Etc.

Refugees
Angela Merkel and the rest of the EU entered into a devil's bargain to deal with the flow of mostly Muslim refugees, the devil in question being Recip Tayip Erdogan.  I suppose they preferred to deal with a devil outside the EU rather than the nativist devils who put increasingly fascist governments in charge in Poland and Hungary, and are threatening the rest of Europe as well.

Brexit
See above.  The nativists of UKIP are eating away at Britain's Conservative Party, and the controversy over EU membership is threatening to split the Conservatives in much the same way that Tr*mpism is threatening to split the Republicans on this side of the pond.

"Our" Muslims
Obama is pissing off the Saudis.  Good.  It's about time.  Somebody has to do something to end the human rights abuses in Yemen, and cut into support for world Islamism.  While he's at it, maybe something can be done about the buildup of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, which now seems to include tactical nuclear weapons, and is vulnerable to Taliban attack.

Merrick Garland
Hopefully, the nomination is more a political ploy than a serious indication of the kind of candidate most Democrats want to see on the court.  We've had more than enough "moderation" from Obama himself, and we don't need a Justice who reflects Obama's illiberal views on the primacy of government over individual liberties.

Religion and Ethics

I like to watch the Religion and Ethics Newsweekly on PBS.  In the real world, though, there seems to be far too much of the former and a paucity of the latter.  If there ever might be a better time for mass conversions to atheism, I can't imagine when it might be.

For starters, Pakistan is a sinkhole, all on its own.  With honor killings, prosecutions for blasphemy, persecution of the Ahmadi sect, and more, its efforts to get control over extremists in North Waziristan don't count for much.

It seems likely that the perverts who captured and killed the three Israeli boys actually were not members of Hamas, but that didn't stop the Israelis from conducting a pogrom against anybody associated with Hamas on the West Bank, primarily to prevent a Fatah-Hamas reconciliation.  Bibi needs an enemy to stay in power.  On the other hand, the killers of that Muslim boy certainly were religious fanatics.  That (in addition to the pogrom and the need to improve their reputation for political purposes) inspired Hamas to launch their rather inept rocket attacks on Israel.

Boko Haram is yet another crazy Islamic cult, making an unstable part of the world even less stable.  Then again, in the Central African Republic, the Christians may be more bloodthirsty than the Islamists.  Moving up to Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, the crazy animists are attacking medical relief workers trying to address the the Ebola epidemic.  Well, their shamans can't be too much less effective than Doctors Without Borders as far as cures go, but MSF probably stands a better chance of containing the outbreak.

The Eastern Orthodox Church is solidly behind Putin.  Buddhists (yes, Buddhists) are killing Muslims in Cambodia.  Let's not even mention (okay, I'll mention it) relationships between India and Pakistan.  Back here in the USofA, the "Family Values" crew seem to be losing on gay marriage, but the 2011 post-census redistricting has offered them definite advantages, not least in states like North Carolina and Virginia.

What the hell.  I'm old, and pretty soon I'll be dead, and Jesus won't be there to welcome me home.

Polio and the CIA

Polio is back.  It almost was gone — almost extinct — but it's back.

The epicenter is Pakistan, where health workers vaccinating children are victims of Islamist attacks.  The problem, it seems, is that health workers vaccinating children against polio probably were working as CIA informants in the search for Osama bin Laden.

Neither the Obama Administration nor the CIA has refuted those accusations.  Most likely, the accusations are accurate.  Most likely, the USofA has sacrificed the health and the lives of who knows how many children for the sake of killing one man in hiding.

The informants could have been selling leather-bound Korans, or doing market research for some mass producer of chapatis, or anything else.  Why polio?  Who gave the okay?  It's dreadful.  It's horrible.

Me, I'd call it a war crime.

Helpless, helpless

The United States has, by far, the largest military establishment in the world.  Our expenditures are roughly equal to the next fourteen world powers combined.  China and Russia, together, spend only 30% of what we spend.

