Why Picking Sides in the Middle East Is Hard -- and Pointless

Remember last year when John McCain was stomping around the world insisting that the United States help the Syrian rebels and attack Syria, this very instant? Flash forward a year later, and the Syrian rebels, now calling themselves ISIS, have swept into Iraq, murdering thousands of innocents based solely on their religion. Now John McCain is stomping around the world insisting that we attack ISIS, this very instant.

Tea Party and Libertarian websites are now claiming that McCain was consorting last year with the very ISIS terrorists he's now advocating we attack. Not long after these photos were taken it was discovered that the terrorists McCain was palling around with  were "bad rebels" that were holding Lebanese Shiites hostage.

Now, I'll be the first to criticize John McCain for his buffoonish impulse to get the United States to butt into every conflict around the planet: from the ISIS invasion of Iraq most recently, to the Russia-backed rebellion in Ukraine and Crimea, to Egypt, to the Syrian revolution, to the Libya revolution, to the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008.

But I can't claim to know whether the Syrian rebels John McCain met with were good guys or bad guys. Obviously, neither can John McCain.

That's why we don't just pick sides, rush in and start dropping bombs every time John McCain says so. It's very difficult to know who the good guys and the bad guys are when we have utterly no idea who any of them really are, or what their history is. And even if we think we do, they wind up switching sides on us. If we had supplied those Syrian rebels with anti-aircraft weapons when McCain said we should, they would now be using them against the U.S. aircraft that are now bombing their mortar emplacements to protect Yazidi civilians and Kurdistan. Unfortunately, they may still be using U.S. weapons because ISIS may have captured some when the Iraqi army cut and ran.

George Bush had the same problem of knowing who the good guys were when he invaded Iraq. He took the word of Ahmed Chalabi about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. It turned out that Chalabi was an Iranian agent and had lied about everything. The main reason that ISIS is able to invade Iraq is that the Iraqi government that George W. Bush installed is run by an Iranian puppet, Nouri al-Maliki, who has used his power to oppress Sunnis in Iraq. He appointed Shiite loyalists to lead the army instead of competent officers, and used the army to attack Sunnis. When ISIS invaded the Sunnis did nothing, and the Iraqi army fled in disarray. The Sunnis don't like ISIS any more than they like Maliki, but they figure they'll be able to eject a small number of foreign terrorists, as they did during the "Surge," once the Shiite Iraqi army has been ejected.

Remember George Bush's "Surge" in Iraq to stop Al Qaeda? The reason that succeeded was not because we increased our troop levels, but because Bush reversed course on the Sunnis who had once been allied with Saddam. Instead of treating them like enemies, we used their hatred of Al Qaeda (whom they viewed as foreign terrorists trying to take over their country) and made allies of them.

However, the Maliki government trashed all that after the United States left Iraq, by denying Sunnis any real say in the Iraqi government and persecuting them. And why did the U.S. leave Iraq? Because George Bush signed an agreement that said we would: the Iraqis were tired of an American occupation and our meddling in their internal affairs. Barack Obama was obliged to abide by Bush's agreement, no matter how much John McCain blustered.

We knew there was a distinct possibility that the majority Shiites would oppress the minority Sunnis after we left, but it's impossible to use force to make people behave reasonably -- unless you stay there and babysit them for 50 or 60 years, like we did in Europe and Japan. Can we really afford to occupy every country in the Middle East?

Pretty much the same thing happened in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion in the 1980s. The U.S. allied itself with several groups, including the Taliban and Osama bin Laden's nascent Al Qaeda, to force the Soviets out. After the Soviets left, we let the Taliban have a free hand and they imposed an oppressive theocracy on Afghanistan. Was Afghanistan better off under the Soviets or the Taliban? At least the Soviets would have kept Al Qaeda out.

We crossed bin Laden by stationing troops in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War to eject Saddam from Kuwait, and thus inspired him to hate us and spawned 9/11. I'm not saying 9/11 was our fault, I'm just saying that no good deed goes unpunished in the Middle East. Time and again we knowingly allied ourselves with bad guys to deal with a more pressing problem, and it always comes back to bite us in the end.

