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The real Trumped?
Someday, someone will write a history of the U.S. national security state in the twenty-first century and, if the first decade and a half are any yardstick, it will be called something like State of Failure. After all, almost 15 years after the U.S. invaded the Taliban’s Afghanistan, launching the second American Afghan War of the past half-century, U.S. troops are still there, their “withdrawal” halted, their rules of engagement once again widened to allow American troops and air power to accompany allied Afghan forces into battle, and the Taliban on the rise, having taken more territory (and briefly one northern provincial capital) than at any time since that movement was crushed in the invasion of 2001.
Thirteen years after George W. Bush and his top officials, dreaming of controlling the oil heartlands, launched the invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (the second Iraq War of our era), Washington is now in the third iteration of the same, with 6,000 troops (and thousands of private contractors) back in that country and a vast air campaign underway to destroy the Islamic State. With modest numbers of special operations troops on the ground and another major air campaign, Washington is also now enmeshed in a complex and so far disastrous war in Syria. And if you haven’t been counting, that’s three wars gone wrong.
Then, of course, there was the American (and NATO) intervention in Libya in 2011, which cracked that autocratic country open and made way for the rise of Islamic extremist movements there, as well as the most powerful Islamic State franchise outside Syria and Iraq. Today, plans are evidently being drawn up for yet more air strikes, special operations raids, and the like there. Toss in as well Washington’s never-ending drone war in Pakistan’s tribal borderlands, its disastrous attempt to corral al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen (leading to a grim and horrifying Saudi-led, American-supported internecine conflict in that country), and the unending attempt to destroy al-Shabaab in Somalia, and you have at least seven wars and conflicts in the Greater Middle East, all about to be handed on by President Obama to the next president with no end in sight, no real successes, nothing. In these same years Islamic terror movements have only spread and grown stronger under the pressure of the American war machine. - Nick Turse_ _ _ _ _ _ _
In England,
In 1647, the Levellers, hoping to remedy this small defect, drafted “An Agreement of the People,” with the idea that every freeman would assent to it, granting to his representatives the power to represent him. That never quite came to pass, but when, between 1649 and 1660, England had no king, and became a commonwealth, it got a little easier to pretend that there existed such a thing as the People, and that they were the sovereign rulers of . . . themselves. This seed, planted in American soil, under an American sun, sprouted and flourished, fields of wheat, milled to grain, the daily bread. (“The fiction that replaced the divine right of kings is our fiction,” Morgan wrote, “and it accordingly seems less fictional to us.”) When Parliament then said, “We, the People, have decided to tax you,” the colonists, meeting in their own assemblies, answered, “No, we’re the People.” By 1776, what began as make-believe had become self-evident; by 1787, it had become the American creed.
We the people are, apparently, grievously vexed. Around the corner from Don King, NBC News was running a promotional stunt called Election Confessions (“Tell us what you really think”), asking passersby to write on colored sticky notes and shove them in a ballot box; the confessions were displayed, anonymously, on a wall monitor. Blue: “I can’t believe it got this far.” Orange: “I get to vote for the first time, and now I don’t want to.” Green: “THESE ARE OUR CHOICES?”
I wandered down an aisle and sat next to Johnny Shull, a delegate from North Carolina who used to teach economics at the Charles Koch Institute and helps run a conservative talk-radio hour, “The Chad Adams Show.” Sitting beside him was Susan Phillips, a warm and friendly woman who was a guest that day on the show. I told Shull what Wick had said, about the end of America. “That’s silly,” he said. Shull had originally supported Rand Paul and was now a Trump delegate. He thinks America is resilient and will bounce back, no matter who wins. Phillips agrees with Wick. She loves Trump because he says all the things she wants to say and can’t; because he speaks her thoughts about the half of America that’s living off the other half, and about the coming lawlessness. (Mitt Romney’s “forty-seven per cent,” which is the same figure that the Nixon campaign complained about in 1972, has very lately risen, in the populist imagination, to forty-nine per cent.) I asked Phillips what happens if Trump loses. She said, “Then we’ve got to build our compounds, get our guns ready, and prepare for the worst.” Half of the people believe that they know how the other half lives, and deem them enemies.
The more things change . . .
