Guardian | The most under-discussed aspect of the NSA story has long been its international scope. That all changed this week as both Germany and France exploded with anger over new revelations about pervasive NSA surveillance on their population and democratically elected leaders.
As was true for Brazil
previously, reports about surveillance aimed at leaders are receiving
most of the media attention, but what really originally drove the story
there were revelations that the NSA is bulk-spying on millions and millions of innocent citizens in all of those nations. The favorite cry of US government apologists -–everyone spies! –
falls impotent in the face of this sort of ubiquitous, suspicionless
spying that is the sole province of the US and its four English-speaking
surveillance allies (the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand).
There are three points worth making about these latest developments.
• First, note how leaders such as Chancellor Angela Merkel
reacted with basic indifference when it was revealed months ago that
the NSA was bulk-spying on all German citizens, but suddenly found her
indignation only when it turned out that she personally was also
targeted. That reaction gives potent insight into the true mindset of
many western leaders.
• Second, all of these
governments keep saying how newsworthy these revelations are, how
profound are the violations they expose, how happy they are to learn of
all this, how devoted they are to reform. If that's true, why are they
allowing the person who enabled all these disclosures – Edward Snowden – to be targeted for persecution by the US government for the "crime" of blowing the whistle on all of this?
If the German and French governments – and the German and French people – are so pleased to learn of how their privacy
is being systematically assaulted by a foreign power over which they
exert no influence, shouldn't they be offering asylum to the person who
exposed it all, rather than ignoring or rejecting his pleas to have his
basic political rights protected, and thus leaving him vulnerable to
being imprisoned for decades by the US government?
Aside from the
treaty obligations these nations have to protect the basic political
rights of human beings from persecution, how can they simultaneously
express outrage over these exposed invasions while turning their back on
the person who risked his liberty and even life to bring them to light?
• Third,
is there any doubt at all that the US government repeatedly tried to
mislead the world when insisting that this system of suspicionless
surveillance was motivated by an attempt to protect Americans from The
Terrorists™? Our reporting has revealed spying on conferences designed to negotiate economic agreements, the Organization of American States, oil companies, ministries that oversee mines and energy resources, the democratically elected leaders of allied states, and entire populations in those states.
Can
even President Obama and his most devoted loyalists continue to
maintain, with a straight face, that this is all about Terrorism? That
is what this superb new Foreign Affairs essay by Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore
means when it argues that the Manning and Snowden leaks are putting an
end to the ability of the US to use hypocrisy as a key weapon in its
soft power.
64 comments:
Given the entheogenic tilt hereabouts, that headline could have supported a waaay more interesting story.
lol, nah, kept in the dark and fed shit is just kept in the dark and fed shit...., there's no way to gild that lily.
"Mr Obama has gone from seeming like someone who doesn’t quite know what’s going on in his government to someone who doesn’t really want to. He has perfected a sense of surprise. He’s always finding out at just the moment you are, and feeling your indignation." -- Peggy Noonan
A master of deception at work.
"master"?!?!?!?!? rotflmbao......,
Peggy Noonan's a joke. She wrote speeches for someone that couldn't recall anything when asked some tough questions. It's possible that NSA pulled one over on the president. There's no way you could stay on top of them and expect to govern. There's too much to clean up.
My question is why is the government contracting everything out?
Our President is not a micro-manager. He's the kind of guy who likes to set overall policy direction, but leave most of the specifics to his subordinates. The NSA is not afraid of him.
Then again, the NSA isn't afraid of anyone.
The government has to contract genuine technical services out because the General Schedule is a boon to incumbency, inertia, and incompetence projected over entire career spans of time, while technology races forward continuously and only those who hump hard have a prayer of keeping up. The goons occupying GS-13/14 spots who're supposed to know how to do things are for the most part incapable of distinguishing shit from shinola, and the apple polishing ass-kissers above them at the Division Chief and higher levels are still less competent.
The Hon.Bro.Preznit is an incompetent teleprompter-reading token whose primary value was always symbolic and whose profound limitations have become increasingly conspicuous to the casual observer. Jofi Joseph was not lying about any of these ass-clowns which is precisely why he had to go; http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/24/us/secret-white-house-tweeter-and-national-security-council-official-loses-job.html
To your point, the NSA as a primary instrumentality of the Deep State isn't afraid of anyone and it's struggling mightily at this juncture to try and put on a publicly convincing subordinate face.
