Monthly Archives: March 2017

03.21.17
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Reminder: Call Your Senator And Tell Them To Vote No On Justice Gorsuch

 

Image result for old fashioned phone switchboard

Seriously, get on the horn

 

One way or the other, Neil Gorsuch will be the next Supreme Court justice. If the Democrats try to filibuster, Mitch McConnell will, with “deep sadness at this unprecedented assault on Presidential prerogative”, get rid of the filibuster. Or, knowing this, and knowing that Gorsuch is generally popular, will keep their powder dry, and maybe have some protest votes against him, but will largely let him pass through.

But they shouldn’t. The answer to Gorsuch should be the what Michael Corleone offered to Senator Geary: nothing. Gorsuch should not get one single Democratic vote.

This is partly a matter of politics (we have to fight everything about Trumpism to make sure that none of this is normalized and to get out the vote in midterms and local elections), but also, mostly, principle. It’s not just that this seat belongs to Merrick Garland. It’s that, in denying President Obama his right to nominate a Supreme Court justice, the Republican overturned the 2012 election.

There’s no other word for it: they nullified the election, trampled on the will of voters in the biggest display of contempt for the union since Wallace, or possibly the Civil War. In 2012, by a wide margin, voters elected Barack Obama to a four-year term. Everyone votes knowing that there is always the chance of a Supreme Court seat opening up. Mitch McConnell saw that he had a chance to overthrow the election and literally reduce Obama’s term to three years, and he took it. This wasn’t legally treason, but it was a moral assault on our democracy.

And they won, thanks to the slave-state empowerment of the Electoral College. And now they get to put on an extremely, overwhelmingly conservative justice, against the will of the majority of voters in two straight elections. And they will do so, and the nation will suffer.

Over at Slate, the incomparable Dahlia Lithwick talks about teeth-breaking GOP hypocrisy during the hearings, insulted as they are that anyone would even question Gorsuch. (“GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch lectured the Judiciary Committee about the fact that the Senate ‘owes the president deference over his judicial nominees.’ Hearing this, Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont about fell out of his chair.”)

We have to expect their cynicism. We have to be willing to stand up to their calculated outrage (which probably isn’t “phony”, per se; cognitive dissonance rules all). We have to let our Senators know that they aren’t in a hearing for Gorsuch, as we normally understand it. They are in a hearing for Merrick Garland’s seat, which was stolen through a subversion of democracy.

So call your Senator. Tell them you support them voting NO on Gorsuch, and not because of any reprehensible position of the other. That’s important, but in a way incidental, because a right-wing Scalia-y Justice is the outcome of the crime, not the crime itself. Give our Senators the strength and backing to protest this outrage against our very democracy.

A hard right court can destroy environmental pushback, end labor, and annihilate civil rights. Our country will be changed in ways it is hard to imagine. But it already has: the idea of a Presidential term was suddenly subject to a political gamble. That hits at the basis of our country. Tell your Senator to fight back against it. We might not win, but it’s how the fight can start.

03.21.17
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Trey Gowdy’s Comey Strategy: All Tomorrow’s Conspiracies

 

“Did reverse vampires have access to redacted names?” 

 

Trey Gowdy first came to the national spotlight when he began his relentless investigation into Benghazi, which, to hear the GOP tell it, was the first time something bad had happened to Americans in the Middle East, which is the only reason they spent years and millions of dollars investigating. Gowdy was determined to find out exactly what happened, because that was his solemn duty as an American, and there were no alternative motives.

It was probably just a happy coincidence that, although the main takeaways were 1) sometimes tragic things happen in unstable countries and a nation determined to have a global military and diplomatic presence will bear the brunt of that; and 2) maybe the GOP shouldn’t have cut embassy and consulate security spending, the investigations also helped to hurt Hillary Clinton.

Really, obviously, that was the entire point. The GOP knows the way to work the modern media climate. Keep putting things in the news. Keep hyping up scandals even if they can be disproven easily. People will hear words and phrases bandied about and assume something bad has to be going on. The media will duly report on it, and the initiates in the media and the right-wing noise machine will amplify it. Facts don’t matter; what matters are certain words that enter the ether, sulfurous and redolent of crime. That’s why there were innumerable hearings on Benghazi. It kept the name alive.