This is why invading Middle Eastern countries has such poor outcomes. Many of the people who live there aren't united by any concept of national identity: they don't consider themselves Iraqi, or Afghan, or Syrian. Instead, they are motivated by religious identity or extreme ideology -- Sunni, Shiite, Alawite, Wahabi, Christian -- or by ethnicity -- Kurdish, Persian, Turkish, Arab, Pashtun -- or even by local tribal association.

As such, all alliances are viewed as temporary, merely to gain their splinter group an advantage toward their ultimate goal of exacting retribution for grievances that have been boiling over for centuries and millennia.

This is why the United States cannot successfully pick sides in the Middle East. There is no loyalty to the concepts of equality, justice and freedom, only a fervent devotion to a particular cause or group.

This should serve as an object lesson to Americans. Republicans have been criticizing Maliki for practicing exactly the kind of divisive all-out political warfare the Tea Party has been practicing against Democrats and even fellow Republicans.

We have to stop thinking of ourselves first as conservative or liberal; Tea Party, Democrat, or Republican; Christian, Jew or Muslim; white, Hispanic, or African American. We have to think of ourselves as Americans first and foremost, and acknowledge that other American citizens are just as American as we are.

And then work together to make sure this country doesn't devolve into the same sort of cesspit that Iraq and Syria have become. We have to stop splintering apart, and start coming together.

Until There Is Plurality...

The political world is all in a tizzy today as Hillary Clinton described the president's decision not to support the Syrian rebels early on as a "failure." Let's set aside the fact that her motivations were purely political and likely planned far ahead of time by both her and the White House. What I'm wondering today is this: what action would have been better and why?

The issue here is the massive growth of ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, also known as ISIL, Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) in both Syria and Iraq. Many of the president's critics seem to think we could have prevented this from occurring. How, exactly? We tried taking over Iraq and staying there for years and that didn't work. We've been nation building in Afghanistan for nearly 13 years and that hasn't worked. In Libya, we helped the rebels get rid of Gaddafi and that didn't work.

And who exactly we were supposed to arm in Syria? The rebels weren't even soldiers and were made up of doctors, lawyers and ordinary citizens. They wouldn't be able to fight against the power of a state run military. Further, the various factions in Syria (as in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya) all hate each other and are mostly enemies of the United States, the one exception being the Kurds in Northern Iraq whom we are now arming and assisting with an air campaign.

In looking at all of this information, a pattern emerges. These turbulent countries are filled with people who don't like each other. Juxtapose this simple fact with the two Arab Spring countries that haven't had any of these issues-Kurdistan and Tunisia. These two countries contain citizens that do like each other and thus, have a desire for plurality. They are also two nations that have zero involvement from the United States which likely also contributes to their sunny disposition.

Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya are never going to be stable countries until there is a desire for plurality in each nation. No sole power on earth (especially the United States) can force that on people. We can, of course, protect the innocent and our interests as we are right now in Iraq but until we get the buy in from the world community, there is nothing to be done.

Blaming President Obama for all these problems and calling his policies a failure is ludicrous.

Putting the Investment Lie To Bed

For the past six years, Wall Street has enjoyed one of its longest bull markets (64 months at an increase of 191%). This is fourth on the list behind Dec 1987-March 2000 (150 months, 582%), June 1949-August 1956(87 months, 267%), and Oct 1974-Nov 1980 (75 months, 126%). While the top 7 percent of our country have seen a 28 percent increase in their net worth, the rest of us in the 93 percent have lost 4 percent of our net worth. The gap between the top one percent of earners and everyone else is the widest its been since 1928.

According to conservative ideology, all of this wealth at the top should pay off in our economy in the form of investments, right? We should be seeing massive job increases and a ton of economic growth. We are told, time and again, that wealth increase at the top means better days for everyone else.

Where are the better days?

Apparently, they only exist inside of the right wing bubble because the last six years should illustrate to everyone that this assertion is a complete fucking lie.

Crater Mystery Solved

The craters were a mystery: they started appearing in the Siberian permafrost, one almost a hundred feet across. Some people thought they were from meteors. Others said they were caused by aliens. Still others said they were caused by underground missile explosions.

Residents claimed to see the area smoking, and then there was a bright flash. Others said a celestial body fell there.