That may be true but the real joke is on the people who were suckered into supporting candidate Obama based on his slick rhetoric--"change you can believe in."
A master indeed. The NSA is carrying out policies and programs which are consistent with the administration of: indefinite detention without due process, the prosecution of whistleblowers, targeted assassinations of American citizens, war crimes--killing children and 68-year-old grandmothers, etc. But the Real Slim Shady has convinced people that he is above the fray, and did not know jack sh^t. If not for Snowden and Greenwald the NSA would have continued to fly under the radar, while above ground Obama establishes the precedents for Police State America. And he was doing so with barely whimper of protest--simply brilliant.
The alternatives to candidate Obama were candidate Clinton and candidate McCain. Were either of those two a better option?
Or are presidential elections themselves the problem, in that they now are just a suckers' game?
Of course the Executioner-in-Chief, oops I mean the "incompetent teleprompter-reading token" had no knowledge of the NSA's role in executing his Kill List.
http://wapo.st/1cmMcoc
lol, the continuing tactical evolution of the unspeakable requires live-fire targets. Continuity of the overarching GWOT narrative requires statistical activity.
Other than giving you something to feign self-righteous indignation about, exactly what is the strategic significance of dusting off disgruntled medievalists and former CIA contractors in the remote corners of the world where full-spectrum dominance is being debugged? That work has been in progress for over a generation, long before the rorschachian was selected, and it will continue long after he has been replaced by a new figurehead.
It wasn't slick rhetoric; he was the best available candidate. If you don't believe me, you can look at the possibilities for 2016. When he campaigned, he was subtly telling people that they had to get active. People didn't get active so we have what's going on right now. I remember bitching about the Patriot Act when it was signed and people told me it wasn't a big deal. They told me they didn't give a shit about people getting tortured because it made them feel safe. They didn't care about hydro fracking because it was happening over there. I told people about student loans and I was told 'I paid my loans, why should I care?'
With what I just described, what would any reasonable person expect an elected official to accomplish? You can be Michael Jordan, but the rest of your team has to be somewhat decent.
When he campaigned, he was subtly telling people that they had to get
active. People didn't get active so we have what's going on right now.
Assuming he was serious about that, it was a major miscalculation on his part. The America he was trying to conjure up with that rhetoric:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/17/Save_Freedom_of_Speech.png
doesn't exist anymore. Every year, fewer and fewer Americans are like the one depicted. The country is fundamentally different than it was in 1981. What Obama meant by "active" was that his supporters should join all those moribund Democratic Party political clubs and organizations and revive them, regularly take part in political rallies, "get-out-the-vote" phone banks, voter-registration drives, etc. What we the people mean by active is click "I support" on an on-line e-petition. It's about all the majority of people believe they have time or energy for now.
There's a "heaviness", a "physicality" to Obama's meaning of "politically active" that just doesn't mesh well with present-day "light-and-airy" American culture. If he didn't understand it back then, I think he understands it now.
Incompetent. In what way(s)?
lol, gentlemen, stop playing.
When activism got real, a federally coordinated physical counterinsurgency, violence and intimidation got exponentially realer - and all under this preznit's narrative aegis http://subrealism.blogspot.com/search?q=crackdown+on+occupy
The ONLY thing that this symbolic token signified in my fevered imaginings about the near term prospects for America, was that the clampdown wouldn't escalate any further specifically on or against black folks. Hell, after the decades long war on drugs (war on black men) there was no tangible need. It has however proceeded apace against undocumented mexicans, and, it has gotten as real as it needed to get against predominantly young and white Occupy protesters.
The only folk who've benefitted under the Obama administration are gays and lesbians...,
Occupy was not the kind of activism Obama had in mind, as it was not tied at all to the DP, and so could not be controlled by it. Occupy was tolerated only until it became clear that they were experimenting with governmental structures that were both non-constitutional and non-republican in form and content:
The assembly is the main OWS decision-making body and uses a modified
consensus process, where participants attempt to reach consensus and
then drop to a 9/10 vote if consensus is not reached
This was the heart of the matter, what the Federal counterinsurgency strangled in its cradle, with Obama's blessing. All the other "goals" (reduction of corporate political power, banking reform, more balanced income distribution, etc), while not trivial, were of secondary importance. None of them posed a conceptual challenge to the present constitutional republican order (small c. small r). The assemblies did, and so were neutralized, with extreme prejudice.
