The Crapification of the War Machine

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“Yeah, she’s got a little age on her, but we have to keep using her until they can debug the software on the new-generation tanks.” (Photo by Andy/Flickr

You know those movies in which the villain at some point shouts, “I’m going to rule the world?” He never adds, even under his breath, “if I can get this damn tank started,” or “providing this fershlugginer gun will shoot for a change.” But for anyone setting out to take over the real world today, such qualifications — and many many more — are embarrassingly necessary.

The relentless enrichment of the “defense” industries at the expense of everybody else continues apace in all those countries run by people who want to take over the world — on other words, countries that are run by the defense industries. Expense is no object, it seems, when you’re after the biggest bomb, fastest fighter, or most menacing ship. The results are increasingly hilarious: Continue reading →

Living on a Flat Earth

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One of the Sunday magazine shows the other week devoted a segment to a meeting of the Flat Earth Society. It featured interviews with earnest, articulate people professing their belief in the proposition that the earth is flat, and their scorn for all the so-called “evidence” to the contrary: the moon landing, the space station, the stunning images from orbiting satellites — all fake.

The scariest thing about this story was not the weirdness of the mass delusion of ordinary people — I looked very closely to see a glint of irony somewhere, to catch somebody winking, but no — the scariest thing was how normal it all seemed, like just another day at the Trump White House. Continue reading →

Repost: America’s Deadliest Terrorists

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[This post was published in March of 2015. It seemed timely to bring it back.]

Say “terrorist attack” to us and, like Rudy Giuliani asked how he’s feeling, we immediately respond “Nine-eleven!” But in the 14 years since 9-11, it’s not Al Qaeda operative who have been killing us. We have met the enemy, as Al Capp told us so long ago, and he is us. (US Navy/Wikipedia photo.) “The domestic radical right has killed more people than radical Islam since 9/11 in the United States, without a doubt.” Those are  the words of Ryan Lenz, principal writer of a Southern Poverty Law Center study of violent “terrorist” attacks that occurred in the U.S. between 2009 and 2015. In a classic example of confusing ideologues with facts, the SPLC study found that while US security officials were focused exclusively on protecting against foreign organizations of Islamic extremists, Americans were steadily being picked off by home-grown, Christian lone wolves. Continue reading →

Caravans From Hell

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A bloodthirsty army of gang members and terrorists, some as young as two years old, brandishes its armaments as it marches toward confrontation with US forces at the Alamo.

A significant part of the population of the United States is alarmed about what it thinks is an enemy army approaching our southern border — a collection of rapists, MS-13 gang members, middle eastern terrorists and zombies intent on forcing their way into the country in order to destroy our society and culture. One of our citizens became so anxious about this invasion, which, he had it on good authority, was being financed by Jews, that on Saturday he went into a synagogue in Pittsburgh and killed 11 people.

The information about the content and intentions of this caravan, as it is being called, first came to public attention almost exclusively through fulminations on Fox News and subsequent tweets from the Tweeter in Chief of the United States. (Except the part about the zombies, I made that up. But there are still a few days until the midterm elections. Watch that space.) The entire FoxTrump Tango has been a pathetically transparent attempt to scare the bejesus out of American voters so they will gallop out and vote for the wall, or whatever. Continue reading →

Telling It Like It Is

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He was a charming man, and I took to him immediately when I met him at a social function. Well into his eighties, he had the appearance and energy of a much younger man. And his stories, oh lordy the stories he could tell: about living in his native Germany under the Nazis, of scrounging for trinkets to sell to soldiers so his own family could eat; about the apprehension that permeated life in a repressed country that was losing a war; about coming to America speaking no English, and the struggle of adapting, learning a trade, starting a business and raising a family. I loved this guy. Then, for some reason, he felt it necessary to make an announcement. “I voted for Trump, you know.”  

I have a rule against engaging Trumpits in argument. It is, I have long since learned, a waste of time. But I loved this guy! So I couldn’t help asking him, “Why?”

“Because he tells it like it is,” he said, with a small smile. Continue reading →

The Silence of the Leaves

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The view from my deck (in West Virginia) in mid-October, 2007.

