Far East Cynic

I just could not resist re-posting this:

Lovingly stolen from Power Point Ranger!

Watching the news about Egypt, that phrase repeatedly comes to mind.  Mubarak may have behaved like a dolt but he was our dolt and his successor may not be. Revolutions can be tricky things. It is probably wise to remember that-especially when you hear talk about waves of revolt spreading across the region.

I’m sitting here in the transit lounge watching the BBC which to my mind has had better coverage than CNN. (Being overseas there was no Fox News , for which, God be praised.) But I think Americans are missing the point-just because something may be good for the average Egyptian does not mean that it will be good for the US. And Egypt is pretty important to us because of that whole Suez Canal thing. (1956 probably started us down this dreary path).

I’m too lazy to break out the laptop-but I think it is important to remember that whoever does come in will still have mind crushing poverty for a lot of people to deal with. The military is going to come out of this a lot stronger with a bigger voice than most people realize. ( That’s why they are laying back and just channelling the herd at this point). They will choose the next leader of Egypt. People tend to forget that.

I’ll be back today and posting will resume once I sleep off my jet lag.

The new neocon meme that says the recent riots in Tunisia and Egypt are because of George W. Bush’s worthless decision to invade Iraq.

Even though the events are most decidedly not interrelated. But that fact will not make any difference to William “the bloody” Kristol or that moron Krauthammer.

Understand this, while all Arabs are scum- not all of them are the same.

Spike explains why.

But I have been busy. And what free time I have had, I have been indulging in finishing (re-reading really) Andrew Baecevich’s book. The guy is a genius-and he has accurately captured how we got to the state of war without end, and what we need to do to get out of it. (Not that he , or I, expect that we will). His take down of “King David” Petreaus is especially pointed and on the mark. Baecevich reminds us that before Petraeus was the solution he was part of the problem.

I thought going back to read that book was particularly timely-in view of my visit to Bahrain and Ft Apache.

A more detailed review and regular posting will resume this weekend.

Greetings from sunny-and surprisingly cool Bahrain. Back here for work and to see the changes in the city.

I first started coming here in 2002-and at that point it had been some 20 years since I had visited the ASU (politely nicknamed the Alcohol Support Unit) in those days.

The building that is going on here is positively amazing. Places that were just vacant lots a few years ago are all built up shopping malls and apartment complexes. Even the base here is amazing-the changes that have occurred to it. Every time I see it-it confirms what I thought more than five years ago-the Navy has too many people over here and what was supposed to be more of a temporary facility has become a permanent fixture. Too much so in my humble opinion. I always think of “Ft Apache” every time I come through the gates here. Huge walls, barbed wire, and lots of buildings crammed into a chunk of land. Less would be more-but its not going to change anytime soon.

Oh well-its work and its overseas. Can’t complain about any of that. So call me a happy man-if only it were for a longer period. Ah, well-you take what you can get. Inshallah………….

Well, I got that off my chest. Sometimes you just gotta do that. And I got a good nights sleep. And soon I am headed to the airport to do one of my favorite things-travel to a far away place.

Because-its a beautiful world. And anytime you are going to see some place other than Shopping Mall-its a beautiful thing.

So, are you worthless f*cKs happy now that you have had your pointless gesture?

What follows is a retelling of what we all already know:  health care reform repeal is a ticket back to a system that was long ago recognized as a disaster, a ride powered by zombie lies and a damn good media machine.

Oh, and for the record, it never was a “government takeover of health care”-its just that the overweight specimens of Americana showing up at town halls didn’t know any better:

PolitiFact editors and reporters have chosen “government takeover of health care” as the 2010 Lie of the Year. Uttered by dozens of politicians and pundits, it played an important role in shaping public opinion about the health care plan and was a significant factor in the Democrats’ shellacking in the November elections.

