CapitalistImperialistPig

It's very hard to get out of a war, even a war that most know that you are losing. If you are a superpower, and your opponent is weak mini-state, the difficulty of extraction is greatly increased. An awful lot of people are certain to have a stake in continuing the war long after it becomes clear that the original goals can't be achieved, or can't be achieved at an acceptable cost. Foremost among those are the idiots who got you into the war in the first place, in our case, the President, the Congress, and the Neocon cabal. They aren't the only ones of course. For many, a war is a great moneymaking opportunity. For a partially outsourced war like Iraq, the opportunities are multiplied. All those who supply weapons, food, fuel, equipment, and contract mercenaries are making a killing, and they don't want the war to stop. The soldiers, though, are a key. In Vietnam, and in the Soviet disaster in Afghanistan, the soldiers were mostly draftees with little investm...

Responding to a Debate in the Comments: A couple of years ago a Jewish relative of mine returned from a trip to Israel filled with enthusiasm for the country and its accomplishments. We fell to discussing the Palestinian question and she explained to me that the Arabs there were mostly immigrants, and that the country had been almost unoccupied when the Zionists started arriving. This seemed implausible to me - a fertile country, a stone's throw from the origins of early civilization, unoccupied and uncultivated. I started researching the question, and it quickly became clear that this had to be nonsense. In 1944, for example, the British survey found that 90% or more of the land was owned by Arabs, who produced an even larger proportion of the agricultural production. The notion that the land was unpopulated is also belied by the statistics; From census data: The Ottoman census of 1878 for Jerusalem, Acre, and Nablus showed 400,000 Muslims, 43,000 Christians, and 25,000 Jews, of w...

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I caught a bit of Scarborough Country on MSNBC, and they were discussing US Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho) and his bathroom exploits. The discussion mentioned Craig's actions as described by the arresting officer (repeatedly putting his eye up to the crack between door and stall to peek in, foot tapping and touching, etc.) At this point, Tucker Carlson mentioned that he had been bothered in a men's room. I suddenly remembered a road trip through Idaho a few decades ago. I was just trying to get comfortable on my seat in a restroom stall, when I noticed a small hole in the partition, and a creepy eye behind it. Being still a bit busy, I wadded up some toilet paper and stuffed it in the hole. This bought me only a little time, as the eye's finger poked it out - whereupon I fled and complained to the management, who allowed that they had indeed had a problem. Macho girl that he is, Tucker was more direct - at least in his account. He recruited a few friends and went b...

Suffocating heat in the Southeastern US, floods in the midwest, calamitous fires in Europe and the drought stricken Western US, records broken every day in the disappearance of Arctic sea ice. Evidence of global warming? Except possibly for the sea ice, scientific caution suggests that it's too early to tell. Denialist nuts find proof for their doubt in one cool summer day in one city , but science can't afford to work that way. Cherry picking the evidence is a standard tactic of the dishonest in every endeavor, so the climate doubters are hardly an exception here. Extreme local weather events, taken in isolation, can't be evidence of global change, but they do serve a useful purpose in reminding us that reality can be ignored only at our peril. Some, of course, are notably slow learners.

The Republican Party has been the stalwart defender of Christian virtue against the supposed evils of homosexuality, so why does it seem that the most conservative, anti-gay reactionaries keep turning out to be closeted Republican gays? Compulsive dishonesty about everything?

From David Remnick's article The Lobby in The New Yorker : Last year, two distinguished political scientists, John J. Mearsheimer, of the University of Chicago, and Stephen M. Walt, of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard, published a thirty-four-thousand-word article online entitled “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” a shorter version of which appeared in The London Review of Books. Israel, they wrote, has become a “strategic liability” for the United States but retains its strong support because of a wealthy, well-organized, and bewitching lobby that has a “stranglehold” on Congress and American élites. Moreover, Israel and its lobby bear outsized responsibility for persuading the Bush Administration to invade Iraq and, perhaps one day soon, to attack the nuclear facilities of Iran. Farrar, Straus & Giroux will publish a book-length version of Mearsheimer and Walt’s arguments on September 4th Remnick's short article is essentially an attack masqu...