The view from my deck in mid-October 2018. Notice anything?

If you Google “fall foliage 2018,” you will be deluged with Chamber-of-Commerce rantings and tour-operator ravings about the glories of fall and the many opportunities for the well-heeled tourist to revel in it all — for a suitable fee, of course. There’s big money in leaf-peeping, and no money to be made at all from observing that the leaf emperor does not have any clothes on. Well, he does, but they are looking very drab. Continue reading →

The New York Times: To Treat Food Poisoning, Use More Poison

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No, no. no! Bulldoze this. Plow it, spray it, and plant just one thing! It’s the American way.

What used to be called journalism, when it was a profession dedicated to informing people about their world, should be rebranded journalitis — an inflammatory infection of the body politic that can lead to sepsis and death. There is no better example than the paean to industrial agriculture that appeared last week in the once-iconic New York Times. The Times and other former bastions of excellence in journalism, such as CBS News, the Christian Science Monitor,  the Los Angeles Times and so on, are like elderly movie stars — they are still capable of flashes of ability that remind us why we once loved them, but mostly they are emaciated, irritable, drooling shadows of their former selves.

The point was driven home when the New York Times brandished the following headline: “China’s Small Farms Are Fading. The World May Benefit.” I went through all the manifestations of cartoon-character astonishment — my eyes bugged out, my lower jaw hit the floor with a clang, and all four of my feet came off the ground and vibrated. It could not be possible, I hoped and prayed, that the Times was so ignorant of the depredations of industrial agriculture and the advances of restoration agriculture around the world that it would portray industrialization as something good for China and the world. It could not be. Continue reading →

Just Kill Me Now: The Copout

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More and more people — and they seem to be young people — are taking to social media and various doomer sites (Reddit/Collapse is one of them) to moan that they are so bummed by the prospect of civilizational collapse that they are considering suicide. Now, suicide, like sex, is talked about far more than it is actually done — but this drivel should be dealt with before it becomes a fad.

Did you not get the memo, young tragedians, that you (and I, and everyone we know) are going to die? I can understand the error, because our culture is about being special, and forever young, and being anything you want to be, and never, ever talking about death. Continue reading →

No Time for Optimism

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There may have been a time when it was appropriate to look on the sunny side of things. But it’s not now.

There’s a dumb old joke about an optimist who falls off a 40-storey building and is heard saying, as he passes the 20th floor, “Well, nothing bad has happened yet.” We have met the optimist, and he is us.

The optimist is, for example, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Policy, which this week issued a report to a world that has not yet begun to implement the agreed-upon changes needed to hold global warming to 2 degrees Celsius. Two years after that target was set by 195 nations, after years of negotiations, at the Paris climate agreement, the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, the primary drivers of climate change, are still rising. There is no hope of limiting climate change to two degrees. But it would be so much nicer, says the IPCC now, to hold the increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

In other words: I started trying to lose 40 pounds a year ago, I haven’t lost any weight at all, so now I’ve decided to try to lose 50 pounds. Continue reading →

Idiots in the Rain. Again.

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Breaking News: No one in their right mind should be out in this weather. Back to you.

The minute the sun peeked out from behind the clouds of Hurricane Florence, the squadrons of idiots who had been standing out in the rain and leaning into the wind in front of television cameras, shoulder to shoulder along the entire Carolina coast, trooped inside and went back to emoting about tweetstorms. (I suppose they are smart enough, really, but my father’s definition of an idiot was someone who did not have the sense to come in out of the rain.) Florence faded from our screens and minds, over and done with, forgotten along with last year’s Harvey, Irma and Maria, along with Matthew from 2017 and all the others.

Forgotten, that is,  by all of us whose experience of Florence was vicarious, but not by those whose homes are gone, or soaked to the rafters in foul brown water, not by those whose businesses have been destroyed for the second time in two years (remember Matthew?) or by those whose relatives or friends are gone forever. Not by those who will spend the next several years of their lives living in shelters, filling out forms, trying to get back just to where they were last week. Continue reading →