The phrase is simply not true. Said Jonathan Oberlander, a professor of health policy at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill: “The label ‘government takeover” has no basis in reality, but instead reflects a political dynamic where conservatives label any increase in government authority in health care as a ‘takeover.’ ”

What’s really interesting of course about today’s show of intellectual petulance is the list of things our glibertarian overlords seem to forget-like that whole thing of “replace”:

What’s not as expected, however, is that the GOP gave up on “repeal and replace” so early. Throughout the election, that was their message. If you look at their press language, it’s still their message. Being on the side of the status quo is, according to the pollsters, a bad place to be. But that’s where they are. They voted for repeal despite offering nothing in the way of replacement, save for the vague intention to have some committees come up with some ideas at some future date. Barry Goldwater might have wanted the GOP to offer a choice, not an echo, but Speaker Boehner saw more upside in a shout than a choice.

There’s a reason for that: Opposition is easy, governing is hard. You have to get your members to agree on a single piece of legislation. You have to make the tough tradeoffs that are the hallmark of governance. You have to explain how you’ll do things, rather than merely what you want done. You have to own the popular parts and defend the unpopular parts.

But of course it never was about replacing or fixing our incredibly flawed health care system. It was about proving how “superior” our tri-corner hat wearing village idiots companions are to those of us who actually know a thing or two about the world. Slogans count more to these people. They certainly don’t have any compassion.

The amazing part of course is that these morons folks actually have the balls to believe that going back to the old way will somehow save money or reduce health insurance premiums-because it won’t. For people who pretend to care about the defict-they have some pretty strange ways of showing it. But that is kind of the point-today’s Republican party and their tea sucking mongrels are not really serious about improving the financial status of the federal or state governements.  These, after all, are the same assholes who  spent twenty two months decrying stimulus spending and then turned around and gave the “socialist” President a boatload of it, only to get an extension of tax cuts for the rich. Tax cuts that demonstrably failed at doing what they were supposed to in their first decade.

But don’t kid yourself-health care costs will rise without insurance reform and so too will government taxes-eventually. The evidence is there-especially when you look at the balance sheets and payroll statements of the leading health care providers.

Because , a majority of your elected representatives seem to only wish to return to the health insurance companies the power to deny you healthcare if you’re already sick, cancel your coverage if you GET sick. In other words, the Teabagger plan for healthcare is

Don’t get Sick

If you Do Get Sick, Die Quickly.

Because-after all, if you do get sick-you must have done something to deserve it. Unless you are one of the overweight, tri-corner hat wearing loons. Then it is all someone else’s fault or a liberal conspiracy. But God forbid the country would actually advance and move forward in the world.

That , in my opinion, is what has changed. It used to be both sides believed in wanting the country to move forward-all they did was disagree on how to get there. Now, however, we actually have a group of people-not a majority, but large enough. to cause trouble-who actually want the country to return to some pretty bad times.

And yet-I am not supposed to lash out at these people for their stupidity, because if you do-then you are just a political opportunist who hates “real murrika”.

WELL FUCK THAT! AND FUCK ALL THOSE IDIOTS SUPPORT REPEAL.

In case you haven’t figure it out yet-this is a more than slightly angry, incoherent ( but sadly NOT drunken)  rant. I’m allowed a few of those from time to time. There will be no comments on this post. I’m right. I know I am right. And I am not going to argue tonight with anyone. It’s my party and I will rant if I want to.

One final point-I used to side with these idiots. But no longer. Because John Cole is right-they are fucking stupid.

One thing that is different from when I was a Republican is that they really are just that much dumber. Sure, the policies might have been bad, and I have no doubt that many of them were evil, and yes, there were some Dan Burton types shooting watermelons, but overall, the mean iq of the public face of the GOP has just plummeted in the last 5-7 years. What else is there to say about a party whose base honest to goodness thinks that closed captioning is a government plot to generate applause?

And again, I’m sure many of you will want to say “They were always this dumb.” They just weren’t though. It’s been a noticeable shift in both stupidity and meanness. Somehow or another they’ve managed to take the old stupid/evil continuum and figured out how to get stupider and more evil.

Selection day-after getting your 3rd choice and before you head to McGuire’s to drink yourself stupid ( follow up to Phib’s video):

And by the way-I was there. I launched on the first E-2 mission from USS America (CV-66), January 17 1991.