So Obama "won" that battle, I suppose, but it was a Pyrrhic victory, as it destroyed ANY inclination among the Millennials to engage in the kind of 1970's-1980's "work within the system" DP-controlled "activism" that Obama was pushing for. And as for the sundry Tea Parties, well, let's just say that, while they may be a source of nostalgic inspiration to 50/60-something Baby Boomers, they offer ZERO inspiration to younger people. So they're withdrawing from politics, you see; refusing to help the machine advance, refusing to further tighten the rachet, and instead spending their time doing other things.
And the clampdown grinds on, of course, in one form or another. Gays and lesbians being the primary exception, as you pointed out. Which is interesting...
As Howard Zinn said: "If the gods had intended for people to vote, they would have given us candidates." Of course it's a suckers game. How is a corrupt system sustained without masses of people buying in at some level--the lesser of two evils; the best candidate available, and other such rationalizations? Expediency trumps moral conscience. The greatest fear of TPTB is that the American body politic will one day break the monopoly which the corrupt two-party system has on their minds.
Neither Clinton nor McCain could have accomplished what Obama has--imperial expansion (particularly in Afrika) and constitutional contraction without massive protests. Obama's magnetic appeal blurs the contradictions between what he really does and what people believe he represents. He is the "Man of Lawlessness."
"It wasn't slick rhetoric; he was the best available candidate." That's how the suckers game works. Obama could have kept people active if that was his objective. He has been running a perpetual campaign since 2007. The only activity he and his handlers wanted was votes, so that Obama could execute the agenda of the oligarchic psychopathocracy.
Besides that as Bro. Nulan pointed out Obama has done enormous damage to the Black brand: "Obama has put a black face on all the very worst attributes of the American system of production. In so doing, he has identified American black folks once and for all - with all those very worst traits - and flushed the highest and best aspirations of King et al right down the toilet. Obama has traded ruthlessly on black social capitalo, leaving nothing in our account for justice or moral propriety - and only an opportunistic and self-serving IOU for perceived racial slights in its place."
I remember you being resistant to this story way back, as time goes by do you find this story being more of a possibility how things really happened?
http://socyberty.com/issues/white-house-insider-obama-hesitated-panetta-issued-order-to-kill-osama-bin-laden/
"what is the strategic significance of dusting off disgruntled medievalists and former CIA contractors?" The military-industrial complex requires endless enemies. These enemies have to be manufactured to fill the ranks Al Qaeda, Al Shabaab, and entities yet to be developed. They want people to blow things up and undoubtedly assist them to do it. The rorschachian is just making his contribution, but his particular personality was needed at that particular point in history to continue the enterprise.
The Hon.Bro.Preznit has exactly zero operational or executive experience. In the first case, that means he doesn't know how to walk about, kick the tires, ask all the right questions, and figure out how to setup punchlists and tic and tie the work being conducted by his purported subordinates. He's not an experienced and knowledgeable legislator, so he doesn't know how to work the legislatures he has to work with, and much of the work he simply doesn't understand, so he's left having to trust others and to surround himself with a cadre of genuinely smart people he can trust.
In the second case, i.e., "being a competent executive" or leader of men, he'd have to have the talents of an adept empath or adept manipulator, either will suffice. He has neither. An adept executive surrounds himself with highly competent people that he can trust and who are fundamentally loyal to him. He hasn't surrounded himself with smart new people who are themselves adept operators, rather, he has primarily surrounded himself with people that he's comfortable with. The upshot of that being that in the aggregate, we're left with aloof and pompous nincompoops occupying the white house and incumbent adept operators free to do their own thing in all the departments and agencies of the executive branch where they're embedded.
This selfsame lack of operational grasp and executive talent is precisely why urban blocks of black political power have epic failed nearly without exception all across the U.S. - It's one of the main things I rail against in my uncompromising harshness about the failed leadership of the 2nd/3rd generation inheritors of the civil rights movement.
lol, as I always suspected, and as you've now explicitly confirmed, you hold the rorshachian in vastly higher esteem than I do. Not only would Deval Patrick have seamlessly substituted for him, Patrick would've been a vastly more competent operator and executive. Matter fact, just about any properly seasoned black corporate executive could've easily substituted for this teleprompter dependent sock puppet.
