Most wars aren’t “rational” and become more irrational the longer they go on (See Afghanistan). And most attempts to “rationalize” them are freighted with the very biases that will serve to perpetuate them. It’s one reason Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August will never go out of date. Almost all of the “lessons” learned from the insane bloodbath of World War I were wrong and helped to set the stage for the even more genocidal World War two decades later, was itself a war that produced  not global peace but a world at perpetual war with itself, with antagonistic nuclear powers still fighting over the same scraps of land and oil reserves, insensate to the future of the planet itself.

George Washington was a patrician dandy of no exceptional military or administrative genius, who abused his troops, committed war crimes, bought his first election to public office with booze, and held 100s of slaves, often treating them cruelly in response to his own ineptitudes as a gentleman plantation owner.

“There’s a difference between saying: ‘Look, I’m going to kick him in the face because I want what he has,’ and the American way, which is to say ‘I’m going to kick him in the face because that’s right and just, and if he tries to get out of the way, he’s a criminal.’ That’s [...]

This is what it sounds like when Democrats gear up for war. Silence from the stalwarts. No mass demonstrations. No protest songs. No campus sit-ins. Those will only come later, after the administrations change hands and the body bags start coming home–if we’re all not turned into piles of irradiated ash first.

+ I was asked this morning to name my favorite Neil Young song and said, Lookout Joe, for obvious reasons. There’s at least one Young song for each decade of my life. But I keep coming back to Tonight’s the Night. One of my best friends in HS was killed on his first date (and [...]

Given the speed at which the most cherished landmarks of American liberalism–reproductive rights, workplace safety, voting rights and the regulatory power of the state–are being shredded, a recently-arrived foreign exchange student (assuming there are any left who want to come here, except to sample the potent quality of our fentanyl) might be forgiven for assuming that rightwing vandals seized the capitol 15 years ago and began ransacking the government.

If your country (unlike Cuba) isn’t willing to rapidly vaccinate the global population, then it doesn’t have much moral or epidemiological standing to demonize the unvaccinated within its own borders, since the virus doesn’t recognize & isn’t impeded by borders or border walls. The virus doesn’t care why you are unvaccinated, whether it’s for reasons of politics, religion, fear, ignorance, poverty or governmental neglect. It is likely to infect you and be passed on by you to others, across rivers, oceans, borders and border walls. And the longer it circulates, the more it has a chance to mutate and resist the defenses against it. As long as some are vulnerable, we all are.

It’s not surprising to me that Omicron is a more contagious but less lethal version of COVID. Unlike humans, viruses get tend to get smarter over time and don’t want to go extinct by killing off their host environment all at once.

As a review of the year climate politics should make clear, much more dangerous than the politicians who tell you “Don’t Look Up” are the politicians who encourage you to “Look Up” and then, while your attention is diverting from looking up, quietly offer oil leases on 82 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico.

Fourteen-year-old Valentina Orellana-Peralta was in a dressing room at a Burlington department store in North Hollywood and police officers opened fire on an assault suspect. After the shooting, the investigators found a hole in a wall of the store and behind it found Valentina on the floor of the room where she’d been trying on dresses for her quinceañera, dead at the scene from a gunshot wound to the chest.

+ Let us return to Baghdad in the sweltering summer of 2007, four years into the bipartisan war that destroyed Iraq. It is day one of Operation Ilaaj, a maneuver in the Sunni section of town known as New Baghdad that was designed to “clear” neighborhoods of “insurgents” and “caches of weapons.” Thanks to onboard [...]

Biden told many stammering whoppers during the primary campaign, but perhaps none more ludicrous than this one back on November 20, 2019: “And I would make it very clear we were not going to, in fact, sell more weapons to them [Saudi Arabia], we were going to, in fact, make them pay the price and make them, in fact, the pariah that they are. There’s very little social redeeming value of the — in the present government in Saudi Arabia.” 

