Our Forever Wars
Submitted by gjohnsit on Thu, 08/22/2019 - 12:59pm
In the more than 6,5oo+ days that we've occupied Afghanistan, the United States has spent $2.4 trillion and wasted the lives of 2,433 military men and women and another 1,143 allies. Not to mention the tens of thousands of civilians that we've killed.
Yet we still see headlines like this one.
Two U.S. troops were killed in Afghanistan this week. It just never seems to end.
Last week a U.S. Marine was killed in Iraq.
Speaking of Iraq, we are still getting headlines like this.
What does it take to end this?
Comments
You may recall this ditty
Forever is well, forever. Especially when they breed for it...
Prof: Nancy! I’m going to Greece!
Nancy: And swim the English Channel?
Prof: No. No. To ancient Greece where burning Sapho stood beside the wine dark sea. Wa de do da! Nancy, I’ve invented a time machine!
Firesign Theater
Stop the War!
my skin crawls
My skin crawled when I heard that song when it first came out.
It still crawls for that song today!
"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar
"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides
The East Kingdom version had a better ending :-)
"Set my son the melee quest,
Make him one of Eastland's best,
Teach him to be brave and true
And run like hell from Duke Andrew!"
(Duke Andrew of Seldom Rest was King of the Middle Kingdom - the East Kingdom's traditional Pennsic War foe - several times, and one of the better fighters anywhere.)
There is no justice. There can be no peace.
What will it take?
I'm beginning to fear it's going to take the complete and utter collapse of the Democrat Party, and thereby enabling the Republican Party and it's cohorts to run completely wild, rolling back Roe vs Wade, eliminating taxes for the wealthy and corporations, instituting a true and in our faces Police State, and turning the Constitution into a useless and "quaint" piece of paper.
Only abject serfdom will make the working people of America take notice of the pot of boiling water they now find themselves in.
Then, and only then, will the people stir and possibly rebel.
It's going to get really bloody, and only the true serfs will relinquish and survive "The Great American Holocaust", eclipsing the Jewish one for all time.
Why do I think this?
Jay Insley, the only candidate running on climate change as a serious threat, just dropped out of the race. The American people apparently couldn't give a crap less about the coming changes they are already witnessing.
And Gabbard, the only one speaking out about our forever wars and concomitant robbery of our national treasure, in addition to the sacrifice of our troops remains in single digit polling numbers.
Through apathy, ignorance, or just plain bloodlust, the American people just don't seem to care.
IMHO
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
empty suit squashed the left
most thought change was coming but it was
all a mirage
I never knew that the term "Never Again" only pertained to
those born Jewish
"Antisemite used to be someone who didn't like Jews
now it's someone who Jews don't like"
Heard from Margaret Kimberley
Boycott the duopoly,
the two major political parties are the clear and present danger in all this, they are responsible for these wars.
Boycotting is the ideal weapon for the situation.
Your instincts are good.
But you have to pick the right target — a target that will knock the Party off its feet for years to come. And, you have to make a direct with your first strike — because the American people cannot fight a sustained battle.
A Political Party is a fake construct with meandering goals. It's vsporware. They sell influence and access to the top levels of the Federal government. Their customers are entities who are willing and able to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into Party coffers. Use boycotts to scare off the Donors, and you'll send the Party into a tailspin from which it will not recover soon..
Don't make threats. Execute the boycott. Hit them with everything you got on your first strike. You won't get another chance. And they will never forget that the People have the real power. (There are many factors that make now the ideal time for this demonstration.)
Forget politics. It's fake. Economic warfare is the only game that means anything in the world we live in.
Well, that could be part of an overall action plan,
but a major action to vote third party and boycott the democratic and republican parties might be in order. Just throwing out ideas, if I offended anyone I'm sincerely sorry.
You sure didn't offend me.
Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.
That's 'more of the same' and it hasn't worked, even once, during the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which began at the end of the last millennium. The goal of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is to eliminate human workers in real world jobs that can be done better by robots and artificial intelligence. Politics is now a distraction. Anyway, humans have more important things to do now if we are going to survive.