Well, now we know. The craters are caused by the explosion of methane gas, freed by the melting of permafrost, which in turn is caused by global warming. Temperatures in the arctic have gone up drastically: for example, Alaska's average temperature has increased 3.4 degrees in the last 50 years, and winter temperatures have increased 6.3 degrees.

Confirmation comes from Andrei Plekhanov, an archaeologist at the Scientific Center of Arctic Studies in Salekhard, Russia. The hole was discovered last year, after abnormally hot summers in 2012 and 2013. Plekhanov measured a methane level of almost 10% at the bottom of the crater. The normal atmospheric level of methane is 0.000179%.

This region of Siberia is home to huge natural gas fields. Permafrost, which covers millions of square miles in Alaska, Siberia and Canada, has large deposits of methane hydrates trapped in its ice. As temperatures rise due to global warming, the poles are heating up much faster than the lower latitudes.

This is not a new story: for years scientists have known that arctic lakes are emitting methane; there are lakes in Alaska and Canada that can be set on fire.

The permafrost is melting at an alarming rate, and as it melts, the methane hydrates will melt as well, releasing methane, a greenhouse gas even more potent than carbon dioxide. The melting also allows bacteria to feed on the plant material in the thawed permafrost, creating even more methane and CO2.

This is one of the feedback loops that climate scientists have been concerned about. As we warm the planet by entrapping more heat with the CO2 released by burning fossil fuels, we are accelerating the production of greenhouse gases from natural sources.

Methane hydrates are also found at the bottom of polar oceans. The oceans are heating up as well, and if the oceanic methane hydrates melt the problem will get a lot worse a lot faster than any of the climate models are predicting.

Koch Brothers Fail to Buy Tennessee Supreme Court --- This Time

The Koch brothers spent about a million bucks to buy three Supreme Court seats in Tennessee. They failed, but not by much. And they're raring to go again.

This is the result of the U.S. Supreme Court's inane rulings that corporations are people and speech is money. The Kochs failed this time, but it's just a matter of time before they and their ilk control the entire judiciary with their millions of dollars.

The Koch's front operation, Americans for Prosperity, is trying to buy elections across the country, from seats in state legislatures from Alaska to Florida, to a levy for the Columbus zoo, to city council races in Iowa. They are trying to stage a corporate takeover of the United States of America.

Thankfully voters in Tennessee saw through this. But only because opponents were able to spend enough money to counter Koch lies.

It's appalling that the conservative members of the Supreme Court are so blinded by their ambition to force their conservative ideology on the country that they are allowing corporations gain control of every facet of government, from the legislatures (with ALEC), to the executive branch and their stranglehold on regulation, and now the judiciary.

The Supreme Court's decisions are the height of foolishness because in the end, corporations are not people: they have no loyalty to this country, and will turn the United States into a corrupt puppet of corporations. If the Kochs have their way, the United States will go the way of China, where every government official is on the take, the air is filled with toxic sludge from coal plants, corporate farms just dump dead pigs in the river, and the food is tainted with feces, toxins and filth.

All in the name of the false "freedom" from those regulations that keep our food, air and water clean.

Even if the Koch brothers were angels with the purest intent, conservatives have to know in their heart of hearts that this is wrong. When corporate money becomes the sole source of power, the people of the United States will lose -- even the conservatives. When the Koch's oil reserves run dry, they won't be the richest kids on the block anymore, and then it'll be tech guys like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Jeff Bezos calling the shots. Or Michael Bloomberg and George Soros. Or the cabal of Wall Street bankers who brought us the Great Recession with their unbridled incompetence, greed and gall.

Or worse, Carlos Slim of Mexico, Li Ka-Shing and Lui Che Woo of Hong Kong, and Alisher Usmanov of Russia. Yeah, it'll be illegal. At first. But only until they buy enough politicians and judges to get the laws changed.

Just like the Koch brothers did.

Good Words

From a question on Quora...

Have you read the bible? There's some great inspiration and thought provoking ideas, but if you've read it in it's entirety, you can't really deny it's full of some things that are really terrible ideas, including a man marrying his daughter to her rapist and justification of slavery. We hear talk in this country of living my Biblical principles, but that is dangerously vague. Which ones? Which sects interpretation?

