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How’s that for a slap in the face? The President of the United States just wins the Nobel PEACE PRIZE and that very day, some nit wit SENIOR advisor warns
(CNN) … that anything less than 25,000 extra international troops in the country would not be enough to win.
David Kilcullen, who also advised U.S. commanders in Iraq, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour the window of opportunity to turn around the war (in Afghanistan) is closing.
So I just have to ask: win what? Exactly what are we doing? Does anybody really know?
I don’t want to hear about terrorism. Because as far as I can tell, the only people being truly terrorized are those at the other end of drones, guns, and bombs being exploded by the power players. Yeah. Our country, the NATO countries, the guys with all the guns and ammo. Millions of civilians have been implicated in this mess. They’ve lost their families or their legs or their homes. Certainly, they’ve lost sovereignty and their countries. Perhaps their cultures.
And yesterday, I open the laptop, go to the news and WHAM_fucking_O. President Barack Obama wins Nobel Peace Prize. Shocked. Stunned. Embarrassed. Yeah. I felt embarrassed. I can’t explain it. But I was overcome by it. It drove home how fucking out of whack the entire fucking planet is. A guy who has escalated war is given a peace prize. I just don’t get it.
The Nobel committee awarding the prize mentioned that Obama has changed the tone of politics. Okay. He talks different. He talks real good, in fact. But I don’t think he’s closed Gitmo. He’s ramping down Iraq to ramp up Afghanistan. He’s protecting BushCo.
There will be no peace until the power players are held accountable for their crimes against humanity. And not just humanity. It’s our senseless destruction of the oceans and the animals there. It’s our insane industrial farming practices and the brutality towards creatures who give their lives to feed us. It’s the people who would count their profits as their products sicken and/or kill babies. It’s living in a country that has for-profit prison systems. It is fucking vulgar.
Think about it. Crimes against humanity. It’s really crimes against earthlings and the earth itself. Our country is killing people to control their countries’ resources. That’s what this is about. That’s what winning means.
For these vampires to win means most of us lose.
This can not be acceptable. So here’s what I suggest to this site and progressive bloggers everywhere:
STOP SUPPORTING DEMOCRATS. This is a call for progressive sites looking for more and better citizens willing to do the hard service work of politics.
START CITIZEN COALITIONS and take a page from Dr. Dean: dig down deeper than state-by-state, but go community by community. Look for school board seats, town councils, and zoning boards. Take the small steps. In smaller groups.
STOP the finger wagging. START exploring ways in which we can recognize our common problems and the real perpetrators of terror… the guys in expensive suits scrambling their strategies to make ever more money and power.
It is the blatantness of it all. . . of all the greed. The bloated seemingly fathomless fucking greed. We have to change this conversation.
It is not about health care. Our problems are structural. Dealing with health care is like remodeling the bathroom as the very foundation rots away. This is about our infrastructure. Our values. Our core values and what we are willing to do to live the life we all talk about. This is about adhering to the law and enforcing the law. Making better and more equitable laws.
Good god. Anyway.
Bottom line: I can not tell you how unsettling it is to feel weirded out that President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. I should be happy about it. I should feel like we get it, that there’s hope.
But all I can think of is: can we… would we, even if we could?
Just what is it we can do? What are we, collectively, willing to do?
One thing we must do, imo, is move beyond Democrats. Stop relying on the conventional political system to solve these problems. BECAUSE IT IS THAT VERY SYSTEM THAT GOT US HERE.
Holy moly. How much weirder can it get?
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it’s raining here in Leiden, Nederland. i’m an expat living in the lowlands and wondering just what the fuck is happening back home……………….
cross posted at Daily Kos and at Wimpy Badger
Yeah. it’s crazy out there.
