Daily Archives: August 3, 2016

08.03.16
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Programming Note: Out on The Road

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I’ll be traveling the next week and a half, with almost no internet (and virtually none after Saturday). There won’t be any posts tomorrow or Friday, but I have some scheduled for next week. These are longer (how?), more big-picture posts on American fascism, Constitutional crises, AQAP vs ISIS, and more. Hope you enjoy. Try not to let Trump take the lead, ok?

Bold prediction: by the time I’m blogging again on the 15th Trump will have said something stupid. You can take it to the bank. The money bank!

Selah,

brian

08.03.16
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Ron Johnson, Climate Change, and The Most Republican Paragraph Ever

 

“I don’t really understand things.”

 

We haven’t talked much on the blog about Ron Johnson, Senator of Wisconsin. Wisconsin being literally near me, and dear to my heart, we’ve spent a lot of time on the destructive reign of Scott Walker, the intellectual horrorshow of Paul Ryan, and even some on the quisling nebbishness of Reince Priebus. They are sort of the Big 3 in the new era of Wisconsin politics: ruthless hyper-capitalists with zero respect for the state’s progressive traditions, who think any hint of community is communism. But we’ve ignored the Senator, who defeated the great Russ Feingold in the catastrophe of 2010.

That’s because he’s…well, he’s pretty dumb. He’s one of those “I’m good at business so let me screw over the poor” kind of guys. He was perfect for Wisconsin in 2010. Honestly, the most remarkable thing about him is that he’s the head of the Homeland Security Committee, which could be shorthand for just what a stupid and unserious party the Republicans really are. Anyway, he smuckered together some words today about global warming, and you’ll never guess: it’s a hoax.

“The whole climate change debate gives, and there are all kinds of quotes from adherents of and promoters of climate change, the reason they’re doing it is it’s such a great opportunity to control, you know, pretty much, government, and control your lives,” Johnson said Monday, onthe Glenn Klein Show on the WRJN radio show. “There’s an arrogance of power there that they’re utopians, that they really think they can create heaven on earth, and where it’s failed in the past, those people like Stalin and Chavez and the Castros, the nutcases in North Korea–by the way, if you want equal results, go to North Korea, you have equal misery.”

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08.03.16
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Throwback Thursday: The CIA and The Killing of Dag Hammarskjold

 

If this man was killed by the CIA it’s a really big deal, or at least it should be. 

 

Here’s today’s must-read: Foreign Policy‘s Colum Lynch on the UN reopening an investigation into the Congolese plane crash that killed heroic UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold in 1961. If you want to understand what the early 60s were actually like for actually oppressed people, the opening paragraph has a lot of pretty important keywords.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki­-moon will propose reopening an inquiry into allegations that Dag Hammarskjold, one of the most revered secretaries-general in the organization’s history, was assassinated by an apartheid-era South African paramilitary organization that was backed by the CIA, British intelligence, and a Belgian mining company, according to several officials familiar with the case.

Christ. That’s a rogue’s gallery right there. Basically, in a nutshell, Hammarskjold was working for Congolese independence and security, and try to broker a treaty between the government of the new Congo and the separatists in uranium-rich Katanga, who were backed by the Belgians and other western powers to make sure that the Soviets stayed away (and let’s be honest: to make sure that other riches continued to flow into the right pockets). Hammarskjold believed that the Congo should be one independent nation, and not carved up by colonialists.

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