But over at John Cole’s place they noticed something I had too-we are too busy sniping about Sarah Palin to notice the 20 year anniversary of Desert Storm:

Because the Persian Gulf War made a hard thing look easy, Villagers didn’t learn the real lessons of that war. In their eyes, the Gulf War became a failure because we didn’t get Saddam, and Iraq remained a dictatorship. Even though he accomplished the fairly rare diplomatic feat of uniting a disparate coalition of countries that committed significant resources, George H.W. Bush was a wimp because the agreement that led to the coalition kept us from a glorious march to Baghdad. Despite the clear success of the Powell Doctrine, Colin Powell was too timid because he didn’t endorse an occupation of Iraq. Only Dick Cheney was wise enough to understand that the real lesson of Iraq is that we need to do it again, and that made him tough and serious.

The events of the last ten years have shown that the Village narrative of the Persian Gulf War was upside-down, and the reason we’re not having a commemoration is because it would be yet another opportunity for Village accountability. Their inability to learn the right lessons from the Persian Gulf War was the first step in the long road to their endorsement of the current folly in Iraq, and you don’t celebrate a fuckup like that.

The Gulf War began the expansion of US presence in the Middle East as a whole-when in fact, less would have been more. And it started the chain of events that led to our current dreary time.

Still, the flying was great.

Especially if you are spending it in Australia or New Zealand. ( Anybody got tips on getting Rugby World Cup tickets?).

This is also a parody of New Zealand’s tourist commercials.-Thanks to Coming Anarchy for discovering this funny video.

I pursed my lips a bit when I read this about Gravatar:

I’m a lawyer specialising in internet and privacy issues at a Fortune 100 company and I personally think that Gravatar is easily the worst service available in terms of your data security and privacy. I generally don’t comment on any blogs that are Gravatar-enabled (this being an exception), for the following reasons:

1. The entire reason Gravatar offers their service is to collect internet usage data across multiple sites. It is not offered free out of the goodness of their heart. The entire purpose of the service is to analyse the way YOU navigate the internet.
2. Gravatar has clear plans to monetise this data. Whether they are successful or not is another story.
3. It is unlikely that Gravatar would ever disclose individual user’s personal information, but it is not impossible. The Chinese government has often requested to these kind of information aggregators to disclose data for the prosecution of political dissidents – and very often these requests are met resulting in bloggers being jailed (see Yahoo!’s experiences in China). For example, if I leave a number of comments promoting democracy criticising the PRC government on various blogs, it is entirely possible that the Chinese government could use legal authority to request the holder of information to disclose that to them. By retaining this information and preventing you from stoppping it’s collection, Gravatar is putting both bloggers and commenters at risk. This is not just in China. The Patriot Act and many other new pieces of post-9/11 legislation in Western countries convey similar powers to government.
4. The most egregious part of Gravatar’s service is the inability to stop them from collecting your data. I have in the past tried to cancel a Gravatar registration. Gravatar does not allow this and will continue to track your e-mail address for the rest of time.
5. Gravatar does not provide any details about how they use your personal information and does not respond to any queries relating to privacy issues.
6. I do not believe Gravatar is an opt-in service. Obviously they will not display an avator unless you register, but if a blog is Gravatar-enabled, every time you comment on it, your e-mail address is sent to Gravatar. Even if they do not retain this address (and it is quite possible that they do – their Privacy Policy is silent on this point and they have not responded to any of my enquiries on this point), it is VERY likely that your internet usage is still tracked in an anonymous fashion. That is, if I use the same e-mail address to comment on 5 different blogs, even if I am not a registered Gravatar user the fact that a user has accessed those 5 blogs is very likely retained by Gravatar.

Much is made of facebook and Google Chrome’s use of personal information, but Gravatar is far and away the worst popular internet service I have encountered in terms of user (and non-user) personal information.

As a lawyer, I strongly urge all blog authors and users who are concerned about their privacy to avoid Gravatar.

Deep down-I’m not sure I think it is that big a deal. Every one should be aware that whenever they type anything anywhere it is going to some recording event. The bigger concern is  how the downloading of a bunch of images every time slows down your page load.