The Power of Nightmares..a BBC documentary from 2004. The real perpetrators of terror and it sure is not al Qaeda. If the long url fails, just google it.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2081592330319789254&hl=en#docid=4602171665328041876
it’s amazing to me, bluebutterfly. how much destruction there is outside of America and we are conditioned to leave it as background noise… if that.
how do we scale up our thinking? are ability to understand relationships in broader circles? how do we stop people who have no ability to process “consequence”???
how do we start to believe what is happening is, in fact, happening. . .
Around and around we go..until the MSM tells the truth, the majority of people will not have a clue as to what is really going on. Media being controlled by a handful of those invested in the MIC is the biggest problem. Argentina just solved their media propaganda problem with new legislation. The media has been forced to break up their monopolies. An AP article, so a link only.
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http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Argentine-Senate-apf-3361171127.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=main&asset=&ccode=
let me think . . . oh yeah. wasn’t it President Clinton who signed the Telecom act in 1996??? On some bullshit reasoning about cheaper cable or something . . . but it gave Murdoch what he needed. And that was a Dem president.
We are way to monolithic in our thinking. the MSM is a label. It’s we, the people, who must stand for something. People who become journalists or captains of industry OR presidents. it is our value systems that need some re tooling. and that is why it is soooooooo urgent to enforce the law. our laws, while many can be better and more fair, are a reflection of what we value. and letting BushCo get away with their bullshit is destroying the country. it’s emboldening the people with no values. it’s reinforcing the wrong messages.
It’s more than the media. It is us and what we demand. We have got to stop saying: this is the way it is… or: this is as good it gets.
we can change things. yes, we really can. but the heavy lifting starts with us. we just need a little help on how to do it … like stop buying plastics, for example. or what companies support progressive ideals or just need a little push to become green and spend our money there… don’t use credit cards with local merchants… how to take back school boards and zoning boards… small, common sense measures that give us back some control at least in our own back yards. it’s where we need to start.
MSM is a label, but it is still the base problem. I believe that the majority of people just have no idea of what goes on inside, or outside, of their country and the blame for that falls in the lap of the media. Very little news about the rest of the world makes to big MSM outlets like CNN. What does, is often biased and only partially true. The media lies and people and the environment die. The Glen Beck advertising boycott has now involved businesses world wide. The boycott against Isreali products is world wide. Small groups all over the US are involved in great projects like buying from local businesses and local farmers rather than the big companies and the big box stores. I agree with you that small changes by individuals are important and that in each hometown citizens can make positive changes. I still believe in the goodness of the majority of people. I also believe that the majority of people just don’t know what is going on. They certainly do not realize how corrupt their own government is. It is difficult to motivate the masses to change if they don’t know that change is needed.
An experiment..’forget’ everything you ever read and researched on the internet. You can speak to only what you have ‘learned’ from a channel like CNN. What do you know now?
even with the best journalism, without the ability to think critically, information has no power. it’s what we do with the information.
education is key. inciting the mind with questions and ending the reign of answer-based education. thinking isn’t the end of the process, ie, the answer. thinking is the process way before the answer. and that’s what we seem to miss: the process. we have become so results oriented that we have stopped living the process.
so, for example, when George Bush asserted that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction AND that the guy was crazy enough to use them AND we had to stop him, why then did we announce our attack before we attacked? know what i mean? even though the papers seemed to go along with Bush, any thinking person would have said…
hmmmm. crazy guy with weapons that he’ll use. yet we are antagonizing him and he’s not deploying those weapons. in fact, when we landed finally to attack, nobody was wearing gas masks… hmmmmm maybe it’s all a bunch of horse shit.
you can draw that out to any of the myriad events over these past 9 years, including Obama continuing to bail out wall street.
anyway… butterfly effect. i believe it. one person at a time. one step at a time. be we will cover those thousand miles . . .
and one other thing that the internet could do: help to connect the diverse groups in their great projects. citizen coalitions connected by progressive sites . . . what works, what doesn’t.
I don’t think your “stop supporting democrats” will win praise on Dkos, but you are squarely on target.