Not resistant to the story itself, just contemptuous of the poor trash putting it forward as somehow substantiating their objections to Obama. Teatard bigots frosting the turd of their racial animus can never substantively propound a coherent and credible critical cake. The very fact that they're bigots renders moot anything further emanating from their quarter. I make no exceptions.
“any properly seasoned black corporate executive could've easily substituted for this teleprompter dependent sock puppet.”
The fact of the matter is neither Patrick nor anyone you are referring to was selected to deliver the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention. You’re suggesting that they could have selected anyone from this pool of “properly seasoned black corporate executives” and achieved the same result--the election of America’s first Black president. You can’t be serious.
Furthermore you are suggesting that Patrick et al possess the enormously deceptive charisma and total lack of moral conscience that Obama possesses. Prove it. Finally did any of the operatives you’re referring to work for the CIA?
This sums up my esteem for The Perfect Proxy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB-vYuYhdSE&app=desktop
lol, this post is not about Obama's campaign or his careful selection as a candidate, rather, it's about his capacity to effectively OPERATE the executive branch and to lead a cadre of senior managers. It's the fundamental difference between a shallow "leading man" actor cast into a role, and the producer/director of the cinematic production into which the actor is cast.
There are lots of responsible and empowered black senior line managers in every industry vertical known to man, each of whom could easily step in and OPERATE the branch and lead the cadre. These are the types of guys who know how to ask the right questions, organize a punch list, put a time line to it, set performance hurdles and conduct routine operations meetings in which results are reported, measured, and decisions taken on that well-informed basis. The Hon.Bro.Preznit has no prior experience with any of that and it's increasingly conspicuous to the casual observer.
After preliminary hiccups, Patrick has successfully served two terms as governor of Massachusetts, his bona fides are well established. Gov. Patrick is Zbigniew Brezinzki's spare Obama http://thephoenix.com/boston/news/54627-thats-what-he-said/
Got it. I don't disagree with much of what you say, though I do think he understands a lot more than you give him credit for.
That being said, part of why the American people elected him twice is we didn't want the kind of managerially-competent corporate/business executive you're describing occupying the highest office in the land. Such people are fine in business, but we don't much care for them in politics, particularly at the Federal level; it's one reason why Romney doesn't live in the White House. Did Gov. Patrick ever indicate that he was seriously interested in the job? I'm not aware of such, and had he been I suspect his very managerial competence would've proven to be a strike against him.
Full disclosure: I voted for Obama twice.
Sadly, I'm surrounded by JD's and PhD's and while every single one of them can endlessly run his/her mouth, not a single one of them is capable of competently analyzing a novel problem, project managing anything more complicated than getting their own habitual groceries, and their leadership capabilities are abysmal.
I admitted to voting for Obama in 2008 for a very specific reason I disclosed. It didn't take very long for him to embody the worst things I suspected of him during his original campaign. For all the hope he inspired and all that was invested in him, he must be one truly shocking disappointment.
"I admitted to voting for Obama in 2008 for a very specific reason I disclosed." And I am assuming you left out 2012 because you didn't. This of course puts you in a very slim majority, a black person who didn't vote for Obama in 2012. The key is only in battleground demographics do you worry how to win a vote. And the black vote at 90% for democrats and 96% and 93% voted for Obama isn't a battleground demographic. There is absolutely no threat of blacks leaving the democrat party. It doesn't matter if the democrat system works locally or nationally for them, blacks are voting democrat, especially if he is black, so since you have that vote, to maintain power why not battle for other sectors of the voting public you don't already have a lock on?
"For all the hope he inspired and all that was invested in him, he must be one truly shocking disappointment."
It would be shocking for me to believe that anyone who was truly inspired by all the hope he provided will now saddle him as being the one who is responsible for their disappointment. Obama still is on the campaign trail running against the system, his hands our tied, and he is just as mad and disappointed as the ones who were inspired by his hope. He hasn't been treated fairly, and those who are inspired by know it.
Ken, the role of the US President is to be one individual with checks and balances power against a huge Congress and Supreme Court. The US Constitution framed the US President job for individual leaders to take individual spirited initiatives, not complain about being not treated fairly by the other branches of government.