Plus, I’ve tried to upgrade my comments twice-with lousy results. But I am going to keep trying.

I might be overdoing it-just a bit.

While I was working on the project which will come to fruition one way or another by mid week- I pushed back from the “L” shaped desk that the S.O. gave me-which is the heart of Far East Cynic HQ- to marvel at my set up:

Monitor connected to my desktop Dell 530-which is connected to two external hard drives and a printer as well as some kick ass speakers. ( Safety tip number one-always put the “video” library under ‘lock and key’).

To my left the lap top is set up so I can look at other things via the wonders of the wireless router.

To its left, the I-pad is propped up on its keyboard charging dock-also connected via wireless to the web.

Sitting in front of me are a Blackberry and an I-phone.

Plus I have a big desk phone with a great set up for hands free speaker phone-for those annoyingly timed conference calls from our masters in DC.

I think we can…. officially ……call…….it…….. overkill ………………

Thanks to this project and the renewed education it has given me into EXCEL spreadsheets, the worth of an human being, and the real nature of corporate indifference to the needs of their employees ( Author’s note-in this case it also applies to govermental entities), I have not had a chance to come back to this line of thought.

But now I have some time.

One of the things that I continue to be amazed about is the defensiveness of the hard core right wing pundits. They have ranted and raved for over a week about how wrong it is to mention or discuss the atmosphere that the politics of the last two years have created. One, the moron known as Gateway Pundit ( who epitomizes the “look down your nose on the rest of us” attitude I will discuss later) had the balls to mistake closed captioning for some sort of conspiracy to get applause at the memorial service this past week.

The reason why they pontificate so is because it has touched a nerve with them-they are terrified that the other side might be right. For those who are skeptics about this, ask your self this one main question-which side stands the most to gain from delegitimizing the government of the US?

Answer- the right wing. Even when they were in power they had the most to gain from that line of thought.  Its been so for a long time now-but the difference between times before and the first decade of the 21′st century is the rise of media, posing as mainstream, doing the advance work for the wackos. Esquire probably has it right:

There is no more moving memorial in America than the one that they built on the place on North Harvey Street in Oklahoma City where the Murrah Federal Building used to be. There is a reflecting pool between two large arches — the time, 9:01 A.M., is carved into one of them, and 9:03 A.M. is carved into the other. The lost minute is represented by the reflecting pool and by the long lines of lonely, empty chairs, all on crystal bases, each representing one of the American citizens killed in the bloodiest act of insurrection since the Army of Northern Virginia hung ‘em up. In the accompanying museum, there is a remarkable exhibit — an audiotape of a mundane governmental hearing that was going on not far from the Murrah Building when Timothy McVeigh’s bomb went off. Some poor guy is asking for permission to drill for designer water on his land. You can almost hear everyone on the tape yawning. The mundane business of self-government is grinding along. And then there’s a tearing in the universe and somebody’s screaming for a flashlight.

Outside again, the lonely chairs are reflected in the pool and one truth hangs there between the arches: This is what we can do to each other.

This moment should have been transformational. This should have been a moment of diamond-tipped truth. This is part of who we are. This is a part of our politics. This is something to look at, honestly, and admit to ourselves that, pushed by our own dread and anger, whether or not they are skillfully stoked by demagoguery or not, this is what we can do to each other. This is what we will do to each other.

And the most remarkable thing about what happened in Oklahoma City is how little it matters today. The president of the United States gave a fine speech Wednesday night in Tucson at the memorial for the people Jared Loughner shot. The only mention of Oklahoma City in connection with the president’s speech was to compare it with the speech that another Democratic president had given in the aftermath of the memorial service for the 168 people that Timothy McVeigh murdered in 1995.

People mostly remembered that Bill Clinton once had made a passing mention of what he called “the purveyors of hatred and division… the promoters of paranoia” on the airwaves. (At the actual memorial service, Clinton quoted Scripture and talked about healing.) This time, many people struck pre-emptively; Rush Limbaugh may be self-medicating his wounded ego for the rest of his life over what he imagines Clinton said about him. There was a lot of what was called “defensiveness” on the activist Right, but it was nothing of the sort. They were on offense, just the way they have been since they took that heat in 1995. They abide by the order Stalin gave to the Red Army when the Germans invaded in 1942: Ni shagu nazad.

