there as well. Scott Horton has done, as always, a wonderful job in this regard so what more is there to say really? My quick take; there are no good guys in this story. None. So, Inflation. Side A: Joe Biden is the worst! Side B: Greedy...
Against Public Interest, Supreme Court Protects Torture Cover-Up
The Supreme Court declared last week that Americans have no right to learn the grisly details of CIA torture because the CIA has never formally confessed its crimes. The verdict symbolizes how the rule of law has become little more than a form of legal mumbo-jumbo to shroud official crimes. Why should anyone expect justice from a Supreme Court that covers up torture? In 2002, the CIA captured Abu Zubaydah, a Palestinian radical, in Pakistan, mistakenly believing he was a kingpin with al-Qaeda. The CIA tortured him for years in Thailand and Poland. As dissenting Justice Neil Gorsuch noted,...