I find it bewildering to make the US President to be some kind of hapless victim now President Obama is in office. Last I check my history notes, Abraham Lincoln been through worse but done more under his Presidency as an individual in a much more divisive situation.
Summing it up briefly (in only 46 hard-hitting sec),
Pastor Manning spake thusly ---> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoZjXDP7LHs
Romney's not a competent manager. http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/the-book-on-mitt-romney-here-is-john-mccains-ent
This guy had no business governing. And if you can't beat Mitt, politics isn't for you.
Bush was born in a place where he wasn't allowed to fail. He didn't have to learn from his mistakes. Let him tell it he didn't make any. He's not what I would call a competent manager. It's also nice to have a congress that will lay down for you most of the time.
I'll have to say his mistakes came from making sure all the outsiders were squeaky clean. That meant a lot of talented people were shut out. Did you ever cuss online? Well, don't worry about a job in his White House. That's how bad it was for new people. At the same time he kept dickheads like Rahm Emmanuel around him. So that could explain a little of what went wrong. All the techies I know are pretty damn good, but they may have gotten some poom poom once or twice in their lives. So it's possible you have the 144,000 working under you and they might not be up to it.
Personally, I'd hire you if you have talent. I don't give a shit about the midget porn. Just not at work.
It’s doubtful that this Minister of Imbecilic Incantations gave Obama anything, but he probably gives white supremacist neanderthals a lot of wet dreams.
The Wall Street oligarchs and military-industrialists who did give don’t consider Obama to be a failure at all.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJQ2tndQT14#t=302
Speaking of that NSA mentality.
[According to the new book “Double Down,” in which journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann chronicle the 2012 presidential election, President Barack Obama told his aides that he’s “really good at killing people” while discussing drone strikes. Peter Hamby of The Washington Post reported the moment in his review of the book. The claim by the commander-in-chief is as indisputable as it is grim.]
http://yhoo.it/16ZpdRV
Wall St. been done with him and is back with the Clintons saying increasingly pointed and nasty things about his inability to work with the teatards in Congress.
A lot of people on the left have something against obtaining power. Instead of 'how do we beat these assholes?' The word is 'the GOP is being mean to us.' There's rarely an accounting of what the actors could be doing wrong. Anyone that decides to take responsibility is shut out of the conversation. The Democratic Party isn't much better. They act as if they accept failing. They lack the ruthlessness necessary to win.
The historical end of left/progressive politics coincided with the failure of organized labor to establish and maintain vigorous oppositional political blocks through thick or thin at.the.grassroots.level. When organized labor became hierarchical and excluded "others" - that marked the living memory death of muscular progressive politics in America.
The so-called Democratic party is a compliant participant in the oligarchical 2Party/1Ideology system of governance.
Is that Wall st or the Clintons saying that?
Both. Hellury has given back-to-back gimme speeches pickup up fat checks for nothing at Goldman Sachs, and, it clear that the Clintons are doubling down on distancing themselves from Double-0
Wall Street got what the paid for in 2008. No prosecutions and certain provisions of Dodd-Frank were never implemented. They favored Romney in 2012--$61m to $19m for numerous reasons, but the repeal of Dodd-Frank was primary. Now the House Republicans and 70 Democrats have passed a Citigroup written deregulation bill. It appears to me that Obama has more of a problem on this issue within his own party, than with “teatards.” Obama will not risk losing the Senate to save Dodd-Frank, so Wall Street wins either way.
http://bit.ly/16yCMVL
Wall St. wins despite Double-0, not because of him. In consequence of this fact, he's overstayed his welcome.
My point wasn't to debate the relative managerial skills of Obama and Romney on their merits. My point was that, for Americans, having good managerial skills is not relevant to being president. If anything, it's a liability. Nobody wants to see a well-run Executive branch. Therein lies the road to tyranny (at least in most Americans' minds).
American presidents are valued, or not valued, for the other things they bring to the table.
Who did the 9% vote for? Romney? Stein? NOTA?
PhDs, and most JDs, are scholars by training, not managers. And narrowly trained, overspecialized scholars at that. By training and temperment, most of them tend to be loners, and prefer working alone. Whatever talents they may have, being a good manager is rarely one of them.
Obama is an incremental social democrat by temperment and ideology ("change is hard, change is slow"). He never pretended to be anything else--it's all there, clearly spelled out in his books. And his decisions and actions over the last five years are pretty consistent with that. As for people who don't care for incremental, he had this to say in Rolling Stone to his critics just before the 2010 election:
"Making change happen is hard. But if people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren't serious in the first place."