And that was their strategy yesterday during the Comey hearing as well. The entire plan, revolving largely around the boss’s unhinged ego-preservation strategy, is that the real crime issue here is leaks. One might point out that Gowdy’s own Benghazi panels leaked like a reefstruck dinghy, in a way that just so happened to consistently hurt Hillary Clinton. One might even argue that was the entire point of the hearings. But no matter: right now, the Republicans are united in fury at the very thought of leaks! This is the most serious issue our country is facing.

As we talked about yesterday, this is part distraction, and part fervent belief that the Obama “Deep State” is hurting Trump. They are unable to believe otherwise. And Gowdy, who pretends to be a serious prosecutor but is really just a skilled manipulator of the media, both normal and alternative, knew his job.

During his interlude with Comey, he commiserated about the seriousness of the crime of leaking (which is a crime in many cases). He then put forth a laundry list of names of people who could, in theory, have access to redacted names that made it to the press. (Times summary, then WaPo transcript)

In an outraged tone, Mr. Gowdy noted Washington Post and New York Times articles citing anonymous sources to report that in conversations intercepted by American intelligence, Mr. Flynn had discussed sanctions against Russia with Moscow’s ambassador to the United States, Sergey I. Kislyak. Such interceptions are highly classified intelligence, Mr. Comey confirmed.

“I thought it was against the law to disseminate classified information. Is it?” Mr. Gowdy asked.

“Yes, sir,” Mr. Comey replied. “It’s a serious crime.”

GOWDY: Do you know whether Director Clapper knew the name of the U.S. citizen that appeared in the New York Times and Washington Post?

COMEY: I can’t say in this forum because again, I don’t wanna confirm that there was classified information in the newspaper.

GOWDY: Would he have access to an unmasked name?

COMEY: In — in some circumstances, sure, he was the director of national intelligence. But I’m not talking about the particular.

GOWDY: Would Director Brennan have access to an unmasked U.S. citizen’s name?

COMEY: In some circumstances, yes.

GOWDY: Would National Security Adviser Susan Rice have access to an unmasked U.S. citizen’s name?

COMEY: I think any — yes, in general, and any other national security adviser would, I think, as a matter of their ordinary course of their business.

GOWDY: Would former White House Advisor Ben Rhodes have access to an unmasked U.S. citizen’s name?

COMEY: I don’t know the answer to that.

GOWDY: Would former Attorney General Loretta Lynch have access to an unmasked U.S. citizen’s name? COMEY: In general, yes, as would any attorney general.

GOWDY: So that would also include Acting AG Sally Yates?

COMEY: Same answer.

GOWDY: Did you brief President Obama on — well, I’ll just ask you. Did you brief President Obama on any calls involving Michael Flynn?

COMEY: I’m not gonna get into either that particular case that matter, or any conversations I had with the president. So I can’t answer that.

This is perfect. He’s just throwing names out there, just in theory, just trying to see who may have had the ability to disseminate this information. Just because the names he threw out there happen to be a rogue’s gallery for the right wing doesn’t mean anything. He’s just doing his damn job.

What he’s doing is giving red meat to the base while trying to force the actual media to look at the “theoretical possibility” that many people in the previous Administration, up to and including President Obama, had access to these names, and could have leaked them. The right wing Twitter armies and talk radio goons will go nuts poring over every name, and tying that to their broad conspiracy that the reason Trump is failing is because a perfidious and traitorous elite, aided by a Bolshy bureaucracy, is undermining him (undermining America).

Dragooning Sally Yates into this is key. She, of course, said that she couldn’t defend the travel ban, and was duly (and rightfully) fired. That was the beginning of the “Obama is still ruling Washington!” campaign, a distraction from the gross illegality and immorality of the ban. And now, Gowdy is continuining to push that, hoping that it’ll work once again.

My guess is no, it won’t. I mean, it’ll be great for Breitbart and Alex Jones and their satellites, and someone will uncover evidence that Ben Rhodes was offered a discount on a Washington Post subscription when he signed up for Amazon Prime, so there is your goddamn quid pro quo, but they are beginning to realize things are different when it is your party in power. You can’t point to the bogeyman. It’s you.

03.20.17
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The Republican’s Comey Strategy: The Bubble and the Damage Done

Nope

The story, to any rational person, is that FBI Director and de facto Trump Campaign Chaperone James Comey confirmed that the FBI “is investigating Russia’s meddling in the presidential election, including possible links between the Trump campaign and Moscow.” He also shot down, in no uncertain terms, Trump’s insane wiretap claims, British involvement and quotation marks and all.