Can you drink the tap water over there?
you’re funny, Art! and hell NO! i would not drink the tap water over there. but i keep in touch there because there are still good people there… all of whom need some other place. maybe like this place.
but god… no more democrat sycophants, okay? promise me???
Here’s the deal: Obama’s not sending more troops. Instead, he’s considering cutting a deal with the Taliban, which is running most of the country anyway, have no ambitions outside of Afghanistan, and aren’t too fond of their nominal ‘allies’ in Al-Qaeda.
Afghanistan is too strategic for the power players to leave to the locals. it’s pipeline and drugs and that’s lots of cash.
I’m not sure I’m disposed to believe or rely on the Taliban when they say they have no ambition outside Afghanistan… they’re just another set of brutes. I’d rather have left Saddam in power than let the Taliban back in control. and that’s a FOR SURE/
i do agree that the taliban and al qaeda are not allies, but jockeying for power and position.
but how many times do we have make that mistake? the enemy of my enemy thing?
we gotta work on some break out thinking and strategy. playing this game the same way as we have for 1000s of years is destroying us.
Actually Afghanistan’s strategic importance is negligible.
What on earth are you talking about here? There is not now and never was any connection between the two.
To describe David Kilcullen as a senior adviser is quite simply flat out wrong he is one civilian advisor of many. He pushes a fashionable theory on a particular form of warfare. He is not a “SENIOR advisor” as you have put it.
well, we disagree. if North Korea had something we wanted, we would have been there in a heartbeat. And yet we let a real crazy loon preside over what we’ve pretty much verified as a country with nuclear capability.
But there aren’t poppy fields in North Korea. Or, as far as I know, oil.
For me, Afghanistan has no strategic importance. But then, I’m not hungry to make tons of cash from heroine nor am I in the business of wanting to transport oil or gas through that country.
As for Saddam Hussein vs Taliban? Well, I think it’s an apt comparison. Under Saddam, women in Iraq went to university, participated in gov’t, and did NOT have to hide their faces under burkas. Under the Taliban, women in Afghanistan are pretty much fucked. As are kids who’d like to listen to music, debate issues, or live a secular life. So our making any deals with the Taliban, knowing that they are brutes, as we wreck havoc in Iraq for freedom and democracy is downright sick. imo . . .
Saddam is not the only bad guy here. The US is responsible for 100s of thousands of devastated lives in Iraq. If I had to guess, it would be that BushCo must be responsible for as much devastation as Saddam. Only our destruction was in the name of FREEDOM and DEMOCRACY. Yeah.
As for senior advisor, that is CNN’s description, not mine.
And so it goes… i guess it’s all just a matter of perception.
You can’t win the unwinable. Our soldiers are defending the poppie crop, so it can be freely exported to the world. The Taliban had almost iradicated it before we came in, but since it has done nothing but grown.
The idiots in this Country that have fallen for the bullshit that we can win. Eight years, many troops dead, and they want to win a war for Country that has nothing but poppies and rocks. Their peole don’t like us, the Taliban hates us. So what are we fighting for. The terrorists have done just fine in other countries, and will just move, if chased out of any.
None of the reasons to win have any credibility, even the results of winning are worthless, but we must win is still the call.
what was that song? what are we fighting for . . .
some of us are fighting to satisfy a phantom produced by some old genetic imperatives. those in charge are old outdated models. they are the new neanderthals, in fact. dick swingers clubbing away at those of us who are the newer models, trying to keep us in submission.
we’re smarter than they. we are not, however, really prepared to face what we know. we are not ready to fight in a new way. we’re not ready to understand this is about evolutionary thought.
but if we don’t invoke evolution now, good god, then when? we need to understand how we got here. these people aren’t crazy. these people are limited, small scale thinkers who truly don’t understand the dimensions of the hole they’ve dug.
once we realize that and that we can NOT stop them via revelation, then we better work on some other strategy.
not sure that this makes any sense . . .
Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die
that’s the one! thanks.
Quite flowery, sounds like like you could have been a member of Congress. they are hard to understand to.
flowery huh? incoherent is more like it. well, maybe one day i’ll be able to explain it better. but for now, we’ll leave it at um, flowery.
did make me laugh though.
Russia is getting fed up with the poppy crops in Afghanistan being protected instead of destroyed.
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http://article.wn.com/view/2009/09/23/Russia_urges_US_to_destroy_Afghan_opium_crop/
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/dyinginafghanistan.php
Big Business has completely taken over our country. I was reminiscing about that this morning. At one time (40yrs ago) I worked for the USPO. When working dispatch, quite a few of envelopes paying bills to the phone co. or power company would have no stamp on them, yet we sent them on. The mailman would collect postage from the recipient. These days the post office has a large sign warning that letters without proper postage would not be mailed.
A few years ago, prior to our local phone co. being taken over by another larger one I completely forgot to pay my phone bill for 5 months. I finally received a notice from them advising me that if I didn’t pay my bill I would be cut off. I called them and we laughed about it. I had completely forgotten to pay my phone bill for five months. I promptly mailed a check. There were no hard feelings on anyone’s part.
Nowadays, you are charged a late fee if your payment is late. This has become a large income producer for Big Business. Me, I just tell them I pay no late fees and if they are unhappy with me as a customer we can part amicably.
But its the way our culture (what little we had) has changed With the conniving of our politicians and Big Business; the people are just a cash cow, to be milked to the last drop.
The military are just part of this picture. Big Business. Where would all the generals and admirals be if we became a peaceful nation all of a sudden? All the arm manufacturers, the ship builders; all the people who make a living from bringing misery to others…
As the Fat Man (Rush) says. We are trying to emasculate America!!
I wish we could; starting with him.
yeah. i agree.
but we have to do something about it. we have to be more careful where we spend our money and on what… it’d be great to come up with a consumer product type thing for the best companies to patronize . . .
that’s one way to change the game. but we have to find some way of going global with it.
but that’s for another day. take care, andres11.
Your right about what would the generals and Admirals do. Eisenhower warned of the Military Industrial Complex, and He was a General. Mommy Bush owns a hugh part of the Arms business Her dady built that’s why the
old man sticks with Her and the kids kiss up. We since the last war we actually won spent enough trillions of dollars on our military, that our streets could be paved with gold, or all three hundred million of us could be billionaires. All for a military that didn’t protect us at Pearl harbor or 911. Hasn’t won a wars since. Doesn’t protect us, but does every other place all over the world. It hasn’t protected our borders, or protected us form much of anything.
That’s not the worst throw in the intelligence agencies and what they cost, the state department and a few others, and we could be taken care of from cradle to grave. We let some choose to spend on a military to show power, where people power can out do it every time. The people in our military make it, and cover up what the Generals and their counterparts mess up. We have had many good Americans die not to protect us, but to boost political and military aims. It is a sad Country we have when the people have fallen for this, and support it.
This conversation reminds me of something my first sergeant used to say, “Keep your eye on the donut, not the hole.” There may be some prurient content there (given the source), but I’ve always applied it to those who seem to be having visions of sugarplum fairies. Come on, Y’all, it’s nuts to talk about abandoning the Democratic Party. Especially since we have a majority in both houses for the first time in decades. Big business had taken over the country before you were born. And yeah, generals and admirals like war and always want to keep fighting; thank God. How would you like to be led into combat by a bunch of wooses? But, they are not supposed to decide who, when, where or how long to fight. The Constitution says that’s Congresses call. A Republican Congress sat on their thumbs and rotated while Dick and Don and Dubya got us mired in Afghanistan and Pottery Barned us in Iraq. Let’s give President Obama a chance to do better.
no more troops.
hunt down al-queda with intel /drones.
leave the afgans run themselves.