The government is not there to benefit the People. Unless we make it impossible for them to do anything else.
How much money do you/we have to keep from them?
I'll vote one last time (unless Bernie wins, then I figure I'll be voting up a storm).
But first things first . . .
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6otjCKg594]
Looks that way, doesn’t it?
Boycotts, for example — look how aghast both parties are at the thought that BDS might catch on, that ordinary people would actually start joining in. BDS has been one of the few grass-roots moves that has gotten elites’ goat enough to move the needle and warrant the bipartisan cartel’s attention.
Last night German government-supported TV had an extended “color revolution” type documentary about protest in Hong Kong. I had to laugh at how they only love populist democracy movements when they’re far away from home and not challenging NATO-allied Gulf tyrants like the Saudis or Bahrain.
Yellow Vests in France? A protest movement right next door and in its eleventh month? Forget it — that kind of protest is populism, and populism is bad! Meanwhile, German establishment media seem to see it as their job to burnish Macron’s image as this great leader who, together with Merkel, is going to save Europe. The sycophancy is disgusting.
The big inspiring vision for the European Union? A federal level of government complete with its own powers of taxation and its own military — a federal government even more Byzantine and less accountable to voters than the U.S. one.
I like Macaron only
for this week and only b/c he apparently has made Nice with Putin at their meeting in the French Riviera.
Hong Kong coverage by the German MSM? Only b/c that one was sponsored and driven by US intel. Yellow Vests -- not sponsored by US powerful interests, so no coverage. Bad.
You should consider doing a regular Letter From Europe post on this board to keep us up to date with what's going on over there across the pond.
Boycotting both political parties...
by not voting will not slow down the war machine one iota.
He was asking how to stop the wars,
what's your idea?
You're the one...
who made the statement. Explain how a political boycott will stop the MIC when it's quite obvious the monsters work their death and destruction totally oblivious to any political party. You of all people should know that.
There are candidates that are speaking out against the madness, support them, that's my idea. Suppressing the vote only works in favor of the monsters. Do you really think that they give a flying back flip if I or anyone else doesn't vote?
I didn't say don't vote, I said don't vote for the two
war parties. Vote for the Greens or the People's Party, try to get a new party voice into the system. It's clear the two major political parties are the problem, at least to many of us, so go a different direction. Electing more and better democrats just doesn't work, THAT has been tried before.
Maybe nothing will, but at least protesting the parties that make these wars happen is something.
It worked pretty damn good when FDR got elected
again and again.
Edit/add: And it would have worked even better if people stood up and insisted on Henry A Wallace being the candidate to follow him. A peace candidate who as a Democrat would have gone a long way in preventing the threat of wars and nuclear anniliation.
Yep, and I would
add JFK to that short list.
People should read up on how Wallace got screwed out of another term as VP -- it may have relevance for the Dems upcoming convention and selection of the P choice. FDR liked and wanted him, but (I suspect) he was too sick mid-'44 to protest much when some powerful party bosses came calling and announced they would not back Wallace -- too lefty for them -- but instead preferred Truman. In any case, FDR didn't attend the convention, so his direct influence on delegates wasn't felt.
Party bosses and the DNC leaders dictated the VP choice -- it went to a second ballot, after Wallace led on the first but not by enough, and after that TPTB in the party worked their magic with delegates and delivered Truman.
Something similar could happen to Ds at next year's convention. But I just strongly doubt TPTB will have controversial and shopworn Hillary in mind as their choice if Bernie or Liz or Biden should fall a bit short on the first ballot. I think the convention would erupt and the party would be badly split.
The possible Henry A. Wallace analogy. . .
. . may be very prescient.
I forget how Truman was selected to be the foil to Wallace. He certainly wasn't that big a name at the time. I recall O. Stone paying a lot of attention to it in his US History documentary but I don't have access to it now. Not that his interpretation is necessarily the best one.