As a lot of people are saying, this might be just the beginning. Comey made it clear that all he will say is that there is an ongoing investigation, and he can’t comment on that. While that might seem like hypocrisy, it fits his very narrow definition that he established with Hillary Clinton.

There is something here, and while it is true that Russia didn’t literally hack the election, there is clearly enough to warrant an investigation. So the GOP strategy, led by Trump? Ask just who is doing the leaking that top security advisors are having secret meetings with Russians while also getting paid by Turkey.

Republicans on the committee focused their questions on getting to the bottom of who leaked to the news media the fact that former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had pre-inauguration conversations with Russia’s ambassador.

Sure, part of this is distraction. They don’t want to talk about the real issue here, and are hoping that people will be more offended by the leak. But that’s because, I think, a lot of them actually sort of believe that. Once all this started, the idea of “leaks” being part of the Obama shadow campaign has become axiomatic on the Right. It’s an article of faith. It’s how they explain the disaster everything has been.

This is part Trump, part the broader GOP, and entirely at the intersection between the two (and there is very little difference, really). The GOP has no idea how to govern, and no desire to. They’ve based their entire identity on being not-liberals, and more to the point, not-Obama. So being faced with the reality of government, of course they turn to what it comfortable.

For many, it isn’t much of a turn. These are talk radio kids and internet idiots. They live in the bubble, and what they hear is that people are worried about the shadow government. I think they actually believe it, and that they actually also think it is good politics.

That’s also the world, of course, in which Trump lives. He honestly thinks the only important thing here is the leaks, because that’s the “deep state”, and it’s the only reason he isn’t already being placed on Mt. Rushmore (or a bigger, better mountain, somewhere in Manhattan). His own personal pathologies and vanities make it impossible for him to understand that he’s a know-nothing idiot with no idea how to be President. So of course, the only thing that matters is the leaks.

By temperament, in paranoia and accusatory frenzy, in believing that what 10,000 idiots on Twitter are convinced of, Trump and the GOP are perfect for each other. And so they believe it’s not what we know that matters, but that we know it at all.

And that it’s the black guy’s fault. I mean, that goes without saying, right?

03.20.17
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GOP’s Healthcare Blues Show Foot-Shooting Danger of Right Wing Propaganda

 

There might be symbolism here, but I’m not sure…

 

Even since Donald Trump won the electoral college, partly on the basis of the “white working class” and their economic anxieties, there have been a few types of articles written. The first was the most prevalent: centrist reporters asking why the media has forgotten the white working class, and how no one talks about them. There were approximately 58 million stories about these hidden folks.

Then, since the inauguration, those stories were overtaken by articles about how a lot of Trump voters are recognizing that they might have been sold a bill of goods, and that their health care is being taken away, and that everything they were promised about their lives getting better is a lie.

The third are thinkpieces where we on the left ask whether we should react to this with scorn, anger, pity, sympathy, or some combination.

The Times yesterday had a classic example of the 2nd type, talking about the “GOP Health Care Tightrope in the Midwest”.

DEFIANCE, Ohio — James Waltimire, a police officer on unpaid medical leave, has been going to the hospital in this small city twice a week for physical therapy after leg surgery, all of it paid for by Medicaid.

Mr. Waltimire, 54, was able to sign up for the government health insurance program last year because Ohio expanded it to cover more than 700,000 low-income adults under the Affordable Care Act. He voted for President Trump — in part because of Mr. Trump’s support for law enforcement — but is now worried about the Republican plan to effectively end the Medicaid expansion through legislation to repeal the health care law.

“Originally the president said he wasn’t going to do nothing to Medicaid,” Mr. Waltimire said the other day after a rehab session. “Now they say he wants to take $880 billion out of Medicaid. That’s going to affect a lot of people who can’t afford to get insurance.”

You read this, and your first instinct is to say, well…yeah. What the hell did you think? After all, Donald Trump is a Republican, and Republicans want to gut Medicaid. They want to take away your health insurance. That’s how it always is. How the hell did you not know this?