In fact, many aspects of the bible are in direct opposition to the Constitution. I think if the founders of this country wanted or intended us to follow biblical law, they'd have clearly stated so by quoting and referring chapters and verse. Since they clearly did not, then I think it's safe to say that they did not intend for the U.S. to be a Christian theocracy .

Amen.

Stupid People, Large Groups

Contrasting a Democrat and a Republican

John Walsh, up for election to the Senate for Montana, has ended his campaign. Walsh is embroiled in a plagiarism scandal with his master's degree at the Army War College. This allows a non-scandal-plagued Democrat to run instead.

Contrast Walsh with Scott DesJarlais, a Republican from Tennessee who appears to have defeated his primary opponent by the barest of margins:

Pundits expected DesJarlais to get crushed after his campaign funds dried up (his opponent out raised him by $1 million) when everyone learned the sordid details of his personal life. Court documents showed that DesJarlais admitted to at least eight multiple affairs, encouraged abortions and threatened his ex-wife with a gun during a fight. The former practicing physician was also fined and reprimanded by the Tennessee Board of Medical Examiners for having sex with his patients.

Are Tennessee Republicans the biggest suckers ever, or do they really not give a damn about the things they say are important: a pro-life philosophy, family values and integrity? They had a chance to stand up for what they believed in, and tens of thousands of them voted for a despicable, lying, cheating, abortion-mongering womanizer who threatened to kill his wife. How can they excuse this man's constant lying hypocrisy and sheer immorality? In most states DesJarlais would be in jail for having sex with patients, or would at least have lost his license. But Tennessee merely slapped him on the wrist with a $500 fine.

Even more hypocritically, DesJarlais is undergoing treatment for cancer, while trying to torpedo the health care law and deny health coverage for tens of millions Americans who finally have it under the ACA.

This election shows what Republican "family values" really are, at least in Tennessee: old white men can do whatever they hell they want and screw everyone else.

Well, at least nine women.

And That's The End of the Voter Fraud Myth

31 out of 1,000,000,000 ballots cast. That's how many credible incidents of voter fraud were found in this recent investigation that covers the years 2000 to 2014. Mr. Levitt welcomes anyone to check his work.

So, that's the end of the quaint (lie) notion that there is rampant voter fraud in this country and we must have photo ID YESTERDAY!!! (unless we are talking about absentee voter fraud in which case Sgt. Schultz from Hogan's Heroes suddenly makes a cameo appearance). Levitt notes the following.

ID laws are not aimed at the fraud you’ll actually hear about. Most current ID laws (Wisconsin is a rare exception) aren’t designed to stop fraud with absentee ballots (indeed, laws requiring ID at the polls push more people into the absentee system, where there are plenty of real dangers). Or vote buying. Or coercion. Or fake registration forms. Or voting from the wrong address. Or ballot box stuffing by officials in on the scam. In the 243-page document that Mississippi State Sen. Chris McDaniel filed on Monday with evidence of allegedly illegal votes in the Mississippi Republican primary, there were no allegations of the kind of fraud that ID can stop.

Uh Huh:)

Bastion of Capitalism Issues Report on Income Inequality

Recently there has been a lot of discussion of income inequality, with the work of Thomas Piketty drawing a great deal of attention. Conservatives have derided this research, labeling Piketty and other economists like Paul Krugman pointy-headed liberal Marxist pseudo-voodoo-economists.

Well, another organization has entered the fray with its study on income inequality, and it backs up Piketty's conclusions:

Higher levels of income inequality increase political pressures, discouraging trade, investment, and hiring. Keynes first showed that income inequality can lead affluent households (Americans included) to increase savings and decrease consumption (1), while those with less means increase consumer borrowing to sustain consumption…until those options run out. When these imbalances can no longer be sustained, we see a boom/bust cycle such as the one that culminated in the Great Recession (2).

Aside from the extreme economic swings, such income imbalances tend to dampen social mobility and produce a less-educated workforce that can't compete in a changing global economy. This diminishes future income prospects and potential long-term growth, becoming entrenched as political repercussions extend the problems.

Which hyper-liberal organization issued this report? Why, none other than Standard & Poor, the bastion of capitalism that provides financial market data and bond ratings, and issues the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average.