A little help would be appreciated from anyone in refreshing my memory.
Thing is, the Dems were riding high in those days. Hardly the case now.
The possible scenarios haven't yet been exhausted. Hillary and Harris? Biden and Hillary? Biden and Michelle? None of the above? Who knows? And let's not yet give up on the notion that Bernie might miraculously squeak by and win the nomination.
Well, I think the
selection of Wallace was roughly as I broadly outlined above, but admittedly I haven't done a deep dive into the serious literature to get into more particulars.
But FDR definitely didn't attend the '44 Dem convention -- busy with inspecting troops somewhere out at sea, which suggests he wasn't all that sick. Was that trip to avoid the, um, awkward situation with his VP being passed over for Truman, as previously acquiesced to?
The Ollie Stone long documentary, The Untold History of the United States (iirc), is overall a very worthy watch. OS is definitely in the Wallace camp, and also wonders how things would have turned out differently with a liberal president who might have been less willing to always defer to the Pentagon and less willing to create a dangerously empowered intel agency in the CIA in 1947.
Someone can remind me why HST is consistently rated in the Top 10 of American presidents. My view is that these establishment historians doing the ratings are rather happy with presidents who toe the FP Establishment line and are also prone to favor the bold & tough guy, unnuanced leaders.
Also re the 1944
convo: if I'm not mistaken, it was the last time a nominee didn't attend the convention. Also the last time, at least for the Dems, that the convention went to a second ballot either for P or VP. But that is working from memory.
Wallace vs Truman
Some interesting tidbits here.
From your cite,
these are key words: "he was not a well man". An important factor, imo. Whole 'nother story, but his primary medical care person, a Navy admiral physician, was stuck in the 19th C with his medical attitude. FDR's blood pressure was dangerously high, and that idiot thought it was normal for aging men. Gross negligence. And he also arranged to destroy most of FDR's medical records.
Contrast with the 1940 convention. While it's true the party bosses generally had more sway back in those days re the VP pick, in '40 FDR sent Eleanor to the convention, which was divided over the VP, liberals for Wallace conservatives for a pol from Alabama, to rally them to get behind her husband's preference, which person she didn't specify but it was known by all that FDR wanted Wallace.
Her very effective speech calmed the convention enough to get them on board. Wallace however was hardly an enthusiastic overwhelming pick by the convention. Many got on board very reluctantly, feeling strong-armed by the president and his men. It is also indisputable that if the delegates hadn't gone with his VP pick, FDR was going to tell them that he would not accept their nomination for P. In that year, he had energy and clout, and used it for the desired outcome.
$2.4 Trillion
I remember when John Kerry got universally roasted in 2004 for claiming the Iraq War cost $200 billion. "That's too high," claimed FactCheck.org. Actually, it was way too low. The costs related to just Iraq were pegged at $1.1 trillion as of the end of 2011. Additional costs since then and including future expenditures are estimated to bring the total cost to $2.4 trillion, just like Afghanistan.
But hey, what's a few trillion here and there among friends?
So-called fact-checking is often a racket though.
In practice, it’s just another form of propaganda the powerful can use to discredit — and ultimately silence / de-platform / cancel — voices, positions, and discussions that undermine their control over the narrative.
It’s like Wikipedia’s “reliable sources” doctrine. Unsurprisingly, “reliable sources” turns out to mean that something has been published (and vetted by the gatekeepers) in establishment media. It’s a circular argument: “reliable” means approved by the powerful, and the powerful are powerful because they control what views people are encouraged to hold and what views people are punished or ostracized for holding.
Here you go, here's the solution.
George Soros and Charles Koch team up for a common cause: an end to “endless war”
https://uspolitics.10ztalk.com/2019/07/01/george-soros-and-charles-koch-...
Not a bad idea,
but so far I haven't heard much from their effort. Tom Steyer is drowning out just about everyone.
Another idea: Charlie Koch and Soros and Bill Gates and Warren Bouffé and Jeff Bezos team up for a Tax the Rich movement.