FU, IOW.
Here's the root of the disappointment. Most of those who voted for Obama expected something completely different. Something that was not incremental. Incremental has a grim, joyless, rather pointless quality about it that casts a grey, depressing pall over everything. Incremental encourages withdrawal, not engagement. And that's what's happening now.
The Hon.Bro.Preznit has proven a piss-poor narrator-in-chief, incapable even of selling his "crowning achievement" legislation...,
The changes made on behalf of homosexuals were anything but incremental, because those were the only changes clearly undersigned by the Brookings. While Obama and Holder haven't vigorously opposed the incremental end of the marijuana prohibition, I'm willing to chalk that up to concern for his "legacy".
As for PhD's and JD's who go into K-12 education, not a single one of them qualifies as a "scholar". For those who wind up in urban public education, not a single one of them qualifies as a manager or leader. Rather, they're adults who sincerely enjoyed school, particularly the tattle-telling and endless drama aspects of the undertaking, and, they found themselves incapable of engaging any more difficult subject matter. The JD's are a truly supernumerous special case, comprised as they are mostly of folks trained to practice law but who either couldn't pass their bar exams or washed out in the profession.
What specific assets, beyond complexion, sprightly bearing, and, "he speaks so well" teleprompter reading, did you find so terribly appealing about the rorschachian? http://subrealism.blogspot.com/search?q=rorschachian
The greatest salesman on the planet can't sell a car which will not run.Why that car is on his lot is the larger issue. But...
[For the sake of argument, let’s assume the following to be true: Barack Obama is not a stooge, a cipher, an empty suit, or a puppet. He is not incompetent, indecisive, or deranged. He is, in fact, intelligent, purposeful, and rational. Let us further assume that Obama is sincere in his actions, if not always his rhetoric, and that his actions, from the persecution of whistleblowers to the assassination of American citizens, are premeditated, planned, intentional and taken without ambivalence.
What do we make of this? On the surface, it means that Obama is as culpable as he is capable. His icy certitude has always been his most grating affectation. Yet there is no one to hold him accountable for his crimes against the Constitution, high and low, not even the Visigoths of the House. Despite the daily hysterics fulminating from the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, Obama is the choice of the elites, the man they want at the helm at this fraught moment for global capitalism. It’s his competence that makes him so dangerous.
Obama is the executive manager of what the British punk band the Mekons called the “Empire of the Senseless”. By this, I don’t mean an empire that is inchoate, but a government that doesn’t sense, that doesn’t feel, that is immune to the conditions and desires of the governed. America has degenerated into a sham state, a republic of the observed and monitored, where government operations are opaque and menacing. A pervasive dread seems to envelope the nation.] -- Jeffrey St. Clair
http://bit.ly/177zDJW
But Wall Street has reached record highs under Obama. Record highs which are totally disconnected to the economic realities on main street. Obama has been a boon for the oligarchs and that may be understating the magnitude of his benefits to them.
[A recent analysis by UC Berkeley’s Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, revealed that 95 percent of the economic gains since the recession began have been captured by the top one percent.]-- St. Clair
Witness Virginia for proof of this argument.
[More likely, though, the Democratic Party will just become stronger. Their grip on the White House and their control over less benighted regions of the country will be enhanced. Barack Obama, more than any other factor, has brought this situation about ... Obama has brought the GOP to ruin and perhaps even to extinction just by being there.
Whatever happens, the Democratic Party has already inched closer to becoming the favored political instrument of the economic elites it yearns to serve.]
http://bit.ly/19CzBOe
Speaking of elites, did Obama campaign bundler, Texas software billionaire Joe Liemandt, fund the Libertarian candidate in Va. to steal votes from Cuccinelli?
[In March 2012, ABC News reported Liemandt was among three dozen of the Obama campaign’s largest bundlers invited to a state dinner honoring British Prime Minister David Cameron. ABC News reported the invited bundlers, who also included Vogue editor Anna Wintour and Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, were responsible for at least $10.7 million of the $250 million the campaign had collected to that point.]