Then, of course, you are taken again with how breathtaking a liar Donald Trump is. He did say, over and over, that no one was gonna touch Medicaid, ok, and everyone would have health care and no one would pay for it. It was amazing, his sheer and unrelenting dishonesty, and you might feel bad for how a low-information voter might hear that and think it is possible. Because, after all, we’ve never had a politician lie like this before. There was not even an attempt to pay observance to the truth.

But then, on the other hand, you remember that it was Donald Trump. He’s been a public sleazebag for 40 years. If you’re a 54-yr-old and it somehow escaped your attention that he’s a crooked liar, that’s on you.

And then, of course, you see the heart of it: he was sucked into the lie because of “Mr. Trump’s support for law enforcement”, a piece of culture war bullshit that is barely coded racism. Because this wasn’t a race between Donald Trump and, I don’t know, Leonard Peltier or something. It’s not like Hillary didn’t support law enforcement. But she also believed that Black Lives Mattered.

That’s what his “support” came down to. The right wing decided that BLM, or really anyone who wanted to hold police accountable for murder or other violent abuses of power, were the enemy of society. This was very wrapped up in race, and in the idea that cops should be able to do whatever they wanted to the “right” people, you know the ones who deserve it. Trump made it very clear where he stood in this.

His outlandish and wildly unrealistic fairy tale lies were believed because people thought he was on their side. It’s not because he talked about jobs. Hillary talked way more about jobs, in a way more detailed manner. Part of the problem was the press clearly wasn’t interested in policy, just emails, so none of that got through. But another problem is that what Trump as saying got through loud and clear, because he got in the door speaking the right language.

Race and economics are incredibly interlinked in this country. It does a disservice to the truth to pretend they aren’t for fear of liberal condescension. Trump’s dishonest messages, the ones that will hurt the people who voted for him, got through because of the ones he, and the modern GOP, are deadly honest about.

03.20.17
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Monday Quick Hits: Berry and Breslin, Exxon, the NCAAs, and More

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Some quick hits and good reads to get us into a shining new American week…

-When I got the alert yesterday that Jimmy Breslin had died, hard on the heels of Chuck Berry, I had a vague notion of writing a piece about how the two men both created an American langauge. They took old traditions, grabbing along the way snatches of different and older languages, different sounds jumbled through the tumult of our history, bouncing around in the vastness of the land, from concrete wisdom to country passions, and in their own way, forged new and more democratic modes of expression. But then I thought: hm, I don’t know if I am really capable of exploring that, and anyway, it seems like something Charlie Pierce will do 10000 times better. He does not disappoint.

Did anyone do more to change American pop culture than Chuck Berry? This isn’t incidental; pop culture is culture. It’s an expression of our desires. Coming up with other names yields a short list, with maybe James Brown at the top of it. The list of musicians who were more awesome than Chuck Berry might be even shorter.

-So there was this commercial, in which a Jessica Chastain look-alike tells us that Exxon Mobil is really nothing more than a big ol’ jobs creator, and all the people they show are model attractive, that ran approximately 360000 times during the games this weekend. It wasn’t advertising anything, per se, other than the idea that Exxon is basically your neighborhood store, giving kids their first job so that Johhny can take Mary Sue to the movies this weekend. It’s basically a way for them to make us vaguely remember that “oil = good”. It’s essentially political, which is very smart.

Anyway, the repetition of that commercial is maybe why I had a dream this morning in which the real Jessica Chastain was giving a lecture where she said “There is maybe no more clear example of the importance of elections than fracking. Think about it: it’s an issue dominated by hydrologists, geologists, engineers, and increasingly, seismologists, yet is determined almost entirely by the people we elect. That makes it up to us. Do we elect the thoughtful, or the cheerfully venal?”

Seriously, those are my dreams with Jessica Chastain. Thanks, brain!

-Speaking of Exxon, that commercial was considerably more accessible than Exxon’s former CEO, who is settling into a quiet job outside the public eye, Secretary of State. On a weekend in which he moved us closer, rhetorically, to conflict with North Korea (a state to which North Korea themselves are also rushing), he also give some limited statements about why he’s not accessible to the press (and why he didn’t bring them along for his Asian trip, save for one friendly reporter).

“I’m not a big media press access person. I personally don’t need it. … When we’re ready to talk about what we’re trying to do, I will be available to talk to people. But doing daily availability, I don’t have this appetite or hunger to be that.”

He added: “When I have something important and useful to say, I know where everybody is and I know how to go out there and say it.”