Computers May One Day Be Able to Reason Exactly As Humans Do, But Will They Ever Be As Dumb? (Artificial Unintelligence)
The scientists, who were young guys of the sort you would expect, talked among themselves in low, smug voices. I hung around, pretending to look at my phone, and eavesdropped. Oh, how pleased these guys were with the way their new program had performed! Already that evening, the computer had forgotten to call home and tell its “wife” — another computer, apparently — that it would be late, and then had inadvertently sent “her” embarrassing flirtatious e-mails intended for another computer at the office. Can everything I do, everything I am, be translated so easily into code? I felt myself descending further into despair.
No, damn it! I am a human being! Our species does poorly thought-out things, and we must not take a back seat to any machine on that. Remember when I saw Bev at the Shelbys’ New Year’s Eve party and blurted out, in front of everybody, “Bev, how fabulous! You’re pregnant!,” when she had only put on a lot of weight? I defy any mere mass of circuitry to duplicate this deeply human feat. As I recalled the horror on Bev’s face, and on everybody else’s, my entire body contorted in a wince of shame and — I’ll be honest — a certain species-specific pride. Top that, techno-wizards! Other un-smart stunts came back to me: No computer will ever amass enough mainframe cluelessness to cut a big patch from the pair of bluejeans that it is mending rather than from the old bluejeans that it uses for patches. Nor will it ever finish filling out its income-tax return and then mail it, along with the check for the I.R.S., to a distant relative it hasn’t seen in years. You need to be a living, breathing, flesh-and-blood creature to achieve such things.
I calmed myself down, proceeded to the platform, got on the wrong train, and did not notice my mistake until Trenton. The train back to Penn Station would not leave for another hour and a half. I never expect to be as smart as a computer, but, by God, I can be dumber. A hard rain began to fall, and I left the station so I could practice not knowing enough to come in out of it.
Funny? Yes. In a morbid way.
And quite newsworthy for those who can handle the truth that humans, who are sometimes not very smart, are handing over the tools that maintain life to robots.
Not to worry about for whom to vote.
The voting machines (robots) will do it for you. (And this is probably what we've contributed to the DNC for.) Even Donald Trump has noticed.
On a very side note: you know if strange events didn't keep occurring no one would ever be accused of being a "conspiracist."
I rest my case.
From Radscal at Reader Supported News:
HRC and DNC blaming the leaks on Russia and/or Trump also permits the corporate media to avoid looking further into the murder of Seth Rich.
He was the DNC computer nerd whose job was running their database.
First, if the earlier NGP-VAN firewall breeches did permit HRC's team to get the info on Sanders' supporters (and the source of what Mayor de Blasio called the "targeted" voter roll striping in NYC, and across the nation), Seth would have known where those bodies are buried.
Second, he could be the actual source of the leak.
But he was shot to death in the wee hours of the morning, mid-way between DNC admitting the leak and the Convention in what the police are trying to call a robbery even though NOTHING was taken from him. Not his wallet. Not his watch. Not even his cell phone.
http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/Man-Shot-Killed-in-Northwest-DC-386316391.html
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/washington-dnc-staffer-seth-conrad-rich-shot-killed-article-1.2707538
Comments:
# 2016-08-01 07:06
Getting rid of Goldilocks is just fine, but like Eichman, she was just following orders. Her orders came directly from her employer, Hillary Clinton. Hillary's foreign policy orders came from Deep State which is the agglomerated thinking of the CIA/FBI/MIC/Wall Street and enunciated by John Brennan of the CIA to Hillary - note that she and Bill are and have been Deep State members.)
Domestic policy is their own research from MIC, primarily big oil, Wall St., and defense industry individuals' interests.
If one looks carefully behind the curtains it becomes clear that contrary to the general public's belief, we are already living Germany - about 1934 - and there may no longer be any way to unwind it or to escape it. Our government is thoroughly embedded in a form of democratic fascism where we vote (as did the Germans), but between the female in pants (sort of Eva Braun for President) and crazy Donald as the choice, the discovery may have come too late.
The Clinton killings seem to have started in Arkansas, but most likely were only Bill following orders as he was groomed by Deep State as a compliant successor to the Don of the Bush family who were no doubt involved in the disposal of the Kennedys. (Remember the chronology: cocaine left the iniate circle to become big business in the 'late '60s/early '70s.) Ten/fifteen years later the CIA Director becomes Pres. America, thereafter, was owned, by slick new-generation mafiosos.
# economagic 2016-08-01 08:19