Why does S&P say that income inequality is bad?

To be sure, it seems counterintuitive that inequality is associated with less-sustainable growth, since some inequality, by providing incentives to effort and entrepreneurship, may be essential to a functioning market economy. But beyond the risk that inequality may heighten the susceptibility of an economy to booms and busts, it may also spur political instability--thus discouraging investment. Inequality may make it harder for governments to enact policies to prevent--or soften--shocks, such as raising taxes or cutting public spending to avoid a debt crisis. The affluent may exercise disproportionate influence on the political process, or the needs of the less affluent may grow so severe as to make additional cuts to fiscal stabilizers that operate automatically in a downturn politically unviable.

The S&P report doesn't recommend drastically increasing taxes on the wealthy, though it notes that policies like George W. Bush's capital gains and dividend tax cuts have exacerbated inequality. It concludes:

[S]ome degree of rebalancing--along with spending in the areas of education, health care, and infrastructure, for example--could help bring under control an income gap that, at its current level, threatens the stability of an economy still struggling to recover. This could take the form of reallocating fiscal resources toward those with a greater propensity to spend, or toward badly needed public resources like roads, ports, and transit. Further, policies that foster job-rich recoveries may help make growth more sustainable, especially given that rising unemployment correlates with rising income concentration. Additionally, effective investments in health and education promote durable growth and equity, strengthening the labor force's capacity to cope with new technologies.

This is the exactly the policy prescription that Barack Obama has been pushing since 2009, which the Republicans have fought tooth and nail. Not because they really believed it was a bad idea, but because they knew it would work and they could not abide giving the president any kind of victory, even if it meant hurting the country and the people they had sworn to serve.

Could You Live In This House?

Not me...yikes!!

Comcast: Common Carrier or "Information Service?"

In an attempt to grease the skids for its merger with Time Warner Cable, Comcast is expanding its Internet Essentials program. This allows poor families (defined as having kids eligible for free lunch) to get basic Internet for $10 a month. This is an implicit acknowledgment that the Internet is now a basic requirement for modern living, a public utility like phone service, clean water and electricity.

There's been a lot of discussion on the role of the Internet recently, with the recent court decision on net neutrality. Back when the Internet started taking off, there was an argument to be made about how it should be free from niggling regulations while it got off the ground (from Forbes).

The Clinton Administration’s Telecommunications Act of 1996 sorted this mess out and launched the age of modern Internet policy – trusting market forces and technological innovation to the maximum extent. It was an act of incredible political maturity. Its authors knew something remarkable was about to happen and that government could best serve it by stepping back and letting private investment happen.

So the 1996 Act drew a line – the old phone system would remain regulated as a “common carrier,” but the emerging new world of “information services” would be allowed to develop on its own free from utility-style requirements such as government oversight of prices, forced sharing of infrastructure with competitors, or rigid traffic management rules. As a result, we have seen over $1.2 trillion in investment since the 1996 Act, and the innovation, growth and new services the Act’s framers imagined.

It's been almost 20 years now, and things have shaken out. It's now clear now that the Internet is a utility, and that Comcast is a common carrier like any telephone company. Want proof? Millions of people get their telephone service over Comcast's cables. It's one of the big selling points in Comcast's marketing: they have their "Triple Play:" for $89/month in my area you can get (up to) 50 mps Internet, 140 cable channels and nationwide long-distance telephone service.

It's a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment that Comcast is completely unregulated and can jack up the cost of its phone service any time, while CenturyLink, the phone company that provides my DSL through essentially the same kind of network, is subject to intense scrutiny every time they want to change their rates.

Back when the Internet consisted of 2400 baud modems dialing up through the phone system it made sense to see how things would work out. Now we know: Comcast charges their customers ever more while charging content providers like Netflix for sending you data over the line you already paid for. That means you pay Comcast twice: once for the line, and again through your Netflix subscription, because Netflix has to pay blood money to keep Comcast from slowing their data stream to a crawl.

Cable companies have been raising their rates at four times the rate of inflation. They excuse it by telling us that they're adding new channels and hardware -- but all the new channels are basically useless repetitions of the same nonsense, which I don't want anyway, and our house has been hooked up with the the same coax cable for almost 40 years.