He added that there’s plenty of media in the cities where he’s heading, lowering the need for a traveling press. And he disregarded the tradition of the secretary of State spending time with reporters on flights, saying “that’s not the way I tend to work.”

Well…shucks, Rex. It is admirable that you’re not one of those big media persons, always needing to be on the twitter for the kids, like one of those Kardashians or Kissingers. Here’s the thing, though: you’re not a CEO anymore. You don’t get to work in the shadows. You’re on the public dime, and you’re talking about issues of literal life and death, all the time. You don’t actually get to decide when we know what’s going on and when we don’t.

It’s fine that you don’t want to be a celeb SecState, and just want to do your job. But saying “I’ll only talk to the press when I feel like it” isn’t admirably modest or a burst of down-home sensibility. It is, at best, incredibly patronizing and undemocratic, and at worst, sinister. If you don’t want people to think that you’re colluding with foreign powers to help the energy industry, maybe don’t be so secretive.

-Speaking of the NCAAs, while I didn’t watch every game, I had at least most of them on at one point or the other. Yesterday was clearly the best day, though Nigel Hayes’s winner against Nova was bucket of the tournament, for sure. Witchita/Kentucky, which should clearly have not been a Round of 32 game, had that breathtaking sequence at the end, which might have been the most exciting part of the weekend. UCLA showing off their powerhouse offense in a 5-minute blitz against Cincinnati demonstrated everything that’s fun about hoops. And Duke losing in the first weekend makes every tournament worth it.

But, to me anyway, the most impressive game of the tournament was Kansas vs. Michigan State. It was a close one throughout, with a feisty Michigan St trading blows with the Jayhawks, until with about eight minutes left, Kansas methodically and brutally pulled away, winning by 20. In a weekend in which a 3-seed lost by about 900 to an 11-seed, in which Gonzaga nearly collapsed against Northwestern, in which UNC struggled against Arkansas, and in which the defending champ and #1 overall seed lost, to see a team remember they’re great, and play like it, was a sight to behold.

(Although, sneakily, and I might be biased, the best overall weekend went to Butler, which took on a very good Winthrop team and an extremely dangerous Middle Tennessee team, and never trailed in either game. Now their half of the bracket is UNC, UCLA/Kentucky, and most likely Kansas. Let’s take on some blue bloods, Butler.)

-Finally, my favorite read of the week was this in the most recent London Review of Books, in which Benjamin Kunkel talks about the “captialocene.” It’s a take on the Anthropocene, the idea that human activity has so changed the planet, in ways that were before only the result of gradual climatic and geologic shifts or sudden space-borne disasters, that it’s a whole new Epoch. This isn’t just a catchphrase, either: by the end of this year, the Anthropocene might be officially established alongside the Pleistocene, Holocene, Miocene, and others.

But the idea of the “captialocene” is slightly different. It argues that the great changes weren’t really the results of all humans, but came about as a result of capitalism, in which the land and the people were converted into capital for the benefit of the very few. That is, we as a species didn’t make a choice to do something, but a select group got rich destroying the planet.

There’s a damn good argument there (and nowhere is it I think more true than in North America, in which literally everything was alchemized into money). There is a counterargument that communism wasn’t exactly good for the environment (see, while you can, the remainder of the Aral Sea), but that was a reaction to capitalism, and still in the essential capitalist framework. The nature of the project is to wring profit out of everything, and if that means using up the world the way it uses up workers, so be it.

The other counterargument is that the process started long before capitalism. Hell, the people that came over to North America set out to immediately wipe out all large mammals save for buffalo, changing the ecosystem almost irreversibly. So maybe capitalism is just the ultimate expression of our nature?

The idea is that the capitalocene can actually transform into the Anthropocene, in which humans more broadly have a say in the environment, and our systems are revised to redistribute both economic and environmental justice. That is: the decisions about the earth aren’t just made by the few, for the few, but finally, for once, by the species as a whole. That does seem to be the only way to solve this mess. All it takes is a complete reordering of all our priorities. I’m guessing another asteroid will hit first.

03.17.17
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Brief Notes on Publishing and The Evil Spying British

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Wait, who might be Preshident?

