There are roughly 30,000 U.S. troops in the middle east region.

NOTE:The title and much of the quoted text are from Jackson Browne's brilliant Before the Deluge

Some of them were dreamers
And some of them were fools
Who were making plans and thinking of the future
With the energy of the innocent
They were gathering the tools
They would need to make their journey back to nature
While the sand slipped through the opening
And their hands reached for the golden ring
With their hearts they turned to each other's hearts for refuge
In the troubled years that came before the deluge

As we head into the abyss...

For far too long far too many of us have mostly ended up just going along with some of the worst acts against humanity, ever. Either in outright denial of reality or via superhuman feats of rationalization...or by being misled in one way or another, or by simple exhaustion, pummeled as we are by the constant torrent of media-borne propaganda.

There's a good possibility that you are aware of President Eisenhower's farewell speech about the dangers of the Military-Industrial-Complex. It's unquestionably a prescient warning.
What gets totally overlooked and forgotten is what he says in his speech immediately after the MIC warning. Skip ahead to the 9:30 mark.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy wasn't supposed to win.
The establishment wanted the corrupt, anti-Russian President Petro Poroshenko to be re-elected.
Zelenskiy is liable to do something unpredictable.

I used to think that the establishment hated Bernie the most. After all, he threatened the profits of Wall Street and Big Pharma, and for that he will never be allowed to win.

All three CIA directorates will now be headed by women https://t.co/hKzlQaVpOu

— Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) January 5, 2019

That’s how editor, Sam Thielman, is describing Congress at NBC News after watching the House Judiciary Committee grilling Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, and questioning him about who was responsible for the media bias against conservatives on the Internet. On Tuesday, Republican ignorance was front and center by virtue of the fact that they head the committee and they are calling the shots. The Democratic brain-trust will be on display in January 2019, if this committee reforms.

The technical illiteracy in both parties is a danger to the nation. Their inquiry strategy is reminiscent a blindfolded man with a long stick trying to land a blow on a pinata that he cannot see. The current Congress simply does not fully grasp the technology enough to see where it is headed in order to ask a competent question. The spectacle is at once humorous and terrifying. Any attempt to regulate or legislate the technologies involved is beyond their comprehension. They are clearly unable to judge the meaning and proper context of the information they were handed by their "advisors" in preparation for this hearing.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai had to explain to Congress why Googling the word "idiot" brings back a picture of President Trump.

You can watch, and hear your tax dollars fly toward more war, more intervention, more profiteering and ultimately, more refugees to hate on, while kicking back on holiday and telling yourself how great this self-sustaining cycle of violence called the USA is. This is a symptom of decades of domestic psyops having embedded militarism into every phase of our lives…politics, economy and even recreation. This is also another accident waiting to happen.