That level of expenditure might be justified if our military actually accomplished anything, but it really hasn't been good for much lately.  Some may argue that "lately" goes back half a century or so, but let's start by looking a lot more "lately" than that.

Not even factoring in all the lost lives, and the contributions they might have made to our society, Iraq and Afghanistan are likely to add up to $4 trillion — when you add in the costs of caring for the injured and disabled, and the interest on the debt we accrued to fight in those countries.  Hell, we're still paying the social and psychological costs of Vietnam — and we lost that one too.

Yes, that's what I said.  We lost.

Iraq's Shi'a government — thoroughly corrupt, aggressively purging Sunnis, hostile towards the Kurds, and not even remotely recognizable as democratic — looks like a good bet to become Iran's closest ally.  Afghanistan, as any student of history might have predicted, will return to it's natural condition of tribal-warlord-dominated-failed-state-locked-in-perpetual-civil-war.  Nobody even can guess what will transpire in Pakistan, but it doesn't look too hopeful for the USofA.  Great job, America!

Then there's Syria — not to mention Libya, Egypt, Mali, Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, and an host of other severely challenged not-quite-states — places where even the most ambitious American generals fear to tread.  And, no, we can't get away with invading Venezuela or Bolivia or Peru, and our military is useless against provocations by Russia or China (despite our commitments to Japan, Georgia, and the Philippines.)  What good is a huge, bloated military if you can't even use it?

(Okay, Clinton managed to get the Balkans back to where they were, more or less, before World War I — but, as you may recall, that "balkanized" region was where World War I started.  All Obama does is launch drone attacks, which is kind of like using laser beams against the flies buzzing around those starving babies' eyes.)

Does global capitalism need a powerful army to protect its interests around the world?  It seems to think it does — but why in hell should you and I pay for it?  Let global capitalism hire Eric Prince and whatever he's calling Blackwater these days — and pay for the protection, extortion, and intimidation without putting it's grasping tentacles in our pockets.


Oh — and, yeah...  Happy New Year.

Unsubstantiated conjecture

Raymond Davis, the CIA operative, claims he shot two Pakistanis on motorcycles because they were attempting to rob him. The Pakistanis say he shot both of them in their backs, through the windshield of his car, for no particular reason — although it has been suggested that the two were "assets" who had turned against him.

Washington maintains that Davis is entitled to diplomatic immunity. Islamabad says he's a murderer, pure and simple.

So here's my unsubstantiated conjecture: the two dead men were agents of ISI, the Pakistani intelligence agency, and the killings were the outcome of some kind of "spy vs. spy" conflict that neither government cares to discuss. What kind of conflict? How the hell would I know? Clearly, the CIA and the ISI have not always worked and played well together, and the last people to find out about it are citizens of the US and Pakistan.

Let's just wait and see what emerges.

Sunday, 2/27, 9:40 AM — Unsubstantiated conjecture substantiated

Well, we didn't have to wait long! Here's the latest update!

Afghanistan, again

Now that the US has been in Afghanistan longer than the Soviet Union was — which also makes our fumbling around there the longest war in our history — it seems like a good time for a review of what's going on over there. The Obama administration is planning to release a "December Review" shortly, but we already know what it's going to say. According to Petraeus and crew, we'll be "making good progress" — military leaders just hate losing wars, possibly more than even presidents do.

On the ground, though, all we're doing is propping up a corrupt government, lining the pockets of warlords and military contractors, and creating a great deal of misery at very great expense. We already know that whatever remains of the original Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden included, is in Pakistan — probably guests of the Haqqani Network, under the protection of Pakistan's ISI. Yes, it's a shame that so many lives had to be lost so that a pack of rich, sleazy bastards could get even richer, but that's what happened, and throwing more lives and money at an impossible situation won't bring any of them back.

Some are concerned that the Iranians will go into Afghanistan if the US pulls out "too soon." If they do, it will be a damned shame for Iran. Afghanistan is not called "the graveyard of empires" for nothing.