[Campaign finance records show the Libertarian Booster PAC has made the largest independent contribution to Sarvis’ campaign, helping to pay for professional petition circulators who collected signatures necessary to get Sarvis’ name on Tuesday’s statewide ballot. Liemandt is the Libertarian Booster PAC’s major benefactor.]
I repeat. Barack Obama is the most brilliant stroke of disguised hypocrisy in American political history.
Work with me pumpkin....,
THIS is the post under which your comments this morning more properly belong http://subrealism.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-tedium-of-building-rallying-and.html
The point you've underscored this morning is one I've long made about the rorschachian. I simply don't attribute any particular greatness to his person, rather, I attribute all strategy, insight, and guile to the ensemble which selected and cast him to play this role. The reason I'd ask you to reposition your comments Bro. Makheru, is because one of the core masterstrokes integral to this bit of casting, was the pretense that he is a "community organizer" and that his campaigns involved "grassroots tactical brilliance".
What horseshit. His campaigns were the product of big data carpet bombing finesse and his stint as a "community organizer" was his period of audition before various and sundry talent recruiting elites who are constantly scouring these skreets for somebodies to personify their agendae....,
He is indeed a brilliant stroke of carefully constructed, disguised and orchestrated elite hypocrisy.
By this, I don’t mean an empire that is inchoate, but a government that
doesn’t sense, that doesn’t feel, that is immune to the conditions and
desires of the governed. America has degenerated into a sham state, a
republic of the observed and monitored, where government operations are
opaque and menacing.bears repeating - the very antithesis of people-centric leadership - yet some folks remain doggedly loathe to admit they got hoodwinked, bamboozled, and done, with an inexplicable smell of afrosheen pomade emanating from their hindquarters....,
Actually, I think the changes on behalf of gays are incremental, as incremental as the American people can handle (though I concur that Brookings no doubt did undersign them). Allowing gays to openly serve in the military was just the next logical step after nearly 20 years of Clinton's DADT policy. As for marriage, Obama has basically passed it off to the states as their responsibility. It's currently only legal in 14, and most of the remainder are not likely to legalize it anytime soon. You don't get much more incremental than that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Samesex_marriage_in_USA.svg
Of course, the main reason why so much political capital is being spent nationwide on gay rights issues in the first place is that politically, socially, culturally it's not disruptive to either the constitutional political order or the Reaganomic economic order. Politically, it's the path of least resistance.
(Besides, at this point the whole gay rights/gay marriage thing is old news, sub-san. Transgender is the socially hot thing these days, but even there, the bloom is just beginning to fade. Socially, polygamy/polyandry is where the tip of the spear is. The most avante-garde artistic production in the last ten years bar none was the HBO TV series "Big Love". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9y9c2Sfo1hM
PG/PA is the ultimate alternative lifestyle--the Omega Point--where all the varying American gender/sexuality/relationship explorations are incrementally converging to...Getting Brookings to that place where they can feel comfortable undersigning it is now only a matter of time.)
lol, since this thread has utterly and completely flown off the tracks of the sepia mushroom-head, and since you've brought us to the question of incremental social change, inquiring minds want to know what you believe the outcome of the Miami Dolphins offensive line brouhaha will be?
Will the NFL hold steady as a bastion of testosterone-drenched ritual violence, or, will it begin to surrender to its intensifying drubbing on the multiple fronts of;
1. unsustainably injurious to players
2. racially insensitive mascots
3. bullying 6'4", 320lb gay linemen
What is to become of Amurka's favorite faux gladiatorial pastime?
I didn't find anything terribly appealing or unappealing about Obama in 2008. I perused his books, listened to him speak, and read him as basically a Western European-style social democrat who, consistent with that philosophy, would change the focus of the war from Iraq to Afghanistan/Pakistan (social democrats never unilaterally end wars. Ask Kerensky), and domestically would bring the country towards adopting some form of national health insurance. The politician he most reminded me of at the time was Tony Blair, in political philosophy, temperment, and "let's find consensus in a non-partisan way" methodology.
I never saw him as either a transformative figure or a demonic monster, and still don't. I felt that it was worth giving this American version of Tony Blair a shot, for no other reason than to see if consensus-based politics still makes any sense in 21st century America. So I saw his candidacy and presidency as an experiment of sorts, to see whether or not politics still can be used by Americans as an effective instrument for making decisions about life that require a collective response.