In the 48 years since Roe was decided, the Democrats have had ample opportunity to codify the right to an abortion. In that time, they’ve controlled the Senate for 29 years, the House for 29 years and the presidency for 21 years. Instead, many Dems sought to restrict abortion rights, especially for poor women, largely by enacting the Hyde Amendment, which prohibited federal funds for abortions. The Hyde Amendment was first enacted in 1977, only four years after Roe. One of its most enthusiastic co-sponsors: Joe Biden.

My mind keeps going back to the gloves on Rittenhouse’s hands, glowing blue in the streetlight, as this strange kid marched from block to block down Kenosha’s tear-gassed streets, with a goofy luck on his face, like he was moving from one kill level to another in a video game for the damned. What do the gloves mean? Were they meant to keep his fingerprints off the AK-15 strapped so awkwardly across his chest? Were they a measure of self-defense? A thin layer of latex to protect him from the virus so many of his fellow patriots contented was a hoax. Or were they an essential part of the costume for the role he was playing that night of the helpful paramilitary, the vigilante medic with the first-aid kit dangling from his belt.

But Rittenhouse shot white people! Doesn’t that prove he’s not a racist? No. He shot race traitors, white people protesting the police shootings of blacks. During Reconstruction some of the most sadistic murders in the South were committed against so-called Radical Republicans, Southerners who supported emancipation and black suffrage, a threat that needed to be completely neutralized before JIm Crow could be implemented.

Here they come: James Carville, Paul Begala, Mark Penn, Andrew Stein, and the rest of the doddering pack of “New Democrats” from the Clinton era, exploiting the loss of their pal Terry McAuliffe in Virginia, to decry the alleged “wokist” takeover of the Democratic Party, “wokism” being the latest K Street slang to refer to any progressive policy that the US Chamber of Commerce finds objectionable.

Biden’s remarkable passivity as his political agenda is demolished from within by two lightweight senators from his own party is not a sign of his mental feebleness. It’s endemic to the post-Carter Democratic Party. They don’t fight for anything, except their own reelections and now they don’t even seem much interested in fighting for that. Look back to one of the original “new Democrats,” Al Gore, who refused to fight for his own election as president, as it was stolen right in front of his eyes. Gore showed the same listlessness as Biden.

In thinking about Colin Powell on the day of his death, I kept flashing back to one of the greatest, if most opaque, novels about what we might loosely call the American project: Melville’s The Confidence Man. The first, maybe only prerequisite, for a conman is the ability to win people’s confidence. Powell had this gift to such an elevated degree that he was able to retain public confidence even after his tricks had been exposed as lethal frauds, over and over again.

As Biden vows to keep the ports of LA and Long Beach running 24/7, likely gutting labor rules to in the process in effort to speed the import of consumer goods made by low-wage Asian laborers, it’s hard not to reach the conclusion that the most pressing supply chain issue is housing, where there’s not a single state in the US where an employee who works a 40-hour can afford a 2-bedroom rental at the current minimum wage of $7.25 hour.

The Huntington Beach blowout was not merely predictable. It was inevitable. But when does the inevitable become the criminal? And where does the liability begin and end? With the pipeline company? The oil drilling company? The holding companies? Their lobbyists and PR hacks? The hedge funds? The regulators? The politicians?

There are, of course, quieter ways to kill than in a gun battle on the streets of London and Biden, no less eager to claim Julian Assange’s head than Trump, seems to have settled on a more insidious method: allowing Assange to waste away in the dark chambers of a prison, whether in Belmarsh, where he is now confined, or, if extradited, in some even more austere Supermax in the American outback.

We reenact our history again and again without even realizing it, so absolutely has the darkest chapters of our nation’s past been erased from the collective memory. Our leaders react in mock horror when confronted with the outlandish scenes of torture and gratuitous violence that they themselves have set in motion. The liberal conscience, frail as it is, recoils momentarily at what it has done, then quickly reverts to its default setting of moral superiority by blaming the victims, people so poor and desperate they hold all of their earthly possessions in their hands, if, that is, their hands aren’t already holding a frightened and hungry child.