Sorry for the lack of posts this week. Been sick as a dog and barely able to keep a thought in my head. Which, sure, wouldn’t make the blog that much more different than usual. In my feverdreaming state, I honestly thought I read somewhere that the Trump budget cuts Meals with Wheels, but then, no one–and certainly no political party–could have that level of baseline meanness, right?

Next week we’ll be back with budget stuff, Great Lakes book reviews and budget cuts, an in-depth analysis of Butler’s run to the Sweet 16 (I hope) and more. But right now I just want to quickly mention the ridiculousness of the Trump administration publically accusing the British government of spying on Trump, based on Sean Spicer reading out loud something an idiot said on Fox.

The White House has assured No 10 that allegations British intelligence spied on Donald Trump will not be repeated, Theresa May’s spokesman has said.

The claim that GCHQ helped former president Barack Obama wiretap Trump during the 2016 election drew a rare denial by British intelligence officials after the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, repeated it on Thursday.

Spicer quoted a claim by the Fox News analyst Andrew Napolitano that three intelligence sources confirmed to him that the Obama administration used GCHQ to spy on Trump so there would be “no American fingerprints on this”.

In its surprise public rebuttal, GCHQ described the allegation as “utterly ridiculous” and on Friday, the prime minister’s spokesman said the White House had told the British ambassador and the UK’s national security adviser that Spicer had been instructed not to repeat them.

A couple of things: one, we’re still basing policy and public declaration on what idiots say on Fox. Administrations tend to run from the top down, no matter how much we like to ascribe to the people President’s have around them. When the dude at the top is a paranoid TV-obsessed idiot, so is everyone else.

Two, this is just another example of how their TV-obsession and the grudge-fueled need to never be wrong on anything leads to chaos and disaster. Because they have to back up Trump’s insane claims, arguing at one point that his quotation marks were a sign of ignored subtlety, they will flail wildly to the point where they are accusing allies of crimes. That’s an insanely dangerous way to run things, but it is the heart of Trumpism. The boss’s petty pride is the top priority.

And that gets to the main point: I hope the GCHQ was spying on Trump. That is, I hope the Fox reports were right. It’s the job of intelligence agencies to monitor potential threats. A dangerous madman becoming the President of the United States is a major threat. They should be monitoring him.

But even if they are right about this, it’s a given. We monitor allies. We monitor threats. Trump being both, ostensibly, makes it an imperative to be monitored. But you don’t come out and say it. You don’t levy criminal accusations against your most important allies. You accept it as a price of doing business in a fallen world.

So Spicer saying this, and the reasons why he did so, really proved GCHQ correct. The Brits were right to do so. This is the world we are in.

Now, it’s St. Patrick’s Day, and my health is revived, so I am out in the world, and this was the last nice thing I’ll say about the British all day.

03.14.17
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Yemen’s “Areas of Active Hostilities”: A Tautology for the 21st Century

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Remember that things can somehow always get worse. Image from BBC

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is exploring how to dismantle or bypass Obama-era constraints intended to prevent civilian deaths from drone attacks, commando raids and other counterterrorism missions outside conventional war zones like Afghanistan and Iraq, according to officials familiar with internal deliberations.

Already, President Trump has granted a Pentagon request to declare parts of three provinces of Yemen to be an “area of active hostilities” where looser battlefield rules apply. That opened the door to a Special Operations raid in late January in which several civilians were killed, as well as to the largest-ever series of American airstrikes targeting Yemen-based Qaeda militants, starting nearly two weeks ago, the officials said.

“Areas of active hostilities” is an interesting phrase, one that is both clinical and carries within it a depth of soon-to-be-explored horrors. It’s a holdover from the Obama administration (whose worst legacy will be handing over a set of dangerous tools to a madman), and one that looks to be exploited by Donald Trump and his band.

Essentially, declaring an area to be one of active hostility means that there doesn’t need to be a Presidential-level approval for missions, and that the rules of engagement regarding civilians are loosened. The Times described it as “open(ing) the throttle” on counterterrorism activities.

The main problem with this, aside from the increased casualties in civilians and military personnel, is that it essentially becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, a tautology. If you declare an area to be actively hostile, and treat it as such, and say, lose a Navy Seal while killing a dozen children, then it becomes more hostile, and the question of whether or not there is conflict becomes self-answering (if the area wasn’t hostile, we wouldn’t have lost a Seal, right?)

