Wanna Die? Get Real Animated In Public

Criminal Injustice, Fascism, Law, Liberty, Psychiatry, The State

Whatever you do, don’t gesture wildly in public, limp or act spastic. People around you could die. Those who swore to “To Protect and to Serve” all Americans—the halt and the lame too—may just take a potshot in your general direction. This is what happened to one New Yorker:

The 35-year-old man was behaving erratically, standing in the middle of a busy intersection and unsuccessfully weaving his way through the cars, when police confronted him around 9:30 p.m. Saturday night. “He tried to run and ended up getting hit by three different cars,” one witness told The New York Times. Or, perhaps, some think he was trying to be hit. “It appeared that he wanted to be struck by cars,” New York Police Department commissioner Ray Kelly said at a press conference early Sunday morning. There was some debate as to whether he had actually been hit by any cars. But there was little debate concerning his mental state. “He definitely looked like he was high on something or was mentally off. He couldn’t walk in a straight line. He was limping and jerking his legs around,” one witness told the New York Daily News.

“While officers were attempting to subdue him, [he] ‘reached into his pocket, took out his hand, and simulated as if he was shooting at them,’ Kelly told reporters. One officer fired a single shot and missed; another fired two rounds and missed.”

The militarized police force in action.

Our town has a “madman”; a young man who cannot stop waving his arms, gesturing frantically and praising the Lord loudly. Local businesses often harness his exuberance; they give him ad signs to hold up on street corners. He has boundless energy and enthusiasm, and is quite beautiful; his biblical-length locks tumbling down his shoulders. To think he may be imperiled. …

UPDATE II: The Proof Is In the Putin

Media, Middle East, Military, Propaganda, Republicans, Russia, The State, War

The punditocracy is shouting almost in unison that Russia and Syria have pulled one over us. The US, they say, has been weakened because someone halted the momentum of the American war juggernaut.

You see, the pundits and the pols cannot perceive of greatness outside the state because they are part of the state apparatus; and depend on it for status and income.

Individual Americas who have nothing to gain and only losses to sustain from a war are somehow mistakenly identifying with the state and its emissaries—politicians and pundits—who have everything to gain from the great theatre that is war. “In Syria (and all else), it’s ‘Us’ against ‘Them.'”

Think about it. Who benefits when America goes to war? Not you. Not ordinary Americans. Those who benefit “function within the nimbus of great power” in D.C. and around it—the media-military-congressional-industrial complex.

What happens to the bluster of Bill O’Reilly, his sidekick Dennis the Menace or Charles Krauthammer if the US is no longer dictating the terms of war (lots of it) and peace (too little of it) in the world? Their immense egos suffer. Maybe even their incomes, eventually. But not you, the ordinary American. Krauthammer, ridiculously, equates the failure to go to war against Syria with “Russia supplanting America as regional hegemon.”

But the proof is in the Putin, who stopped a war. Why is stopping a war tantamount to supplanting US power?

Rather, the Russians are replacing bully power with a balance of power. And this is good for Americans (if not for their overlords who art in D.C.)

He who saves you from war is better than he who sends you to war.

UPDATE I: Gerson, another neocon:

“This allows Moscow to supply proxies such as Syria and Iran with weapons while positioning itself as the defender of international law and peace.”

UPDATE II (9/15): Yet another Republican pundit (albeit one of the few talented ones) who depends on The Party for status and income. Here Ann Coulter praises Republican wars.

She promotes and profits from ’em; YOU fight ’em.

About That Credibility

America, BAB's A List, Conflict, Foreign Policy, Free Markets

Myron Robert Pauli on that credibility America is purported to have lost: “It makes sense for 50 sovereign states to be united for free trade and travel and for common defense but not to maintain an EMPIRE. Does Singapore or Switzerland or Costa Rica lack for ‘respect’ because they don’t bomb countries or bribe its leaders? Do we need to purchase ‘respect’ by threats, bombs, and bribery? How can Ireland and Sri Lanka and Chile get along without the world quaking at their boots?”

Myron’s BAB archive is here.

Yes, what ever happened to “Blessed are the peacemakers”?

Syria At The Week’s End: Where Do We Stand?