Not a step back.

The activist Right wants this rhetoric for 2012. It wants the same dark energies that helped it win the House last fall. It wants to be able to say the same things with impunity that it’s been saying since 2009, as though Tucson never happened. Oklahoma City might as well have happened to the Hittites.

Which is how nothing ever changed. Which is why Oklahoma City wasn’t enough.

One-hundred and sixty-eight people.

One-hundred and sixty-eight lonely, empty chairs.

It wasn’t enough.

And it is never going to be enough. Not as long as there is the idea, maintained and promoted as part of the Tea Party “movement”-that the United States can only be a one party nation, only part is fit to lead,  and that as a result-only on party is allowed to govern the nation.

Consider this-the fortunes of the United States cannot advance unless it accepts the idea of a conversation between personages of equal standing; only then can it advance ideas of equal standing and in the discussion thereof- a consensus of a compromise emerge. The health care debate of 2009 undermined that idea.  First,  it undermined the basic need-that the system for paying for health care needed to be improved, in a manner that provided access for all citizens. Second-it resorted to the use of OUTRIGHT LIES to get as many people stirred up as it could. The bogus town halls filled with some fine examples of the lack of American education and the results of eating too much and not exercising enough-they did the rest. And the rest of the world got to see the country at its worst. In so doing-every bad image of America was reinforced a thousand times over.

However, no one should be surprised.  ( And this gets to the follow up to the other post)  One of the central ideas to the Tea Bag nation is that of division. Only to them its expressed in terms of “deserving” versus “undeserving”-and its key to understanding their psyche.  The tri corner wearing idiots cannot accept a premise of the fact that all people deserve the same access to a chance. Which does not mean that all people will take advantage of that chance-but they at least deserve a chance. No, key to understanding this group of folks is their almost religious zeal to the idea that they produce-and the rest of “us” take what is undeserved or unearned. Never mind: 1) what the law allows; 2) the circumstances under which you receive; and 3) the fact that you may have also contributed to the best of your ability and have a right to receive that which you were promised. In other words, to borrow Curtis’ words-if you collect unemployment, Social Security, or any other entitlement-somehow you are stealing. And for sure you will waste it. ( Since most of you don’t pay taxes anyway-another convenient lie).

Because if they did accept that idea, that you have a right to that which you were promised-then it would undermine the long term goal. The creation of a one party state. Next time you see the letter GOP-think PAP. ( If you need explanation of that reference, then you are behind on the goings on here-try to keep up). Its not that the PAP has all bad ideas-it is just the high handed way they enforce obedience to them and crush dissent. They are a tea partiers wet dream.

Which brings me to Sarah Palin and her whining-and that is a good way to close. No Sarah, no one blames you for the murders of innocent people. “Yes, there was some lashing out at you over the crosshairs surveyor’s symbols, which is to be expected, but no one thinks that you are directly responsible for the murders. What is reasonable to discuss is a climate of hate and paranoid fear, fueled by lies and misinformation, that creates an environment in which lunatics like Loughner might be motivated to act out their revenge fantasies. For that, there is no doubt which party is responsible.“-Get over it. It’s the truth and that is all that matters. It’s an attempt to distract from a more complicated description of what is going on in the world. The attempt to say “the left is blaming Sarah Palin” is a way to distract from the multiple things that can lead to and encourage an event like this.

Until we as a nation collectively can accept the idea that main masses of both sides want the country to advance and succeed-it remains vulnerable to the ranting of demagogues-like Palin.  The fact that Palin herself-and her impressionable , but severely learning impaired followers can’t understand that,  means that there will be no civility in politics for a long time to come.

After the S.O. told me not to be so noisy for the 15th time-I was really sweating it in the fourth quarter, I thought for sure Baltimore was going to come back- laid back and savored the win.

So now of course, the question is who will they play next Sunday?

Your thoughts?