In Yemen, this sort of policy will almost certainly be a disaster. Let’s look at the confluence of forces. Many of these came under the Obama administration, and have been exacerbated by Trump.

  • The support for Saudi Arabia’s scorched earth campaign against the Huthis. Expect this support to increase, even vocally, as the administration tries to work a grand bargain of anti-Iran Arab nations (part of its Israel/Palestine plan, led by noted regional expert Jared Kushner).
  • The relentless viewing of Yemen through a strict counterterrorism lens, which leads to more militancy, and a strengthening of AQAP and, to an extent, ISIS (though I think AQAP will prove to be stronger in Yemen).
  • The confluence of Yemen with Iran, never entirely true, and now wildly and dangerously exaggerated.
  • An increase in boots-oriented and civilian-dismissing CT activities, designed so that a know-nothing President can appear tough. I don’t expect US military commanders and personnel to go Kilgore in Yemen, but the loosening of the rules will lead to more conflict, with its higher chances of casualties and civilian deaths. The fact that it is common knowledge that the Administration approves of this only makes America and American intentions look worse.
  • And speaking of American intentions, the hateful illogic of the travel ban solidifies the AQ/ISIS narrative that the West has declared war on Islam, and Islam has to protect itself. That the huffing and bloated face of Islamaphobia is now the face of the nation is an incredible gift to our enemies, and all his actions so far have proven their point.
  • One of his other actions is to gut foreign aid and the State Department. Due to the war, continued drought, and decades of mismanaged resources, Yemen is on the brink of a catastrophic famine. ISIS can’t feed everyone; nor can AQAP. This is an area where the US, and the West, can actually make a difference. But instead, we are going to cut aid, which barely makes a dent on our budget, to appeal to xenophobes.

It’s hard to overstate how crazy that is (not to mention bleakly immoral). Donald Trump and the Republicans are the only people in the world who think there is a purely military solution to radical Islamic terrorism. The idea that on the brink of a hideous humanitarian catastrophe the right course of action is to 1) reduce aid and 2) increase military activity is madness. It’s the best way to ensure that you are seen as the enemy for generations to come.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think sending grain is going to “solve” Yemen. This is a long-term internal issue that partly has to answer the question of what Yemen really is, and whether a unified Yemen is possible or desirable. But the US and the West have a role to play, and the only way to do that is build trust with political and tribal leaders on all sides.

Backing war criminals, demonizing Muslims at home, turning your back on suffering Muslims around the world, ignoring famine, and treating a country entirely as a problem for bombs and guns will is the exact opposite of what we want to do. It guarantees Yemen stays a war zone. The massive human suffering will radiate around the peninsula and across the sea. It’s the best way to make every area actively hostile.

03.13.17
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My Favorite Spam

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Before we get into this week’s horror, probably beginning with Steve King, I want to share with you my favorite spam ever, received this weekend.

Attn Dear fund owner!!!

I am Mr.Rex Tillerson,United States Secretary of State by profession. This is to inform you officially that after our investigations with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other Security Agencies in the Country for this year 2017, we discovered that you have not received your fund.

I have your file here in my office and it says that you are yet to receive your fund valued at US$10,500,000.00 (Ten Million Five Hundred Thousand
Dollars) These Funds will now be delivered to your designated address or your preferred payment option.

We have perfected all modules on how to bring this fund to your house without any problem, but be aware that United Nations and the United States Government
has only authorized my office to release the Sum of US$10,500,000.00 to you as true beneficiary of the Fund.

Note that if you still wish to receive your funds do get back to us immediately so that we will remove your funds transfer from the list of
those transactions to be seized by the United States Government.

I want you to answer me back now and if possible try and give me a call or Text me now +1{202}7695955

Yours Sincerely,
Mr. Rex Tillerson,
United States Secretary of State.

I appreciate that Rex put both the CIA and FBI on the case of whether or not I received my fund. It’s nice to see the IC working together instead of being rent by bureaucratic infighting.

It’s also good to know what Rex has been up to.

03.10.17
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“The Jurassic Park Rule of Internet Security”

 

Image result for jurassic park clever girl

Clever girl.

 

Over at Just Security, our good friend Brett Max Kaufman breaks down why the idea that “government and judges, not technology, should decide when the government can get to your private information” is absurd even if you grant the best intentions to security services.