But I have no choices: unlike the phone company, which lets me pick which features I want to pay extra for, Comcast changes its channel line up constantly, making me pay for channels I will never watch. That's the power of the monopoly: Comcast is the only cable company in my city, and it's the only way I can get reliable local television service -- satellite doesn't work very well with things called "rain," "trees" and "hills."

It's nice that Comcast is making Internet affordable for poor people with kids. But what about poor people without kids? And the rest of us?

Clearly, the FCC should reclassify Comcast as a common carrier and not an "information service," since it provides telephone and telecommunications services such as email and Facebook, which is a glorified party line.

How Climate Change Changed Tom Steyer

Here's a great piece from Tom Steyer on how climate change altered the course of his life. A very worthwhile read from a man that is a living example of how wealth can be used in pursuit of actually solving problems as opposed to making them worse.

The Blamestream Media

And their solutions to our problems are...?

Palestine in 1896

Very interesting!

 

No Republican Party Anymore

Exit Stage Left

What a fantastic end to this Congressional session, eh? Let's see...they did...absolutely nothing. The good news for all you Tea Party and libertarian types is that your ideological mission of having the federal government do as little as possible has been accomplished.

The bad news is that you now have to face your voters:)

Making The Connection Between Insanity and Guns

The End of A Great Conservative Tactic

There have been a couple of great questions on Quora of late that most effectively are ending a much used conservative tactic. The strategy more or less goes like this: say the most anger, hate filled, fucked up paranoid thing you can think of and then society will fall in line with the "liberals are just as bad" meme because of our culture's nauseating sense of fairness. Essentially, it absolves conservatives of their responsibility of being intransigent assholes. Yet, a question like this and its answers illustrate the most effective way for combating this strategy.

I especially liked this answer.

The GOP seems to have come to the point at which they may legitimately need psychiatric help. I've agreed with some Republican policies in the past and, at times, wouldn't have minded voting for a centrist Republican. But the crazies in their party have scared me to the extent that I would rather vote for a centrist Democrat over a centrist Republican just to keep the crazies at bay. 

The more neurotic elements of the GOP seem to be clinging desperately to past norms in a world of rapid cultural change. Maybe they think that the only way they can do this is by vehemently preserving everything that reinforces the status quo and violently rejecting anything that threatens to change it (alternative lifestyles, alternative fuels, diverse religions, etc.). 

This extreme sort of thinking isn't conducive to dialogue.

Yep.

Red State Deadbeats

It's well established that red states receive more than their share of government money, mostly because they have lower taxes and depend on the federal government to make up for it. Red states are also poorer, in large part because they don't invest in their citizens' futures. Red states also have higher divorce rates, due to the higher divorce rates among conservative protestants. Red states also have higher teen pregnancy rates, because they make it harder to get contraception and abortion.

Now it turns out that red states have significantly higher numbers of deadbeats. A study by the Urban Institute found that states in the South have a much higher proportion of residents with debt in collection than the Upper Midwest and Northeast. Data from the TransUnion credit bureau were examined.

In states like Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, Kentucky, Louisiana, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, West Virginia and Nevada (which was really hammered by the financial meltdown) more than 40% of the population has debt in collection. States like Minnesota, Massachusetts, North Dakota, Hawaii, South Dakota have 19-25% of the population with debt in collection, while states like New York, Oregon, New Jersey, Iowa, Washington, California, Utah, Wisconsin, etc., have debt in the 26-35% range.

Why is this? A lot of it has to do with history: red states have historically been more rural, more poverty-stricken, less well-educated. But that's because of the taxing and spending policies they've chosen. Even though states like Texas claim to have an economy that's going like gangbusters, it doesn't trickle down to the average person, who's swimming in unpaid debt. These states also have more laissez-faire lending and business practices, which allows their citizens to get into financial trouble more readily.

But it makes you wonder: how much of it is general societal attitudes? Who's more likely to worry about debt? A wishy-washy liberal who wants everyone to like him, or a self-centered red-neck who doesn't give a damn what anyone thinks?

I guess that's why the conservatives need all those guns: they've got to keep the bill collectors at bay.