The last five years have clearly shown that the answer to that question is basically no. The American political system can no longer accommodate his kind of consensus-based approach. The cultural institutions needed to support it are gone, and the American people no longer think in ways that would facilitate their reconstruction.
It's because we needed to find that out that we needed to elect Obama to the presidency. Twice. The question had to be answered. The hypothesis needed to be tested. And it has. And now that we know, we are free to make other plans, to seek out alternatives to politics to reorganize society consistent with the coming reality.
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the_choices_we_make/
Martin will eventually get some amount of monetary compensation from the Dolphins and play somewhere else, and Incognito will get reprimanded but not be banned from the sport.
The NFL will mostly hold steady I think. Fundamental reform won't take place until the NFL imposes a fixed weight limit on all players (like, say, 250 lbs). Most of the crippling injuries and virtually all of the brain damage now occurring would simply go away, and the sport would be just as faux gladitorial and fun to watch as it ever was.
Bullying is partly just a natural consequence of no weight limits (the bigger you are, the easier it is to bully), and partly a cultural one (bullying is well-tolerated in American society). Breaking its hold requires both imposition of weight limits and changes in cultural attitudes, neither of which is forthcoming.
Changing the mascots should in theory be easy (changing from Redskins to Redhawks, for example), but it may not be, especially if an owner wants to dig in over it. Willingness to change them requires empathy, which is in short supply in the NFL and the rest of the U.S.
It looks like Dana White is looking to use mma as a suitable replacement. What's more gladiatorial than actual fighting? I don't see leftist interference on this front. Unlike football, you can make one pay for aggressiveness by beating the shit out of him. And it's equal opportunity. Women can get their asses kicked as well if they want to. I think it was Joe Rogan that said people understand fighting all over the world.
To make it to the professional level you're immersed in the culture as a child. How did this guy make it this far being a punk? At 300 pounds he should've kicked his ass. What the fuck is wrong with that dude? Sounds like he could've gotten his buttcheeks violated.
lol, you 6"5" 319lbs of muscle - and some dude "hurt your feelings"?!?!?!?! How is it that we knew how to take care of that shit when we were little?
The dude wrote some bullshit in that article. The NFL has too many graduates from strong division 1 schools. Stanford's put a few players in the pros. I haven't seen any stories about them getting pushed around. He better not have said that guy hurt his feelings. Lol@ that guy.
True. And the best way to preserve this more positive aspect of killer-ape society (ritual combat) is for the NFL to impose a weight limit of 260 lbs on all teams. We'll get a much more realistic live-action combat simulation, and the players won't all end up crippled and brain-damaged. As it stands now, the gargantuan ballooning of American football players into human versions of the Stay Puff marshmallow man has turned the sport into a ridiculous parody of itself.
Let's return the game to the pre-Refrigerator Perry days of yore, shall we?
All the other guys are > 300 lbs as well. That's the problem.
Wasn't the triggering event something about some of the other Dolphin players "bringing family" into it by threatening to gang-rape Martin's sister?
Now that's what I call "taking killer-ape society" to a whole new level!
NK-San, I was 12 the first time I stood up for myself. The other kid had beaten me up a couple times previously, once in my own backyard. My father witnessed this event which took place on a saturday afternoon. He enrolled me in tae kwan do the following monday. It took me a full year to toughen up. The next time this same kid decided to come at me was on a baseball field in front of 30 or so of our peers, a gaggle of fathers, (pretty much the whole world).
It took three grown men to pull me off of him and he had to be taken to the hospital in an ambulance. Jonathan Martin doesn't have what I found when I was 12 years old. He has permanently disqualified himself from participation in killer-ape society and needs to retire from the NFL and go back to parents in higher-ed where leftist, feminist, pseudo-intellectuals predominate.
lol, are you forgetting the simple mass times acceleration rule that puts an upper bound on how large a competent heavy-weight boxer can be? I'm almost inclined to say that the capacity to accelerate is inversely proportional to the fighter's mass. A 260lb weight limit is not a realistic barrier to either massive player injury, or, permanent crippling brain-damage, because those players can still generate maximum striking force due to their acceleration speed.
Sheer size is not the problem in football, rather, it's the prevalence of steroids and other performance enhancing drugs that are abused from the high-school level forward and which have produced a hyper-aggressive nut jobs who are permanently altered by their time spent on very powerful hormones, hormone derivatives, and drugs.
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