Just War, Middle East, Russia, UN, War

Tuesday, September 10, Barack Obama opened his mouth to say … nothing much at all. On display, in the his meandering message on Syria, was the president’s very elementary thinking—eighth-grade elementary. Why the allusion to the eighth-grade? A Smart Politics study has found that, as measured by the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, the President’s State of the Union messages were written at an eighth-grade level.

On Syria, he stuck to this simplistic formula.

The Abstract: A horrible chemical attack happened in Syria. How do we know that? We saw the videos. Assad did it. How do we know that? Trust us (no need to verify). If we don’t “stand against the use of chemical weapons,” we, Our Allies and The Children will be imperiled forever after. The Argument from Hitler was thrown in for good measure. Iran the evil-doer too. As he rejected the world’s policeman mantle, the president ventured that the US is “the anchor of global security” [what’s the difference?] Only the US is up to the task, because we’re special. Think of The Kids. Franklin Roosevelt would have.

The president then paraphrased questions purportedly posed by Americans, the majority of whom oppose the strike, choosing to reply—sort of—to the easiest among them.

Left unanswered was a question like this about The Kids. “If you’re so dead-set against the killing of children that you are willing to send us into yet another conflict,” demanded TV’s Judge Jeanine, in her weekly Opening Statement, “will you guarantee that the 1000-pound Tomahawk missiles that you will heap on Syria won’t kill children—or are they simply your collateral damage? Will the murders of those children be less significant than those we go to avenge?”

The president took full credit for the Russian initiative. As such, it stipulates that, provided the US foreswears the use of force against Syria, Russia will assist in disarming that country of its chemical arsenal. (Next Obama will be taking credit for Dennis Rodman’s inroads in North Korea, or for the basketball player’s road-map for peace with that country: “building trust and understanding through sport and cultural exchanges.”) Syria has joined in insisting that the steroids-pumped president of the US foreswear the use of force against it.

There was also Obama’s likely unintended admission in the address that Libya was his “prolonged air campaign.” At the time, the president used NATO as a fig leaf for that offensive, when the truth was that the U.S. Africa Command was in charge of the mission. By Conor Friedersdorf’s telling, President Obama had authorized CIA agents to liaise with Libyan rebels and supply them with arms.

In Libya, Obama was even in violation of the War Powers Resolution, which in itself is an affront to the constitutional text and the framers’ original intent, as it expanded presidential war-making powers. In the words of James Madison: “Those who are to conduct a war cannot in the nature of things, be proper or safe judges, whether a war ought to be commenced, continued, or concluded.” Explained Louis Fisher, senior specialist in separation of powers at the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress: “Keeping the power to commit the country to war—and to all the costs of war—in separate hands from the power to wage war once declared was a bedrock principle for the framers.”

How did Obama violate the statute? Contrast his actions with the relevant section of the Act, courtesy of The Atlantic:

“The constitutional powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, are exercised only pursuant to (1) a declaration of war, (2) specific statutory authorization, or (3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.”

Not even under this permissive statute, which blurs red lines America’s Constitution makers drew, is the excursion into Syria legitimate.

Then there is the pesky matter of the evidence. Here the president’s modus operandi in Libya is also instructive. As revealed by Daniel McAdams, in “Humanitarian Wars and Their NGO Foot-Soldiers,” the allegation that “Gaddafi had already killed 6,000 of his own people and was determined to kill many more” was a fiction invented by Soliman Bouchuiguir, the head of the Libyan League for Human Rights, funded in part by the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

“Bouchuiguir initiated a petition that was eventually signed by 70 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) demanding that the US, EU, and UN “mobilize the United Nations and the international community and take immediate action to halt the mass atrocities now being perpetrated by the Libyan government against its own people.”

In short succession, “Bouchuiguir’s petition turned into a UN Human Rights Council action, which then turned into a UN Security Council action, which then turned into a NATO [nudge, nudge. wink wink] war on Libya.”

As to Syria, McClatchy was, I believe, first to relay that “German intelligence does not believe Assad sanctioned the alleged attack on August 21.” When the skepticism finally percolated down to the US press, The Washington Times seconded that the “U.S. can’t prove Bashar Assad approved the chemical attacks in Syria.”