Yemen

Is the enemy of my enemy, etc. etc... ?  Apparently not.

We have heard Yemen described as a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and I suppose that's accurate enough a description.  We've also heard it described as an outgrowth of the classic Middle Eastern conflict between Sunni and Shi'a Islam.  That, I'm pretty sure, it is not.

The Houthi are adherents of the Zaydi sect, which is an offshoot of Shi'a Islam, but not nearly orthodox enough to satisfy the clerics who hold power in Iran.  Iranian Muslims supporting the Houthi because they're, sort of, Shiite, would be kind of like the Roman Catholic Church supporting Seventh Day Adventists because they're sort of...  well, you get it.

Move over to Iraq, and you find Sunni clients of the USofA fighting the Sunni zealots of Daesh, aka all those other names and acronyms tirelessly repeated in the American press.  Why are Sunni fighting Sunni?  Not because IS (aka etc. etc.) is especially naughty what with the beheadings and whatnot.  No, it's all about the usual, just as it was from the time of the Cheney invasions or even the CIA's 1953 overthrow of the democratically elected Mosaddegh government in Iran and installation of the Shah.

It's about the oil.

That's why Saleh could be fighting the Houthi one minute and supporting them the next.  That's why the Egyptian military, an equal opportunity oppressor of Islamists no matter what branch of Islam they spring from, is out there trying to restore Hadi to power.  That's why Americans, even some in government, are having such a hard time figuring out how and why anybody is putatively allied with anybody out there around the Persian Gulf.

Don't be confused.  Just follow the money.  Follow the oil.

Religion 2013

Yes, it's nice that Time named Pope Francis "Man of the Year," but it's hard to imagine that even a very charismatic religious leader can steer the world away from all the violent stupidity the practice of religion has  brought us this year.

Sunni Muslims, Shi'a Muslims, various Christians, Hindus, and even Buddhists and animists have been killing each other this past year. Iraq and Afghanistan, of course, continue to be torn apart, and Syria is worse.  Then there are Cambodia and the Central African Republic and Chad and Ethiopia and Lebanon and Ceylon and Burma and Uttar Pradesh and Bahrain and the Northern Caucasus and more places I can't remember right now.  Oh, yeah, and don't forget the Israeli ultra-orthodox zealously expanding the settlements, and the Palestinians who hate them.

Then there are the secularists and the Putinistas and the radical atheists and Kim Jong Un.  It's all religious craziness, even when there's not much obvious religion involved.  It's all religion.

There was a very long time before you were conceived, and there will be a very long time after you are dead.  We are very, very finite, and there are no angels nor virgins nor reincarnation awaiting us.  We occupy a finite space in time, the same space we always shall occupy.  Those who intentionally truncate that time — by volunteering as suicide bombers, for example — get no special consideration.

In the long run, of course, it doesn't make any difference.  It doesn't make any difference at all.

Happy New Year.

Religion

This morning I read that Pope Francis has taken the brakes off the the beatification of Oscar Romero. I'm not entirely sure what the requirements are for martyrdom, but Romero certainly met my requirements.  Perhaps you are old enough to remember Pope John XXIII, and the Second Vatican Council.  Perhaps you are old enough to remember Liberation Theology.

Perhaps not, but every once in a while the Catholics remember what Jesus and Christianity once were all about.  Francis seems to have remembered it was about helping the poor, but  the rest of Christianity may take a long time to catch up.

In the meanwhile, Coptic Christians in Egypt are being exterminated by Salafists; Sunnis in Lebanon are being suicide-bombed by by Shi'ia; Muslims in India and Cambodia are being exterminated by Hindus; (who knows what kinds of) Christians and (who knows what kinds of) Muslims are exterminating each other in various former colonial fiefdoms of Africa; and the Sunni-Shi'ia conflict is playing itself out all over the Middle East.

One nice thing about the USofA is that we atheists are far less likely to be suicide bombed than in other parts of the world (unless we work at abortion clinics.)  Maybe it feels good to feel so fucking sure of yourself, but that's no excuse.

Tell your god to go fuck himself.  Take care of all those orphaned children, and all those refugees.  Probably there's no reward after you're dead, but that shouldn't matter.  Do it for now.

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.