For example, despite reportedly rigorous testing before deployment, the Stuxnet worm used by the United States and Israel to attack an Iranian nuclear facility unexpectedly spread to non-target computers. And when the government sits on a zero-day exploit to be able to exploit it later, there is always the chance that an adversary is doing the same thing. These risks are, for the most part, inherently unknowable beforehand.

I don’t want to spoil what the Jurassic Park Rule is, but you should read the piece. It’s a perfect look of how, as he says, “when it comes to encryption, doors are doors”, and when you or James Comey or anyone else create one, anybody can come in.

03.10.17
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America’s Infrastructure Report Card Another Sign of Being Ungovernable

I know this is going to sound weird in light of Wednesday’s post on how the entirety of the American experiment has been about transforming land into capital, but the 2017 Infrastructure Report, in which the fruits of that experiment are shown again to be falling apart, is just as depressing. If you’re going to transform a continent with epochal repercussions, at least do it right.

The report, in which we got an overall D+, is filled with depressing little nuggets of sadutainment. Dams, obviously, got a D. Drinking water got a D. Levees got a D, which means no place to stay. Rails, bless them, received a B.

Most striking, maybe, or at least in its own way most telling, is that Inland Waterways also got a D. As the report says:

The United States’ 25,000 miles of inland waterways and 239 locks form the freight network’s “water highway.” This intricate system, operated and maintained by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, supports more than half a million jobs and delivers more than 600 million tons of cargo each year, about 14% of all domestic freight. Most locks and dams on the system are well beyond their 50-year design life, and nearly half of vessels experience delays. Investment in the waterways system has increased in recent years, but upgrades on the system still take decades to complete.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that inland waterways built this country, or, at least, this country was built around inland waterways. As Peter Bernstein detailed in Wedding of the Waters, Washington knew that the fledgling nation needed a way to connect the eastern ports and cities with the settlers beyond the Cumberland Gap. This was when the country was still unformed, and the British and French held land on the continent, and there was no real reason for settlers to identify with America.

Washington wanted a canal that ran through Virginia, near Mt. Vernon (which was known back then as “our own old-timey Mar-A-Lago”), but the difficulties were insurmountable. Through the indefatigable workings of DeWitt Clinton, many-times governor of New York, the Erie Canal was built, linking the Great Lakes to the oceans via the Hudson, and unifying the nation.

It was a hell of a project, requiring monumental dams and incredible feats of engineering. The later Welland Canal surpassed even the Erie, and of course the St. Lawrence Seaway outdid them all. They weren’t the only canals, though, of course. Inland ports dotted the lakes and rivers of the new west, none more prominent than the ones in Chicago, that connected the small Chicago River to the slightly bigger Des Plaines, and thence to the Illinois, and the Mississippi. More canals were dug in the region, reversing the flow of the Chicago, and helping to open up the Lakes to the Gulf.

(There have been some very negative consequences of opening up the Lakes to the ocean, as Dan Egan details in his new book The Death and Life of the Great Lakes. We’ll have a review coming next week.)

But the canals are too narrow, and the locks are rusty and old, and the inland waterway infrastructure is decaying. Infrastructure has long been a huge problem. Democrats can’t get Republicans to spend any money on it, because that is wasteful. Republicans promise to do so, but then, as Trump is doing, “punt” it in favor of tax cuts. It’s an argument, but it is more than that.

This isn’t just politics. This is fundamental. We let our roads and bridges crumble like some kind of metaphor, because we are, ultimately, ungovernable. We’re too big, and too unruly, and too atomized, to be governed correctly. We muddle through, but for all the hegemony of CVS and Applebees in every corner, for every same-seeming strip mall of auto part joints and check cashing places in every concrete roadway of the nation, there is no real unifier. Maybe there can’t be: maybe the anonymity of modernity and the retreat of the digital age combined in a swirl of late-stage capitalism that only guarantees isolation and addiction. Maybe, really, we’re just too big, and the idea of a huge continental nation is absurd.

That would be a pretty bitter irony, there. We carved out this continent, transformed nature, and exterminated nations wholesale in order to fulfill a manifest destiny. And, barely 100 years after reaching that shore and taming the natives, the very scope of the conquest is also our undoing. We size the perils of giganticism and empire in Russia, which is falling apart, eroding its eastern possessions to China while being unable to maintain internal coherence beyond Putinism. Is it a surprise that it is happening here, too?