Almost everything Tom Wolfe wrote about the glitterati left in the late 60s has been recapitulated in subsequent decades, with the faux radicalism diminishing into hip liberalism and the artistic pretense inflating into camp couture for the one-percent. It’s beyond parody. In the 60s, the message wouldn’t have been “Tax the Rich” but “Fuck the Rich”, “Eat the Rich”, “Infect the Rich.” As a radical artistic statement, AOC’s catwalk at the Met Gala was pathetic, a commercial aimed at the most middlebrow donors to the DNC.

We often hear from the humanitarian bombers that drone strikes are necessary tool for teaching repressive and misogynistic regimes a lesson in the Western values. And for 20 years that’s exactly what the US has done–a war that started with revenge killings against an entire country that had no direct role in the 9/11 plot ends with a revenge killing that killed Afghan children and their parents in retaliation for a suicide bomber, who may have been from Syria or Iraq.

Curtis LeMay wanted to bomb Vietnam into the Stone Age, “destroying every work of man.” HRC wanted to bomb Afghanistan into modernity, destroying every vestige of misogyny. The bombs fell for years until the US finally left. Amid ruins and graveyards, both nations remain culturally much the same. The US, however, is weaker now, morally, politically, and internationally, than it has ever been.

The next war on Afghanistan will be a silent war, one waged behind the shadowed windows of board rooms and bank vaults, an economic war, fought with sanctions and debt, weapons indiscriminate as cluster bombs, that will almost certainly inflict much more misery and death than the hot war of the last 20 years. It’s already started.

For years, the mantra of “anti-war” liberals, including the Peace Prize president, was that by invading Iraq, the US was fighting the wrong post-9/11 war, losing its focus on Afghanistan. In fact, the US shouldn’t have been at war with Afghanistan either…

Managed forests–that is logged, roaded, grazed–forests burn and they tend to burn long and hot. Under normal circumstances, logging is an accelerate not a deterrent for fire. Under these extreme climate conditions, logging has fueled the infernos that have swept the West for the last decade. Last year was the worst fire season in the West in the last 2,000 years. This year will worse. And so, likely, will be the consecutive years of the next several decades. There’s no immediate solution and all of the proposed political responses will only exacerbate the crisis. Welcome to the Pyrocene.

No one can pinpoint precisely when the US war on Iraq began, but certainly dates back at least to 1962 when the CIA began plotting the overthrow of Abd al-Karim Qasim (who was executed in early 1963). And, of course, no one can predict when, if ever, the war on Iraq will come to an end. But it’s became the duty of each American president since JFK to declare the Iraq war over, then expand it…

There can be no doubt that Ham, the first chimpanzee in space, would have made a more evocative and intelligent description of his suborbital flight than the vapid mutterings of Bezos, who didn’t even have the sense to hire a professional peddler of pomp, like Jon Meacham, to script a few uplifting lines.

The worst thing the Cubans ever did to the US was to export the island’s most reactionary criminal element to south Florida, where they’ve dominated the economic and political scene for the last 60 years, using the same corrupt practices that got them chased out of Havana. And they’ll probably be paying price for this island cleaning until the Atlantic reclaims Miami.

On almost every issue that matters, including the future of life on the planet, the US government, if not the entire US culture, has become a real time case study of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, where the more incompetent it becomes, the less able it is to realize that what it’s doing isn’t working. The less you know, the less you know what you don’t know.

The “heat dome” shouldn’t have caught any of use by surprise. The new normal is yesterday’s abnormal. The surprises and anomalies come and go, but only in one direction. The hotter they come, the hotter the records fall. It’s time to stop calling the PNW heat wave “unprecedented” and start calling it the precedent for a future that has already arrived.

When Bill Clinton and Dick Morris perfected triangulation politics, the strategy was to work with the GOP to strangle progressive policies and advance a neoliberal agenda. Biden’s strategy takes this one step further and relies on Democrats to play the role of the 90s GOP politicians, many of whom were to the left of Sinema and Manchin.